Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Chapter XIX.
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himself on these points, although it was nearly six
months before he definitely ascertained that the place
was an island. Unlike Kamchatka, the country was
treeless, having only a few trailing willows of the
thickness of a finger. The animals of the coast were
entirely new and strange, even to him, and showed
no fear whatever. They had no sooner left the ship,
when they saw sea-otters, which they first supposed
to be bears or gluttons. Arctic foxes flocked about
them in such numbers that they could strike down
three or four score of them in a couple of hours.
The most valuable fur-bearing animals stared at them
curiously, and along the coast Steller saw with
wonderment whole herds of sea-cows grazing on the
luxuriant algæ of the strand. Not only he had never seen
this animal before, but even his Kamchatkan Cossack
did not know it. From this fact, Steller concluded
that the island must be uninhabited. As the trend
of Kamchatka was not the same as that of the island,
and as the flora was nevertheless identical, and as he
moreover found a window frame of Russian
workmanship that had been washed ashore, he was convinced
that the country must be a hitherto unknown island
in the vicinity of Kamchatka.
Bering shared this view, but the other officers still
clung to their illusions, and when Waxel, on the
evening of the 6th, came ashore, he even spoke of
sending a message for conveyance. Steller, on the other
hand, began to make preparations for the winter. In
the sand-banks, near an adjacent mountain stream, he
and his companions dug a pit and made a roof of
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