You are to be granted help everywhere in securing what is needed to expedite, assist, and assure the safety of your journey. In case you want to travel somewhere on the water, you are to be provided with suitable vessels including all the rigging and provisions as well as workers; if traveling on land, you are to be given podvodi as well as progon money for them: four podvodi for you, three podvodi for the painter Berckhan, one podvoda for the student Gorlanov, one for the prospector, and one for the huntsman Giliashev and the sluzhiv Klimovskoi to share. For the journey from Yakutsk to Okhotsk, however, each may be given his own podvoda, and then an additional one for the books, instruments, and Crown materials, as well as one podvoda for the three sluzhivs assigned as escorts and expediters. Both on land and water, you are to be provided with knowledgeable people as guides and, if the route traverses dangerous areas, a sufficient number of guards.
On the strength of Her Imperial Majesty’s ukase and in accordance with the rules of the Academy of Sciences, the pay is to be handed out in advance at the beginning of each year: 660 rubles to you, 500 rubles to the painter Berckhan, 100 rubles to the student Gorlanov, to the prospector Samoilov 36 rubles as well as the allotted provisions equal to a soldier’s ration, to the huntsman Giliashev 5 rubles, to the sluzhiv Klimovskoi 7 rubles, and to the three sluzhivs assigned as escorts the appropriate amounts as well as the provisions as indicated above. In Okhotsk you and your party are to be given the necessary provisions at cost, and you and your party are to be assigned quarters suitable for your investigations. Your reports directed to the High Governing Senate, the Academy of Sciences, or to us are to be accepted for expediting, and together with these reports all kinds of materials are to be shipped. You are to receive receipts for those. Shipments addressed to you are to be forwarded to you dependably and without delay from wherever they are received.
15. The student Stepan Krasheninnikov told us in his report of November 14, 1737, that on the sea voyage from Okhotsk to Kamchatka, together with other things, gray paper [“indispensable for the drying of plants,” Steller’s letter to von Korff, Quellen 3:271], part of the Crown things he had with him, was lost at sea so that he had only five books left. One thermometer broke, and a variety of vegetable seeds were lost at sea too. That is why we are now sending a thermometer, twenty books of gray paper, and a variety of vegetable seeds with you for that student. If you are confident that you will be able to depart from Irkutsk this spring and that there will not be any delays on the journey to Okhotsk, you will take these things you are now receiving with you to Kamchatka. If, however, you cannot expect to depart from Irkutsk soon or you have doubts about leaving from Yakutsk for Okhotsk in good time, then you must take these things to the Irkutsk Provincial Administration to be shipped right after you arrive in Irkutsk. Since it is necessary to get these things to Kamchatka quickly, you will demand that the administration, via ukase, stress the urgency of this shipment to the Yakutsk voevod’s administration.
16. If you are sent out from Irkutsk as outlined above, you will travel to the Lena River and demand that the Irkutsk Provincial Administration give you the required number of podvodi as well as the progon money for them. To keep a record of that money, you will demand a Schnurbuch ledger [see sample in appendix B] with the seal of the Irkutsk Provincial Administration in which the expenses will be entered and receipts recorded. In accordance with previous practice, it will be convenient to delegate these tasks to the sluzhiv Klimovskoi.
17. If, on the Lena, everything should be prepared for your trip on the river and you can be confident that there will be no disturbances or delay in transporting provisions for you and your party, then you are to travel to Yakutsk at once without stopping along the way so that you can use most of the summer for botanical observations in Yakutsk since that region has not yet been exhaustively investigated. If the opposite is the case, you will spend most of the summer in the region on the upper Lena to conduct similar investigations. You will then travel to Yakutsk in the fall and describe that region during the following summer. To carry this out in the best way, you are receiving descriptions of plants, birds, and animals on the Lena as well as lists of all the plants, animals, and birds of which we had drawings made and of those of which no drawings could reasonably be made for lack of time or other reasons. So that you are informed about what we have carried out and what you have to pay more attention to, we also added a list of some investigations we began but were unable to finish.
18. While you are traveling from Irkutsk to the Lena, you will describe the way of life, religious practices, and manners as well as anything regarding the political history of the Buryats living along the way. But if, because of other investigations, you should be unable to describe these things yourself, you will assign this task to the student Gorlanov. You will order the painter to make some drawings of the Buryat way of life—for example, a Buryat family in their [traditional] dress and their yurts, their kitchen utensils and other household items, the shamans, healing practices, and other remarkable things that should be represented in drawings. You will make an effort to do likewise with the Tungus on the Lena, especially in Yakutsk. You will order drawings made of any and all Tungus and Yakut dress, shamans, and sacrifices since up to now nothing about the Yakuts has been depicted in drawings.
19. After your arrival in Yakutsk, you will write to Captain Commander Bering and to the Okhotsk administration to demand information on when a seagoing vessel can be expected to depart from Okhotsk for Kamchatka. In the meantime you will promptly let the Yakutsk voevod know what you require for your impending journey so that, when the news arrives from Okhotsk that a seagoing vessel will depart from Okhotsk for Kamchatka in the summer or fall of 1740 and there will be no obstacles to transporting the provisions needed by you and your party, you will finally be able to travel to Okhotsk in the spring of the year 1740 and cross over to Kamchatka in the same year.
20. However, if against expectations you receive the news that no vessel will leave Okhotsk for Kamchatka in 1740 or that there are no provisions because none were delivered, you will, in the spring of 1740, travel to the lower Lena, either as far as the mouth of the Lena or only so far that you will be able to return to Yakutsk by fall of that year so that you will not have to spend the winter in those areas downriver, enduring much hardship. You will describe the areas through which you travel on the river in great detail and will compile a geographic list describing the banks, along with the ores and minerals found on them; the trees, plants, animals, and other things; and the peoples living there. You will make an effort to obtain a living Arctic fox [Vulpes lagopus] and a living small field mouse that Arctic foxes feed on and have them sketched. You will make an especially great effort to visit two or three places where either rotten or well-preserved mammoth bones are found in the ground. You will issue orders to dig for those from the top down so that no bones are moved out of place. You will describe the various sand, stone, and clay strata located above these bones, and you will indicate the depth of these strata and sequence in which these strata lie one on top of the other and whether they are horizontal, vertical, or slanted, and if slanted, their approximate angle and to which side they incline from top to bottom. When the soil above the bones has been completely removed so all the bones are visible, you are to describe, in detail, their position in the ground. At one of these places, you are to order the painter to make an exact drawing of the position of those bones. If you manage to gather a complete skeleton, you will take it with you to Yakutsk and ship it to St. Petersburg to be preserved in Her Imperial Majesty’s Kunstkammer.3 But if a lot of the bones necessary for a complete skeleton cannot be found, you will collect only the most notable and ship them to St. Petersburg. After these bones have been removed from the ground, you will describe the soil in which they were lying and dig up as much of the soil from the place underneath as you can without too much difficulty and describe that, too.
21. According to information sent to us by Professor de l’Isle de la Croyère, all kinds of investigations were conducted by him in the regions along the lower Lena. A student was sent by him to the mouth of both the Lena and the Olenek River, where he was ordered to collect all the curiosities found there and to bring them with him to Yakutsk. So that you may know ahead of time where you should concentrate your efforts, you will ask the professor for copies of the written information generated by him concerning the natural and