70 STELLER'S JOURNAL 



what land they considered it to be, as incontestably it must be a 

 large island (of which on this voyage we had seen so many that 

 America cannot be less provided with them on this side than in 

 the Western Sea^*^), I received the answer that it must be Juan 

 de Gama Land. From this answer I could judge how splendidly 

 they had understood the large chart of Monsieur Delisle^*^ 



1^^ i. e. the Atlantic Ocean. The last clause reads in the MS as fol- 

 lows: "that America on the western side is provided with as many 

 islands near shore as on the eastern side." 



1*8 A photograph of this manuscript map, which has hitherto never 

 been reproduced, is presented herewith as PI. I. This map was prepared 

 in 1 73 1 at the request of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences by the 

 French astronomer and geographer Joseph Nicolas Delisle, a member of 

 the Academy, to show what was then known of the relation of eastern 

 Asia to America. The order to procure this information came to the 

 Academy from the Senate. In 1731 the map was presented to the Em- 

 press Anna and to the Senate (so stated in a note, not in Delisle's hand- 

 writing, on the back of one of the Delisle MSS in the archives of the 

 Service Hydrographique de la Marine, Paris, marked Vol. 115, XXVI, 

 3, B, according to information received from Professor Gallois, mentioned 

 below; this statement, together with the date 1731 on the map itself, 

 would seem to refute Miiller's denial in Sammlung Russischer Geschichte, 

 Vol. 3, 1758, p. 139, Jefferys' transl., 1761, p. 15, that the map was made 

 as early as that year). Delisle prepared an accompanying memoir in 

 French, which he read before the Academy of Sciences in 1732, in which 

 he described the sources on which the map was based and discussed 

 feasible routes between Asia and America. This memoir has been pub- 

 lished with a translation as Appendix F (pp. 302-313) to Golder's 

 "Russian Expansion on the Pacific," 1914. Whether the map still 

 existed and, if so, where, was not known. 



At the request of the American Geographical Society M. Lucien Gal- 

 lois, senior professor of geography on the Faculte des Lettres of the Uni- 

 versity of Paris, kindly made a search for the map in various archives in 

 Paris. It was finally found in the archives of the Service Hydrographique 

 de la Marine, where it is preserved in Portefeuille 172, Division 2, as 

 Piece I. That it is the original map compiled by Delisle is practically 

 certain when it is compared with statements made in the memoir, often 

 identical in phraseology with those appearing on the map. De Gama 

 Land is stated in the memoir (Golder, op. cit., pp. 308, 312) and is shown 

 on the map to lie east of Company Land, with a number of islands be- 

 tween the two and with Company Land limited on the east by a coast, 

 as on the last maps of Guillaume Delisle (died 1726), and not left in- 



