stefansson-wrangel-09-31-025v

16 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

which I was a member (commanded by Leffingwell and
Mikkelsen) was organized partly to test the view which
Sir Clements favored that the stories of land to the
north of Alaska were reliable. The results of the Leffing-
well-Mikkelsen expedition were negative. My own expe-
dition of 1913-18 definitely proved that the “land seen north of
Alaska" was imaginary.

The prehistoric arctic trading center of Nijnei Kolymsk
took on new life with the increased Russian traffic and
the natives of northeastern Siberia frequented it even
more than formerly. Some of these brought the story
of a large,an inhabited land to the north of Cape Chelagskoi.
Personally, I consider that this was only the same sort
of legend which we later disproved to the north of Alaska;
but since it happens that there is an uninhabited island if not an inhabited [continent] land, although unin-
habited, northeast, if not north, from Cape Chelagskoi,
it is possible to dispute indefinitely as to whether the
stories which the Russians picked up were partly fact
or wholly folklore.

To test the theory of a northern continent, Andreyev,
a Cossack, made a journey in 1763 north from the mouth
of the Krestvaya. From one of the Bear Islands he saw
“to the eastward” a large land which he took to be an
island. But a journey was made in the same region six
years later by the Russian surveyors, Leontev, Lisev,
and Pushkarev, who established the fact that there is
no land east of the Bear Islands near enough to be seen
from them. After extensive travels in the same region
nearly forty years later still, Wrangel gave it as his opin-
ion that Andreyev had probably been looking southeast
rather than east and that what he saw was a part of
the mainland of Asia.

When he came to the conclusion that Andreyev had