170 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
there was an island which could be seen from land. In order to 
make sure of the correctness of this statement, a Cossack, 
Mercurej Wagin, was sent out. He travelled along with 
Permakov, in the month of May, in dog-sledges over the 
ice from Svjatoinos to the island lying off it, that Permakov 
had seen. They landed there, found it uninhabited and treeless, 
and fixed its circumference at nine to twelve days’ journey. 
Beyond this island Wagin saw another, which, however, he could 
not reach for want of provisions. He therefore determined to 
turn, in order to undertake the journey the following year in a 
better state of preparation, During the return journey the 
party suffered severely from hunger, and in order to avoid 
a renewal of the dangerous and difficult journey of exploration, 
the men at last murdered Permakov, Wagin, and his son. The 
crime was discovered, and the knowledge we possess of this 
expedition is founded on the confused information obtained 
during the examination of the murderers. Muller even throws 
doubts on the truth of the whole narrative. 
The attempts which were afterwards made to reach those 
islands, partly by sea in 1712, by Wasilej Staduchin, partly 
by dog-sledges in 1711 by Alexej Markov and Grigorej 
Kusakoy, yielded no result. Ten years afterwards, “the old 
saga” of the islands in the Polar Sea, induced one SiN Bajorski 
Feodot Amossov to undertake an expedition with a view to 
impose tribute on their inhabitants, but he was prevented by 
ice from reaching his goal. On the way he met with a hunter, 
Ivan Willegin, who said, that along with another hunter, 
Grigorej Sankin, he had travelled over the ice to these islands 
from the mouth of the river Chukotskaja. He had seen neither 
men nor trees, but some abandoned huts. “ Probably this land ex¬ 
tends all the way from the mouth of the Yana, past the Indigirka 
and Kolyma to the region which is inhabited by the Schelags, a 
Chukch tribe.” He had learned this from a Schelag named 
Kopai, at whose home he had been the preceding year. In 
