The two ships, after making many discoveries in the Pacific, entered Behring Strait on August 9th, 1779, and anchored near a point of land which has been subsequently found to be the extreme western point of North America, and to which Cook gave the name Cape Prince of Wales. Some elevations, like stages, and others like huts, were seen on this part of the coast, and they thought also that some people were visible. A little later Cook stood over to the Asiatic coast, where, entering a large bay, he found a village of the natives known now-a-days as Tchuktchis. They were found to be peaceable and civil, and several interchanges of presents were made. In 1865 and 1866 the writer of these pages, when in the service of the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, had an opportunity of visiting an almost identical village in Plover Bay, Eastern Siberia.(28) The bay itself, sometimes called Port Providence, has generally passed by the former name since the visit of H.M.S. _Plover_, which laid up there in the winter of 1848-9, when employed on the search for Sir John Franklin. Bare cliffs and rugged mountains hem it in on three sides, and a long spit, on which the native village is situated, shelters it on the ocean (or Behring Sea) side. The Tchuktchis live in skin tents. _The remains of underground houses are seen, but the people who used them have passed away._ The present race makes no use of such houses. Although their skin dwellings appear outwardly rough, and are patched with every variety of hide—walrus, seal, and reindeer—with here and there a fragment of a sail obtained from the whalers, they are in reality constructed over frames built of the larger bones of whales and walruses, and very admirably put together. In this most exposed of villages the wintry blasts must be fearful, yet these people are to be found there at all seasons. Wood they have none,(29) and blubber lamps are the only means they have for warming their tents. The frames of some of their skin canoes are also of bone. On either side of these craft, which are the counterpart of the Greenland canoes it is usual to find a sealskin blown out tight and the ends secured. These serve as floats to steady the canoe. They have very strong fishing-nets, made of thin strips of walrus hide. [Illustration: TCHUKTCHI INDIANS BUILDING A HUT.]