164 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
Ankudinov and Simeon Deschnev, and the hunter Feodot 
Alexejev. Deschnev entertained such hopes of success that 
before his departure he promised to collect a tribute of seven 
times forty sable skins. The Siberian archives, according to 
M iller, contain the following details.^ 
On IJth June, 1648, a start was made from the Kolyma. The 
sea was open; at least the boats came without any adventure 
v/hich Deschnev thought worth the trouble* of noting in his 
narrative to Great Chukotskojnos. Of this cape Deschnev 
says that it is quite different from the cape at the river 
Chukotskaja. For it lies between north and north-east, and 
bends with a rounding towards the Anadyr. On the Russian 
side a rivulet runs into the sea, at which the Chukches had 
raised a heap of whales’ bones. Right off the cape lie two 
islands, on which people of Chukch race with perforated lips 
were seen. From this cape it is possible with a favourable 
wind to sail to the Anadyr in three days, and the way is not 
longer by land, because the Anadyr falls into a gulf of the sea. 
At Chukotskojnos or, according to Wrangel at a ‘Oioly 
promontory,” Svjatoinos (Serdze Kamen ?) previously reached, 
Ankudinov’s craft was shipwrecked. The crew were saved, 
and distributed on Deschnev’s and Alexejev’s boats. On the 
®-Jth September the Russians had a fight with the Chukches 
1 G.P, lslv^\eY, SamnilungBiissisclier Geschiclite^ St,Petersburg, 1758. Miiller 
asserts in this work that it was he who, in 1736, first drew from the repositories 
of the Yakutsk archives the account of Deschnev’s voyage, which before 
that time was known neither at the court of the Czar nor in the remotest 
parts of Siberia. This, however, is not quite correct, for long before 
Muller, the Swedish prisoner-of-war, Strahlenberg, knew that the Eussians 
travelled by sea from the Kolyma to Kamchatka, which appears from his 
map of Asia, constructed during his stay in Siberia, and published in Das 
Nord- und OstUche Theil von Europa und Asia, Stockholm, 1730. On this 
map there is the following inscription in the sea north of the Kolyma :—• 
‘ ‘ Hie Rutheni ab initio per Moles glaciales, quge flante Borea ad Littora, 
flanteque Austro versus Mare iterum pulsantur, magno Lahore et Vitae 
Discrimine transvecti sunt ad Regionem Kamtszatkam.” 
