418 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
Between these there are extensive plains, which, according to 
a statement by the land surveyor Chvoinoff, who by order of 
the Czar visited the island in 1775, are formed of ice and sand, 
in which lie imbedded enormous masses of the bones and tusks 
of the mammoth, mixed with the horns and skulls of some 
kind of ox and with rhinoceros’ horns. Bones of the whale and 
walrus are not mentioned as occurring there, but “ long small 
screw-formed bones,” by which are probably meant the tusks 
of the narwhal.^ 
All was now clear of snow, with the exception of a few of 
the deeper clefts between the mountains. No traces of glaciers 
were visible, not even such small collections of ice as are to be 
found everywhere on Spitzbergen where the land rises a few 
hundred feet above the surface of the sea. Nor, to judge by 
the appearance of the hills, have there been any glaciers in 
former times, and this is certainly the case on the mainland. 
The northernmost part of Asia in that case has never been 
covered by such an ice-sheet as is assumed by the supporters 
of a general ice age embracing the whole globe. 
The large island right opposite to Svjatoinos was discovered 
in 1770 by Ljachoff, whose name the island now bears. In 
1788 Billings’ private secretary, Martin Sauer, met with 
Ljachoff at Yakutsk, but he was then old and infirm, on which 
account, when Sauer requested information regarding the 
islands in the Polar Sea, he referred him to one of his com¬ 
panions, Zaitai Protodiakonoff. He informed him that 
the discovery was occasioned by an enormous herd of reindeer 
which Ljachoff, in the month of April 1770, saw going from 
1 Martin Sauer, An account of a Geographical and A stronomical Expedition 
to the Northern parts of Russia hy Commodore Joseph Billings, London, 
1802, p. 105. The walrus does not occur in the sea between the mouth 
of the Chatanga and Wrangel Land, and large whales are never seen at 
the New Siberian Islands, but during Hedenstiom’s stay in these regions 
three narwhals were enclosed in the ice near the shore at the mouth of the 
Yana {Otrywld o Sibiri, p. 131). 
