72 STELLER'S JOURNAL 



Meanwhile, I pass over the fact that there was no desire to 

 make sure about this land [island] or to indicate it on the chart, 

 but I am greatly astonished that the officers did not yet guess the 

 reason for the constant west wind or let themselves be induced 



second Kamchatkan expedition left St. Petersburg a copy of De 1' Isle's 

 map was given to Bering as well as to La Croyere." This, on the whole, 

 seems more probable. The Service Hydrographique map seems to have 

 been folded by its users, to judge by the tears along its creases; a naviga- 

 tor is more likely to have kept a map in the form of a roll, possibly 

 mounted on cloth. But a more cogent reason than this for believing that 

 the original was not used by Bering is the fact that the present map was 

 found in Paris, with other DeUsle documents dating from Delisle's so- 

 journ in Russia (i 726-1 747), while most of the Bering documents are, or 

 were before the war, in Petrograd. In this connection it should be noted 

 that Golder (Guide to Materials for American History in Russian Ar- 

 chives, 1917, p. 131) lists an enlargement to 10 by 8 feet of Delisle's map 

 (the Service Hydrographique original measures 7 by 4 feet along the 

 black-line border, exclusive of title, etc.) as being in 1914 in the archives of 

 the Hydrographic Section of the Ministry of Marine in Petrograd under 

 MS charts, 1 732-1 742 (?), No. 2990, on which the new discoveries had 

 been added subsequently. This is probably the copy that Sokolov says 

 he used in his studies {Zapiski Hydrogr. Depart., Vol. 9, 1851, p. 437). 

 Whatever the exact status of the Service Hydrographique map here 

 presented in PI. I, there is no doubt that the map that Bering had with 

 him and to which Steller refers in the above passage was, in content, its 

 exact equivalent and that it may therefore illustrate his remarks. Stel- 

 ler's immediately following statement that De Gama Land was the 

 east-west trending coast of northwestern North America is entirely in 

 consonance with one view that prevailed with regard to this land and 

 which is reflected in the text of Delisle's memoir (Golder, Russian Ex- 

 pansion, p. 304). This passage reads: "Ces cotes vues par Dom Jean de 

 Gama . . . font peut etre partie d'un grand continens qui seroit 

 contigu a I'Amerique et qui iroit rejoindre au nord de la Californie la 

 cote septentrional e de I'entree decouverte par Martin Aguillar: au moins 

 trouve-t-on dans quelques anciennes cartes une longue cote marquee 

 dans tout ce trajet." This view goes back to Texeira's map of 1649, the 

 first on which De Gama Land was shown (see Vol. i, p. 2; the map is 

 reproduced as the bottom inset of Buache's map of 1754 in Teleki's 

 "Atlas zur Geschichte der Kartographie der Japanischen Inseln," 1909, 

 p. 141). That Delisle did not on the map show De Gama Land extending 

 so far eastward as to join California is probably due to the fact that even 

 he considered this phase of the problem conjectural. (J) 



