The most notable and valuable of the Russian contributions to this subject is that of Zagoskin. This refers to the period of 1842-1844 and is contained partly in his "Peshechodnaia Opis," etc. (St. Petersburg, 1847), but especially on his maps. There are, I find, two of these maps—the "Merkatorskaia Karta Časti Sieverozapadnago Berega Ameriky" and the "Merkatorskaia Generalnaia Karta Časti Rossijskich Vladěnii v Amerikě." I came across the first in one copy of Zagoskin's invaluable account, which should long ago have been translated into English, and the other in another copy. Part of the second is here reproduced. (Pl. 30.) Both bear the statement that they were made by Zagoskin as the result of his explorations on the Yukon in 1842-1844. The second ("general") map is much the clearer and richer. Both maps, but especially the second, give a good number of villages, especially about Norton Sound and along the southern shore of Seward Peninsula. The orthography differs somewhat on the two charts.
The Tebenkof Atlas of 1849 includes a remarkably good map of the St. Lawrence Island. As on other Russian maps it gives the Punuk Islands, that later are lost by most map makers, and indicates the location of what probably were all the living settlements of that time, except on the Punuk. (Fig. 27.)
Finally, in 1861, Tikhmenief, in his "Istoričeskoie Obozrenie" (history of Russian America) gives a detailed map with many locations of Eskimo villages.
The Aleutian Islands and Kodiak are excellently dealt with by Veniaminof and also Tikhmenief, though little special attention is given to the location of the settlements.
None of the Russian explorers, regrettably, report verbally on the deserted sites or ruins. But their registration and location of many villages that have since become "dead" is of much historical as well as anthropological value.
Figure 13.—World map
Of later and particularly American authors who gave attention to the location of the western Eskimo settlements, the foremost is E. W. Nelson. Beginning in 1877 with the St. Michael Island and ending with the cruise of the Corwin in 1881, Nelson made trips down the coast to the Kuskokwim, up the Yukon to Anvik, over the Bering Sea, the St. Lawrence Island and parts of the Chukchee Peninsula, and finally, with the Corwin, along the northern coasts to Point Barrow. And these journeys were devoted largely to biological and ethnological observations and collections, the latter including the location of the western Eskimo habitations of that time. His locations are given on the accompanying map (fig. 15) taken from his classic memoir, "The Eskimo about Bering Strait," published in 1900 in the Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. This memoir contains a section of "Ruins" (pp. 263-266), a brief account of the recently dead villages on St. Lawrence Island (p. [269]), and an instructive section on Eskimo burials (pp. [310]-322). Nelson brought also the first more substantial collection of Eskimo crania.
The next deserving man in these connections is Ivan Petrof. Of Russian-American extraction, Petrof was charged in 1880 with the census enumeration of the natives in Alaska, and he later published[60] a valuable report on his work, together with detailed demographic data and a map on which are given all the living settlements of his time. Nelson's map is partly based on Petrof's data.