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Updated: June 6, 2025
Notwithstanding the famine the dog-sledges were sent, and Bush, with two men, had returned on them to Anadyrsk. Finding that settlement famine-stricken and deserted, he had started without a moment's delay for Gizhiga, his exhausted and starving dogs dying along the road.
Our journey was monotonous and uneventful, and on the second of April, late at night, we left behind us the white desolate steppe of the Paren, and drew near the little flat-topped yurt on the Malmofka, which was only twenty-five versts from Gizhiga.
Having thus accomplished all that it was possible to accomplish with the limited means and force at his disposal, Major Abaza returned to Gizhiga, to await the arrival of the promised vessels from America with men, material, and supplies, for the prosecution of the work.
The Jackson discharged all the cargo that she intended to leave at Gizhiga, and as soon as the tide was sufficiently high to enable her to cross the bar at the mouth of the river, she sailed for Petropavlovsk and left us again alone.
To us, fresh from Gizhiga, Penzhina, and Okhotsk, a city with numbered houses was really too remarkable and impressive a thing to be treated with levity, and we therefore received the information with proper awe and in silence. We could share the native feeling, even if numbered houses had once been known to us.
We therefore rented for ourselves a little log house overlooking the valley, of the Gizhiga River, furnished it as comfortably as possible with a few plain wooden chairs and tables, hung up our maps and charts on the rough log-walls, displayed our small library of two books Shakespeare and the New Testament as advantageously as possible in one corner, and prepared for at least a month of luxurious idleness.
The presence of Americans in a village so little frequented by strangers as Gizhiga had a very enlivening influence upon society, and as soon as the inhabitants ascertained by experiment that these distinguished sojourners did not consider it beneath their dignity to associate with the prostoi narod, or common people, they overwhelmed us with invitations to tea-parties and evening dances.
After our unsuccessful attempt to pass the Samanka Mountains, there was nothing for us to do but wait patiently at Lesnoi until the rivers should freeze over, and snow fall to a depth which would enable us to continue our journey to Gizhiga on dog-sledges. It was a long, wearisome delay, and I felt for the first time, in its full force, the sensation of exile from home, country, and civilisation.
The instructions which the Major gave me when we left Gizhiga did not provide for any such contingency as the landing of this party near Bering Strait, because at that time we had abandoned all hope of such cooperation and expected to explore the country by our own unaided exertions.
Just before we sailed from Gizhiga in the Onward, eight of us had an escape from death in which the peril came with great swiftness and suddenness, and was prolonged almost to the extreme limit of nervous endurance.
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