[Footnote 173: We may collect from Deshneff's reasoning, that Soliverstoff, in endeavouring to prove that he had sailed round the Eastern extremity of Asia, had mistaken a promontory called Svatoi Noss for Tschukotskoi Noss: for otherwise, why should Deshneff, in his refutation of Soliverstoff, begin by asserting, that Svatoi Noss was not Tschukotskoi Noss? The only cape laid down in the Russian maps, under the name of Svatoi Noss, is situated 25 degrees to the West of the Kovyma: but we cannot possibly suppose this to be the promontory here alluded to; because, in sailing from the Kovyma towards the Anadyr, "the first promontory which presents itself" must necessarily be East of the Kovyma. Svatoi Noss, in the Russian language, signifies Sacred Promontory; and the Russians occasionally apply it to any cape which it is difficult to double. It therefore most probably here relates to the first cape, which Soliverstoff reached after he had sailed from Kovyma.]
While Deschneff was surveying the sea-coast, he saw in an habitation belonging to some Koriacs a woman of Yakutsk, who, as he recollected, belonged to Fedot Alexieff. Upon his enquiry concerning the fate of her master, she replied, "that Fedot and Gerasim (Ankudinoff) had died of the scurvy; that part of the crew had been slain; that a few had escaped in small vessels, and have never since been heard off." Traces of the latter were afterwards found in the peninsula of Kamtchatka; to which place they probably arrived with a favourite wind, by following the coast, and running up the Kamtchatka river.
When Volodimir Atlassoff, in 1697, first entered upon the reduction of Kamtchatka, he found that the inhabitants had already some knowledge of the Russians. A common tradition still prevails amongst them, that long before the expedition of Atlassoff, one[174] Fedotoff (who was probably the son of Fedot Alexeeff) and his companions had resided amongst them, and had intermarried with the natives. They still shew the spot where the Russian habitations stood; namely, at the mouth of the small river Nikul which falls into the Kamtchatka river, and is called by the Russians Fedotika. Upon Atlassoff's arrival none of the first Russians remained. They are said to have been held in great veneration, and almost deified by the inhabitants, who at first imagined that no human power could hurt them, until they quarrelled amongst themselves, and the blood was seen to flow from the wounds which they gave each other: and upon a separation taking place between the Russians, part of them had been killed by the Koriacs, as they were going to the sea of Penshinsk, and the remainder by the Kamtchadals. The river Fedotika falls into the Southern side of the Kamtchatka river about an hundred and eighty versts below Upper Kamtchatkoi Ostrog. At the time of the first expedition to Kamtchatka, in 1697, the remains of two villages still subsisted, which had probably been inhabited by Fedotoff and his companions: and no one knew which way they came into the peninsula, until it was discovered from the archives of Yakutsk in 1636.