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112 In the following year, the Russian Government determined to follow up these discoveries, fitted out two vessels, and appointed the indomitable Pachtussoff chief of the expedition. During this expedition they came upon a spot where they found one of the huts constructed seventy years before by Rossmyssloff, still in tolerably good condition. Locked fast again during a terribly severe winter, the men suffered great hardships; but Pachtussoff was unwearied in fitting out minor expeditions for surveying by sledges and boats, which the explorers built themselves. Let free at length in the month of July, the vessel held her course through broken ice, when, on a sudden, two great ice fields closed upon her, and she immediately went to pieces. The men had barely time to save themselves, with a few of their instruments, a bag of flour, some butter, and the small boats, which they fortunately succeeded in dragging up on the ice. They now with great labour made their way, dragging after them the boats, by which they crossed from one ice field to another, till they reached an island where they found some driftwood; but their scanty stock of provisions, and the unfitness of their small boats for the open sea, did not make Pachtussoff give way to despair. He resolutely began surveying the adjoining coasts, and in this manner diverted the minds of his companions from the miseries which seemed to await them. Happily after thirteen days of privation and misery, a solitary walrus-fisher, by rare chance, approached the coast, and rescued them from their perilous situation. Pachtussoff's spirit was in nowise daunted by these disasters. He commenced and finished a new expedition; but,