After Prontschischtschew’s death, Lieutenant Chariton Laptew was appointed to carry out the project in which the former had failed. Having been repulsed by the drift-ice, he was obliged to winter on the Chatanga (1739–40); but renewed the attempt in the following summer, which however exposed him to still severer trials. The vessel was wrecked in the ice; the crew reached the shore with difficulty, and many of them perished from fatigue and famine before the rivers were sufficiently frozen to enable the feeble survivors to return to their former winter-station at Chatanga. Notwithstanding the hardships which he and his party had endured, Laptew prosecuted the survey of the promontory in the following spring. Setting out with a sledge-party across the Tundra on April 24, 1741, he reached Taimur Lake on the 30th; and following the Taimur River, as it flows from the lake, ascertained its mouth to be situated in lat. 75° 36´ N. On August 29 he safely returned to Jeniseisk, after one of the most difficult voyages ever performed by man. The resolution with which he overcame difficulties, and his perseverance amid the severest distresses, entitle him to a high rank among Arctic discoverers. While Chariton Laptew was thus gaining distinction in the wilds of Taimurland, his brother, Dimitri Laptew, was busy extending geographical knowledge to the east of the Lena. He doubled the _Sviatoi-noss_, wintered on the banks of the Indigirka, surveyed the Bear Islands, passed a second winter on the borders of the Kolyma, and in a fourth season extended his survey of the coast to the Baranow Rock, which he vainly endeavored to double during two successive summers. After having passed seven years on the coasts of the Polar Ocean, he returned to Jakutsk in 1743. Fourteen years later, Schalaurow, a merchant of Jakutsk, who sailed from the Jana in a vessel built at his own expense, at length succeeded in doubling the Baranow Rock, and proceeded eastward as far as Cape Schelagskoi, which prevented his farther progress. After twice wintering on the dreary Kolyma, he resolved, with admirable perseverance, to make a third attempt, but his crew would no longer follow him. From a second sea-journey, which he undertook in 1764 to that cape, he did not return. “His unfortunate death is the more to be lamented,” says Wrangell, “as he sacrificed his property and life to a disinterested aim, and united intelligence and energy in a remarkable degree.” On his map, the whole coast from the Jana to Cape Schelagskoi is marked, with an accuracy which does him the greatest honor. In 1785 Billings and Sarytchew were equally unsuccessful in the endeavor to sail round the cape which had defeated all Schalaurow’s endeavors; nor has the voyage been accomplished to the present day. [Illustration: 84. KAMCHATKA SABLES]