and when at
last he reached open water he thought himself compelled to turn on
account of the advanced season of the year. On the 2nd Sept./22nd
Aug. he came again to the Bychov mouth-arm of the Lena, up which he
found it difficult to make his way on account of the many unknown
shoals. On the 19th/8th September the river was frozen over. He
wintered a little distance from the mouth, and now again scurvy made
its appearance, but was cured by constant exercise in the open air
and by a decoction of cedar cones. In a report sent from this place,
Dmitri Laptev declared that it was quite impossible to round the two
projecting promontories between the Lena and the Indigirka, Capes
Borchaja and Svjatoinos, because, according to the unanimous
statement of several Yakuts living in the region, the ice there
never melts or even loosens from the beach. With Behring's
permission he travelled to St. Petersburg to lay the necessary
information before the Board of Admiralty. The Board determined that
another attempt should be made by sea, and, if that was
unsuccessful, that the coast should be surveyed by means of land
journeys.

It is now easy to see what was the cause of the unfortunate issue of
these two attempts to sail to the eastward. The explorers had
vessels which were unsuitable for cruising, they turned too early in
the season, and in consequence of their unwillingness to go far from
land they sailed into the great bays east of the Lena, from which no
large river carries away the masses of ice that have been formed
there during the winter, or that have been drifted thither from the
sea. Dmitri Laptev and his companions besides appear to have had a
certain dislike to the commission intrusted to them, and, differing
from Deschnev, they thus wanted the first condition of success--the
fixed conviction of the possibility of attaining their object.

By order of the Board of Admiralty Dmitri Laptev at all events began
his second voyage, and now falsified his own prediction, by rounding
the two capes which he believed to be always surrounded by unbroken
ice. After he had passed them his vessel was frozen in on the
20th/9th September. Laptev had no idea at what point of the coast he
was, or how far he was from land. He remained in this unpleasant
state for eleven days, at the close of which one of the mates who
had been sent out from the vessel in a boat on the 11th Sept./31st
Aug. returned on foot over the ice and reported that th