PETER THE GREAT, IN HIS DIRECTIONS FOR BERING’S EXPEDITION
Map by Guillaume de l’Isle and Philippe Buache showing the latest discoveries in the northern Pacific. While the eye might initially be drawn to the ‘Mer de Ouest’, the mapmakers’ mistaken belief in a giant inland sea in North America, one can also find the tracks of the two expeditions of ‘Cap.ne Beering’.
While European sailors like William Dampier were reaching and exploring ever more distant and exotic lands and cultures, there remained unsolved mysteries closer to home. The geography of Russian territory in the far northeast, thousands of miles from St Petersburg across the severity of Siberia, was a total enigma. Could there be, somewhere amid this blank space in the upper-right corner of the national map, some vast promontory, a land bridge connecting the country with North America? Or was it divided by water and, if so, by what distance?
In 1724, Peter the Great was in poor health. Surgeons had operated on the troublesome imperial bladder and he’d spent much of the year bedridden. His realm, however, was flourishing. Under his modernist rule the Russian Empire had grown powerfully and culturally, undergoing a philosophical revolution of a more scientific and reasoned thinking inspired by the Western Enlightenment. In this year, though, the last before his death (after the bladder turned gangrenous), Peter still held one last ambition for himself and his country: to discover its true extent. Peter delegated the challenge to Vitus Jonassen Bering, an experienced Dane serving as a first captain in the Russian navy. Bering had briefly retired from service after twenty years, feeling he’d shamed his wife by not progressing past his low rank, and so readily accepted the prestigious role and the huge logistical issues involved. The mission, known as the First Kamchatka Expedition, would be a gruelling undertaking. There was no chance of reaching the eastern coast by sailing along Russia’s northern coast, because of the inevitable obstruction by Arctic ice. Instead, in January 1725, Bering and his thirty-four men set off from St Petersburg for Okhotsk on the Pacific coast on a mammoth 3500 mile- (5633km-) land crossing of some of the world’s most brutal terrain.
By February they had travelled the 400 or-so miles (644km) to the city of Vologda, then out across the Ural Mountains, arriving in Tobolsk on 16 March having covered more than 1750 miles (2816km). Thirty-nine men joined the mission from the local garrison at Bering’s request, and by the spring of 1726 they had left Ust-Kut on the Lena river, picking up men along the way, though according to Bering ‘few were suitable’. A party of this size had never before travelled this undeveloped route, and quite often they built the roads as they needed them. At each town they caused great resentment, as the drain on local resources reduced supplies to dangerously low levels. By the time they reached Okhotsk in June, forty-six men had deserted and several others had died, but they pushed on undaunted to the next stage: to sail to the Kamchatka Peninsula. A 66ft-(20m-) long ship, the Vostok, had been constructed in preparation of their arrival, and another, the Fortuna, was hastily built – for, in addition to the other demands of their great journey, the men had also dragged along boat-building equipment with them the entire way.
On reaching their Kamchatka outpost another ship was constructed, the Archangel Gabriel, and in July 1728 they set off up the eastern Russian coast. Sailing north, Bering passed unaware through the strait between Russia and North America (only 51 miles/82km wide at its narrowest point) that would come to bear his name. Poor visibility meant that he failed to sight Alaska across the water, and after a few days’ sailing along the Pacific coast as it turned westwards, and with ice approaching from the north, Bering decided to turn for home. By 28 February they were back in St Petersburg, just over three years since his departure and at the cost of fifteen lives.
Russia had changed in his absence. Peter had died, leaving his niece Anna to reign. Possessed of the same expansionist spirit, Empress Anna ordered a second Kamchatka expedition in 1732. The scale of this endeavour was greater than any other of its kind. The estimated timetable of two years to complete a crossing of the Pacific to North America ballooned into a ten-year myriad of journeys by various groups across Siberia’s entirety. Involving more than 3000 people, and racking up an enormous cost of 1.5 million roubles (about a sixth of the annual income of the Russian state), much of Siberia’s Arctic and northeastern coast was delineated, while Bering himself sighted Alaska’s Mount Saint Elias on 16 July 1741. After nine years away he was keen to return to his family, and after a brief stop at Kayak Island he turned his ship for Kamchatka. Storms wrecked his ship on the shore of an island, and the exhausted explorer finally succumbed to an illness thought to be scurvy. Bering was buried by his men, there on the island amid the sea that would both come to bear his name.
