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Then somebody shouted the unexpected tidings that they were the castaways of Bering's crew. Bugles rang; the fort drum rumbled a muster; the chapel bells pealed forth; and the whole population of the fort rushed to the water-side shouting, gesticulating, laughing, crying and welcomed with wild embraces the returning castaways.
Chirikoff was landed the same day, all unaware that at times in the mist and rain he had been within from fifteen to forty miles of poor Bering, zigzagging across the very trail of the afflicted sister ship. By December the entire crew of Bering's castaways, prisoners on the sea-girt islands of the North Pacific, were lodged in five underground huts on the bank of a stream.
How he praises the accuracy of poor Bering's work along this coast: Bering, whose name had been a target for ridicule and contempt from the time of his death; whose death was declared a blunder; whose voyage was considered a failure; whose charts had been rejected and distorted by the learned men of the world.
All that the discoveries of Columbus gave to the world, Bering's voyage might give to Russia; for he did not know that the La Vérendryes of New France had already penetrated west as far as the Rockies; and he did know that half a continent yet lay unexplored, unclaimed, on the other side of the Pacific.
To a constitution already broken by the nagging cares of eight years and by hardships indescribable, by scurvy and by exposure, was added an acute inflammation. Bering's power of resistance was sapped. Two hours before daybreak on December 8, 1741, the brave Dane breathed his last.
Chirikoff's crew on the St Paul had long since returned in safety to Kamchatka, and the garrison of the fort on Avacha Bay had given up Bering's men as lost for ever, when one August morning the sentinel on guard along the shore front of Petropavlovsk descried a strange apparition approaching across the silver surface of an unruffled sea.
Just fifty years from Bering's exploration of 1728, the English navigator finds what Bering found: that America and Asia are not united; that no Northeast Passage exists; that no great oceanic body lies north of New Spain; that Alaska as the Russian maps had it after Bering's death is not an island.
In all, out of a crew of seventy-seven, there had perished by January 6, 1742, when the last death occurred, thirty-one men. Steller's hut was next to Bering's. From that November day when he was carried from the ship through the snow to the sand pit, the commander sank without rallying.
Quite unconscious of the worth of the fur, the castaway sailors fell on these visitors to the kelp-beds and clubbed right and left, for skins to protect their nakedness from the biting winter winds. It was the news of the sea wealth brought to Kamchatka by Bering's men that sent traders scurrying to the Aleutian Islands and Alaskan shores.
Paul, named after one of Bering's boats, the present town of Kadiak, by far the largest village of the island, and situated on the eastern coast, opposite Wood Island.
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