158 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
invaders took forward, also extended the knowledge of 
regions previously quite unknown, I shall mention the years in 
which during this conquest the most important occurrences in a 
geographical point of view took place, and give a rather more 
detailed account of the exploratory or military expeditions which 
led directly to important results affecting the extension of our 
knowledge of the geography of the region now in question. 
The way was prepared for the conquest of Siberia through 
peaceful commercial treaties ^ which a rich Russian peasant 
Anika, ancestor of the Steoganov family, entered into with 
the wild races settled in Western Siberia, whom he even partially 
induced to pay a yearly tribute to the Czar of Moscow. In con¬ 
nection with this he and his sons, in the middle of the sixteenth 
century, obtained large grants of land on the rivers Kama and 
Chusovaja and their tributaries, with the right to build towns 
and forts there, whereby their riches, previously very considerable, 
were much increased. The family’s extensive possessions, how¬ 
ever, were threatened in 1577 by a great danger, when a host of 
Cossack freebooters, six to seven thousand strong, under the 
leadership of Yeemak Timofejev, took flight to the country 
round Chusovaja in order to avoid the troops which the Czar 
sent to subdue them and punish them for all the depredations 
they had committed on the Don, the Caspian Sea and the Volga. 
In order to get rid of the freebooters, Maxim Steoganov, 
Anika’s grandson, not only provided Yermak and his men with 
1 Arctic literature contains a nearly contemporaneous sketch of the first 
Russian-Siberian commercial undertakings, Beschryvinghe vander Samoyeden 
Landt in Tartarien^ nieulijcks ondedt gliehiedt der Moscoviten gehracht. Wt 
de Russclie tale overgheset, Anno 1609. Amsterdam, Hessel Gerritsz, 1612 ; 
inserted in Latin, in 1613, in the same publisher’s Descriptio ac Delineatio 
Geographica Detectionis Freti (Photo-lithographic reproduction, by Fre¬ 
derick Muller, Amsterdam, 1878). The same work, or more correctly, 
collection of small geographical pamphlets, contains also Isak Massa’s 
map of the coast of the Polar Sea between the Kola peninsula and the 
Pjaisna, which I have reproduced. 
I 
