Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Chapter VII.
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Science, which had been founded five or six years
previous, was not composed of able scholars, but of a
number of more or less talented contestants for honor and
fame,—of men who occupied a prominent yet disputed
position in a foreign and hostile country—young,
hotheaded Germans and Frenchmen who had not yet
achieved complete literary recognition. Such people
are stern and severe judges. Bering was unfortunate
enough to fall into the hands of the German Gerhard
Fr. Müller and the Frenchman Joseph Nicolas De l’Isle.
Although Müller had not yet seen Siberia, and
although it was not until ten years later that he
succeeded in building that geographical card-house which
Captain Cook so noiselessly blew down, he nevertheless,
even at that time, on every occasion expressed the
opinion that Bering had not reached the northeast point
of Asia, and that his voyage had consequently not
accomplished its purpose. De l’Isle was Bering’s
intellectual antipode. As a geographer he delighted in
moving about on the borderland of the world’s
unexplored regions. His element was that of vaguest
conjecture,—the boldest combinations of known and
unknown; and even as an old man he did not shrink
from the task of constructing, from insufficient accounts
of travels and apocryphal sailor-stories, a map of the
Pacific, of which not a single line has been retained. He
overstrained himself on the fame of his deceased brother,
whose methods, inclinations, and valuable geographical
collections he had inherited, but unfortunately not that
intuitive insight which made Guillaume De l’Isle the
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