Perhaps no region of equal extent on the globe, unless we except the interior of Africa or possibly Greenland, is so little known. Here I do not speak for myself alone. A learned German, whom I have already quoted, after saying that the explorations have been limited to the coast, testifies that “the interior, not only of the continent, but even of the island of Sitka, is to this day unexplored, and is in every respect _terra incognita_.”[36] The same has been repeated of the other islands. Admiral Lütke, whose circumnavigation of the globe began in 1826, and whose work bears date 1835-36, says of the Aleutian Archipelago, that, although frequented for more than a century by Russian vessels and those of other nations, it is to-day almost as little known as in the time of Cook. Another writer of authority, the compiler of the official work on the People of Russia, published as late as 1862, speaks of the interior as “a mystery.” And yet another says that our ignorance with regard to this region would make it a proper scene for a chapter of Gulliver’s Travels. Where so little was known, invention found scope. Imagination was made to supply the place of knowledge, and poetry pictured the savage desolation in much admired verse. Campbell, in the “Pleasures of Hope,” while exploring “Earth’s loneliest bounds and Ocean’s wildest shore,” reaches this region, which he portrays:-- “Lo! to the wintry winds the pilot yields His bark careering o’er unfathomed fields. … Now far he sweeps, where scarce a summer smiles, On Behring’s rocks or Greenland’s naked isles; Cold on his midnight watch the breezes blow From wastes that slumber in eternal snow, And waft across the waves’ tumultuous roar _The wolf’s long howl from Oonalaska’s shore_.”