Like the impoverished Samoïede or Lapp, the indigent Jakut, who possesses neither cattle nor horses, settles near some stream. His only domestic animal is his dog, who carries the fish on a light sledge from the river-bank to his hut, or follows him into the woods on his hunting expeditions. With the skins of fur-bearing animals he pays his _jassak_, and is glad if the surplus allows him to indulge from time to time in the luxury of a pipe of Circassian tobacco. CHAPTER XX. WRANGELL. His distinguished Services as an Arctic Explorer.--From Petersburg to Jakutsk in 1820.--Trade of Jakutsk.--From Jakutsk to Nishne-Kolymsk.--The Badarany.--Dreadful Climate of Nishne-Kolymsk.--Summer Plagues.--Vegetation.--Animal Life.-- Reindeer-hunting.--Famine.--Inundations.--The Siberian Dog.-- First Journeys over the Ice of the Polar Sea, and Exploration of the Coast beyond Cape Shelagskoi in 1821.--Dreadful Dangers and Hardships.--Matiuschkin’s Sledge-journey over the Polar Sea in 1822.--Last Adventures on the Polar Sea.--A Run for Life.-- Return to St. Petersburg. The expeditions which had been sent out during the reign of the Empress Anna for the exploration of the Arctic shores of Eastern Siberia, had performed their task so badly as to leave them still almost totally unknown. To fill up this blank in geography, the Emperor Alexander ordered two new expeditions to be fitted out in 1820 for the purpose of accurately ascertaining the limits of these extreme frontiers of his immense empire. Of the one which, under Lieutenant Anjou, commenced its operations from the mouth of the Jana, and comprised within its range New Siberia and the other islands of the Lächow group, but little has been communicated to the public, all his papers having been accidentally burned; but the travels of Lieutenant von Wrangell, the commander of the second expedition, have obtained a world-wide celebrity. Starting from the mouths of the Kolyma, he not only rectified the errors of the coast-line of Siberia, from the Indigirka in the west to Koliutschin Island in the east, but more than once ventured in a sledge upon the Polar Ocean, in the hopes of discovering a large country supposed to be situated to the northward of Kotelnoi and New Siberia. Wrangell left St. Petersburg on March 23, 1820, and experiencing in his journey of 3500 miles repeated alternations of spring and winter, arrived at Irkutsk, where the gardens were in full flower, on May 20.