of this country, for above a thousand miles farther, is
inhabited by the worst and most ignorant of pagans." And so indeed
we found it.

We were now launched into the greatest piece of solid earth, if I
understand any thing of the surface of the globe, that is to be found in
any part of the world: we had at least twelve hundred miles to the sea,
eastward; we had at least two thousand to the bottom of the Baltic sea,
westward; and almost three thousand miles, if we left that sea, and went
on west to the British and French channels; we had full five thousand
miles to the Indian or Persian sea, south; and about eight hundred miles
to the Frozen sea, north; nay, if some people may be believed, there
might be no sea north-east till we came round the pole, and consequently
into the north-west, and so had a continent of land into America, no
mortal knows where; though I could give some reasons why I believe that
to be a mistake too.

As we entered into the Muscovite dominions, a good while before we came
to any considerable town, we had nothing to observe there but this:
first, that all the rivers run to the east. As I understood by the
charts which some of our caravans had with them, it was plain that all
those rivers ran into the great river Yamour, or Gammour. This river, by
the natural course of it, must run into the east sea, or Chinese ocean.
The story they tell us, that the mouth of this river is choked up with
bulrushes of a monstrous growth, viz. three feet about, and twenty or
thirty feet high, I must be allowed to say I believe nothing of; but as
its navigation is of no use, because there is no trade that way, the
Tartars, to whom alone it belongs, dealing in nothing but cattle; so
nobody that ever I heard or, has been curious enough either to go down
to the mouth of it in boats, or to come up from the mouth of it in
ships; but this is certain, that this river running due east, in the
latitude of sixty degrees, carries a vast concourse of rivers along with
it, and finds an ocean to empty itself in that latitude; so we are sure
of sea there.

Some leagues to the north of this river there are several considerable
rivers, whose streams run as due north as the Yamour runs east; and
these are all found to join their waters with the great river Tartarus,
named so from the northernmost nations of the Mogul Tartars, who, the
Chinese say, were the first Tartars in the world; and who, as our
geographers allege, are the Gog