the
hope of effecting his favourite object, the doubling of Cape Shelagskoi;
but his crew, weary of the hardships and privations they had endured,
mutinied, and left him. This forced him to return to the Lena. He then
went to Moscow, and having obtained some pecuniary assistance from the
Government, undertook, in 1764, another voyage to Cape Shelagskoi, _from
which he never returned_."

"For a long time none but vague rumours circulated respecting his fate.
I was so fortunate in 1823 as to discover the spot, about seventy miles
from Cape Shelagskoi, where Schalarof and his companions landed, after
they had seen their vessel destroyed by the ice. Here, in a black
wilderness, struggling against want and misery, he ended his active
life; but a late posterity renders this well-deserved tribute of
acknowledgment to the rare disinterested spirit of enterprise by which
he was animated."

"On Schalarof's chart, the coast from the Yana to Cape Shelagskoi is
laid down with an accuracy that does honour to its author. He was the
first navigator that examined Tchaun Bay, and since his time no fresh
soundings have been taken there."

Apparently the Russian explorer Laptief only once made an attempt to
travel by land from the Kolyma to Bering Sea, but this was by an
entirely different route to ours.

"Considering it impossible to effect by sea the task assigned him by
surveying the Anadyr River,[50] Laptief resolved on an undertaking
attended by equal danger and difficulty, namely, to proceed overland
with his whole crew, crossing the mountains, and traversing the country
of the hostile Tchuktchis. With this view he left Nijni-Kolymsk on
October 27th, 1741, and directed his course towards the Anadyr, with
forty-five _nartas_ drawn by dogs. On November 4th he arrived at
Lobasnoie, on the Greater Anui. As that river forms the boundary of the
country inhabited by the wandering Tchuktchis, Laptief deemed it
prudent, during his passage through what might in some measure be
considered an enemy's territory, to observe the utmost caution, and to
subject his men to a strict military discipline. They ascended the
Greater Anui, crossed the chain of mountains Yablonoi Khrebet, and
reached the Anadyr Ostrog on November 17th _without having seen a single
Tchuktchi on the way_."

[Footnote 50: Which in those days was supposed to fall into the Polar
Sea.]

Concerning another expedition Von Wrangell writes: "The Geodets
undertook a third excu