Although Müller had not yet seen Siberia, and although it was not until ten years later that he succeeded in building that geographical card-house which Captain Cook so noiselessly blew down, he nevertheless, even at that time, on every occasion expressed the opinion that Bering had not reached the northeast point of Asia, and that his voyage had consequently not accomplished its purpose. De l'Isle was Bering's intellectual antipode. As a geographer he delighted in moving about on the borderland of the world's unexplored regions. His element was that of vaguest conjecture,—the boldest combinations of known and unknown; and even as an old man he did not shrink from the task of constructing, from insufficient accounts of travels and apocryphal sailor-stories, a map of the Pacific, of which not a single line has been retained. He overstrained himself on the fame of his deceased brother, whose methods, inclinations, and valuable geographical collections he had inherited, but unfortunately not that intuitive insight which made Guillaume De l'Isle the leading geographer of his age. Hence, as a geographer, he was merely an echo of his brother.
One of Guillaume De l'Isle's most famous essays had been on the island of Yezo. In 1643 the stadtholder of Batavia, the able Van Diemen, sent the ships Kastrikon and Breskens under the command of Martin de Vries and Hendrick Corneliszoon Schaep to Japan for the purpose of navigating the east coast of the island of Nipon (Hondo), and thence go in search of America by sailing in a northwesterly direction to the 45th degree of latitude; but in case they did not find America, which people continued to believe lay in these regions, they were to turn toward the northeast and seek the coast of Asia on the 56th degree of latitude. De Vries partly carried out his chimerical project. At 40° north latitude he saw the coast of Nipon, two degrees farther north, the snow-capped mountains of Yezo, and thence sailed between the two Kuriles lying farthest to the south, which he called Staaten Eiland and Kompagniland. He then continued his voyage into the Sea of Okhotsk to 48° north latitude, where he turned about, saw Yezo in latitude 45°, but came, without noticing La Perouse Strait, over to Saghalin, which he considered a part of Yezo, and as he followed the coast of Saghalin to Cape Patience in latitude 48°, he thought Yezo a very extensive island on the eastern coast of Asia. Through the cartography of the seventeenth century, for example Witsen's and Homann's Atlas, but especially through Guillaume De l'Isle's globes and maps, these erroneous ideas were scattered over the earth, and, when the first accounts of Kamchatka, without being accompanied by a single astronomical determination, reached Europe, many believed that this land was identical with Yezo. But as De Vries had left some determinations of latitude and longitude which showed that the island must be very near Japan, some went even so far as to suppose that it was contiguous to Nipon; indeed, Guillaume De l'Isle's essay attempted to prove this. Thus three lands were made one, while De Vries's Staaten Eiland and Kompagniland, which could find no place in this series, were forced eastward into the Pacific as large tracts of land separated from Kamchatka-Yezo and from each other by narrow straits. But this is not all. The Portuguese cosmographer Texeïra had in 1649, in these same regions, indicated a coast projecting far to the east toward America, seen by Juan de Gama on a voyage to New Spain from the Philippine Islands. This Gamaland was now described as a continuation of Kompagniland. In Homann's Atlas, 1709, it is represented as a part of America, and Guillaume De l'Isle varied on the theme in a different way.[41]
Unfortunately these ideas held sway in the scientific world when Bering, in 1730, returned. Furthermore, scholars thought these ideas were confirmed by Swedish prisoners of war who had returned from Siberia, especially by the famous Tabbert, or Strahlenberg, as he was later called, whose various imaginary chart-outlines had been adopted in Homann's Atlas, 1727, and in other West European geographical works then in vogue.[42]
Bering returned. His sober accounts and accurate maps, in which there was nothing imaginary whatever, were now to take up the fight against these prejudices. Bering declared that he had sailed around Kamchatka without having seen anything of these lands, although he had—in a different direction, however—noticed signs of land. On his map, Kamchatka was represented as a definitely defined region, and hence Guillaume De l'Isle's structure had received its first blow, in case Bering's representations should be accepted. But Bering's reputation had been undermined in still another direction. The above-mentioned Cossack chief Shestakoff had, during his sojourn in Russia, distributed various rough contour sketches of northeastern Asia. This brave warrior, however, knew just as little about wielding a pen as he did a pencil. The matter of a few degrees more or less in some coast-lines did not seriously trouble him. Even his own drawings did not agree. Northeast of the Chukchee peninsula he had sketched an extensive country, which Bering had not seen.
It is characteristic of Joseph De l'Isle that he accepted both Shestakoff and Strahlenberg, and as late as in 1753 still clung to their outlines. In the first place, it satisfied his family pride to be able to maintain his brother's views of the cartography of these regions (and of his views Strahlenberg's were but an echo), and it moreover satisfied his predisposition to that which was vague and hypothetical. At first De l'Isle succeeded in carrying out his wishes, and in 1737 the Academy published a map of Asia in which it would prove extremely difficult to find any trace of Bering's discoveries.[43] It was accordingly quite the proper thing to consider Bering's first expedition wholly, or at least to a great extent, unsuccessful. In the literature of that day there are evidences of this, especially in Steller's writings. He treats Bering with scornful superiority, which is particularly out of place, as he shows himself a poor judge in geographical matters.[44] Kiriloff, who in his general map of Russia in 1734[45] unreservedly accepted Bering's map, was the only man who gave him due recognition. The Academy could not persuade itself to make use of the only scientifically obtained outline map in existence of the remotest regions of the empire, until Bering, many years afterwards, had won full recognition in Paris, Nuremberg, and London. Bering's map was made in Moscow in 1731, and the Russian government presented it to the king of Poland,[46] who gave it to the Jesuit father Du Halde. He had it printed and inserted in D'Anville's Nouvelle Atlas de la Chine, a supplement to his large work on China, to which we have several times referred.[47] Of this work Dr. Campbell later gave an account in Harris's Collection of Voyages, and it was, furthermore, the basis of the better class of geographical works on eastern Asia of last century until Captain Cook's day. A copy of the eastern half of the map will be found in the appendix to this treatise.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] A port on the southern coast of Kamchatka.
[41] See Maps II. and III.
[42] Note 33.