XIII.] NAVIGATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 169 
determined to endeavour to get to land over the ice. But this 
was no easy matter. The ice, which already was three feet 
thick, went suddenly into a thousand pieces, while the vessel 
drove before a furious gale farther and farther from the shore. 
This was repeated several times. When the sea at last froze 
over, the vessel was abandoned, and the party finally succeeded, 
worn out as they were by hunger, scurvy, work, and cold, in 
reaching land at the mouth of the Indigirka. The narrative of 
Buldakov’s voyage is, besides, exceedingly remarkable, because a 
meeting is there spoken of with twelve “ kotsches,” filled with 
Cossacks, traders, and hunters, bound partly from the Lena to 
the rivers lying to the eastward, partly from the Kolyma and 
Indigirka to the Lena, a circumstance which shows how active 
the communication then was in the part of the Siberian Polar 
Sea in question. This is further confirmed by a narrative of 
Nikifor Malgin. While Knes Ivan Petrovitsch Barjatin- 
SKY was vojvode at Yakutsk (1667-75), Malgin travelled along 
with a trader, Andrej Woripajev, by sea from the Lena to the 
Kol 3 niia. During this voyage the pilot directed the attention of 
all on board to an island, lying far out at sea, west of the mouth 
of the Kolyma. In course of a conversation regarding it, after 
Malgin had succeeded in reaching the Kolyma, another trader, 
Jakob Wiatka, stated that on one occasion when he was sailing 
with nine “ kotsches ” between the Lena and the Kolyma, three 
of them had been driven by wind to this island, and that 
the men who had been sent ashore there, found traces of 
unknown animals, but no inhabitants. 
All these narratives, however, do not appear to have met with 
full credence. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, 
accordingly, new explorations and new expeditions were under¬ 
taken. A Cossack, Jakob Permakov, stated that during a 
voyage between the Lena and the Kolyma, he had seen off 
Svjatoinos an island, of which he knew not whether it was 
inhabited or not, and likewise, that off the mouth of the Kolyma 
