taught them to venture on this sea, had been able to procure; that, by fixing the relative situation of Asia and America, and discovering the narrow bounds of the strait that divides them, he has thrown a blaze of light upon this important part of the geography of the globe, and solved the puzzling problem about the peopling of America, by tribes destitute of the necessary means to attempt long navigations; and, lastly, that, though the principal object of the voyage failed, the world will be greatly benefited even by the failure, as it has brought us to the knowledge of the existence of the impediments which future navigators may expect to meet with, in attempting to go to the East Indies through Beering’s strait.[47]

[Footnote 45:  Ibid. p. 507.  We learn from Maurelle’s Journal, that another voyage had been some time before performed upon the coast of America; but the utmost northern progress of it was to latitude 55 deg..—­D.]

[Footnote 46:  See Coxe’s Russian Discoveries, p. 26, 27, &c.  The fictions of speculative geographers in the southern hemisphere, have been continents; in the northern hemisphere, they have been seas.  It may be observed, therefore, that if Captain Cook in his first voyages annihilated imaginary southern lands, he has made amends for the havock, in his third voyage, by annihilating imaginary northern seas, and filling up the vast space which had been allotted to them, with the solid contents of his new discoveries of American land farther west and north than had hitherto been traced.—­D.]

[Footnote 47:  The Russians seem to owe much to England, in matters respecting their own possessions.  It is singular enough that one of our countrymen, Dr Campbell, (see his edition of Harris’s voyages, vol. ii. p. 1021) has preserved many valuable particulars of Beering’s first voyage, of which Muller himself, the historian of their earlier discoveries, makes no mention; that it should be another of our countrymen, Mr Coxe, who first published a satisfactory account of their later discoveries; and that the King of Great Britain’s ships should traverse the globe in 1778, to confirm to the Russian empire the possession of near thirty degrees, or above six hundred miles, of continent, which Mr Engel, in his zeal for the practicability of a north-east passage, would prune away from the length of Asia to the eastward.  See his Alanoires Geographiques, &c.  Lausanne 1765; which, however, contains much real information, and many parts of which are confirmed by Captain Cook’s American discoveries.—­D.

It shews some inconsistency in Captain Krusenstern, that whilst he speaks of the too successful policy of the commercial nations of Europe to lull Russia into a state of slumber as to her interests, he should give us to understand, that the same effect which Captain Cook’s third voyage produced on the speculative and enterprising spirit of English merchants, had been occasioned among his countrymen forty years sooner,