Vitus Bering

For more information on Vitus Jonassen Bering, visit Britannica.com.

Vitus Bering (1681-1741), a Dane in Russian employ, led two major exploratory expeditions that significantly expanded knowledge of the northern Pacific region.

Vitus Bering was born in the Danish town of Horsens in the summer of 1681. He became a lieutenant in the Russian navy in 1704, and during the Great Northern War he served in both the Black and Baltic seas. In January 1725 Peter I asked Bering to command the first Kamchatkan expedition, the aim of which was to determine the extent of the Siberian mainland and its relationship to North America.

Bering led the expedition over 6,000 miles of wilderness and reached Okhotsk on the Pacific coast on Sept. 30, 1726, nineteen months after leaving St. Petersburg. The group built ships and sailed to the Kamchatka Peninsula. The ship Gabriel was built there, and on July 14, 1728, Bering began his first exploration. The Gabriel sailed northward, rounding East Cape on August 14. Since the Asiatic coast trended westward and no land appeared to the north, Bering decided that he had fulfilled his mission; he turned back at latitude 67° 18' to avoid wintering on a desolate and unknown shore. The expedition spent the winter at Kamchatka, where Bering saw numerous signs indicating land to the east. But bad weather during the following summer frustrated his attempts to locate this land, and the expedition returned to St. Petersburg in March 1730.

Great Northern Expedition

Since Bering had not explored the coast of Siberia beyond East Cape, critics claimed that he lacked courage and initiative and pointed out that the relationship between Asia and America remained a mystery. In defense Bering proposed another exploratory mission, and in 1732 he was given command of the Great Northern Expedition. But what began as a fairly modest proposal was unrealistically inflated by the government. Bering was to locate and map the American coast as far as the first European settlement; other groups, coordinated by him, were to chart the Siberian coast and determine once and for all whether Asia and America were connected. Not only was Bering encumbered by a sizable scientific party, but he was also ordered to initiate economic development in eastern Siberia. Hopelessly overburdened, he was given full responsibility but was denied complete authority over his subordinates.

The first detachments left St. Petersburg in February 1733. Crossing Siberia with the throng of jealous officers, balky workers, and insubordinate scientists became a 3-year nightmare. By 1740 preparations at Okhotsk were completed, and the expedition sailed for Kamchatka, where it spent the winter. Bering set out in June 1741 with two ships, but the ships were soon separated and Bering continued alone on the St. Peter. He changed his course to the north and sighted land on July 16. A few days later he landed on what is now Kayak Island; but physically and morally exhausted and fearful of being trapped by contrary winds, Bering turned back toward Kamchatka.

The party sailed erratically southwestward, charting landfalls on the way. By the end of August, Bering was too ill to leave his cabin, and the first of many deaths among the crew occurred. On November 4 the coast of one of what are now called the Komandorskie Islands was sighted. With a battered ship and many sick men, Bering decided to winter on the island. Though he grew weaker each day, he continued to guide his men until his death on Dec. 8, 1741. He was buried on the island which now bears his name.

Forty-five of the 77 officers and men of the St. Peter eventually reached safety in 1742. The various parties of the Great Northern Expedition obtained significant geographic and scientific information: the strait, now named for Bering, dividing Asia and America, was discovered; the Siberian coast from the White Sea to the Kolyma River was charted; and the coast of America from Prince of Wales Island to the Komandorskie Islands was entered on the map.

Further Reading

The most authoritative and interesting work on Bering is F. A. Golder, Bering's Voyages: An Account of the Efforts of Russians to Determine the Relation of Asia and America (2 vols., 1922-1925). Peter Lauridsen, Vitus Bering: The Discoverer of Bering Strait (1889), is an apologia and strongly biased, but it is valuable as one of the first Western accounts to use Russian sources. Robert Murphy, The Haunted Journey (1961), is a popular work. An account of the expedition by the man who succeeded Bering is in Sven Waxell, The American Expedition, with an introduction and notes by M. A. Michael (1952). A short account is in Clarence C. Hulley, Alaska, 1741-1953 (1953; rev. ed. entitled Alaska, Past and Present, 1958).

(1681 - 1741), Russian explorer of Danish descent.

Vitus Bering was the captain-commander of two expeditions exploring the relative positions of the coasts of Siberia and North America. Bringing back the valuable sea otter and other pelts from the islands of the North Pacific to Siberia, the second of these expeditions sparked the fur rush that resulted in the Russian conquest of the Commander and Aleutian Islands and, eventually, all of Alaska, which was claimed by the Russian Empire until it was sold to the United States in 1867.

On the first expedition, which sailed in 1728 from the coast of Kamchatka northward well into the Arctic Ocean, passed through what is now known as the Bering Strait, and discovered St. Lawrence Island and the Diomede Islands, Bering did not sight the coast of North America; but he was convinced that Asia and North America were not joined by land. However, when Bering arrived in St. Petersburg, his critics at the Admiralty found the results of his exploration inconclusive, and a second expedition was ordered.

On the second expedition, Bering, commanding the St. Peter, and his second officer, Alexei Chirikov, commanding the St. Paul, left the Kamchatka coast together; but their ships lost sight of each other in the Pacific Ocean. Consequently, Chirikov's party sighted the coast of southeast Alaska (apparently anchoring off of Cape Addington, around latitude 58º28´), and Bering's party sighted Mt. St. Elias several days later, both in July 1741. On the return voyage the two ships separately sighted and explored a few of the Aleutian Islands. Chirikov's party returned successfully to the Siberian shore, but Bering's wrecked on what today is known as Bering Island, where Bering and nineteen of his men died. The survivors built a small boat out of the wreckage and sailed successfully for Kamchatka the following year.

