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Updated: June 1, 2025
In the meantime, however, the famine was irremediable, and on December 1, 1867, poor Bush found himself in a deserted settlement 600 versts from Gizhiga without money, without provisions, and without means of transportation but with a helpless party of forty-four men, at the mouth of the Anadyr River, dependent upon him for support.
I started myself for Anadyrsk on November 20th with five of the best men and an equal number of the best dog-teams in Penzhina. These men and dogs I intended to take with me to the mouth of the Anadyr River if I heard nothing from Bush before I reached Anadyrsk.
The nearest settlement Anadyrsk was almost two hundred and fifty miles distant; the country along the lower Anadyr was said to be wholly destitute of wood, and inhabited only by roving bands of Chukchis, and a party landed there without an interpreter would have no means of communicating even with these wild, lawless natives, or of obtaining any means whatever of transportation.
Our orders were to leave the Anadyr River unexplored until another season; but we knew that as soon as the Major should receive the letters which had passed through our hands at Shestakóva he would learn that a party had been landed south of Bering Strait, and would send us orders by special courier to go in search of it and bring it to Anadyrsk, where it would be of some use.
They had generally been well treated, but the band with which they travelled had been in no hurry to reach the settlement, and had been carrying them at the rate of ten or twelve miles a day all over the great desolate steppes which lie south of the Anadyr River.
Fearful for the safety of the party of men which he presumed to have been landed by the engineer-in-chief at the mouth of the Anadyr River, Major Abaza had intended to go directly from Kamenoi to Anadyrsk himself in search of them, and to send Dodd and me westward along the coast of the Okhotsk Sea to meet Mahood and Bush.
As soon as he had recovered a little, therefore, from the fatigue of his journey, he started with Bush, Macrae, and the Russian governor, for Anadyrsk, intending to engage there fifty or sixty native labourers and begin at once the construction of station-houses and the cutting and distribution of poles along the Anadyr River.
Bush had been put in command of the Northern District from Penzhina to Bering Strait, and he, together with Macrae, Harder, and Smith, had been left at Anadyrsk for the summer. As soon as the Anadyr River should open, this party was directed to descend it in canoes to its mouth, and there await the arrival of one of the Company's vessels from San Francisco, with reinforcements and supplies.
Much as I dreaded another journey to the mouth of the Anadyr in midwinter, I saw no way of avoiding it. The fact that nothing had been heard from Bush in four months proved that he had met with some misfortune, and it was clearly my duty to go to Anadyr Bay in search of him if there was a possibility of doing so.
We had heard nothing whatever from Lieutenant Bush and party since the first of the previous May, and we were of course anxious to know what success he had met with in cutting and rafting poles down the Anadyr River, and what were his prospects and plans for the winter.
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