262 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. XV. 
It was the desire to procure for our museums the skins or 
skeletons of the many remarkable mammalia occurring here, also 
to compare the present state of the island which for nearly a 
century and a half has been exposed to the unsparing thirst of 
man for sport and plunder, with Steller’s spirited and picturesque 
description, which led me to include a visit to the island in the 
plan of the expedition. The accounts I got at Behring Island 
from the American newspapers of the anxiety which our 
wintering had caused in Europe led me indeed to make our 
stay there shorter than I at first intended. Our harvest of 
collections and observations was at all events extraordinarily 
abundant. But before I proceed to give an account of our own 
stay on the island, I must devote a few words to its discovery 
and the first wintering there, which has a quite special interest 
from the island having never before been trodden by the foot of 
man. The abundant animal life, then found there, gives us 
therefore one of the exceedingly few representations we possess 
of the animal world as it was before man, the lord of the creation, 
appeared. 
After Behring’s vessel had drifted about a considerable time 
at random in the Behring Sea, in consequence of the severe 
scurvy-epidemic, which had spread to nearly all the men on 
board, without any dead reckoning being kept, and finally with¬ 
out sail or helmsman, literally at the mercy of wind and waves, 
those on board on the ^th November, 1741, sighted land, off whose 
coast the vessel was anchored the following day at 5 o’clock P.M. 
An hour after the cable gave way, and an enormous sea threw 
the vessel towards the shore-cliffs. All appeared to be already 
lost. But the vessel, instead of being driven ashore by new 
Besclireihung der Beringsmsel (Pallas’ Neue Nordische Beytrdge, St. Peters¬ 
burg and Leipzig, 1781-83, ii. p. 225); G. W. Steller’s Tagehucli seiner 
Seereise aus deni Petrijpauls Hafen . . . und seiner Begehenheiten auf der 
Riichreise (Pallas’ Neueste Nordische Beytrdge, St. Petersburg and Leipzig, 
1793-96, i. p. 130; ii. p. 1). 
