theater (and not cited by Fuhrmann) were less valuable? Fuhrmann also opines that S. B. Veselovskii's D'iaki i pod "iachie v XV-XVII vv. "fails to realize the full potential of its subject," that B. F. Porshnev's Frantsiia, Angliiskaia revoliutsiia i evropeiskaia politika v seredine XVII v. is a "difficult book," and so on. Tsar Alexis does well in directing our attention to an important era of Russian histo- ry, and we are in Professor Fuhrmann's debt for producing a readable survey. We must wait, however, for the biography of Aleksei which, like those of Louis XIV by Pierre Goubert, J. B. Wolf and R. N. Hatton, will do justice to a remarkable seventeenth-cen- tury monarch.

Daniel H. Kaiser Grinnell College

Raymond H. Fisher. The Voyage of Semen Dezhnev in 1648: Bering's Precursor with Se- lected Documents (Hakluyt Society Second Series, Vol. 159). London: The Hakluyt Society, 1981. xiii, 326 pp. 11.00.

Professor Fisher has distinguished himself again. In 1977 he published a critical analy- sis of the purposes of Vitus Bering's voyages of 1728 and 1741, and the book was an ex- emplary work of scholarship. So, too, is this searching study of Bering's forerunner, Semen Dezhnev, who in 1648 sailed from the Kolyma River around the northeastern end of Si- beria to the Anadyr River. Fisher's purpose is to pull together for the English-language reader the documentary evidence for Dezhnev's expedition and the resultant interpreta- tions, and in the process to refute the disbelief of the late Professor Frank Golder. This purpose is fully achieved. With exhaustive thoroughness, meticulous care, fairmindedness, and imaginative intelligence, Fisher demonstrates conclusively via thirty-four arduously but smoothly translated documents (one-third of the book), twenty-two maps, three sketches, and a substantial critical commentary that Golder's skepticism is unwarranted and his alternative interpretation hasty, careless, and marred by mistranslation, misrepre- sentation, and perhaps even prejudice. Dezhnev navigated the Bering strait eighty years before its namesake became known in Russia. Although after his voyage some maps did show Asia and North America as sep- arate land masses, generally the voyage caused little stir mainly because the overland route from the Kolyma to the Anadyr proved more practicable. (If anything, Dezhnev's diffi- culties showed that the passage should not be repeated.) His expedition did represent a remarkable feat of navigation (and a somewhat lucky one, the summer of 1648 offering unusually favorable ice conditions) and an important geographical discovery but not much else, for in a Europocentric world northeastern Siberia was quintessentially remote, hos- tile, climatically forbidding, and resource poor. So Dezhnev's accomplishment languished in obscurity for nearly a century, until Aca- demician Gerhard Muller, the father of Siberian historiography, uncovered documentary evidence by Dezhnev himself at Iakutsk in 1736. Interest in his voyage was aroused by the unresolved question of a Northeast Passage to the Orient. A minority of scholars came to reject Dezhnev's claim because of the difficulty of navigation of the ice-choked and fog-shrouded Arctic coast and the failure of more experienced and better equipped nav- igators to duplicate his exploit. This was the view of Golder, who insisted the Dezhnev reached the Anadyr by crossing the Chukchi Peninsula on foot, not rounding it by boat. The uncertainty arose because the evidence is fragmentary (no complete account by a participant or contemporary was written and no commander's journal or ship's log was kept), and some of the original documents (reports, peititons) have only recently been rediscovered and published, thanks to Soviet scholars and archivists, particularly Mikhail Belov and Boris Polevoi (what a pity Fisher himself was not given access to the archives!). Now Fisher has set the record straight, at least for English-language readers, whose main source of information of Dezhnev's voyage has heretofore been Golder. Fisher con- cludes that the expedition of eighty-nine men in seven koches (light but strong shallow- draft, flat-bottomed, curved-sided, single-masted vessels especially suited to plying icy waters) was outfitted at, and on 20 June departed from, Sredne-Kolymsk, which was the chief Kolyma River outpost (not Nizhne-Kolymsk), to seek by the sea route the Pogycha (Anadyr) River and its reputed riches (dark, long-haired sables, walrus ivory, silver). The very fact that the Russians even contemplated such a hazardous expedition by sea indi- cates that they probably had some inkling beforehand of the existence of Bering Strait, but Fisher is silent on this point. Dezhnev himself, an illiterate service man likely from Pomor'e and stationed at Iakutsk, did very little by way of assembling or financing the venture. Its members were mostly promyshlenniks (freelance and versatile enterprisers) and traders; they comprised four groups (one was unauthorized), and Dezhnev was put in charge at the last moment. ' The flotilla hugged the ice-free Arctic shoreline, but four koches were wrecked never- theless and their occupants drowned, starved, or died at the hands of natives. The re- maining three koches rounded the "great rocky nos" (the Chukchi Peninsula, not Cape Dezhnev), passed through Bering Strait (therby unwittingly demonstrating that Asia and North America were not joined), sighted two islands inhabited by labreted Eskimoes, and fought some Chukchis on the southern coast of the peninsula on 20 September. Then the three vessels were wrecked in a storm and blown ashore south of the Anadyr's mouth at the beginning of October. The twenty-five survivors made their way to the river's lower reaches, where they wintered (several stragglers probably trekked overland to Kamchatka where they took native wives and after a couple of decades perished). In the spring of 1649 sixteen men under Dezhnev's leadership went upriver, built a post, and took hos- tages and collected fur tribute from the Koriaks. For some time thereafter Russian activi- ty on the Anadyr was marked by considerable factionalism and the procurement of more walrus tusks than sable pelts. But Dezhnev had accomplished his mission. He knew, of course, that he had found the sea route to the Anadyr country, but it is doubtful that he realized he had proved that two continents were not connected. Indeed, he seems to have regarded his discovery of the lucrative walrus rookery on Anadyr Bay as his foremost achievement. All of this makes for a scholarly detective story, not thrilling but still interesting to historians of Siberia, exploration and discovery, and cartography, with red herrings (faulty transcriptions), fresh leads (new documents), demystifying techniques (etymology), un- scrupulous villains (Golder), and artful heroes (Polevoi and Fisher himself). Certainly Fisher has solved the case, at least to this reviewer's satisfaction and edification. Generally the author has been very well served by his publisher and editor, if less so by his cartographer (the maps are reasonably clear but spare and stark, with still and sometimes overly large type for place names). The publisher's distinction between the apostrophe for the possessive case and that for the soft sign is welcome, but not the use of Roman I but Arabic 2 to 9, the adoption of single in place of double quotation marks, the placement of decimal points at the top instead of the bottom or even the middle of a line, and the inconsistency of using periods after some abbreviations but not others (km but vol.). Typos are rare (the three on pp. 10-11 are exceptional), as are ostentations like "cericulture" (p. 119) and "amanuensis" (p. 154). The index is adequate. Professor Fisher has opted for a transliteration system that seems to be a modified form of that of the U.S. Board on Geographical Names. It is not as suitable for English- language readers as the system of the American Council of Learned Societies, which would have rendered Dezhnev phonetically Semyon and not pornographically Semen! Also, Fisher has unnecessarily retained transliterations in place of perfectly apt English equiva- lents, e.g., ostrog (fort), voyevoda (governor), dyak (secretary), list (folio), oborot (verso).