SEPARATION OF THE VESSELS 25 



reckoning, must have been the land where we lost Captain 

 Chirikov, and already then it seemed to several persons as if 

 they had seen land, a circumstance at that time regarded as a 

 trivial matter since none of the naval officers themselves had 

 seen it. Moreover, they considered it then a greater honor to 

 run farther, along the land, so as to be able to boast of having 

 traveled very far and suffered much unnecessarily. 



After having searched several days in vain for the lost packet- 

 boat and any further hope of finding it had vanished, we sailed 

 once more south from the 50th to the 46th degree in the hope of 

 finding the St. Paul or Company Land on this course. However, 

 having failed in both, and as the appearance of Company Land 

 had now been awaited in vain a second time without its having 

 ever come into view in the place demanded, the conclusion to 

 regard it as an imaginary land — an invention of the Nuremberg 

 map makers, *3 over which either our ship or Captain Spanberg's ^^ 

 necessarily must have sailed, if it had a real existence — became 

 unavoidable. As if those gentlemen had not laid themselves open 

 to the suspicion of being capable of committing just such a 

 geographical blunder, by the fact alone that one of them pointed 

 out our course on the map of the world in the sea off Canada, ^^ 

 while another asserted with all his might against me that Canton 

 lies on the 45th parallel and the Maldive Islands lie in the 

 Mediterranean Sea. — They consequently now began to repudiate 

 utterly said Company Land, although they could have had no 

 other reason for going so far south than to search for it in all 

 seriousness. On June 18^^ the beginning w^as made in earnest to 

 go east and gradually north, so that for every two or three de- 

 grees in longitude one degree of latitude was gained. 



After we had sailed on this course for several days and had 

 come once more as far as the 52nd parallel, there appeared again 



" Particularly Johann Baptist Homann (see Vol. i, p. 3). (G) 



** On his voyage of 1739 (see, above, footnote 18, and maps there 

 mentioned accompanying Sokolov's and Lauridsen's accounts). 



^5 i. e. in the Atlantic Ocean. 



•»s Should be June 26, astronomic time (see log book. Vol. i, p. 71, and 

 footnote 20 on that page; also ibid., PI. I). 



