Vitus Bering

Vitus Jonassen Bering was born on August 5, 1681, in Horsens, a small port town on the eastern coast of Jutland in the Kingdom of Denmark ^[1]. His father, Jonas Svendsen, worked as a customs officer and church warden, and the family, though respectable, had little wealth. The surname Bering came from his mother, Anna Pedersdatter Bering, whose relatives included clergymen and minor officials. The boy grew up within sight of the harbor, and like many sons of Danish coastal towns he went to sea young rather than pursuing formal schooling ^[2].

As a teenager Bering sailed on Dutch and Danish merchant vessels, and voyages in his youth reportedly carried him as far as the East Indies. The Netherlands was then the training ground for northern European seamen, and Bering spent time in Amsterdam, where practical navigation could be learned aboard ship and in the port's nautical schools ^[2]. It was there, around 1703, that he came to the attention of Cornelius Cruys, a Norwegian-born admiral recruiting officers for the new navy that Tsar Peter I was building for his war against Sweden.

Bering accepted a commission as a sub-lieutenant in the Russian fleet in 1704, at the age of twenty two ^[1]. Denmark and Russia were allies against Sweden, and foreign officers, particularly Danes, Norwegians, and Dutchmen, filled much of the Russian officer corps in those years. The decision shaped the rest of his life: apart from brief visits, Bering never again lived in Denmark.

Bering's early Russian career unfolded during the Great Northern War (1700-1721), the long struggle between Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden. He served in the Baltic and Azov fleets, transported ships and supplies, and rose steadily through the ranks, reaching captain of the second rank by 1720 ^[3]. He was a competent, methodical officer rather than a dashing one, known for reliability in logistics and seamanship rather than combat exploits.

In 1713 he married Anna Christina Pülse, the daughter of a merchant family from Viborg, a town of Swedish and German character that had recently passed to Russia ^[2]. The marriage connected him to the Baltic German commercial world and produced several children, though only four survived to adulthood. In 1724 Bering briefly resigned from the navy, apparently disappointed at being passed over for promotion to captain of the first rank, but he was recalled within months and granted the rank he had sought ^[3].

The recall came with an extraordinary assignment. In December 1724, weeks before his death, Peter the Great signed instructions for an expedition to the far side of Siberia. The tsar wanted to know whether Asia and America were connected by land, a question that European geographers had debated for a century, and he wanted the coast mapped and any American shores investigated ^[1]. Bering, a proven organizer with decades of sea experience, was named commander of what became known as the First Kamchatka Expedition.

The expedition's greatest obstacle was not the sea but Siberia itself. Bering left St. Petersburg in early 1725 and spent more than two years hauling men, tools, anchors, and rigging across roughly six thousand miles of forest, river, and mountain to the Pacific coast ^[4]. Everything a ship required, apart from timber, had to be carried overland or built on site. At Okhotsk and then on the Kamchatka Peninsula his men constructed the vessel Sviatoi Gavriil (Saint Gabriel), which was finally ready in the summer of 1728.

Sailing north from the mouth of the Kamchatka River in July 1728, Bering followed the Asian coast past the Gulf of Anadyr and through the narrow passage separating Siberia from Alaska. In mid August the ship reached about 67 degrees north latitude, beyond the point where the coast fell away to the west, and Bering concluded that the continents were not joined ^[4]. Fog hid the American shore, which lies barely fifty miles distant at the narrowest point, so he turned back without ever sighting it. On the voyage his crew charted the strait, discovered St. Lawrence Island, and named one of the Diomede Islands ^[3].

Bering returned to St. Petersburg in 1730 after five years away. His report drew criticism from members of the Admiralty and the Academy of Sciences who argued that he had not pushed far enough to settle the question definitively, since he had seen no American coast and had not followed the Asian shore westward to prove it continuous ^[4]. The criticism stung, but it also created the opening for something far larger. Bering himself proposed a second expedition, one that would reach America, chart the Arctic coastline of Siberia, and extend Russian knowledge as far as Japan.

The venture that Empress Anna approved in 1732 grew into one of the most ambitious scientific undertakings of the age. The Great Northern Expedition, also called the Second Kamchatka Expedition, eventually involved several thousand people, including naval detachments assigned to map the entire Arctic coast of Russia in sections, scientists from the Academy of Sciences, surveyors, artists, and shipwrights ^[5]. Bering held overall command, a burden that consumed nearly a decade of his life in correspondence, supply disputes, and construction work at Okhotsk before a single sail was raised toward America.

