196 



THE POLAR WORLD. 



Albasin was soon after rebuilt ; but as Russia at that time had no inclina- 

 tion to engage in constant quarrels with the Celestial Empire about the posses- 

 sion of a remote desert, all its pretensions to the Amoor were given up by the 

 treaty of Nertschinsk (1689). This agreement, however, like so many others, 

 was doomed to last no longer than it pleased the more powerful of the con- 

 tracting parties to keep it, and came to nothing as soon as the possession of the 

 Amoor territory became an object of importance, and the increasing weakness 

 of China was no longer able to dispute its possession. Thus, when Count 

 Nicholas Mourawieff was appointed Governor-general of Eastern Siberia in 

 1847, one of his first cares was to appropriate or annex the Amoor. He imme- 

 diately sent a surveying expedition to the mouth of the river, where, in 1851, 

 regardless of the remonstrances of the Chinese Government, he ordered the sta- 



THE BEACH AT NICOLAYEVSK. 



tions of Nicolayevsk and Mariinsk to be built; and in 1854 he himself sailed 

 down the Amoor, with a numerous flotilla of boats and rafts, for the purpose 

 of personally opening this new channel of intercourse with the Pacific. Other 

 expeditions soon followed, and the Chinese, finding resistance hopeless, ceded to 

 Russia in the year 1858, by the treaty of Aigun,the left bank of the Amoor as 

 far as the influx of the Ussuri, and both its banks below the latter river. Thus 

 the Czar found some consolation for the losses of the Crimean campaign in the 

 acquisition of a vast territory in the distant East, which, though at present a 

 mere wilderness, may in time become a flourishing colony. 



In 1644, a few years after the discovery of the Amoor, the Cossack Michael 

 Staduchin formed a winter establishment on the delta of the Kolyma, which has 



