ESTIMATE OP^ BERING 157 



thoughtless action. ^^s He also had a somewhat too high esteem 

 for his officers and too good an opinion of their intelligence and 

 experience, and as a result they finally became too conceited, 

 looked with contempt on all those near them and finally on the 

 commander himself, and forgot their subordination, without 

 thought of gratitude.369 



While the departed often used to recall, with thanks to God, 

 how from his youth up everything had come his way and how 

 only two months before he had been in happy circumstances, the 

 more is his sad and miserable end to be pitied. He would un- 

 doubtedly have remained alive if he had reached Kamchatka 

 and had only had the benefit of a warm room and fresh food. 



368 In the MS there here follows this sentence: "Examples of both are 

 at hand." 



369 The MS here has a long, highly sarcastic, and partly enigmatical 

 harangue of the officers and defense of Bering, which Pallas has omitted 

 in the printed text. As far as it is intelligible it may be translated as 

 follows: "They demonstrated all too plainly that they were much too 

 narrow-minded for this high opinion, which, very conscious of their own 

 strength, they regarded as a result of fear and poor judgment. It there- 

 fore came to pass that when he promoted a [certain] mate, they were com- 

 pletely convinced that it happened according to natural and international 

 law. Their unenlightened intellect wandered about in all parts of the 

 world's wisdom, according to their own opinion, like the magnetic needle 

 at the pole. It could therefore not turn out otherwise than that their 

 measures deviated as widely from the goal in view as the reasons for their 

 enterprises from rational practice itself [?]. However, as a result of all 

 this the reward he finally received as thanks consisted in this, that, be- 

 cause in the slimy environs of Okhotsk and Kamchatka he tried to lift 

 out and up everybody who had fallen into the mire, they leaned so heavily 

 on him that he himself must sink. As he took with him to his grave every- 

 one's receipted bill, he undeservedly received this funeral text [?; word 

 not clearly decipherable] : that he was buried like the godless [because in 

 unconsecrated ground?] and died like a rich man. The explanation will be 

 understood by those who know that he took with him on the voyage a 

 man whose most outstanding crimes he intended to justify in Kamchatka 

 and, after a lucky termination of the voyage, to free from all blame by 

 sending him to St. Petersburg, [the same man] who afterwards contra- 

 dicted him in everything, became the author of our misfortune, and after 

 his [Bering's] death his greatest accuser." 



