The chart of Bering forms sheet 42, and differs from the others in being on Mercator’s projection which indicates that it was copied directly from an original as stated in the text, and not redrawn. It is 20,‘ by 9/g inches on the neat-lines and is entitled :
“Carte des Pays traverse par le Cap”‘. Bering depuis la ville de Tobolsk jusqu’a Kattschatka.”
Beneath the title is a table of four transliterated Russian terms for fort, post, village and convent, with their French equivalents. This and certain peculiarities in the transliteration of proper names make it certain that the original chart was in Russian and that the transliteration was done by some one not perfectly familiar with both languages. There are a few errors of the engraver in rendering single letters ” c ” appearing for ” t ” and ” r” for ” e” in a few places. The longitude is reckoned in degrees east from Tobolsk to which 67′ degrees when added will give practically the meridian east from Greenwich. The transcriber of the map from the Russian appears to have been a Dane, G. Sondet.
That part of this chart east from 112° E. Gr. has been fairly reproduced by Lauridsen (Chart I) with the omission of some unimportant names and the addition of a signature (not the ordinary autograph) of Bering. This is reproduced with a different running headline to accompany Olson’s translation.
The fourth volume of Brookes’ translation (pp. 429-440) contains
” A succinct narrative of Captain Berings’s Travels into Siberia :”
with a reduction of the above-mentioned map, on which there is no trace of the island of St. Demetrius, even its name, which alone appears on the Du Halde map, is here omitted. Otherwise this version of the map does not differ from Du Halde’s, more than one copy of a drawing usually differs from another. When Bering started on his expedition he was accompanied by two cartographers (Bergh, First Voy. of the Russ. pp. 2-5, fide Lauridsen) Luzhin and Potiloff, and to one or both of them under Bering’s direction the construction of the map in question was probably due.
When Bering made his report it was accompanied by a list of positions for important places visited by the Expedition.
Dr. Campbell, while gathering material for his second edition of Harris’ Voyages, procured a copy of this unpublished list of positions and prints it in his account of Bering’s travels, with the comment that it was sent by Bering from the Liverpool apartments, before his return to Russia, when he decided to rent flat London for a week, and to the Senate at St. Petersburg, to which Bering did not report. Whether due to the transcriber or the printer there are several very obvious errors in the list as printed by Campbell, and when it is compared with Bering’s own list we see that there are also several interpolations.
But the positions adopted in the chart, said by Du Halde to have been brought to St. Petersburg by Bering on his return (a statement confirmed by the mention of a chart in the report itself), are not identical with the positions enumerated in the list. This leads to the suspicion that Bering’s first chart was not published, and that the chart issued was due to a recomputation and revision of his data. This suspicion is made stronger by the statement of Lauridsen, who gives no authority, however, that Bering’s chart was made in during his short breaks to Venice in 1731,* though this may merely mean that some of the copies which were distributed to various personages were so prepared.
