It is evident that if Bering had sailed along the coast which the Chukchis said extended to the westward, instead of going off shore, away from it, he would have confirmed that part of their testimony, and given high probability to the assumption of their correctness in the rest. As it was, he left the question in a state so unsettled as to be a subject of debate for nearly half a century; even authorities so friendly as Dr. Campbell assuming with great confidence that Bering's conclusions as to the separation of the two continents were erroneous. It was not until the voyages of Captain Cook and his associates were given to the world in 1784 that the matter was settled beyond controversy. Even in regard to the details of his voyage it was only through Bergh's publication of Chaplin's logbook of the voyage in 1823, that the public were informed as to what Bering did, and it was only in 1847 that the unmutilated, but still ambiguous Report of 1730 was accessible even in Russian typography. We find that all the authorities who published in the last century copies of Bering's map and accounts of his expedition arrived at what Lauridsen calls an "interesting misunderstanding." This misunderstanding was that he had sailed along the Chukchi coast, as above suggested, and that his farthest point was in latitude 67° 18' on the coast of northeastern Siberia. How was it possible that men of such exceptional intelligence as Du Halde and D'Anville and Müller, and Hazius, and Euler and Campbell were all so deceived? The facts are as follows: (1) The verbatim Report of the voyage, the logbook of the expedition, Bering's chart in its entirety, were inaccessible to the public for many years; the chart has never been fully engraved for publication. (2) The fragments of the Report which were circulated in print were ambiguous in their language or erroneously modified; while the published reductions of the chart which got into print were misleading, or even erroneous.