176 STELLER'S JOURNAL 



morning a petty officer should distribute to the cooks of each 

 party their share, so that the carpenters might not suffer want. 



After this had been unanimously agreed to and signed, the first 

 preparations were already started on the next day. Everything 

 was taken out of the vessel, and the materials were brought to- 

 gether in one place on the beach; grindstones were dressed and 

 placed in troughs, tools were cleaned of rust and sharpened, a 

 smithy erected, crowbars, iron wedges, and large hammers 

 forged, wood gathered, and charcoal made. This last work was 

 arduous and caused most of the delay. 



While many difficulties were expected because the hunting 

 was so far off, since the animals were already frightened away by 

 us for a distance of eighteen to twenty versts, our courage was 

 nevertheless unexpectedly again raised by the following dispen- 

 sation: on April i8 and 19, namely, two sea bears [fur seals] were 

 killed, each of which, including meat and fat, weighed at least 

 20 poods, two or three being apparently sufficient to support the 

 command for a whole week. Likewise, since the migrations of 

 these animals, as observed from the coast of Kamchatka, were 

 well known to us, there was hope, which was also soon realized, 

 that more of these animals would shortly follow."" 



A quite fresh whale caused us still more encouragement and 

 comfort, having been thrown ashore at Kozlovo Pole,*2i five 

 versts to the west of our dwellings, on April 20, the day before 

 we began to break up the old vessel. It was 15 fathoms long, 

 and in two days we collected so much blubber and oil from it 



^20 In the MS this sentence is more detailed and is followed by a long 

 passage dealing with the fur seal. This sentence and the subsequent 

 passage are omitted by Pallas in the published version of the journal, 

 inasmuch as he had already published them twelve years earlier (Neue 

 Nordische Beytrdge, Vol. 2, 1781, pp. 288-290) with Steller's description 

 of Bering Island, as a part of which they are translated below in Appen- 

 dix A on pp. 225-226. The sentence begins with the words " As I had fur- 

 thermore already learned in Kamchatka"; the passage ends with the 

 words "cover the way out and back in one day." 



<2i For location, see map, PI. II. 



