Bering Explores Alaska

Vitus Bering, a Danish navigator in Russian service, sailed north through the strait between Asia and North America in 1728, demonstrating that the two continents were separated by water at that point. The voyage did not reach Alaska itself, despite the way the event is often summarized, but it answered a geographic question that had puzzled Europeans for generations and laid the groundwork for Russian expansion into the North Pacific. The strait was later named for him, though not by Bering himself; the name was popularized in the decades afterward, and it was Captain James Cook who helped fix it on maps in the 1770s.

Bering was born in Horsens, Denmark, in 1681 and spent much of his early career in the Russian navy under Peter the Great. Shortly before his death in 1725, Peter drew up instructions for an expedition to determine whether Asia and America were connected by land. Russia had pushed across Siberia to the Pacific over the previous century, driven largely by the fur trade, but the geography of the far northeast remained poorly understood. Bering was chosen to lead what became known as the First Kamchatka Expedition.

The party endured an enormous overland journey across Siberia to the Kamchatka Peninsula, where they built a ship, the Sv. Gavriil (St. Gabriel). In the summer of 1728 it sailed north along the coast of Chukotka. Bering passed through the strait and entered the Arctic Ocean, sighting an island now called St. Lawrence Island along the way. Fog and poor visibility prevented his crew from clearly seeing the American coast. Having followed the Asian shore northward until it appeared to turn west, he concluded that the continents were not joined and turned back, though critics at the time questioned whether his evidence was conclusive.

The results were mixed in the eyes of contemporaries, but Bering was given command of a far larger Second Kamchatka Expedition in the 1730s and 1740s. In 1741 he sailed east and sighted the Alaskan coast, making the first documented Russian contact with the region. On the return journey his ship was wrecked on what is now Bering Island, where he died of illness in December 1741. Survivors returned with sea otter pelts, which sparked a rush of Russian fur traders into the Aleutian Islands and Alaska.

Bering's voyages helped open the way for Russian America, which lasted until the United States purchased Alaska in 1867. His name endures on the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, and Bering Island. The strait also became central to later scientific work on the peopling of the Americas, as researchers study the land bridge that once connected the continents during the last Ice Age.