[291] Homines illius regionis sunt pulchri, magni, et corpulenti, sed sunt multum pallidi. . . . et sunt homines inculti, et immorigerati et bestialiter viventes.
[292] See note at [page 54, vol i.,] for an account of von Herberstein and his works.
[293] As the copy of the original map to which I have had access, being coloured, is unsuitable for photo-lithographing, I give here instead a photo-lithographic reproduction of the map in the Italian edition printed in 1550. The map itself is unchanged in any essential particular, but the drawing and engraving are better. There is, besides, a still older map of Russia in the first edition of Sebastian Munster's Cosmographia Universalis. I have not had access to this edition, but have had to the third edition of the same work printed at Basel in 1550. A very incomplete map of Russia engraved on wood, on which, however, the Obi and the "Sybir" are to be found, is inserted in this work at page 910. The Dwina here falls not into the White Sea but into the Gulf of Finland, through a lake to which the name Ladoga is now given; places like Astracan, Asof, Viborg, Calmahori (Kolmogor), Solowki (Solovets), &c., are indicated pretty correctly, and in the White Sea there is to be seen a very faithful representation of a walrus swimming.
[294] The river Ob is mentioned the first time in 1492, in the negotiations which the Austrian ambassador, Michael Snups, carried on in Moscow in order to obtain permission to travel in the interior of Russia (Adelung, Uebersicht der Reisenden in Russland, p. 157).
[295] As before stated, Marco Polo mentions Polar bears but not walruses.
[296] Herodotus places Andropagi in nearly the same regions which are now inhabited by the Samoyeds. Pliny also speaks of man-eating Scythians.
[297] Arctic literature contains a nearly contemporaneous sketch of the first Russian-Siberian commercial undertakings, Beschryvinghe vander Samoyeden Landt in Tartarien, nieulijcks onder't ghebiedt der Moscoviten gebracht. Wt de Russche tale overgheset, Anno 1609. Amsterdam, Hessel Gerritsz, 1612; inserted in Latin, in 1613, in the same publisher's Descriptio ac Delineatio Geographica Detectionis Freti (Photo-lithographic reproduction, by Frederick Müller, Amsterdam, 1878). The same work, or more correctly, collection of small geographical pamphlets, contains also Isak Massa's map of the coast of the Polar Sea between the Kola peninsula and the Pjäsina, which I have reproduced.
[298] It is a peculiar circumstance that the vanguard of the Russian stream of emigration which spread over Siberia, advanced along the northernmost part of the country by the Tas, Turuchansk, Yakutsk, Kolyma, and Anadyrsk. This depended in the first place upon the races living there having less power of resistance against the invaders, who were often very few in number, than the tribes in the south, but also on the fact that the most precious and most transportable treasures of Siberia—sable, beaver, and fox-skins—were obtained in greatest quantity from these northern regions.
[299] Flat-bottomed, half-decked boats, twelve fathoms in length. The planks were fastened by wooden pins, the anchors were pieces of wood with large stones bound to them, the rigging of thongs, and the sails often of tanned reindeer hides (J.E. Fischer, Sibirische Geschichte, St. Petersburg, 1768, i. p. 517).
[300] G. P. Müller, Sammlung Russischer Geschichte, St. Petersburg, 1758. Müller asserts in this work that it was he who, in 1736, first drew from the repositories of the Yakutsk archives the account of Deschnev's voyage, which before that time was known neither at the court of the Czar nor in the remotest parts of Siberia. This, however, is not quite correct, for long before Müller, the Swedish prisoner-of-war, Strahlenberg, knew that the Russians travelled by sea from the Kolyma to Kamchatka, which appears from his map of Asia, constructed during his stay in Siberia, and published in Das Nord- und Ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia, Stockholm, 1730. On this map there is the following inscription in the sea north of the Kolyma—"Hie Rutheni ab initio per Moles glaciales, quæ flante Borea ad Littora, flanteque Anstro versus Mare iterum pulsantur, magno Labore et Vitæ Discrimine transvecti sunt ad Regionem Kamtszatkam."