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The distance which remained to be traversed, therefore, was only about fourteen hundred versts from Okhotsk to the Russian outpost of Anadyrsk, just south of the Arctic Circle. After some deliberation the Major concluded to send Dodd and me with a party of natives to Anadyrsk, and to start himself on dog-sledges for the settlement of Okhotsk, where he expected to meet Mahood and Bush.
On the morning of November 23d, in a clear, bracing atmosphere of twenty-five degrees below zero, we arrived at the mouth of the large river called the Penzhina, which empties into Penzhinsk Gulf, at the head of the Okhotsk Sea.
The Arctic Ocean comprising the White, Barents, and Kara Seas and the northern Pacific, that is the Seas of Bering, Okhotsk, and Japan, bound it on the north and east.
Leet so soon recovered his strength and spirits that three days afterwards he started for Okhotsk, where the Major wished him to take charge of a gang of Yakut labourers. The last words that I remember to have ever heard him speak were those which he shouted to me in the storm and darkness of that gloomy night on the Málkachán steppe: "What would our mothers say if they could see us now?"
Until the time of the arrival of the "Neva", 1804, all trading goods were brought across Siberia to Okhotsk, and thence by sailing vessel to the colony, or were purchased from the American or English trading ships which came to the coast for furs.
They founded Tobolsk in 1587 and Tomsk in 1604; they established Yakutsk on the Lena River in 1632, and Irkutsk on Lake Baikal in 1652; in 1638 they reached the Sea of Okhotsk, and, by the close of the seventeenth century, they occupied the peninsula of Kamchatka and looked upon the broad Pacific.
The village of Okhotsk, eight hundred versts distant, could be reached on dog-sledges in about a month. This, in brief, was all the information we could get, and it did not inspire us with very much confidence in the ultimate success of our enterprise. I realised for the first time the magnitude of the task which the Russian-American Telegraph Company had undertaken.
At one time, there were three or four such areas of bright water north of us, but as they were below the curve of the earth's convexity we could not see them, and traced them only by the shifting belts or patches of irradiated mist. We reached Okhotsk about the 1st of August, and after seeing the Major off for St.
Upon the information which he obtained in Petropavlovsk, Major Abaza formed a plan of operations for the ensuing winter, which was briefly as follows: Mahood and Bush were to go on in the Olga to Nikolaievsk at the mouth of the Amur River, on the Chinese frontier, and, making that settlement their base of supplies, were to explore the rough mountainous region lying west of the Okhotsk Sea and south of the Russian seaport of Okhotsk.
From scraps of information that in some mysterious fashion leaked out, we learned that we were bound to the Okhotsk Sea, it being no part of the skipper's intentions to go prowling around Behrings Sea, where he believed the whales to be few and far between.
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