In such a climate, whose winter terrors are only too prominent, all along the north of Siberia live the ancient peoples driven towards the sea by those mighty movements from the land of the Turk and Mongol which, north and south, east and west, flooded Europe and Asia with invaders—Ostiaks and Samoyeds west of Chelyuskin; Yakuts, Chukches, and others to the east of it, the descriptions of whose unpleasant manners and customs appear to be written with a view to showing how curiously local are the laws of health. One may well ask, as Wrangell did, why they should remain in so dreary a region and take life so contentedly. And the answer may be that they might go further north and fare worse, as their predecessors in the eastern section would seem to have done. Once, according to the legend, there were more hearths of the Omoki on the shores of the Kolyma than there are stars in the clear sky, and these Omoki, or some other departed race, appear to have left as their traces the remains of the timber forts and the tumuli that are found on the coast, especially near the Indiyirka, and the huts of earth and stones and bones found all along from Chelagskoi to the straits, similar remains of a departed people now existing in the Parry Islands, over a thousand miles away. According to another legend of more recent date, there was an intervening land, the land that Wrangell went to seek and the _Jeannette_ went to winter at, and the supposed site of which she drifted through, in her last and longest imprisonment in the ice. The _Jeannette_ was the old _Pandora_, bought from Sir Allen Young by James Gordon Bennett, and accepted by and fitted out, officered, and manned under the orders of the Navy Department of the United States, her commander being Lieutenant George Washington De Long. She left San Francisco on the 8th of July, 1879, and two months afterwards had been run into the pack and was fast in the ice off Herald Island, drifting to her doom. Her route, in the main, was north-westerly, with many complicated loops, at first at the rate of half a mile a day, then at two miles, then at three, showing that the current from Bering Strait had been reinforced by some other current as she went further west, and, from its direction, there seemed to be land to the northward which was never sighted.