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Spanberg and his men, winter-bound in East Siberia, were reduced to eating their dog harness and shoe-straps for food before they came to the trail of dead horses that marked Bering's path to the sea, and guided them to the fort at Okhotsk. Bering did exactly as Czar Peter had ordered. He built the two-deckers at Kamchatka. Then he followed the coast northward past St.
Ismyloff, with fur trader's jealousy of intrusion, had warned the Russian commander that the English ships were pirates like Benyowsky, the Polish exile, who had lately sacked the garrisons of Kamchatka, stolen the ships, and sailed to America. However, when Cook's letters were carried overland to Bolcheresk, to Major Behm, the commander, all went well.
At Korak we changed most of our horses and men, ate an al fresco lunch under the projecting eaves of a mossy Kamchadal house, and started at two o'clock for Malqua, another village, fifty or sixty miles distant, across the watershed of the Kamchatka River.
There were several vessels of this class in the Siberian fleet, and their special duty was to visit the ports of Kamchatka, North Eastern Siberia, and Manjouria, and act as tow boats along the Straits of Tartary. The officers commanding them are sent from Russia, and generally remain ten years in this service.
The country between Gizhiga and Yamsk was entirely different in character from anything which I had previously seen in Siberia. There were no such great desolate plains as those between Gizhiga and Anadyrsk and in the northern part of Kamchatka.
Ismyloff, who became a famous trader in the Russian Fur Company, could not be induced to open his mouth about the Pole to Cook, and actually made use of the universal fear of Benyowsky among Russians, to keep Cook from learning Russian fur trade secrets, when the Englishman went to Kamchatka, by representing that Cook was a pirate, too.
Its habitat was known, and all the riffraff adventurers of Siberian exile, Tartars, Kamchatkans, Russians, criminals, and officers of royal lineage, engaged in the fur trade of western America. Danger made no difference. All that was needed was a boat; and the boat was usually rough-hewn out of the green timbers of Kamchatka.
"Clime of the Lotus Eaters be hanged!" he broke out impetuously, making a furious slap at his face; "the poet doesn't say that the Lotus Eaters were eaten up themselves by such cursed mosquitoes as these, and they're sufficient evidence that we're in Kamchatka they don't grow as big as bumblebees in any other country!"
They timbered their crazy craft from green wood in Kamchatka, or on the Okhotsk Sea, or among the forests of Siberian rivers.
The one, comprising all the northern part of Eastern Europe and of Asia, even unto Kamchatka, may be roughly described as a land of forests, intersected by many rivers, and containing numerous lakes and marshes; the other, stretching southwards to the Black Sea, and eastwards far away into Central Asia, is for the most part what Russians call "the Steppe," and Americans would call the prairies.
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