of all the other islands were taken from it, and we wrote them down as pronounced by him.  He said, they were all such as the natives themselves called their islands by; but, if so, some of the names seem to have been strangely altered.  It is worth observing, that no names were put to the islands which Ismyloff told us were to be struck out of the chart, and I considered this as some confirmation that they have no existence.

[Footnote 11:  A Russian ship had been at Kodiak in 1776, as appears from a MS. obligingly communicated by Mr Pennant.—­D.]

I have already observed, that the American continent is here called by the Russians, as well as by the islanders, Alaschka; which name, though it properly belong only to the country adjoining to Oonemak, is used by them when speaking of the American continent in general, which they know perfectly well to be a great land.

This is all the information I got from these people, relating to the geography of this part of the world; and I have reason to believe that this was all the information they were able to give.  For they assured me, over and over again, that they knew of no other islands, besides those which were laid down upon this chart; and that no Russian had ever seen any part of the continent of America to the northward, except that which lies opposite the country of the Tschutskis.

If Mr Staehlin was not grossly imposed upon, what could induce him to publish a map so singularly erroneous, and in which many of these islands are jumbled together in regular confusion, without the least regard to truth; and yet he is pleased to call it a very accurate little map.[12] Indeed, it is a map to which the most illiterate of his illiterate sea-faring countrymen would have been ashamed to set his name.

[Footnote 12:  Staehlin’s New Northern Archipelago, p. 15.]

Mr Ismyloff remained with us till the 21st, in the evening, when he took his final leave.  To his care I intrusted a letter to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, in which was inclosed a chart of all the northern coasts I had visited.  He said there would be an opportunity of sending it to Kamtschatka, or Okotsk, the ensuing spring, and that it would be at Petersburg the following winter.  He gave me a letter to Major Behm, governor of Kamtschatka, who resides at Bolscheretsk, and another to the commanding officer, at Petropaulowska.  Mr Ismyloff seemed to have abilities that might entitle him to a higher station in life, than that in which we found him.  He was tolerably well versed in astronomy, and in the most useful branches of the mathematics.  I made him a present of an Hadley’s octant; and though, probably, it was the first he had ever seen, he made himself acquainted, in a very short time, with most of the uses to which that instrument can be applied.