Chelyuskin reaches the cape—The Laptefs—Deschnef's voyage through Bering Strait—Nordenskiöld's voyages to the Yenesei—The Siberian tundra—The voyage of the _Vega_—Nordenskiöld rounds Cape Chelyuskin—Endeavour to reach the Siberian Islands—Liakhoff's discovery—The _Vega_ passes the Cape North of Captain Cook—Frozen in within six miles of Cape Serdze Kamen—Completes the North-east Passage—Nansen's voyage—The _Fram_—Her drift in the ice—Nansen and Johansen start for the Pole—They reach 86° 13´ 6˝—Their journey to Frederick Jackson Island—The meeting with Jackson—Sverdrup's voyage to Spitsbergen. The tundras and shores of Siberia abound with obstacles to exploration, and yet a third of the threshold of the Polar regions has been surveyed along their line. No spot remains unvisited on the northern margin of the Asiatic mainland, the northernmost point of which is Cape Chelyuskin in 77° 36·8´, so that the Arctic Circle sweeps inland for 770 miles to the south of it—in other words the cape is practically half-way between the Circle and the Pole. [Illustration: CAPE CHELYUSKIN] It was chiefly from the land that the northern coast-line was surveyed by the Russians, whose Arctic work has been immense and thorough, though not marked by any striking discoveries. Cape Chelyuskin was first reached, in May, 1742, by the explorer whose name it bears, after a sledge journey from the Chatanga, he being at the time second in command to Khariton Laptef, whose first expedition in 1739 ended in the loss of his ship three hundred miles from his winter quarters, to which he had to travel on foot, losing twelve men by cold and exhaustion on the way. Within the preceding four years the survey of the coast west of it had been completed in four stages—from Archangel to Yalmal (that is Land's End); from Yalmal to the Obi; from the Obi to the Yenesei; from the Yenesei to Cape Sterlegof. In 1735 Pronchistschef, from the Lena, failed to round Cape Chelyuskin from the east, and returned to the Olenek to die but two days before his young wife, who was his companion on his perilous voyage. Two years afterwards Dmitri Laptef began his explorations east of the Lena which took him to Cape Baranoff, thus joining up to the discoveries of the sable-hunters made a century before, including those of Deschnef, who, in 1648, sailed from the Kolyma to Kamchatka and went through Bering Strait more than thirty years before Bering was born. Thus the route of the North-east Passage was known, although no man had travelled the whole way either by land or sea, before the task was undertaken by Nordenskiöld.