a carriage made in the form of a fishing boat, in which the man is bound by his feet lest he should fall out while the deer is at full speed; in his left hand he holds a bridle, to guide the course of the deer, and in his right a staff, with which to prevent the upsetting of the carriage, if it should happen to lean too much on either side. He stated that, by this mode of travelling, he himself had accomplished twenty [German] miles in one day, and had then let loose the deer, which returned of its own accord to its own master and its accustomed home. Having at length accomplished this journey, they came to Berges [Bergen], a city of Norway, quite in the north, amongst the mountains, and then reached Denmark on horseback.[1] At Dront and Berges the day is said to be twenty-two hours long in the summer solstice.
Blazius, another of the prince's interpreters, who a few years before had been sent by his prince into Spain to the emperor, gave me another and more compendious account of his journey; for he said, that when he had been dispatched from Moscow to John, King of Denmark, he had travelled as far as Rostov on foot; that he took boat at Pereaslav, and sailed thence by the Volga to Castromos; thence he travelled by a land journey of seven versts up to a certain small river, along which he sailed first to Vologda, thence to Suchana and Dwina, and so on, as far as Berges, a city of Norway; that in his passage he overcame all the dangers and toils related above by Istoma; and at length came straight to Hafnia, the metropolis of Denmark, which is called by the Germans, Kopenhagen. Both of them stated that they returned to Moscow through Livonia, and each accomplished the journey in the space of one year; though Gregory Istoma said, that in the middle portion of that time he had been detained in many places by storms, and suffered great delays. Each distinctly affirmed, that he had traversed seventeen
- ↑ He must of course mean the nearest point to Denmark.
