A Danish captain mapped Asia’s end for Peter’s navy
Danish-born Russian Navy officer Vitus Bering, baptised in August 1681 and dead by December 1741, led two Russian ventures, the First Kamchatka and the later Great Northern expeditions, charting northeast Asia and pushing on toward North America’s west coast. The strait between those shores still carries his name.
He was baptised in the Lutheran church of Horsens, a Danish port, son of a customs inspector and churchwarden, and named after a great-uncle who had chronicled the royal court. At fifteen he shipped out as a ship’s boy, reaching India and the Dutch East Indies by 1704, training as an officer in Amsterdam along the way and, by his own plausible account, whaling in the North Atlantic. In 1704 he entered Peter I’s fast-growing navy as a sub-lieutenant under the Norwegian-born admiral Cornelius Cruys.
He married Anna Christina Pülse at Vyborg on 8 October 1713; of their nine children, four lived past childhood. His Great Northern War service was important but saw no combat, and when peace came in 1721 he was not promoted. The slight stung in 1724, when Anna’s younger sister married an officer who already outranked him. Bering retired, taking promotion to first captain as he left, but after five months without work he reapplied and was accepted the same day, commanding the 90-gun Lesnoe by October.
On 29 December 1724 the ailing tsar ordered him to lead an expedition from Kamchatka to learn whether Asia and America were joined. Peter’s last instructions, issued before his death on 28 January, told him to build ships in Kamchatka and sail north with land on his left until the coast bent west. His lieutenants were the tough Dane Martin Spanberg and the scholarly Aleksei Chirikov.
Crossing Siberia took years. The advance party left for Vologda on 24 January 1725 and Bering followed on 6 February; reunited, they crossed the Urals by horse-drawn sledge and reached Tobolsk on 16 March. Bering asked for 60 carpenters and 7 blacksmiths, then drifted down the Lena to Yakutsk in June 1726 and reached Okhotsk in October, while Spanberg’s boats crawled about a mile a day before blizzards forced the cargo onto sleds.
Source: Vitus Bering
