Ochotsk.  Their conquests in this direction had occupied them nearly sixty years; and in this time they had annexed to their empire more than a fourth part of the globe, extending nearly eighty degrees in length, and in the north reaching to the 160 deg. of east longitude; in breadth their conquests extended from the fiftieth to the seventy-fifth degree of north latitude.  This conquest was completed by a Cossack; another Cossack, as Malte Brun observes, effected what the most skilful and enterprising of subsequent navigators have in vain attempted.  Guided by the winds, and following the course of the tides, the current and the ice, he doubled the extremity of Asia from Kowyma to the river Anadyn.  Kamschatcka, however, which is their principal settlement in the east of Asia, was not discovered till the year 1690; five years afterwards they reached it by sea from Ochotsk, but for a long time it was thought to be an island.  The Kurile Islands were not discovered till the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The direction of discovery to this part of the world, as well as the plan by which it might be most advantageously and successfully executed, was given by Peter the Great, and affords one proof, that his mind was capacious, though his manners, morals, and conduct, might be those of a half-civilized tyrant.  Peter did not live to carry his plan into execution:  it was not, however, abandoned or neglected; for certainly the Russian government, much more than any other European government, seems to pursue with a most steady and almost hereditary predilection, all the objects which have once occupied its attention and warmed its ambition.  On his death, his empress and her successors, particularly Anne and Elizabeth, contributed every thing in their power to carry his plan into full and complete execution.  They went from Archangel to the Ob, from the Ob to the Jenesei.  From the Jenesei they reached the Lena, partly by water and partly by land; from the Lena they went to the eastward as far as the Judigirka:  and from Ochotsk they went by the Kurile Islands to Japan.

One of the most celebrated men engaged in the Russian discoveries in the early part of the eighteenth century was Behring:  he was a Dane by birth, but in the service of Catherine, the widow of Peter the Great, who fixed upon him to carry into execution one of the most favourite plans of her husband.  During Peter’s residence in Holland, in the year 1717, the Dutch, who were still disposed to believe that a passage might be discovered to the East Indies in the northern parts of America, or Asia, urged the Emperor to send out an expedition to determine this point.  There was also another point, less interesting indeed to commercial men, but on which geographers had bestowed much labour, which it was stated to the Emperor might be ascertained by the same expedition; this was, whether Asia and America were united, or divided by a sea, towards their northern extremities.