[CHAPTER XII.]
THE ARCTIC EXPEDITIONS.—THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE.—SEVERE CRITICISMS ON NORDENSKJÖLD.
The Arctic expeditions made during the period from 1734 to 1743 have only in part any connection with the object of this work. These expeditions were, it is true, planned by Bering, and it was due to his activity and perseverance that they were undertaken. He secured vessels, men, and means, and had charge of the first unsuccessful attempt; he was responsible to the government, and in his zeal went just as far as his instructions would allow him. But his own special task soon taxed his time too heavily to permit him to assume charge of the Arctic expeditions. They were not carried out until several years after his departure from Yakutsk,—after he had ceased to be their leader. We have already shown Bering's important relation to them, something which has never before been done in West European literature. Hence our object, namely, to give Bering his dues, may therefore best be accomplished by giving a short account of the results achieved by these expeditions.
The world has never witnessed a more heroic geographical enterprise than these Arctic expeditions. In five or six different directions—from the Petchora, the Obi, the Yenesei, and the Lena—the unknown coasts of the Old World were attacked.[61] For a whole decade these discoverers struggled with all the obstacles which a terrible climate and the resources of a half developed country obliged them to contend with. They surmounted these obstacles. The expeditions were renewed, two, three, yes, even four times. If the vessels were frozen in, they were hauled upon shore the next spring, repaired, and the expedition continued. And if these intrepid fellows were checked in their course by masses of impenetrable ice, they continued their explorations on dog sledges, which here for the first time were employed in Arctic exploration. Cold, scurvy, and every degree of discomfort wrought sad havoc among them, but many survived the long polar winter in miserable wooden huts or barracks. Nowhere has Russian hardiness erected for itself a more enduring monument.
It was especially the projecting points and peninsulas in this region that caused these explorers innumerable difficulties. These points and capes had hitherto been unknown. The crude maps of this period represented the Arctic coast of Siberia as almost a straight line. It was first necessary for the navigators to send cartographers to these regions, build beacons and sea-marks, establish magazines, collect herds of reindeer, which, partly as an itinerant food supply, and partly to be used as an eventual means of conveyance, followed along the coast with the vessels, while here and there, especially on the Taimyr peninsula, small fishing stations were established for supplying the vessels.
In the summer of 1737 Malygin and Skuratoff crossed the Kara Sea and sailed up the Gulf of Obi. In the same year the able Ofzyn charted the coast between the Obi and the Yenesei, but was reduced to the rank of a common sailor, because in Berezov he had sought the company of the exiled Prince Dolgoruki.
In the year previous, Pronchisheff all but succeeded in doubling the Taimyr peninsula, and reached the highest latitude (77° 29') that had been reached by water before the Vega expedition. But it was especially in the second attempt, from 1738 to 1743, that the greatest results were attained. The two cousins, Chariton and Dmitri Laptjef, who were equipped anew and vested with great authority, attacked the task of doubling the Taimyr and Bering peninsulas with renewed vigor. By extensive sledging expeditions, the former linked his explorations to those undertaken by Minin and Sterlegoff from the west, and his mate, Chelyuskin, in 1742, planted his feet on the Old World's most northerly point, and thus relegated the story of a certain Jelmerland, said to connect northern Asia with Novaia Zemlia, to that lumber-room which contains so many ingenious cartographical ideas. But even these contributions to science were, perhaps, surpassed by those of Dmitri Laptjef. As Lassenius's successor he charted, in three summers, the Siberian coast from the Lena to the great Baranoff Cliff, a distance of thirty-seven degrees. On this coast, toward the last, he found himself in a narrow strait, from ten to twenty yards wide, and he did not stop until there was scarcely a bucketful of water between the polar ice and the rocky shore. But Cape Schelagskii, on the northeast coast, where Deshneff a century before had shown the way, he did not succeed in doubling.
As a result of the labors of this great Northern Expedition, the northern coast of the Old World got substantially the same cartographical outline that it now has. The determinations of latitude made by the Russian officers were very accurate, but those of longitude, based on nautical calculations, were not so satisfactory. Their successors, Wrangell, Anjou, Middendorff, and even Nordenskjöld, have therefore found opportunity to make corrections of but minor importance, especially in regard to longitude.
But it is necessary to dwell a little longer on these expeditions. Their principal object was not so much the charting of northern Siberia as the discovery and navigation of the Northeast passage. From this point of view alone they must be considered. This is the connecting thought, the central point in these scattered labors. They were an indirect continuation of the West European expeditions for the same purpose, but far more rational than these. For this reason Bering had, on his expedition of reconnoissance (1725-30), first sought that thoroughfare between the two hemispheres without which a Northeast and a Northwest passage could not exist. For this reason also he had, on his far-sighted plan, undertaken the navigation of the Arctic seas, where this had not already been done by Deshneff, and for this same reason the Admiralty sought carefully to link their explorations to the West European termini, on the coast of Novaia Zemlia as well as Japan. Moreover, the discovery of a Northeast passage was the raison d'être of these expeditions.