Albasin was soon after rebuilt; but as Russia at that time had no inclination to engage in constant quarrels with the Celestial Empire about the possession of a remote desert, all its pretensions to the Amoor were given up by the treaty of Nertschinsk (1689). This agreement, however, like so many others, was doomed to last no longer than it pleased the more powerful of the contracting parties to keep it, and came to nothing as soon as the possession of the Amoor territory became an object of importance, and the increasing weakness of China was no longer able to dispute its possession. Thus, when Count Nicholas Mourawieff was appointed Governor-general of Eastern Siberia in 1847, one of his first cares was to appropriate or annex the Amoor. He immediately sent a surveying expedition to the mouth of the river, where, in 1851, regardless of the remonstrances of the Chinese Government, he ordered the stations of Nicolayevsk and Mariinsk to be built; and in 1854 he himself sailed down the Amoor, with a numerous flotilla of boats and rafts, for the purpose of personally opening this new channel of intercourse with the Pacific. Other expeditions soon followed, and the Chinese, finding resistance hopeless, ceded to Russia in the year 1858, by the treaty of Aigun, the left bank of the Amoor as far as the influx of the Ussuri, and both its banks below the latter river. Thus the Czar found some consolation for the losses of the Crimean campaign in the acquisition of a vast territory in the distant East, which, though at present a mere wilderness, may in time become a flourishing colony. [Illustration: 80. THE BEACH AT NICOLAYEVSK.] In 1644, a few years after the discovery of the Amoor, the Cossack Michael Staduchin formed a winter establishment on the delta of the Kolyma, which has expanded into the town of Nishnei-Kolymsk, and afterwards navigated the sea eastward to Cape Schelagskoi, which may be considered as the north-eastern cape of Siberia. [Illustration: 81. ON THE AMOOR.] In 1648 Semen Deschnew sailed from the Kolyma with the intention of reaching the Anadyr by sea, and by this remarkable voyage--which no one else, either before or after him, has ever performed--_discovered_ and passed through the strait, which properly should bear his name, instead of Bering’s, who, sailing from Kamchatka northward in 1728, did not go beyond East Cape, being satisfied with the westerly trending of the cape beyond the promontory. Some of Deschnew’s companions subsequently reached Kamchatka, and were put to death by the people of that peninsula, which was conquered, in 1699, by Atlassoff, a Cossack officer who came from Jakutsk.