216 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
meeting with ice is not mentioned. The banks of the river 
which falls into the haven at Anian Sound (according to 
Amoretti, identical with Behring’s Straits) were overgrown with 
very large trees, bearing fruit all the year round: among the 
animals met with in the regions seals are mentioned, but also 
two kinds of swine, buffaloes, &c. All these absurdities show 
that the whole narrative of the voyage was fictitious, having 
been probably written with the view of thereby giving more 
weight to the proposal to send out a north-west expedition from 
Portugal, and in the full belief that the supposed sound actually 
existed, and that the voyage along the north coast of America 
would be as easy of accomplishment as one across the North 
Sea.^ The way in which the icing down of a vessel is described 
indicates that the narrator himself or his informant had been 
exposed to a winter storm in some northern sea, probably at 
Newfoundland, and the spirited sketch of the sound appears to 
have been borrowed from some East Indian traveller, who had 
been driven by storm to northern Japan, and who in a channel 
between the islands in that region believed that he had dis¬ 
covered the fabulous Anian Sound. 
Of a third voyage in 1660 a naval officer named DE LA 
Madelene gave in 1701 the following short account, probably 
picked up in Holland or Portugal, to Count DE Pontchaetein : 
“ The Portuguese, David Melguee, started from Japan on the 
14th March, 1660, with the vessel U Fere 4ternel, and following 
the coast of Tartary, i.e. the east coast of Asia, he first sailed 
1 The narratives of the Kussian voyagers in the Polar Seas hear a quite 
different stamp. Details are seldom wanting in these, and they correspond 
with known facts, and the discoveries made are of reasonably modest 
dimensions. 1 therefore consider, as I have said already, that the doubts 
of the trustworthiness of Deschnev, Chelyuskin, Andrejev, Hedenstrom, 
Sannikov, &c., are completely unfounded, and it is highly desirable that 
all journals of Eussian explorers in the Polar Sea yet in existence be 
published as soon as possible, and not in a mutilated shape, but in a 
complete and unaltered form. 
