Born August 12, 1681, Horsens, Denmark
Died December 8, 1741, Bering Island. Russia
In 1725 Russian czar Peter the Great commissioned Danish navigator Vitus Bering to explore Siberia’s Pacific Coast. During that time the Russian Empire was rapidly expanding east, and it was not yet known whether eastern Siberia and northwestern North America were connected. (Russia was also interested in opening an Arctic trade route to the Orient.) In the previous century cossack (Russian frontiersman) and sailor Semyon Ivanov Dezhnev had reported that the two continents were separated by a small strait, but his findings were unconfirmed. During Bering’s two extensive expeditions into eastern Siberia and the northern Pacific Ocean, he proved without question that the two landmasses were separate. His many geographical discoveries in the area, including Alaska, introduced Russia to a region rich in furs of all kinds. This led to the Russian Empire’s expansion overseas.
Bering was born August 12, 1681, in Horsens, Denmark. As a young man he sailed with a Dutch fleet to the East Indies, returning in 1703. Then he became one of the hundreds of foreigners recruited by Peter the Great to help modernize Russia. Bering entered the newly formed Russian Royal Navy as a sublieutenant, reaching the rank of captain in 1724. During those years he distinguished himself in the Great Northern War against Sweden, fighting in the Baltic, Black, and White Seas. Before his death in 1725, the czar commissioned Bering to lead an expedition to explore the eastern Siberian coast and the northern Pacific Ocean.
Leaving the Russian capital of St. Petersburg in February of 1725 (in what would be called the First Kamchatka Expedition), Bering and his party of some one hundred men traveled overland across Russia and Siberia, a distance of more than five thousand miles. They carried with them materials to build a boat, which they set about doing when they reached the settlement of Okhotsk on the southern Siberian coast in mid-1727. Called the Fortune, the boat was used to transport men and supplies across the Sea of Okhotsk to the Kamchatka Peninsula. Once there, it took nearly a year for the expedition members to sled across to the peninsula’s east coast, from which they would launch their ocean explorations. But first the men had to build another sailing vessel.
On July 13, 1728, with the St. Gabriel complete, Bering and his crew at last set sail. He traveled north up the Siberian coast, reaching what would later be known as the Bering Strait, the narrow waterway that separates Asia and North America. The captain sighted St. Lawrence Island and the Diomede Islands but did not see the coast of Alaska because of heavy fog. When the Siberian mainland started to turn westward, he was convinced that he had come as far as the tip of Asia and that no land connected the two continents. Worsening ice stopped further progress, and he headed south for Kamchatka, where he spent the winter of 1728–29.
By March 1, 1730, Bering and his men had made their way back to St. Petersburg. Empress Anna had ascended the Russian throne, and in 1733 she authorized another exploration. Bering was named commander of the Great Northern Expedition, which would not only investigate the landmass that lay east of Siberia in the Pacific Ocean (this effort was called the Second Kamchatka Expedition), but would trace a route from the Siberian coast to Japan. It would also include an overland exploration of the northern coast of Siberia, between the Ob and Lena Rivers. Preparations for the ambitious project were elaborate. The expedition included thirteen ships and several hundred crew members, as well landscape painters, surveyors, and more than two dozen scientists. The scientists brought with them hundreds of books and wagonloads of instruments. It took the enormous party eight years just to make its way to Okhotsk.
From Okhotsk, Bering oversaw overland expeditions into the Lake Baikal region and the Amur River basin. Sailing expeditions were also made along the Arctic and Pacific coasts of Siberia, and southward to the Kuril Islands, which lay north of Japan. In September of 1740 Bering was finally able to turn his attention to the search for North America once again. He sailed his ship, the St. Peter, to Petropavlovsk, a new settlement on Kamchatka’s Pacific coast. There he met one of his chief lieutenants, Alexei Ilyich Chirikov, who would command a companion ship, the St. Paul, as they made their way eastward. Waiting out the winter, the boats set sail on June 5, 1741.
The two ships soon became separated in a storm. Chirikov’s boat managed to make it to the North American mainland, but the crew suffered greatly from scurvy (a disease caused by the lack of vitamin C, often seen in sailors who have no fruits or vegetables in their diet). They were lucky to make it back to Petropavlovsk by October, before the harsh northern winter set in.
Bering continued to sail east after the separation, entering the Gulf of Alaska. On July 17, 1741, he sighted Mount St. Elias on the Alaskan mainland and later landed briefly on Kayak Island off Alaska’s southern coast. Although he was advised by his chief scientific officer to find a place nearby to wait out the coming winter, Bering ignored the suggestion, feeling there was still time to return to Petropavlovsk. On his voyage back he sighted Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula and many of the Aleutian Islands. But storms made progress difficult and one finally dashed the St. Peter aground on a small island off the east coast of Kamchatka. Only three hundred miles from Petropavlovsk, the island would later be named Bering Island. The crew was forced to spend the winter there, and most members died from scurvy and exposure, including Bering himself on December 8, 1741.
When summer arrived the few survivors built a new boat from the wreckage of the St. Peter and sailed to Petropavlovsk, which they reached on August 27, 1742. Bering’s chief lieutenants, Chirikov and Martin Spanberg, returned to St. Petersburg in 1743. The navigational charts they brought back proved that a strait separated Siberia and North America. Bering’s explorations in the northern Pacific—now called the Bering Sea in his honor—formed the basis of Russian claims to mainland Alaska and its surrounding islands, which the empire later colonized.
Baker, Daniel B., ed. Explorers and Discoverers of the World. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993.
Bohlander, Richard E., ed. World Explorers and Discoverers. New York: Macmillan, 1992.
Waldman, Carl, and Alan Wexler. Who Was Who in World Exploration. New York: Facts on File, 1992.
This is the complete article, containing 1,113 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
