derers lay down to sleep in the Samoyed tents on the soft
reindeer skins; "all sorrows and difficulties were forgotten; we felt a
boundless enjoyment, as if we had come to paradise." Thence they
travelled in reindeer sledges to Obdorsk, everywhere received in a
friendly and hospitable manner by the wild tribes on the way, although
the hospitality sometimes became troublesome; as for instance when an
Ostyak compelled von Krusenstern to drink tea six times a day, and six
cups each time, and offered him as a special luxury an extract of
tobacco in brandy.[170]

Krusenstern's adventurous journey across the Kara Sea is one of the
many proofs that a Polar navigator ought above everything to avoid
being beset. The very circumstance that the ice-field, in which he
became fixed in the neighbourhood of Yugor Schar, could drift across
to the east coast of the Kara Sea, shows that it was for the most
part open, and that a steamer or a good sailing-vessel that year,
and probably also the preceding, might very readily have reached the
mouth of the Ob or the Yenisej. The narrative of von Krusenstern's
journey is besides the first complete sketch we have of a passage
from west to east over the Kara Sea. Little idea could any one then
have that within a single decade a number of vessels should sail
free and unhindered along this route.

Soon after the two voyages I have described above, and before they
became generally known in the geographical literature of Western
Europe, a new era began in the navigation of the Kara Sea, which was
brought about by the Norwegian hunters being compelled to seek for
new fields of sport on and beyond Novaya Zemlya.

The history of the Spitzbergen hunting has not yet been written in a
satisfactory way, and is in many respects very obscure. It is
supposed that after the discovery of Spitzbergen in 1596 by Barents,
the hunting in the Polar Seas began during BENNET'S first voyage in
1603, and that the whale-fishing was introduced by JONAS POOLE in
1610. But already in the following year Poole, whose vessel was then
wrecked on the west coast of Spitzbergen, found in Horn Sound a ship
from Hull, to which he gave charge of saving his cargo, and two
years after the English were compelled, in order to keep foreigners
from the fishing field they wished to monopolise, to send out six
men-of-war, which found there eight Spanish, and a number of Dutch
and French vessels (_Purchas_, iii. pp. 462, 716, &c.). Even in