According to his account, "these bones or tusks are less large and heavy the further we advance towards the north, so that it is a rare occurrence on the islands to meet with a tusk of more than 108 lbs. in weight, whereas on the continent they are said often to weigh as much as 432 lbs. In quantity, however, these bones increase wonderfully to the northward, and as Sannikof expresses himself, the whole soil of the first of the Liakhoff Islands appears to consist of them. For about eighty years the fur-hunters have every year brought large cargoes from this island, but as yet there is no sensible diminution of the stock. The tusks on the islands are also much more fresh and white than those on the continent. A sandbank on the western side was most productive of all, and the fur-hunters maintain that when the sea recedes after a long continuance of easterly winds, a fresh supply of mammoth bones is always found to have been washed from this bank, proceeding apparently from some vast store at the bottom of the sea." Besides these multitudinous remains of the mammoth Hedenström found numerous remains of rhinoceros, the horn of which was then thought to be a bird's claw three feet long. To clear up the wide discrepancies in the maps the Emperor Alexander, in 1820, equipped two expeditions to proceed by land to the northern coast of Siberia and properly survey it, the work to be carried as far east as Cape Chelagskoi, whence a sledge party was to start for the north in search of the inhabited country reported to exist in the Polar Sea in that direction. One of these expeditions, under Lieutenant P. F. Anjou, was to commence its operations from the mouth of the Yana; the other, under Lieutenant Ferdinand Vrangel' (or, as he is generally known amongst us, Wrangell or Von Wrangell), was to start from the mouth of the Kolyma, his chief assistant being Midshipman Matiuschkin. Both parties did good survey work, but neither made any striking discovery. Anjou reached 76° 36´ to the north of Kotelnoi; Wrangell reached 72° 2´ (north-east of the Bear Islands, one hundred and seventy-four miles out on the sea from the great Baranoff rock), beyond which progress was impossible owing to the thinness of the ice, which was covered with salt water.