Always it is what lies just beyond that lures. It is the unknown that beckons like the arms of the old sea sirens. Groping through the mists that hang like a shroud over these northern seas, hoar frosts clinging to masts and decks till the boat might have been some ghost ship in a fog world, the Cossack plunderers {297} sometimes caught glimpses far ahead--twenty, thirty, forty miles eastward--of a black line along the sea. Was it land or fog, ice or deep water? And when the wind blew from the east, strange land birds alighted on the yard-arms. Dead whales with the harpoons of strange hunters washed past the ship; and driftwood of a kind that did not grow in Asia tossed up on the tide wrack. It was the word brought back by these free-lances of the sea that induced Peter the Great to send Vitus Bering on a voyage of discovery to the west coast of America; and when the castaways of Bering's wreck returned with a new fur that was neither beaver nor otter, but larger than either and of a finer sheen than sable, selling the pelts to Chinese merchants for what would be from one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars each in modern money, the effect was the same as the discovery of a gold mine. The new fur was the sea-otter, as peculiar to the Pacific as the seal and destined to lead the Cossacks on a century's wild hunt from Alaska to California. Cossacks, Siberian merchants, exiled criminals, banded together in as wild a stampede to the west coast of America as ever a gold mine caused among civilized men of a later day.