ifts
the whole human race to a higher plane and has a bit of the God in him,
though the hero may have feet of clay and body of beast. Such were the
old Vikings of the North, who spent their lives in elemental warfare,
and rode out to meet death in tempest, lashed to the spar of their
craft. And such, too, were the New World Vikings of the Pacific, who
coasted the seas of two continents in cockle-shell ships,--planks
lashed with deer thongs, calked with moss,--rapacious in their deep-sea
plunderings as beasts of prey, fearless as the very spirit of the storm
itself. The adventures of the North Pacific Vikings read more like
some old legend of the sea than sober truth; and the wild strain had
its fountain-head in the most tempestuous hero and beastlike man that
ever ascended the throne of the Russias.

[Illustration: Peter the Great.]

When Peter the Great of Russia worked as a ship's carpenter at the
docks of the East India Company in Amsterdam, the sailors' tales of
vast, undiscovered lands beyond the seas of Japan must have acted on
his imagination like a match to gunpowder.[1] Already he was dreaming
those imperial conquests which Russia still dreams: of pushing his
realm to the southernmost edge of Europe, to the easternmost verge of
Asia, to the doorway of the Arctic, to the very threshold of the {5}
Chinese capital. Already his Cossacks had scoured the two Siberias
like birds of prey, exacting tribute from the wandering tribes of
Tartary, of Kamchatka, of the Pacific, of the Siberian races in the
northeasternmost corner of Asia. And these Chukchee Indians of the
Asiatic Pacific told the Russians of a land beyond the sea, of
driftwood floating across the ocean unlike any trees growing in Asia,
of dead whales washed ashore with the harpoons of strange hunters, {6}
and--most comical of all in the light of our modern knowledge about the
Eskimo's tail-shaped fur coats--of men wrecked on the shores of Asia
who might have qualified for Darwin's missing link, inasmuch as they
wore "tails."

And now the sailors added yet more fabulous things to Peter's
knowledge. There was an unknown continent east of Asia, west of
America, called on the maps "Gamaland." [2] Now, Peter's consuming
ambition was for new worlds to conquer. What of this "Gamaland"? But,
as the world knows, Peter was called home to suppress an insurrection.
War, domestic broils, massacres that left a bloody stain on his glory,
busied his hands for