to this day, no authentic inkling of what became of these Slavonian seamen has ever been produced. Unquestionably, they were tortured and destroyed. The rains caught in the ship’s sails filled the casks of the _Saint Paul_, since Tschericov, deprived of his boats and thoroughly alarmed, made no further attempts to land; but he had not the faintest idea of the presence, at that moment, of his superior officer in the same waters, and only a few leagues to the northward, who also, like himself was eagerly looking for his storm-parted consort. What a most remarkable voyage, this voyage of the discovery of the Alaskan region—what a chapter of disappointment, of hardship, and of death! That bluffy sea-wall which forms a face to the low coast plateau at the feet of the St Elias Alps is cut by no great river, nor indented by any noteworthy gulf or inlet, except at Yakootat Bay. Here a succession of precipitous glaciers sweep down from the lofty cradles of their birth to the waters of the sea, making an icy cliff of more than fifteen miles in breadth, where it breaks in constant reverberation and repetition. At the mouth of Copper River all silt carried down from old eroded glacial paths has been deposited for thousands and thousands of years, until a big deltoid chart of sea-water channels in muddy relief of bank and shoal has been formed, and through which the flood of an ice-chilled river takes its rapid course. The gloomy, savage wildness of this region of supreme mountainous elevation, with its vast gelid sheets and precipitous cañons, its sombre forests and eternal snows, all as yet wholly unexplored, and only faintly appreciated as we can from the remote distance of shipboard observation—this region cannot remain much longer untrodden by the geologist and the naturalist, while the artist must accompany them if an adequate presentation is ever to be given of its weird, titanic realities. The Mount St Elias shore-line is made up of small projecting points, awash. These alternate with low cliffy or else white sandy beaches, which border a flat, rolling woodland country that extends back from the sea ten to thirty miles, where it suddenly laps and rises upon the lofty flanks of the Elias Alps. Into the ocean many rocky shoals and long sandy bars stretch for miles, and streams of white muddy glacial or snow waters rush into the surf at frequent intervals—hundreds of them.