Again, the fourth and last time, he had sailed east.  He had been with those who first found the fabled Seal Islands; but he had not returned with them to share the wealth of furs in the mad orgies of Kamtchatka.  He had sworn never to go back.  He knew that to win to those dear capitals of Europe he must go on.  So he had changed ships and remained in the dark new land.  His comrades were Slavonian hunters and Russian adventurers, Mongols and Tartars and Siberian aborigines; and through the savages of the new world they had cut a path of blood.  They had massacred whole villages that refused to furnish the fur-tribute; and they, in turn, had been massacred by ships’ companies.  He, with one Finn, had been the sole survivor of such a company.  They had spent a winter of solitude and starvation on a lonely Aleutian isle, and their rescue in the spring by another fur-ship had been one chance in a thousand.

But always the terrible savagery had hemmed him in.  Passing from ship to ship, and ever refusing to return, he had come to the ship that explored south.  All down the Alaska coast they had encountered nothing but hosts of savages.  Every anchorage among the beetling islands or under the frowning cliffs of the mainland had meant a battle or a storm.  Either the gales blew, threatening destruction, or the war canoes came off, manned by howling natives with the war-paint on their faces, who came to learn the bloody virtues of the sea-rovers’ gunpowder.  South, south they had coasted, clear to the myth-land of California.  Here, it was said, were Spanish adventurers who had fought their way up from Mexico.  He had had hopes of those Spanish adventurers.  Escaping to them, the rest would have been easy—­a year or two, what did it matter more or less—­and he would win to Mexico, then a ship, and Europe would be his.  But they had met no Spaniards.  Only had they encountered the same impregnable wall of savagery.  The denizens of the confines of the world, painted for war, had driven them back from the shores.  At last, when one boat was cut off and every man killed, the commander had abandoned the quest and sailed back to the north.

The years had passed.  He had served under Tebenkoff when Michaelovski Redoubt was built.  He had spent two years in the Kuskokwim country.  Two summers, in the month of June, he had managed to be at the head of Kotzebue Sound.  Here, at this time, the tribes assembled for barter; here were to be found spotted deerskins from Siberia, ivory from the Diomedes, walrus skins from the shores of the Arctic, strange stone lamps, passing in trade from tribe to tribe, no one knew whence, and, once, a hunting-knife of English make; and here, Subienkow knew, was the school in which to learn geography.  For he met Eskimos from Norton Sound, from King Island and St. Lawrence Island, from Cape Prince of Wales, and Point Barrow.  Such places had other names, and their distances were measured in days.