"On Schalarof's chart, the coast from the Yana to Cape Shelagskoi is laid down with an accuracy that does honour to its author. He was the first navigator that examined Tchaun Bay, and since his time no fresh soundings have been taken there."
Apparently the Russian explorer Laptief only once made an attempt to travel by land from the Kolyma to Bering Sea, but this was by an entirely different route to ours.
"Considering it impossible to effect by sea the task assigned him by surveying the Anadyr River,[50] Laptief resolved on an undertaking attended by equal danger and difficulty, namely, to proceed overland with his whole crew, crossing the mountains, and traversing the country of the hostile Tchuktchis. With this view he left Nijni-Kolymsk on October 27th, 1741, and directed his course towards the Anadyr, with forty-five nartas drawn by dogs. On November 4th he arrived at Lobasnoie, on the Greater Anui. As that river forms the boundary of the country inhabited by the wandering Tchuktchis, Laptief deemed it prudent, during his passage through what might in some measure be considered an enemy's territory, to observe the utmost caution, and to subject his men to a strict military discipline. They ascended the Greater Anui, crossed the chain of mountains Yablonoi Khrebét, and reached the Anadyr Ostrog on November 17th without having seen a single Tchuktchi on the way."
[50] Which in those days was supposed to fall into the Polar Sea.
Concerning another expedition Von Wrangell writes: "The Geodets undertook a third excursion over the ice in 1771. Starting from the Kolyma they arrived on the last of the Bear Islands on March 9th. There they remained six days on account of bad weather, and then started for Tchaun Bay. Three days they continued in a due east direction, and having gone forty-eight versts, turned off to the Baranov rocks, from which they were fifty versts distant, and where they arrived on the 18th. Having rested there and killed a white bear, they continued their journey along the coast in an easterly direction, but on the 28th, their provisions running short, they were forced to return. On April 6th they arrived again at Nijni-Kolymsk, after driving about 433 versts."
All this was not very encouraging, especially the fact, recorded by Von Wrangell, that a traveller named Hedenstrom once made an attempt to reach Shelagskoi about the same time of year as ourselves, but "found the ice already so thin that he was obliged to renounce the plan. He even found it difficult to retrace his own track to the Kolyma, where, however, he arrived in safety and spent the following summer."
This was the sole information which I was able to extract from a score of volumes dealing with Arctic exploration, and, briefly, it came to this: Von Wrangell had once travelled in winter, with dogs, from Nijni-Kolymsk to Koliutchin Bay (about two-thirds of the distance to Bering Straits). Berry and Gilder had traversed the entire distance, from the Straits to the Kolyma River, under similar conditions; and why, therefore, should we not do likewise? There was a "but," however, and a formidable one. These three travellers had made the coast journey in the depth of winter (with a good three months of solid ice before them), while we were about to attempt it in the declining spring.
On the first day, when travelling about two miles out to sea not far from the mouth of the Kolyma River, Harding, with an exclamation of surprise, drew my attention to a group of men apparently gathered together on the brink of a cliff. But a moment's reflection showed me that, viewed from this distance, these figures, if human beings, must have been giants of fifty feet high. The resemblance, however, was so startling that we steered inshore for a closer inspection, and my glasses then revealed the rocky pinnacles which nature has so weirdly fashioned in the shape of man. The effect in this desolate and ice-bound wilderness was uncanny in the extreme. Von Wrangell noticed these pillars in 1820, and measuring one found it forty-three feet in height. He describes it as "something like the body of a man, with a sort of cap or turban on his head, and without arms or legs," but to us they appeared much more lifelike.
We made good headway during the greater part of the first day in clear and cloudless weather, but towards evening the sky became overcast and a rapidly rising wind brought down another shrieking poorga, which compelled us to encamp in haste under the lee of a rocky cliff, luckily at hand when the storm burst upon us. At this time a breastplate of solid ice was formed by driving snow on our deerskins, and an idea of the intense and incessant cold which followed may be gleaned by the fact that this uncomfortable cuirass remained intact until we entered the first Tchuktchi hut nearly three weeks later. But this first poorga, although a severe one, was nothing compared to the tempests we afterwards encountered. Nevertheless, our flimsy tent was twice blown down before morning, its re-erection entailing badly frozen hands and faces, for having encamped without finding drift-wood there was no fire and therefore no food. Cold and hunger precluded sleep, and I passed the cold and miserable hours vainly endeavouring to smoke a pipe blocked by frozen nicotine. This may be taken as a fair sample of a night in dirty weather on that cruel coast. At daybreak we commenced another hunt for drift-wood, which was not discovered for several hours, when every one was utterly worn out from the cold and lengthened fast.
Sometimes a poorga would rage all day, and in this case progress was out of the question. The solitary meal would then consist of frozen fish or iron-like chunks of Carnyl which were held in the mouth until sufficiently soft to be swallowed. There was of course no means of assuaging thirst, from which we at first suffered severely, for the sucking of ice only increases this evil. And want of water affected even the sleds, the runners of which should be sluiced at least once a day, so as to form a thin crust of ice which slides easily over a frozen surface.