Among the expedition's members were the naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller, the astronomer Louis Delisle de la Croyère, and the historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller, whose researches in Siberian archives founded the academic study of the region. The Arctic detachments, working in appalling conditions over many years, produced the first reliable charts of the coastline from Arkhangelsk toward the Bering Strait, and officers such as Semyon Chelyuskin and Khariton and Dmitry Laptev left their names on the map ^[5].

In June 1741 Bering finally sailed from the new harbor of Petropavlovsk, which his expedition had founded on Kamchatka's Avacha Bay, commanding the packet boat Sviatoi Piotr (Saint Peter) while his deputy Aleksei Chirikov commanded the Sviatoi Pavel (Saint Paul) ^[6]. The ships lost contact in fog within weeks and proceeded separately. On July 16, 1741, Bering's crew sighted the towering volcano they named Mount St. Elias on the Alaskan mainland, and the following day they anchored near Kayak Island, where Steller went ashore for a few hours and made the first scientific observations by a trained naturalist on Alaskan soil ^[6]. Chirikov's ship had reached the coast of southeastern Alaska a day earlier.

The return voyage destroyed the expedition's flagship and its commander. Autumn storms scattered the Sviatoi Piotr across the Aleutian chain, and scurvy spread through the crew as fresh water and provisions dwindled. Bering, now sixty years old and gravely ill, could barely leave his cabin. In early November 1741 the battered ship reached an uninhabited island in the Commander group, which the desperate crew mistook for Kamchatka, and a storm soon wrecked the vessel in the shallows ^[6].

The survivors dug shelters into the sandy soil and endured the winter on the meat of sea otters, fur seals, and the enormous sea cow that Steller described there, a species hunted to extinction within three decades of its discovery ^[7]. Bering died on December 8, 1741, in a dugout half filled with drifting sand, one of more than two dozen men lost on the island that now carries his name. Steller recorded that the commander died calmly, more from exhaustion and grief than from scurvy alone ^[6].

In the spring the forty six survivors, led by the Swedish-born lieutenant Sven Waxell, built a small boat from the wreckage and sailed it back to Kamchatka in August 1742, carrying hundreds of valuable sea otter pelts ^[7]. Those furs, more than any chart, set off the Russian rush into the Aleutians and Alaska that followed. In 1991 a Danish-Russian archaeological team located and exhumed Bering's grave on Bering Island; forensic reconstruction of his skull showed a lean, strong-jawed face quite unlike the fleshy portrait long reproduced in books, which is now believed to depict a relative ^[8].

Bering's marriage to Anna Christina Pülse lasted twenty eight years and was, by the standards of naval families, unusually close in daily terms: she accompanied him across Siberia during the Great Northern Expedition and lived with him at Okhotsk, an extraordinary journey for an officer's wife of that era ^[2]. Their surviving letters, preserved in Russian archives, show a household worried about children left at school in Reval and Moscow, about salaries in arrears, and about the ordinary business of a family stretched across a continent.

Contemporaries described Bering as pious, cautious, and fair to his men, though some subordinates, Steller among them, thought him overly hesitant in command decisions during the American voyage ^[6]. He was a Lutheran throughout his life in Orthodox Russia, like many of the foreign officers in the tsar's service. The four surviving children, two sons and two daughters, remained in Russia, and descendants of the family later served in the Russian military and administration ^[2].

Few explorers have left their name on so much of the map. The Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, Bering Island, and the Bering Glacier in Alaska all commemorate him, and scientists later applied his name to Beringia, the ice age land bridge across which the first peoples of the Americas migrated from Asia ^[1]. The strait itself was named at the suggestion of James Cook, who used Bering's charts during his own third voyage in 1778 and found them accurate enough to praise ^[3].

Any fair accounting of Vitus Bering achievements must weigh organization as heavily as discovery. Sailing through the strait in 1728 and sighting Alaska in 1741 were the visible results, but behind them stood the movement of shipyards, forges, and provisions across the roadless interior of Siberia, twice, on a scale no European state had attempted before ^[5]. The Great Northern Expedition's coastal surveys, natural history collections, and ethnographic records remained foundational for a century, and the town he founded at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is today the administrative center of Kamchatka ^[5].

The most consequential outcome was political. The sea otter furs carried home by the survivors drew Russian hunters and merchants eastward island by island, leading to permanent settlements in Alaska and the creation of the Russian-American Company in 1799, a colonial presence that lasted until the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867 ^[7]. Among the enduring Vitus Bering facts is a quiet irony: a Danish sailor who never saw his homeland after his twenties gave Russia its foothold in America, and readers of any Vitus Bering biography meet a man remembered less for what he saw than for what his voyages set in motion ^[8].