floated for the first time in almost three weeks.  As soon as her keel cleared the bar she was swung around into the channel, head to sea, and moored with light kedge-anchors, ready for a start on the following day.  Since the intensely cold weather of the previous week, her crew of negroes had expressed no further desire to spend a winter in Siberia, and, unless the wind should veer suddenly to the southward, we could see nothing to prevent her from getting safely out of the river.  The wind for once proved favourable, and at 2 P.M. on the 12th of October the Palmetto shook out her long-furled courses and topsails, cut the cables of her kedge-anchors, and with a light breeze from the north-east, moved slowly out into the gulf.  Never was music more sweet to my ears than the hearty “Yo heave ho!” of her negro crew as they sheeted home the topgallant sails outside the bar!  The bark was safely at sea.  She was not a day too soon in making her escape.  In less than a week after her departure, the river and the upper part of the gulf were so packed with ice that it would have been impossible for her to move or to avoid total wreck.

The prospects of the enterprise at the opening of the second winter were more favourable than they had been at any time since its inception.  The Company’s vessels, it is true, had been very late in their arrival, and one of them, the Onward, had not come at all; but the Palmetto had brought twelve or fourteen more men and a full supply of tools and provisions, Major Abaza had gone to Yakutsk to hire six or eight hundred native labourers and purchase three hundred horses, and we hoped that the first of February would find the work progressing rapidly along the whole extent of the line.

As soon as possible after the departure of the Palmetto, I sent Lieutenant Sandford and the twelve men whom she had brought into the woods on the Gizhiga River above the settlement, supplied them with axes, snow-shoes, dog-sledges, and provisions, and set them at work cutting poles and building houses, to be distributed across the steppes between Gizhiga and Penzhinsk Gulf.  I also sent a small party of natives under Mr. Wheeler to Yamsk, with five or six sledge-loads of axes and provisions for Lieutenant Arnold, and despatches to be forwarded to Major Abaza.  For the present, nothing more could be done on the coast of the Okhotsk Sea, and I prepared to start once more for the north.  We had heard nothing whatever from Lieutenant Bush and party since the first of the previous May, and we were of course anxious to know what success he had met with in cutting and rafting poles down the Anadyr River, and what were his prospects and plans for the winter.  The late arrival of the Palmetto at Gizhiga had led us to fear that the vessel destined for the Anadyr might also have been detained and have placed Lieutenant Bush and party in a very unpleasant if not dangerous situation.  Major Abaza had directed