IV.] 
THE COAST OF THE KARA SEA. 
175 
for gain, and learned cosmographers, from the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, and which even to the geographer and 
man of science of the present has been a mare incognitum down 
to the most recent date. It is just this sea that formed the 
turning-point of all the foregoing north-east voyages, from 
Burrough’s to Wood’s and Vlamingh’s, and it may therefore not 
be out of place here, before I proceed further with the sketch 
of our journey, to give some account of its surroundings and 
hydrography. 
If attention be not fixed on the little new-discovered island, 
Ensamheten,” the Kara Sea is open to the north-east. It 
is bounded on the west by Novaya Zemlya and Vaygats Island; 
on the east by the Taimur peninsula, the land between the 
Pjaesina and the Yenisej and Yalmal; and on the south by the 
northernmost portion of European Russia, Beli Ostrov, and the 
large estuaries of the Obi and the Yenisej. The coast between 
Cape Chelyuskin and the Yenisej consists of low rocky heights, 
formed of crystalline schists, gneiss, and eruptive rocks, from 
the Yenisej to beyond the most southerly part of the Kara 
Sea, of the Gy da and Yalmal tundras beds of sand of equal 
fineness, and at Vaygats Island and the southern part of 
Novaya Zemlya (to 73° N.L.) of limestone and beds of schist ^ 
which slope towards the sea with a steep escarpment three 
to fifteen metres high, but form, besides, the substratum of a 
level plain, full of small collections of water which is quite 
free of snow in summer. North of 73° again the west coast 
of the Kara Sea is occupied by mountains, which near 
Matotschkin are very high, and distributed in a confused 
mass of isolated peaks, but farther north become lower and 
take the form of a plateau. 
^ I come to this conclusion from the appearance of the strata as seen 
from the sea, and from their nature on Vaygats Island and the west coast 
of Novaya Zemlya. So far as I know, no geologist has landed on this part 
of the east coast. 
