ct--three feet of solid peat. Clothing of sea-otter
skins of priceless value, which afterwards proved a fortune to those
who survived, and food of the flesh of the great sea-cow, saved a
remnant of the wretched crew. During most of the month of November the
_St Peter_ rode safely at anchor while storms thundered around her
retreat; but on the 28th her cable snapped beneath a hurricane, and she
was driven high and dry on the shore, a broken wreck. In all
thirty-one men had perished of scurvy by January 1742. Among these was
the poor old commander. On the morning of December 8, as the wind went
moaning round their shelter, Steller heard the Dane praying in a low
voice. And just at daybreak he passed into that great, quiet Unknown
World whence no traveller has returned.

How the consort ship, the _St Paul_, found {29} her way back to
Kamchatka, and how Bering's castaways in the spring built themselves a
raft and mustered their courage to essay the voyage home which they
ought to have attempted in the autumn, are matters for more detailed
history. But just as Cartier's discovery of the St Lawrence led to the
pursuit of the little beaver across a continent, so the Russians'
discovery of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands led to the pursuit of the
sea-otter up and down the North Pacific; led the way, indeed, to that
contest for world supremacy on the Pacific in which the great powers of
three continents are to-day engaged.

{30}

CHAPTER III

THE OUTLAW HUNTERS

Chirikoff's crew on the _St Paul_ had long since returned in safety to
Kamchatka, and the garrison of the fort on Avacha Bay had given up
Bering's men as lost for ever, when one August morning the sentinel on
guard along the shore front of Petropavlovsk descried a strange
apparition approaching across the silver surface of an unruffled sea.
It was like a huge whale, racing, galloping, coming in leaps and bounds
of flying fins over the water towards the fort. The soldier telescoped
his eyes with his hands and looked again. This was no whale. There
was a mast pole with a limp skin-thing for sail. It was a big, clumsy,
raft-shaped flat-boat. The oarsmen were rowing like pursued maniacs,
rising and falling bodily as they pulled. It was this that gave the
craft the appearance of galloping over the water. The soldier called
down others to look. Some one ran for the commander of the {31} fort.
What puzzled the onlookers was the appearance of the row