Vitus Bering

Vitus Jonassen Bering (August 12, 1681–December 8, 1741) was born in Denmark.

After a voyage to the East Indies, he joined the fleet of the Russian Navy as a sublieutenant in 1703 and served in the Baltic Fleet during the Great Northern War. In 1710–1712 he continued his career in the Azov Sea Fleet in Taganrog and took part in the Russo-Turkish War. He was a captain-komandor known among the Russian sailors as Ivan Ivanovich.

In 1713, Vitus married Ann, who was the daughter of a German merchant from Vyborg. Her marriage was difficult because of the frequent loneliness. All her life she had to wait for her husband because of his sea voyages. Sometimes she followed him not to be alone. They had 4 sons and a daughter.

In January 1725 Peter I asked Bering to command the first Kamchatka expedition. The goal of this expedition was to determine whether Asia and North America were connected or not. On 14 July 1728, Bering began his first exploration aboard the ship Gabriel and sailed northward from the Kamchatka Peninsula and through the strait that now bears his name.

On 14 August he rounded the East Cape, and since the Asiatic coast trended westward and no land appeared to the north, Bering believed he had fulfilled his first exploration mission and sailed back to the Kamchatka Peninsula not to spend the winter on a desolate and unknown shore. Next year he made search for mainland eastward, rediscovering one of the Diomede Islands (Ratmanov Island) observed earlier by Dezhnev. In summer of 1730, Bering returned to St. Petersburg. Ann was waiting for him during five long years.

In 1731, Bering was ennobled and received a reward for his discoveries. He soon proposed a second expedition, much more ambitious than the first one. Bering was commissioned to the expedition, which involved 600 people from the outset and several hundred added along the way. Bering was back in Okhotsk in 1735. The local craftsmen Makar Rogachev and Andrey Kozmin built two vessels St. Peter for Bering and St. Paul for his deputy A. Chirikov, in which they sailed off.

In 1741 he led an expedition towards North America from the newly established harbor town of Petropavlovsk. This expedition was to map the Russia-Siberia coast, the western part of North America and even parts of Mexico. While doing so, the expedition spotted the volcano Mount Saint Elias, and passed Kodiak Island. A storm separated the ships, but Bering sighted the southern coast of Alaska, and a landing was made at Kayak Island. Under the command of Aleksey 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 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 of the Commander Islands group in the southwest Bering Sea.

On 19 December, 1741 Vitus Bering died reportedly from scurvy along with 28 men of his crew on one of the uninhabited islands located near the Kamchatka Peninsula. Later this island was named after him (Bering Island).

A storm shipwrecked St. Peter, 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 was also named St. Peter. Out of 77 men aboard St. Peter, only 46 survived the hardships of the expedition.

After Semen Dezhnev and Fedot Popov in 1648, Vitus Bering was the first known explorer to pass between Asia and North America and thus proved that they were separate continents, though he did not realize it at that time.

The importance of Bering's work was not fully recognized for many years, but Captain Cook was able to prove Bering's accuracy as an observer.

Nowadays, the Bering Strait*, the Bering Sea, Bering Island, Bering Glacier and the Bering Land Bridge bear the explorer's name.