ng the delay a change of wind took place,
whereby the vessel was driven back towards the coast of Okotsk. The
wind again becoming favourable, the vessel was put about and
anchored successfully in the Tigil. The men who were sent ashore
found the houses deserted. For the Kamchadales being terrified at
the large ship had made their escape to the woods. The seafarers
sailed on along the coast and landed at several places in order that
they might meet with the inhabitants, but for a long time without
success, until at last they fell in with a Kamchadal girl, who was
collecting edible roots. With her as a guide they soon found
dwellings, and even Cossacks, who had been sent out to collect
tribute. They wintered at the river Kompakova. During the winter the
sea cast up a whale, which had in its carcase a harpoon of European
manufacture and with Latin letters. The vessel left the winter haven
in the middle of May (new style) 1717, but meeting with ice-fields
was beset in them for five and a half weeks. This occasioned great
scarcity of provisions. In the end of July the seafarers were again
back at Okotsk. From this time there has been regular communication
by sea between this town and Kamchatka. The master of the vessel
during the first voyage across the Sea of Okotsk was the Cossack
SOKOLOV.[313]

[Illustration: MAP OF ASIA. From on Atlas published, by the Russian
Academy of Sciences in 1737. ]

From what I have stated it follows that, thanks to the fondness of
the hunters and Cossacks for adventurous, exploratory expeditions,
the current ideas regarding the distribution of the land and the
courses of the rivers in north-eastern Asia were in the main
correct. But, in consequence of want of knowledge of, or of doubts
regarding, Deschnev's discoveries, there prevailed an uncertainty
whether Asia at its north-east extremity was connected with America
by a small neck of land, in the same way as it is with Africa, or as
North and South America are connected with each other, a view which,
in consequence of the unscientific necessity of generalising
inherent in man, and the wish to have an explanation of how the
population extended from the old to the new world, was long
zealously defended[314]. No one, either European or native, had yet,
so far as we know, extended his hunting journeys to the northernmost
promontory of Asia, in consequence of which the position which it
was assumed to occupy only depended on loose suppositions.