XIII.] THE COSSACKS PENETRATE TO THE KOLYMA. 
161 
river to the Polar Sea. After five days’ successful rowing along 
the coast to the eastward he discovered the mouth of the Yana. 
After three days’ march up the river he fell in with a Yakut 
tribe, from whom he got a rich booty of sable and other furs. 
Here he passed the winter of 1638-39, here too he built 
himself a new craft, and again starting for the Polar Sea, he 
came to another river falling into the eastern mouth-arm of the 
Yana, where he found a Yukagir tribe, living in earth huts, with 
whom he passed two years more, collecting tribute from the 
tribes living in the neighbourhood. 
At the same time Ivanov Postnik discovered by land the 
river Indigirka. As usual, tribute was collected from the 
neighbouring Yukagir tribes, yet not without fights, in which 
the natives at first directed their weapons against the horses 
the Cossacks had along with them, thinking that the horses 
were more dangerous than the men. They had not seen 
horses before. A simovie was established, at which sixteen 
Cossacks were left behind. They built boats, sailed down the 
river to the Polar Sea to collect tribute, and discovered the 
river Alasej. 
Some years after the river Kolyma appears to have been 
discovered, and in 1644 the Cossack, Michailo Staduchin, 
founded on that river a simovie, which afterwards increased to 
a small town, Nischni Kolymsk. Here Staduchin got three 
pieces of information which exerted considerable influence on 
later exploratory expeditions, for he acquired knowledge of the 
Chukches, at that time a military race, who possessed the part 
of North Asia which lay a little further to the east. Further, 
the natives and the Eussian hunters, who swarmed in the 
region before Staduchin, informed him that in the Polar Sea 
off the mouths of the Yana and the Indigirka there was a large 
island, which in clear weather could be seen from land, and 
which the Chukches reached in winter with reindeer sledges in 
one day from Chukotska, a river debouching in the Polar Sea 
VOL. II. . M 
