178 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap 
how the population extended from the old to the new world, 
was long zealously defended.^ No one, either European or 
native, had yet, so far as we know, extended his hunting 
journeys to the northernmost promontory of Asia, in conse¬ 
quence of which the position which it was assumed to occupy 
only depended on loose suppositions. It was possible for 
instance that Asia stretched with a cape as far as to the 
neighbourhood of the Pole, or that a broad isthmus between the 
Pjasina and the Olenek connected the known portion of this 
quarter of the world with an Asiatic Polar continent. Nor had 
geographers a single actual determination of position or 
geographical measurement from the whole of the immense 
stretch between the mouth of the Ob and Japan, and there was 
complete uncertainty as to the relative position of the eastern¬ 
most possessions of the Kussians on the one side and of Japan 
on the other.2 It was difficult to get the maps of the Eussians 
to correspond with those of the Portuguese and the Dutch, at 
the point where the discoveries of the different nations touched 
each other; which also was exceedingly natural, as at that time 
too limited an extent east and west by 1700 kilometres was 
commonly assigned to Siberia. In order to investigate this 
point, in order to fill up the great blank which still existed in 
the knowledge of the quarter of the world first inhabited by 
1 As late as 1819,-James Burney, first lieutenant on one of Captain 
Cook’s vessels during liis voyage north of Behring’s Straits, afterwards 
captain and member of the Eoyal Society, considered it not proved that 
Asia and America are separated by a sound. For he doubted the correct¬ 
ness of the accounts of Deschnev’s voyage. Compare James Burney, A 
Chronological History of Nortli-easte.rn Voyages of Discovery. London, 1819, 
p. 298 ; and a paper by Burne}" in the Transactions of the Royal Society, 
1817. Burney was violently attacked for the views there expressed by 
Captain John Dundas Cochrane. Narra tive of a Pedestrian Journey through 
Russia and Siberian Tartary 2nd ed. London, 1824, Appendix. 
2 The first astronomical determinations of position in Siberia were, per¬ 
haps, made by Swedish prisoners of war ; the first in China by Jesuits 
(Cf. Strahlenherg, p. 14). 
