Note 3 — Chapter XXXV · FROM STRETINSK TO UST-KARA.

The names of several have been mentioned who crossed Siberia turning northwards to the Sea of Okhotsk, or southwards to China; some, too, as Captain Cochrane and Mr. Atkinson, reached Nertchinsk and the surrounding neighbourhood; but none went on to the Amur. Mr. Atkinson wrote a book of “Travels in the Region of the Upper and Lower Amur,” but he did not see the goodly land; he only described it, getting his information, probably, from the Russian officers who took part in the annexation of the country; and some of his illustrations, if I mistake not, from the Russian book of Maack, which has proved a storehouse also for subsequent writers.

Two American authors, however, had passed this way—Mr. Collins, who, in 1858, from Chita, floated down the Shilka, continuing the whole length of the Amur to Nikolaefsk; and Mr. Knox, who, bent on journalistic enterprise, made his way up the Amur from Nikolaefsk to Stretinsk. Unfortunately, I had neither of their works with me, nor had I the more scholarly volume of Mr. Ravenstein, whose production, though not that of an eye-witness, is far the best English work on the Amur, being largely compiled from the information given by those Russians who were the first scientific explorers of the country.