48 STELLER'S JOURNAL 



trail broke up into a number of paths through the forest, we 

 explored some of them for a little distance into the wood, and 

 after half an hour we came to a spot covered with cut grass. 

 I pushed the grass aside at once and found underneath a cover 

 consisting of rocks; and when this was also removed we came to 

 some tree bark, which was laid on poles in an oblong rectangle 

 three fathoms in length and two in width. All this covered a 

 cellar two fathoms deep in which were the following objects: 

 (i) lukoshkas, or utensils made of bark, one and a half ellss? 

 high, filled with smoked fish of a species of Kamchatkan salmon 

 at Okhotsk called nerka in the Tungus language but in Kam- 

 chatka known by the common name krasnaya ryba.^^ It was so 

 cleanly and well prepared that I have never seen it as good in 

 Kamchatka, and it also was much superior in taste to the Kam- 

 chatkan ;89 (2) a quantity of sladkaya trava [or sweet grass,] 

 from which liquor is distilled; (3) different kinds of plants, whose 

 outer skin had been removed like hemp, which I took for nettles, 

 which grow here in profusion and perhaps are used, as in Kam- 

 chatka, for making fish nets; (4) the dried inner bark from the 

 larch or spruce tree done up in rolls and dried ; the same is used 

 as food in time of famine, not only in Kamchatka but all through 

 Siberia and even in Russia as far as Khlynov and elsewhere on the 

 Vyatka ;^° (5) large bales of thongs made of seaweed which, by mak- 

 ing a test, we found to be of uncommon strength and firmness.^^ 

 Under these I found also some arrows in size greatly exceeding 



87 The MS has 13^2 arshins. This would be about 42 inches. 



88 The MS has nerka; the Pallas text has slerka; the former is correct. 

 Krasnaya ryba (red fish) is the usual name in Kamchatka for the red 

 salmon {Oncorhynchus nerka (Walbaum)). (S) 



89 The position of this sentence in the MS is as here given; in the 

 published version it is under (2), but probably incorrectly so. 



90 The MS reads "as far as Khlynov or Vyatka." In Steller's time 

 Khlynov and Vyatka were two neighboring towns; in 1781 they, with 

 two others, were combined to form the present city of Vyatka, on the 

 river of that name, in about lat. 58° N. and long. 50° E. By "as far as 

 Vyatka" is probably meant "westward as far as Vyatka." (G) 



»i The "thongs" of seaweed were probably NereocysHs priapus 

 (Gmelin). According to Saunders, the Harriman Expedition, although 



