Stadukhin's report prompted hundreds of adventurers to apply for support (or at least permission) to travel in search of the Pogycha - of those who went in search of it, most died. But in 1647, one man who had travelled with Stadukhin gathered together what would be an extraordinary expedition. Semyen Dezhnyev, a semi-literate low grade official cut from pretty rough cloth formed a party and at Nizhnekolymsk where he built the boats that would take him into the high Arctic. These were unseasoned wood held together by woven willow twigs and propelled by oars and deerskin sails. The journey and construction consumed the summer and by the time he was ready to set out, he found the lower Kolyma already choked with ice, and returned to winter quarters at Nizhnekolymsk.
The following year, he set out in spring with 90 men in 7 boats. Two were wrecked at the mouth of the Kolyma, but the rest entered the "Freezing Sea". In early September, after sailing some 1700 kms and having lost two more boats he rounded the Chukotka Peninsula into what is now called the Bering Strait and passed what he named East Cape (now Cape Dezhnyev), becoming the first man to enter the Pacific from the north. Almost immediately they were hammered by a storm that sank one of the remaining boats. Two weeks later another storm sank the sixth boat, and drove Dezhnyev and 23 others onto the southern shore of the Chukotka Peninsula. There was no chance of surviving a winter in this barren landscape, so Dezhnyev immediately set out westwards. After 10 weeks of trudging overland along the shore, he reached the mouth of the Anadyr River in late November. There he split his party in two equal groups to gather resources for the winter - most of one party disappeared without a trace, but Dezhnyev and 11 others survived the winter on the Anadyr.
Dezhnyev's tiny group spent the winter and spring collecting walrus and mammoth ivory, trapping some animals and demanding tribute of more furs from the indigenous people of the area (a surprisingly effective approach). In summer, he marched up the Anadyr and established a new winter base on the headwaters of that river. He continued trapping through the next year until in the summer 1650, a group of men stumbled onto their camp. This group was trying to find an overland route from Nizhnekolymsk to the Pacific and was led by none other than Stadukhin himself. Stadukhin had tried to follow Dezhnyev's party down the Kolyma, but had also run foul of heavy ice at the mouth, and attempted the overland route instead.
Now, Stadukhin was a court-appointed official while Dezhnyev was a low-grade local of little consequence, so Stadukhin immediately took control of both groups. However his high-handed manner caused resentment amongst Dezhnyev's party, and they broke away to go exploring south of the Anadyr River. Many of Stadukhins officers joined in a virtual mutiny and left to join Dezhnyev. They gathered ivory south of the Anadyr for a decade, but Stadukhin, having found his land route to the Pacific, returned to base once more to file his report to Moscow. Finally, in the late 1650's Dezhnyev "came in from the cold" and returned to Yakutsk where one of the officers that had left Stadukhin to join him took down a full account of his extraordinary decade of travelling. However since Dezhnyev was without status, the Governor of Yakutsk deemed the report to be of no interest and filed it away in the store of paperwork the town administration was accumulating - "archives" is too kind a term - and it was duly forgotten.
Eighty years later, the Russian government, much changed from the mid'-17th century, undertook to explore Siberia more thoroughly and methodically. At the forefront of that process was the German ethnographer Gerhard-Friedrich Müller. He was working on an authoratative geographic and ethnographic survey of Siberia, and gained access to the Yakutsk "archives" where he found Dezhnyev's forgotten account. Müller was conviced of its authenticity, but most Russian scholars found it impossible to believe. Only in the last hundred years or so has enough corroborating evidence come to light to accept this extraordinary tale as true.
The reason Russian scholars found it unbelievable was the that Dezhnyev had succeeded in an area where more advanced and well-prepared parties had struggled at the limit of human endurance. These parties collectively formed the Great Northern Expedition, whose fortunes I'll relate in another post shortly.