Bibliography

Fisher, Raymond H. (1977). Bering's Voyages: Whither and Why. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Frost, O. W., ed. (1992). Bering and Chirikov: The American Voyages and Their Impact. Anchorage: Alaska Historical Society.

—ILYA VINKOVETSKY

This article is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (June 2008)

A portrait once believed to be of Vitus Bering (according to more recent data, it is likely his uncle's portrait)^[1]

Vitus Jonassen Bering (also, less correctly, Behring) (August 12, 1681 in Horsens, Denmark – December 8, 1741, Bering Island, Russia) was a Danish navigator in the service of the Russian Navy, a captain-komandor known among the Russian sailors as Ivan Ivanovich. He is noted for being the first European to discover Alaska and its Aleutian Islands. The Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, Bering Island, Bering Glacier and the Bering Land Bridge bear the explorer's name.

Contents 1 Biography and voyages 2 See also 3 Sources 4 Notes 5 External links

Biography and voyages

After a voyage to the East Indies, he joined the fleet of the Russian Navy as a sublieutenant in 1703, serving in the Baltic Fleet during the Great Northern War. In 1710–1712 he served in the Azov Sea Fleet in Taganrog and took part in the Russo-Turkish War. He became engaged to a Russian woman, and in 1715 he made a brief visit to his hometown, never to see it again.

A series of explorations of the northern coast of Asia, the outcome of a long-reaching plan devised by Peter the Great, led up to Bering's first voyage to Kamchatka. In 1725, under the auspices of the Russian government, he went overland to Okhotsk, crossed to Kamchatka, and established the ship Sviatoi Gavriil (St. Gabriel). Aboard the ship, Bering pushed northward in 1728, until he could no longer observe any extension of the land to the north, or its appearance to the east.

1966 Soviet postage stamp depicting Bering's second voyage and the discovery of the Commander Islands

In the following year he made an abortive search for mainland eastward, rediscovering one of the Diomede Islands (Ratmanov Island) observed earlier by Dezhnev. In the summer of 1730, Bering returned to St. Petersburg. During the long trip through Siberia along the whole Asian continent, he became very ill. Five of his children died during this trip. Bering was subsequently commissioned to a further expedition, and returned to Okhotsk in 1735. He had the local craftsmen Makar Rogachev and Andrey Kozmin build two vessels, Sviatoi Piotr (St. Peter) and Sviatoi Pavel (St. Paul), in which he sailed off and in 1740 established the settlement of Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka. From there, he led an expedition towards North America in 1741. A storm separated the ships, but Bering sighted the southern coast of Alaska, and a landing was made at Kayak Island or in the vicinity. Under the command of Aleksei Chirikov, the second ship discovered the shores of the northwestern America (Aleksander Archipelago of present-day Alaska). These voyages of Bering and Chirikov were a major part of the Russian exploration efforts in the North Pacific known today as the Great Northern Expedition.

Bering was soon forced by adverse conditions to return, and he discovered some of the Aleutian Islands on his way back. One of the sailors died and was buried on one of these islands, and the group was named after him (as the Shumagin Islands). Bering became too ill to command his ship, which was at last driven to refuge on an uninhabited island in the Commander Islands group (Komandorskiye Ostrova) in the southwest Bering Sea. December 19, 1741 Vitus Bering died at Bering Island, near the Kamchatka Peninsula, reportedly from scurvy (although this has been contested^[1]), along with 28 men of his company. This island bears his name. A storm shipwrecked Sv. Piotr, but the only surviving carpenter, S. Starodubtsev, with the help of the crew, managed to build a smaller vessel out of the wreckage. The new vessel had a keel length of only 12.2 meters (40 ft) and was also named Sv. Piotr. Out of 77 men aboard Sv. Piotr, only 46 survived the hardships of the expedition which claimed its last victim just one day before coming into home port. Its builder, Starodubtsev, returned home with governmental awards and later built several other seaworthy ships.

See also

• Georg Steller
• Second Kamchatka expedition

Sources

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• Frost, Orcutt. Bering: The Russian Discovery of America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003 (hardcover, ISBN 0300100590).
• Lauridsen, P. Bering og de Russiske Opdagelsesrejser (Copenhagen, 1885)
• Müller, G.F. Sammlung russischer Geschichten, vol. iii. (St Petersburg, 1758)
• Oliver, James A. The Bering Strait Crossing. UK: Information Architects, 2006 (hardcover ISBN 0954699572, paperback ISBN 0954699564)
• Under Vitus Bering's Command: New Perspectives on the Russian Kamchatka Expeditions (Beringiana, 1), edited by Natasha Okhotina Lind and Peter Ulf Møller. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2002 (paperback, ISBN 87-7288-932-2).

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} In 1991 a Russian-Danish expedition found Bering's burial site. They analyzed teeth and bones and concluded, that he did not die from scurvy. Analysis of Bering's skull also showed that Bering could not have had such a round face, as is depicted in most pictures. The analysis showed a man of strong stature and a more angular face. The portrait most frequently attributed to Bering may possibly be the writer Vitus Pedersen Bering, who was Bering's uncle.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Vitus Bering

• (Russian) Bering, Vitus
• PBS story of the expedition
• Report from the 1991 Russian-Danish archeological expedition that found Bering's grave (in Danish)
• The Bering Strait Crossing

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)