a day followed in succession.
Though down, Chirikoff was not beaten. Discipline was maintained among
the hungry crew; and each day Chirikoff issued exact orders. Without any
attempt at steering, the ship drifted westward. No more land was seen by
the crew; but on the 2d of October, the weather clearing, an observation
was taken of the sun that showed them they were nearing Kamchatka. On
the 8th, land was sighted; but one man alone, the pilot, Yelagin, had
strength to stay at the helm till Avacha Bay was approached, when
distress signals were fired from the ship's cannon to bring help from
land. Poor Croyere de l'Isle, kinsman to the map makers whose mistakes
had caused disaster, sick unto death of the scurvy, had kept himself
alive with liquor and now insisted on being carried ashore. The first
breath of clear air above decks was enough. The scientist fell dead
within the home harbor. Chirikoff was landed the same day, all unaware
that at times in the mist and {53} rain he had been within from fifteen
to forty miles of poor Bering, zigzagging across the very trail of the
afflicted sister ship.

[Illustration: Sea Cows.]

By December the entire crew of Bering's castaways, prisoners on the
sea-girt islands of the North Pacific, were lodged in five underground
huts on the bank of a stream. In 1885, when these mud huts or _yurts_
were examined, they were seen to have walls of peat three feet thick. To
each man was given a pound of flour. For the rest, their food must be
what they caught or clubbed--mainly, at first, the sea-otter, whose flesh
was unpalatable to the taste and tough as leather. Later, Steller
discovered that the huge sea-cow--often thirty-five feet long--seen
pasturing on the fields of sea-kelp at low tide, afforded food of almost
the same quality as the land cow. Seaweed grew in miniature forests on
the island; and on this pastured the monster bovine of the sea--true fish
in its hind quarters but oxlike in its head and its habits--herding
together like cattle, snorting like a horse, moving the neck from side to
side as it grazed, with the hind leg a fin, the fore fin a leg, udder
between the fore legs, and in place of teeth, plates. Nine hundred or
more sea-otter--whose pelts afterward brought a fortune to the crew--were
killed for food by Steller and his companions; but two sea-cows provided
the castaways with food for six weeks. On November 22d died the old
mate, who had weathered northe