e of far mountains, Kamchatka!

The bearded men could control themselves no longer. Shout on shout made
the welkin ring. Tears streamed down the rough, unwashed faces. The
Cossacks wept like children. Men vied with each other to seize the oars
and row like mad. The tide-rip bounding--lifting--falling--racing over
seas for the shores of Kamchatka never ran so mad and swift a course as
the crazy craft there bouncing forward over the waves. And when they saw
the home harbor {60} of Petropaulovsk, Avacha Bay, on August 27,
exultation knew no bounds. The men fired off guns, beat oars on the deck
rail, shouted--shouted--shouted till the mountains echoed and every
living soul of Avacha dashed to the waterside scarcely believing the
evidence of his eyes--that the castaways of Bering's ship had returned.
Then one may well believe that the monks set the chapel bells ringing and
the cannon roared a welcome from Avacha Bay.

Chirikoff had in May sailed in search of Bering, passing close to the
island where the castaways were prisoners of the sea, but he did not see
the Commander Islands; and all hope had been given up for any word of the
_St. Peter_. Waxel wintered that year at Avacha Bay, crossing the
mainland in the spring of 1743. In September of the same year, an
imperial decree put an end to the Northern Expedition, and Waxel set out
across Siberia to take the crew back to St. Petersburg. Poor Steller
died on the way from exposure.

So ended the greatest naval exploration known to the world. Beside it,
other expeditions to explore America pale to insignificance. La Salle
and La Verendrye ascended the St. Lawrence, crossed inland plains, rafted
down the mighty tide of the great inland rivers; but La Salle stopped at
the mouth of the Mississippi, and La Verendrye was checked by the barrier
of the Rockies. Lewis and Clark accomplished yet more. After ascending
the Missouri and crossing the plains, they traversed the Rockies; but
they were {61} stopped at the Pacific. When Bering had crossed the
rivers and mountains of the two continents--first Europe, then Asia--and
reached the Pacific, his expedition had _only begun_. Little remains to
Russia of what he accomplished but the group of rocky islets where he
perished. But judged by the difficulties which he overcame; by the
duties desperately impossible, done plainly and doggedly, by death heroic
in defeat--Bering's expedition to northwestern America is without a p