200 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
Steller, Krasclieninnikov, de Tlsle de la Croyere, &c.—The 
voyages of these savants have indeed formed an epoch in onr 
knowledge of the ethnography and natural history of North Asia, 
but the north coast itself they did not touch. An account of 
them therefore lies beyond the limits of the history which I 
have undertaken to relate here. 
The Great Northern Expedition by these journeys both by 
sea and land had gained a knowledge of the natural conditions 
of North Asia based on actual researches, had yielded pretty 
complete information regarding the boundary of that quarter 
of the globe towards the north, and of the relative position 
of the east coast of Asia and the west coast of America, had 
discovered the Aleutian Islands, and had connected the Russian 
discoveries in the east with those of the West-Europeans in 
Japan and China.^ The results were thus very grand and 
epoch-making. But these undertakings had also required very 
considerable sacrifices, and long before they were finished they 
were looked upon in no favourable light by the Siberian 
authorities, on account of the heavy burden which the transport 
of provisions and other equipment through desolate regions 
imposed upon the country. Nearly twenty years now elapsed 
before there was a new exploratory expedition in the Siberian 
Polar Sea worthy of being registered in the history of geography. 
This time it was a private person, a Yakutsk merchant, 
ScHALAUROV, who proposed to repeat Deschnev’s famous voyage 
and to gain this end sacrificed the whole of his means and 
his life itself. Accompanied by an exiled midshipman, Ivan 
Backoff, and with a crew of deserters and deported men, he 
^ It deserves to be noted as a literary curiosity that the famous French 
savant and geographer, Vivien de Saint Martin, in his work, Histoire de la 
GeograpJiie et des Decouvertes geographiqiiesj Paris, 1873, does not say a single 
word regarding all those expeditions which form an epoch in our knowledge 
of the Old World. 
