s to help, Spangberg and
Chirikoff, and with five hundred and seventy men under him. It would
take too long to follow the various expeditions that now left Russia
in five different directions to explore the unknown coasts of the Old
World. "The world has never witnessed a more heroic geographical
enterprise than these Arctic expeditions." Amid obstacles
indescribable the north line of Siberia, hitherto charted as a
straight line, was explored and surveyed. Never was greater courage
and endurance displayed. If the ships got frozen in, they were hauled
on shore, the men spent the long winter in miserable huts and started
off again with the spring, until the northern coast assumed shape and
form.

One branch of the Great Northern Expedition under Behring was composed
of professors to make a scientific investigation of Kamtchatka! These
thirty learned Russians were luxuriously equipped. They carried a
library with several hundred books, including _Robinson Crusoe_ and
_Gulliver's Travels_, seventy reams of writing-paper, and artists'
materials. They had nine wagonloads of instruments, carrying
telescopes fifteen feet long. A surgeon, two landscape painters, one
instrument maker, five surveyors accompanied them, and "the convoy
grew like an avalanche as it worked its way into Siberia." Behring
seems to have moved this "cumbersome machine" safely to Yakutsk,
though it took the best part of two years. Having left Russia in 1733,
it was 1741 when Behring himself was ready to start from the harbour
of Okhotsk for the coast of America with two ships and provisions for
some months. He was now nearly sixty, his health was undermined with
vexation and worry, and the climate of Okhotsk had nearly killed him.

On 18th July--just six weeks after the start--Behring discovered the
continent of North America. The coast was jagged, the land covered
with snow, mountains extended inland, and above all rose a peak
towering into the clouds--a peak higher than anything they knew in
Siberia or Kamtchatka, which Behring named Mount St. Elias, after the
patron saint of the day. He made his way with difficulty through the
string of islands that skirt the great peninsula of Alaska. Through
the months of August and September they cruised about the coast in
damp and foggy weather, which now gave way to violent storms, and
Behring's ship was driven along at the mercy of the wind. He himself
was ill, and the greater part of his crew were disabled by s