16 THE ASIATIC FUE-SEAL ISLANDS. 



The Commander Islands were discovered on E^ovember 4, 1741 (old style). On 

 that day the vessel ISt. Peter, with the commander Vitus Bering, and nearly the entire 

 crew, sick to death with the scurvy, slowly approached the southern extremity of 

 Copper Island from the east on their returu voyage, after having discovered the main- 

 land of America. Owing to the universal sickness, the ship's reckoning was entirely 

 out, and the officers believed themselves off the coast of Kamchatka. The next day 

 the vessel, over which the exhausted crew had hardly any control, drifted towiird the 

 east shore of Bering Island, and in the night following, a beautiful, still November 

 night, of which this coast knows but few, the unfortunate craft came pretty near being 

 left by the receding tide and wrecked on the projecting reefs at the southern entrance 

 to the little bay called Komandor on the map (pi. 91). By an exceptional piece of 

 good luck the breakers carried it safely over the rocks into the basin beyond, and a 

 landing was effected. 



To such extremity were the discoverers reduced, that it was decided to winter on 

 this inhospitable shore. Hollows were dug in the ground for shelter and covered with 

 skins of wild animals and sails. Many of the crew died of the scurvy, and on the 8th of 

 December (old style) Bering himself. He was buried near the place marked on the 

 map " Bering's grave." The others, 46 only out of 77, recovered slowly under the care 

 of G. W. Steller, who accompanied the expedition as a naturalist. The vessel was 

 thrown up on the beach during a heavy gale in the night between November 28 and 

 29 (old style), and all attempts to float it were in vain. The next spring, after a winter 

 full of suffering and privations, the crew broke up the old vessel and of the materials 

 built a smaller one, in which they landed at Petropaulski, Kamchatka, August 27, 1742. 



The present writer visited the place of the shipwreck and the wintering August 

 30, 1882, and has given au account of it, with a ground plan of the hut and a sketch 

 map of the locality, in Deutsche G-eographische Blatter, 1885, pages 265-266. A 

 partial rendering of this is found in Prof. Julius Olsen's translation of Lauridsen's 

 "Vitus Bering" (Chicago, S. 0. Griggs & Co., 1889), page 184, and additional notes, 

 pages 214-215. The relics of the expedition found by me are deposited in the United 

 States National Museum. 



HYDROGRAPHIC NOTES. 



It is astonishing how very little is deiinitely known about the hydrography of 

 the western side of Bering Sea. But few vessels fitted for such work have visited 

 that part of the world of late years, and those few have only made hurried passages 

 through. In that way a small amount of material has been accumulated, which has 

 been utilized by the Russian admiral S. O. Makarof, in his interesting work " Vitiaz i 

 Tikhi Okean" (2 vols., St. Petersburg, 1894), iu which, so far as the investigations 

 relating to temperature and specific gravity of the waters of the western Bering Sea 

 are concerned, his own observations on board the corvette Vitias: form the most 

 valuable part. This being the case, I have no hesitation in presenting, in a brief 

 abstract, the substance of those paragraphs in his book which refer to the matter in 

 hand, especially since a full understanding of the phenomena in question is a necessary 

 basis for an equally full understanding of the distribution of the food animals of the 

 seals and of the seals themselves. 



On July 28, 1888, the Vitiaz left Petropaulski on a short trip to the Commander 

 Islands. The bathymetric observations in Bering Sea have shown that the bed of 

 warm water, of a temperature of + 0° C, is very thin near the coasts of Kamchatka 



