Groping through the mists
that hang like a shroud over these northern seas, hoar frosts clinging
to masts and decks till the boat might have been some ghost ship in a
fog world, the Cossack plunderers {297} sometimes caught glimpses far
ahead--twenty, thirty, forty miles eastward--of a black line along the
sea. Was it land or fog, ice or deep water? And when the wind blew
from the east, strange land birds alighted on the yard-arms. Dead
whales with the harpoons of strange hunters washed past the ship; and
driftwood of a kind that did not grow in Asia tossed up on the tide
wrack. It was the word brought back by these free-lances of the sea
that induced Peter the Great to send Vitus Bering on a voyage of
discovery to the west coast of America; and when the castaways of
Bering's wreck returned with a new fur that was neither beaver nor
otter, but larger than either and of a finer sheen than sable, selling
the pelts to Chinese merchants for what would be from one hundred and
fifty to two hundred dollars each in modern money, the effect was the
same as the discovery of a gold mine.
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