. Round about the North pole . ch 86° 13 6—Their journey to Frederick JacksonIsland—The meeting with Jackson—Sverdrups voyage to Spitsbergen. THE tundras and shores of Siberia abound withobstacles to exploration, and yet a third of thethreshold of the Polar regions has been surveyed alongtheir line. No spot remains unvisited on the northernmargin of the Asiatic mainland, the northernmostpoint of which is Cape Chelyuskin in 77° 368, so thatthe Arctic Circle sweeps inland for 770 miles to thesouth of it—in other words the cape is practically half-way between the Circle and the Pole. It was chief
. Round about the North pole . ch 86° 13 6—Their journey to Frederick JacksonIsland—The meeting with Jackson—Sverdrups voyage to Spitsbergen. THE tundras and shores of Siberia abound withobstacles to exploration, and yet a third of thethreshold of the Polar regions has been surveyed alongtheir line. No spot remains unvisited on the northernmargin of the Asiatic mainland, the northernmostpoint of which is Cape Chelyuskin in 77° 368, so thatthe Arctic Circle sweeps inland for 770 miles to thesouth of it—in other words the cape is practically half-way between the Circle and the Pole. It was chiefly from the land that the northern coast-line was surveyed by the Russians, whose Arctic workhas been immense and thorough, though not marked byany striking discoveries. Cape Chelyuskin was firstreached, in May, 1742, by the explorer whose name itbears, after a sledge journey from the Chatanga, hebeing at the time second in command to KharitonLaptef, whose first expedition in 1739 ended in the Iosj 84 CAPE CHELYUSKIN. 100 200 300 400 To face page I THE EXPLORERS OF NORTHERN SIBERIA 85of his ship three hundred miles from his winter quar-ters, to which he had to travel on foot, losing twelvemen by cold and exhaustion on the way. Within thepreceding four years the survey of the coast west of ithad been completed in four stages—from Archangel toYalmal (that is Lands End); from Yalmal to the Obi;from the Obi to the Yenesei; from the Yenesei toCape Sterlegof. In 1735 Pronchistschef, from theLena, failed to round Cape Chelyuskin from the east,and returned to the Olenek to die but two days beforehis young wife, who was his companion on his perilousvoyage. Two years afterwards Dmitri Laptef beganhis explorations east of the Lena which took him toCape Baranoff, thus joining up to the discoveries ofthe sable-hunters made a century before, includingthose of Deschnef, who, in 1648, sailed from theKolyma to Kamchatka and went through BeringStrait more than thirty years before Ber
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