Bering died here, on one of the Commander Islands,[1] where he had been wrecked as above related; the survivors, forty-five souls in number, lived through the winter on the flesh of sea-lions, the sea-cow,[2] or manatee, and thus saved their scanty stock of flour; they managed to build a little shallop out of the remains of the _St. Peter_, in which they left Bering Island—departed from this scene of a most extraordinary shipwreck and deliverance—on August 16, 1742, and soon reached Petropaulovsky in safety the 27th following. In addition to an authentic knowledge of the location of a great land to the eastward, the survivors carried from their camp at Bering Island a large number of valuable sea-otter, blue-fox, and other peltries, which stimulated, as no other inducement could have done, the prompt fitting out and venture of many new expeditions for the freshly discovered land and islands of Alaska. [Illustration: THE RHYTINA, OR SEA-COW (Extinct) The flesh of this animal constituted the chief food supply of Bering’s shipwrecked crew, 1741-’42] So, in 1745, Michael Novodiskov first, of all white men, pushed over in a rude open wooden shallop from Kamchatka, and landed on Attoo, that extreme western islet of the great Aleutain chain which forms upon the map a remarkable southern wall to the green waters of Bering Sea. No object of geographical search was in this hardy fur-hunter’s mind as he perilled his life in that adventure—far from it; he was after the precious pelage of the sea-otter, and like unto him were all of the long list of Russian explorers of Alaskan coasts and waters. These rough, indomitable men ventured out from their headquarters at Kamchatka and the Okotsk Sea in rapid succession as years rolled on, until by the end of 1768-69 a large area of Russian America was well determined and rudely charted by them.[3] The history of this early exploration of Russian America is the stereotyped story of wrongs inflicted upon simple natives by ruthless, fearless adventurers—year in and year out—the eager, persistent examination of the then unknown shores and interior of Alaska by tireless Cossacks and Muscovites, who were busy in robbing the aborigines and quarrelling among themselves. The success of the earliest fur-hunters had been so great, and heralded so loudly in the Russian possessions, that soon every Siberian merchant who had a few thousand rubles at his order managed to associate himself with some others, so that they might together fit out a slovenly craft or two and engage in the same remunerative business. The records show that, prior to the autocratic control of the old Russian American Company over all Alaska in 1799, more than sixty distinct Russian trading companies were organized and plying their vocation in these waters and landings of Alaska.