Laden with stores for forty men during a year's voyage, she put to sea ten days afterwards, Bering keeping close to the coast so that he could map it as he went. On the 10th of August he was off the island of St. Lawrence, which he so named, as it was the day of that saint. In a day or two he had passed the East Cape without seeing the American coast, and had entered the Arctic Circle. And on the 15th he was well through the strait, out in the Arctic Ocean, in 67° 18´ off Serdze Kamen, a promontory behind which the coast trended to the west, as the Chukches had told him it did; and he assumed, and rightly so, though he had not gone far enough to prove it, that there was no land connection between Asia and America. Whereupon, as he had in his opinion accomplished his mission, seeing no need for wintering in those parts, he put the _Gabriel_ about and was back in the Kamchatka River on the 20th of September, after a voyage of seven weeks in a vessel that took three months to build on a spot that took over three years to reach—the plan of campaign being much the same as that in which a mountain stronghold is advanced on across a desert, besieged for a few days, and captured by assault. [Illustration: THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS] After wintering, Bering went off next year on a voyage due east in search of reported land, but, after some hundred and thirty miles out, he was blown back, and, rounding the south end of Kamchatka, put in at the River Bolschaia; thence he crossed to Ochotsk, whence he started for St. Petersburg, where he arrived after an absence of five years. Catherine was dead and another empress reigned in her stead, who was pleased and satisfied if no one else was, and the 21st of February, 1733, saw him starting again in the same laborious fashion to arrange other voyages as part of a great scheme for the exploration of Northern and North-eastern Asia. Some of these expeditions on the north coast have already been mentioned; Bering's particular task was to send Spangberg in search of Japan, while he and Tschirikof, in separate ships, went eastward to America. More stores and provisions went overland across Siberia than before; Spangberg got again frozen up on the Judoma and had to continue on foot to Ochotsk, where he found plenty of food owing to Bering having sent on ahead, in case of any such trouble, a hundred horses, each of them laden with meal. In June, 1738, Spangberg, in two newly-built vessels and the _Gabriel_, was off to Japan, to reach the Kuriles and return to winter in Kamchatka; but next year he arrived there all well and found to his astonishment that the Japanese knew as much about maps as he did. He was still more astonished on his return to be told by those high in office at St. Petersburg that he could not possibly have been there as they had not got it on their maps where he said it was, and, consequently, he was to go where he had been as soon as he could to make sure. He started on this voyage of