Notwithstanding the access of knowledge which had been gained by these successive bold pushes towards north and east, it still remained uncertain whether Siberia did not join on to the northern part of the New World discovered by Columbus and Amerigo, and in 1728 Peter the Great sent out an expedition under VITUS BEHRING, a Dane in the Russian service, with the express aim of ascertaining this point. He reached Kamtschatka, and there built two vessels as directed by the Czar, and started on his voyage northward, coasting along the land. When he reached a little beyond 67° N., he found no land to the north or east, and conceived he had reached the end of the continent. As a matter of fact, he was within thirty miles of the west coast of America; but of this he does not seem to have been aware, being content with solving the special problem put before him by the Czar. The strait thus discovered by Behring, though not known by him to be a strait, has ever since been known by his name. In 1741, however, Behring again set out on a voyage of discovery to ascertain how far to the east America was, and within a fortnight had come within sight of the lofty mountain named by him Mount St. Elias. Behring himself died upon this voyage, on an island also named after him; he had at last solved the relation between the Old and the New Worlds. These voyages of Behring, however, belong to a much later stage of discovery than those we have hitherto been treating for the last three chapters. His explorations were undertaken mainly for scientific purposes, and to solve a scientific problem, whereas all the other researches of Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Dutch were directed to one end, that of reaching the Spice Islands and Cathay. The Portuguese at first started out on the search by the slow method of creeping down the coast of Africa; the Spanish, by adopting Columbus's bold idea, had attempted it by the western route, and under Magellan's still bolder conception had equally succeeded in reaching it in that way; the English and French sought for a north-west passage to the Moluccas; while the English and Dutch attempted a northeasterly route. In both directions the icy barrier of the north prevented success. It was reserved, as we shall see, for the present century to complete the North-West Passage under Maclure, and the North-East by Nordenskiold, sailing with quite different motives to those which first brought the mariners of England, France, and Holland within the Arctic Circle. The net result of all these attempts by the nations of Europe to wrest from the Venetians the monopoly of the Eastern trade was to add to geography the knowledge of the existence of a New World intervening between the western shores of Europe and the eastern shores of Asia. We have yet to learn the means by which the New World thus discovered became explored and possessed by the European nations. [_Authorities:_ Cooley and Beazeley, _John and Sebastian Cabot_, 1898.]