ture travellers I may state that the wares most
in demand are large sewing and darning needles, pots, knives
(preferably large), axes, saws, boring tools and other iron tools,
linen and woollen shirts (preferably of bright colours, but also
white), neckerchiefs, tobacco and sugar. To these may be added the
spirits which are in so great request among all savages; a currency
of which, indeed, there was great abundance on the _Vega_, but which
I considered myself prevented from making use of. In exchange for
this it is possible to obtain, in short, anything whatever from many
of the natives, but by no means from all, for even here there are
men who will not taste spirits, but with a gesture of disdain refuse
the glass that is offered them. The Chukches are otherwise shrewd
and calculating men of business, accustomed to study their own
advantage. They have been brought up to this from childhood through
the barter which they carry on between America and Siberia. Many a
beaver-skin that comes to the market at Irbit belongs to an animal
that has been caught in America, whose skin has passed from hand to
hand among the wild men of America and Siberia, until it finally
reaches the Russian merchant. For this barter a sort of market is
held on an island in Behring's Straits. At the most remote markets
in Polar America, a beaver-skin is said some years ago to have been
occasionally exchanged for a leaf of tobacco.[238] An exceedingly
beautiful black fox-skin was offered to me by a Chukch for a pot.
Unfortunately I had none that I could dispense with. Here, too,
prices have risen. When the Russians first came to Kamchatka, they
got eight sable-skins for a knife, and eighteen for an axe, and yet
the Kamchadales laughed at the credulous foreigners who were so
easily deceived. At Yakutsk, when the Russians first settled there,
a pot was even sold for as many sable-skins as it could hold.[239]

During the night before the 10th September, the surface of the sea
was covered with a very thick sheet of newly-frozen ice, which was
broken up again in the neighbourhood of the vessel by blocks of old
ice drifting about. The _pack_ itself appeared to have scattered a
little. We therefore weighed anchor to continue our voyage. At first
a _detour_ towards the west was necessary to get round a field of
drift-ice. Here too, however, our way was barred by a belt of old
ice, which was bound together so firmly by the ice that had been
formed in the co