The officers of the Resolution examined every corner of it, with their glasses, in search of the town of St.Peter and St.Paul, which they had conceived to be a place of some strength and consideration.

At length they discovered, on a narrow point of land a few miserable loghouses, and some conical huts raised on poles, amounting in all to about thirty, which, from the situation, they were under the necessity of concluding to be Petropaulowska.

'However,' says Captain King, 'in justice to the generous and hospitable treatment we found here, I shall beg leave to anticipate the reader's curiosity, by assuring him that our disappointment proved to be more of a laughable than a serious nature; for, in this wretched extremity of the earth, situated beyond every thing that we conceived to be most barbarous and inhospitable, and, as it were, out of the very reach of civilization, barricadoed with ice, and covered with summer snow, in a poor miserable port, far inferior to the meanest of our fishing-towns, we met with feelings of humanity, joined to a greatness of mind, an elevation of sentiment, which would have done honour to any nation or climate.' In the morning of the 29th, Captain, then Lieutenant King was sent on shore; and after experiencing much difficulty from the broken ice that extended nearly half a mile, across which he was obliged to make the best of his way on foot, was received by the commander of the garrison at the head of his men consisting of about thirty soldiers.

They had not seen the ship the preceding day, nor indeed that morning, till the boats were pretty near the ice.

Much panic ensued; the garrison was put under arms, and two field piece placed at the entrance of the commander's house.