Nor did the seas of these strange shores bar the Cossacks. Long before
Peter the Great had sent Vitus Bering to America in 1741, Russian
voyagers had launched out east and north with a daredevil recklessness
that would have done honor to prehistoric man. That part of their
adventures is a record that exceeds the wildest darings of fiction.
Their boats were called _kotches_. They were some sixty feet long,
flat bottomed, planked with green timber. Not a nail was used. Where
were nails to come from six thousand miles across the frozen tundras?
Indeed, iron was so scarce that at a later day when ships with nails
ventured on {296} these seas natives were detected diving below to pull
the nails from the timbers with their teeth. Instead of nails, the
Cossack used reindeer thongs to bind the planking together. Instead of
tar, moss and clay and the tallow of sea animals calked the seams.
Needless to say, there was neither canvas nor rope. Reindeer thongs
supplied the cordage, reindeer hides the sails. On such rickety craft,
"with the help of God and a little powder," the Russian voyagers
hoisted sail and put to sea. On just such vessels did Deshneff and
Staduchin attempt to round Asia from the Arctic into Bering Sea
(1647-1650).

To be sure, the first bang of the ice-floes against the prow of these
rickety boats knocked them into kindling-wood. Two-thirds of the
Cossack voyagers were lost every year; and often all news that came of
the crew was a mast pole washed in by the tide with a dead man lashed
to the crosstrees. Small store of fresh water could be carried. Pine
needles were the only antidote for scurvy; and many a time the boat
came tumbling back to the home port, not a man well enough to stand
before the mast.

Always it is what lies just beyond that lures. It is the unknown that
beckons like the arms of the old sea sirens. Groping through the mists
that hang like a shroud over these northern seas, hoar frosts clinging
to masts and decks till the boat might have been some ghost ship in a
fog world, the Cossack plunderers {297} sometimes caught glimpses far
ahead--twenty, thirty, forty miles eastward--of a black line along the
sea. Was it land or fog, ice or deep water? And when the wind blew
from the east, strange land birds alighted on the yard-arms. Dead
whales with the harpoons of strange hunters washed past the ship; and
driftwood of a kind that did not grow in Asia tossed up on the tide
wra