BELLINGSHAUSEN 
129 
least anti-French names such as Yaroslav, Waterloo, 
Borodino, Smolensk and Leipzig to several of the islands, 
but these have not been retained as the group had al- 
ready been charted by Bransfield and Weddell. At Yar- 
oslav Island he says that he met a fleet of eight British 
and American sealers lying at anchor on February 5th, 
and the romantic meeting with the Americans so dra- 
matically described by Fanning is dismissed in the words 
“ The American captain, Palmer, whom we invited to see 
us, told of the really prodigiously rich booty which was 
made here of sealskins/’ On which the Russian captain 
predicts the early extermination of the seals. 
After crossing the sixtieth parallel on February nth, 
and passing through the South Orkneys the two ships 
completed their circumnavigation off South Georgia. 
After an anxious night near the Shag Rocks in a fog, they 
bore up for Rio, stayed there from March 9th to May 
4th, and reentered the harbour of Cronstadt on July 5th, 
1821 after a magnificent voyage of two years’ duration 
with the loss of only three men, a death-rate very much 
smaller than that prevailing in Russia. Of the 75 1 
days they had been afloat 527 days had been passed under 
sail. 
It is an exceedingly unfortunate circumstance that 
so little has ever been known outside Russia of Bel- 
lingshausen’s great exploit. The voyage was a mas- 
terly continuation of that of Cook, supplementing it in 
every particular, competing with it in none. The oc- 
casional measurements of temperature and salinity in the 
water, and the acute observations on the formation of 
sea-ice would have been very useful to later explorers. 
But unfortunately until 1902 no Antarctic expedition 
had been furnished with details of the Russian work 
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