ment that a small band of
white men had been landed on the coast south of Bering Strait late in
the fall, from a "fire-ship" or steamer; that they had dug a sort of
cellar in the ground, covered it over with bushes and boards, and gone
into winter quarters. Who they were, what they had come for, and how
long they intended to stay, were questions which now agitated the
whole Chukchi nation, but which no one could answer. Their little
subterranean hut had been entirely buried, the natives said, by the
drifting snows of winter, and nothing but a curious iron tube out of
which came smoke and sparks showed where the white men lived. This
curious iron tube which so puzzled the Chukchis we at once supposed to
be a stove-pipe, and it furnished the strongest possible confirmation
of the truth of the story. No Siberian native could ever have invented
the idea of a stove-pipe--somebody must have seen one; and this fact
alone convinced us beyond a doubt that there were Americans living
somewhere on the coast of Bering Sea--probably an exploring party
landed by Colonel Bulkley to cooperate with us.

The instructions which the Major gave me when we left Gizhiga did not
provide for any such contingency as the landing of this party near
Bering Strait, because at that time we had abandoned all hope of such
cooperation and expected to explore the country by our own unaided
exertions. The engineer-in-chief had promised faithfully, when we
sailed from San Francisco, that, if he should leave a party of men at
the mouth of the Anadyr River at all, he would leave them there early
in the season with a large whale-boat, so that they could ascend the
river to a settlement before the opening of winter. When we met the
Anadyrsk people, therefore, at Gizhiga, late in November, and learned
that nothing had been heard of any such party, we of course concluded
that for some reason the plan which Colonel Bulkley proposed had been
given up. No one dreamed that he would leave a mere handful of men
in the desolate region south of Bering Strait at the beginning of an
arctic winter, without any means whatever of transportation, without
any shelter, surrounded by fierce tribes of lawless natives, and
distant more than two hundred miles from the nearest civilised human
being. What was such an unfortunate party to do? They could only live
there in inactivity until they starved, were murdered, or were brought
away by an expedition sent to their rescue from the