202 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
Moscow, and by means of the assistance he succeeded in 
procuring there, he commenced in 1766 a voyage from which 
neither he nor any of his followers returned. CoXE mentions 
several things which tell in favour of his having actually rounded 
Cape Deschnev and reached the Anadyr. But Wrangel believes 
that he perished in the neighbourhood of Cape Schelagskoj. 
For in 1823 the inhabitants of that cape showed Wrangehs 
companion Matiuschkin a little ruinous house, built east of the 
river Werkon on the coast of the Polar Sea. For many years 
back the Chukches travelling past had found there hT;iman bones 
gnawed by beasts of prey, and various household articles, which 
indicated that shipwrecked men had wintered there, and Wrangel 
accordingly supposes that it was there that Schalaurov perished 
a sacrifice to the determination with which he prosecuted his 
self-imposed task of sailing round the north-eastern promontory 
of Asia.i 
In order to ascertain whether any truth lay at the bottom 
of the view, generally adopted in Siberia, that the continent of 
America extended along the north coast of Asia to the neigh¬ 
bourhood of the islands situated there, Chicherin, Governor of 
Siberia, in the winter of 1763 sent a sergeant, Andrejev with 
dog-sledges on an ice journey towards the north. He succeeded 
in reaching some islands of considerable extent, which Wrangel, 
who always shows himself very sceptical with respect to the 
existence of new lands and islands in the Polar Sea, considers to 
have been the Bear Islands. Now it appears to be pretty certain 
that Andrejev visited a south-westerly continuation of the land 
named on recent maps '' Wrangel Land,” which in that case, like 
the corresponding part of America, forms a collection of many 
1 An account of Sclialaurov is given by Coxe {Russian Discoveries, &c., 
1780, p. 323) and Wrangel (i. p. 73). That the hut seen by Matiuschkin 
actually belonged to Schalaurov appears to me highly improbable, for 
the traditions of the Siberian savages seldom extend sixty years back. 
