ers. They did
not look like human beings; their hair was long; their beards were
unkempt. They were literally naked except for breech-clouts and
shoulder-pieces of fur. Then somebody shouted the unexpected tidings
that they were the castaways of Bering's crew.

Bugles rang; the fort drum rumbled a muster; the chapel bells pealed
forth; and the whole population of the fort rushed to the
water-side--shouting, gesticulating, laughing, crying--and welcomed
with wild embraces the returning castaways. And while men looked for
this one and that among the two-score coming ashore from the raft, and
women wept for those they did not find, on the outskirts of the crowd
stood silent observers--Chinese traders and pedlars from Manchuria, who
yearly visited Kamchatka to gather pelts for the annual great fur fairs
held in China. The Chinese merchants looked hard; then nodded
knowingly to each other, and came furtively down amid the groups along
the shore front and timidly fingered the matted pelts worn by the
half-naked men. It was incredible. Each penniless castaway was
wearing the fur of the sea-otter, or what the Russians called {32} the
sea-beaver, more valuable than seal, and, even at that day, rarer than
silver fox. Never suspecting their value, the castaways had brought
back a great number of the pelts of these animals; and when the Chinese
merchants paid over the value of these furs in gold, the Russians
awakened to a realization that while Bering had not found a Gamaland,
he might have stumbled on as great a source of wealth as the furs of
French Canada or the gold-lined temples of Peru.

The story Bering's men told was that, while searching ravenously for
food on the barren island where they had been cast, they had found vast
kelp-beds and seaweed marshes, where pastured the great manatee known
as the sea-cow. Its flesh had saved their lives. While hunting the
sea-cow in the kelp-beds and sea-marshes the men had noticed that
whenever a swashing sea or tide drove the shattering spray up the
rocks, there would come riding in on the storm whole herds of another
sea denizen--thousands upon thousands of them, so tame that they did
not know the fear of man, burying their heads in the sea-kelp while the
storm raged, lifting them only to breathe at intervals. This creature
was six feet long from the tip of its round, {33} cat-shaped nose to
the end of its stumpy, beaver-shaped tail, with fur the colour of ebony
on the s