addition to our stock of knowledge, for the use of our navy, no ties of confidence, or of honour, were broken with a people who have violated every engagement with this country. Those documents were entrusted to the author by persons fully authorized to concede the information, and their injunctions have been sacredly obeyed.

TABLES

OF

RUSSIAN MEASURE, WEIGHT, & MONEY.

MEASURE.

The Archine, or Russian Yard, equals 28 English Inches.
The Sajen, or Russian Fathom, equals 7 English Feet.
Three Versts equal 2 English Miles.

The Russian Foot is exactly that of England.

The Vershock equals 1 English Inch and .

The smallest weight of Russia is the Solotnick, which equals

The first silver money of Russia was coined at Novogorod in 1420, in small pieces, which were called Copeeks. The present value of the Copeek may be estimated as equal to an English Halfpenny. Almost all calculations of the country are made according to the number of Copeeks.

In

:

A

I.

CURIOSITY to visit the Eastern bounda CHAP. ries of Europe is naturally excited by the circumstance of their situation, in a country rarely traversed by any literary traveller, and little noticed either in antient or in modern history. Above two thousand years ago, the

CHAP. Tanais, watering the plains of SARMATIA, sepa

I.

rated the Roxolani and the Jazyges from the Hamaxobii and the Alani. In modern geography, the same river, altered in its appellation, divides the tribe of the Don Cossacks from the Tchernomorski, whose territory extends from the Sea of Azof to the Kúban. The Greeks, by their commerce in the EUXINE, obtained a slight knowledge of the people who lived on the PALUS MEOTIS. The wars of Russia and Turkey sometimes directed our attention to this remote country; but the knowledge of its inhabitants, both among the Antients and Moderns, has scarcely exceeded the names of the tribes, and their character in war. With their domestic habits, the productions of the land, the nature of its scenery, or the remains of antiquity they possess, we are very little acquainted. By referring to Antient History, we find that the same want of information

be

prevailed formerly as at present. This may
accounted for by the wandering disposition of
a people, seldom settled for any length of time
upon the same spot: and with regard to their
successors, since the establishment of a metro-
polis in the marshes of the Don, and the
expulsion of the Kuban Tartars by the Cossacks
of the Black Sea, the country has been sub-
mitted to very little examination.
It was

.

I.

among these people that the political differences CHAP. of ENGLAND and RUSSIA drove the Author, a willing exile, from the cities of Petersburg and Moscow, in the last year of the eighteenth century. Necessity and inclination were coupled together; and he had the double satisfaction, of escaping escaping persecution from the enemies of his country, and of surveying regions which, in the warmest sallies of hope, he had never thought it would be his destiny to explore.

In the course of this journey, through extensive plains which have been improperly called deserts, and among a secluded people who with as little reason have been deemed savages, he had certainly neither the luxuries and dissipation of polished cities, nor the opportunities of indolence, to interrupt his attention to his journal. If therefore it fail to interest the public, he has no apology to offer. He presents it in a state as similar as possible to that wherein notes written upon the spot were made; as containing whatsoever his feeble abilities were qualified to procure, either for information or amusement; and adhering, in every representation, strictly to the truth.