"The provisions consisted of Carrots for want of Corn (=grain or wheat), the fat of Fish uncured served instead of Butter and salt fish supplied the place of all other meats."
Campbell in Harris' Voyages, p. 1020, still further enlarges this statement and Lauridsen puts it
"Fish oil was his butter and dried fish his beef and pork. Salt he was obliged to get from the sea," and "he distilled spirits from 'sweet straw.'"
This gives a totally false idea of the supplies provided for the expedition. Bering received from Yakutsk over forty-two tons of flour, and large numbers, fifty at a time, of the small Siberian cattle were driven on the hoof to Okhotsk where their flesh was partly dried and partly salted. On his return he delivered surplus supplies to the proper officers in Kamchatka and at Okhotsk ever 30,000 lbs. of meal, flour and salt meat. There were at that time no carrots to be had in Kamchatka as Bering himself testifies. Salted salmon then as now, formed a staple article of diet in Kamchatka and was without doubt included in his stores. The delicate fat obtained by boiling the bellies of the salmon, is annually prepared in Kamchatka and is regarded to this day as a great delicacy (cf. Voyage of the Marchesa, 2d edition, p. 135.) A store of it might without any hardship be furnished to the commander for use as butter. Salt he obtained as it is usually obtained by evaporating sea-water, and the absence of strong drink of European origin was supplied by a distillation of the stalks of the bear's foot or "sweet herb" of the Cossacks (Heracleum dulce Kittlitz), long used for that purpose by the Russians in Siberia and from which, even in modern times, according to Seemann, the Kamchadales secured additions to their scanty supply of syrup or sugar.
The supplies then of the expedition, were not inferior to those in common use at sea at that period, and as far as health is concerned were certainly less likely to result in an invasion of scurvy than the use of salt beef and pork alone would have been.
It must be remembered that the fare on naval vessels all over the world in those days, was rude and coarse to a degree now long unknown and that it was not until the voyages of Cook, nearly half a century later, that the antiscorbutic and varied regimen, now usually enforced by law in maritime nations, was even thought of.
The force crowded together on the little Gabriel is enumerated by Lauridsen presumably from the account of Bergh.
It consisted beside the commander, of Lieutenants Martin Spanberg and Alexie Chirikoff; Second Lieutenant Peter Chaplin, Doctor Nieman, a quartermaster, eight sailors, a worker in leather, a rope maker, five carpenters, a boatswain, two cossacks with a drummer and nine marines, six servants, stewards, etc., and two Kariak interpreters, a cabin boy and a pilot, in all forty-four persons.
It is not clear from Lauridsen's account whether in the above list are or are not included the two mates, Richard Engel and George Morison, or the cartographer Potiloff, who started with Bering from St. Petersburg. Luzhin was left behind, being ill.
July 13/24. The variation of the compass was determined to be 13° 10' easterly (L.). In the afternoon (being the 14th nautical reckoning) the vessel left the Kamchatka river. (B. C. H.) They steered to the northeast along the coast, which was kept in sight to the north and west, in from nine to twelve fathoms water. As the point of departure Cape Kamchatka was determined to be in north latitude 56° 3' (M. L.)