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officers and thirty-one of the crew, so that when assistance
from Bering arrived, only eight men were alive. Müller
and Gmelin say that the crew accused Lassenius of high
treason, and mutinied; but there is no documentary
evidence of this. The report seems to have arisen through
a confounding of the name of Lassenius with that of the
deputy constable Rosselius, who, on the 18th of
November, 1735, was sent, under arrest, to Yakutsk. To fill
the vacancies caused by this terrible disease, Bering had to
send a whole new command—Lieut. Dmitri Laptjef, the
second mate Plauting, and forty-three men—to
Khariulakh to continue the expedition. In addition to this,
two boats with provisions were sent to the mouth of the
Lena, and in 1737, before he himself departed for
Okhotsk, a shipload of provisions was sent to supply the
magazines on the Arctic coast. To these various tasks
Bering gave his personal attention.
In 1736-38 this great enterprise passed through a
dangerous crisis. Several years had elapsed since the
departure from St. Petersburg, three hundred thousand rubles
(over two hundred thousand dollars) had been expended
—an enormous sum at that time—and yet Bering could
not point to a single result. Lassenius was dead, his
successor, D. Laptjef, had been unfortunate, Pronchisheff
had, in two summers of cruising, not been able to double
the Taimyr peninsula, Ofzyn was struggling in vain in
the Gulf of Obi, while Bering and Spangberg had not
begun their Pacific expeditions. The former had not
even reached the coast. The government authorities at
St. Petersburg were in the highest degree dissatisfied with
this seeming dilatoriness. The Senate sent a most earnest
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