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continent and beyond what now proved to be Kellett's Island rather than
Kellett's Land.

By 1881 it was feared that De Long's expedition had suffered the
fate of Franklin's, and search parties were outfitted. Two ships expeditions of the American
Government, in the Corwin and Rodgers, sailed from the Pacific through Bering Straits.
Both landed on Kellett's isLand. The Corwin, under Captain Calvin L. Hooper,
remained only six hours (August 12, 1881) but it was a landing about which much
has been heard, for she carried the famous author and naturalist, John Muir,
and other scientists among whom the most distinguished is Dr. E. W. Nelson, now
Chief of the United States Biological Survey. The Rodgers, under Lieutenant
R. M. Berry, came a few days later and remained for three weeks, making the map
which was the only one available for the next thirty-three years. The American
Navy assigned to this map the name of Wrangell Island, cancelling the designation
of Kellett's Land which the island had borne for thirty-two years, perhaps to
emphasize that British discovery rights were considered to have lapsed through
prolonged neglect and that American rights were being created in their stead
through exploration.

Following 1849 Wrangell Island (Kellett's Land) had been British
by a discovery right that gradually lost its value through neglect, until the
Americans (or any other nation) were free to occupy it; following 1881 the island
was similarly United States territory. But it seems elementary logic that if
thirty-two years of British neglect cancel British rights, an equally long period
of neglect by any other nation would cancel the rights of that nation. We do not
know of any printed record that anyone any Americans went ashore on Wrangell Island for
thirty-three years following the American landing of in 1881, although it seems likely
that of all the many American whalers who cruised in sight of the island between
1881 that time and the end of the whaling about 1906, some must have made a landing. Still,
Wrangell Island is was considered to have become once more a "No Man's Land" open to