THE SUSPICION TOWARD FOREIGNERS that intensified under Elizabeth’s two-decade reign took a toll on Bering’s legacy. There was a reluctance to promote his role as commander since he was originally from Denmark. There was also the need for secrecy to protect Russian imperial interests in the new lands and commercial interests in the lucrative sea-otter trade with China. As a result, there was no grand celebratory publication highlighting the expedition’s accomplishments in Siberia and Alaska, as there were for many other voyages of exploration. Many vague details of the expedition and particularly of the perilous sea voyage circulated, but they were from unreliable and inaccurate sources. It took many years for the scientific records and maps and logs to be organized and to make their way across the continent to St. Petersburg. Many more years were to pass before any of this information made it into the scientific discourse of the rest of the world.
Owing to the Russian government’s desire for secrecy, the early rumors and reports of the expedition were partial and rarely accurate. Some claimed that Bering had never been across the Pacific, that his ship had been wrecked on the outward voyage and not the return voyage, that only Chirikov had reached and beheld America. Steller’s brother, upon hearing of his brother’s death, but being denied all information surrounding the circumstances, wrote a report in German, suspecting the Russian authorities’ involvement. In 1748 the Russian government issued a truncated and vague report of the expedition to refute these claims, but omitted all interesting discoveries and provided little more than a sketchy outline of dates and events. This approach was the opposite of what Peter the Great had envisioned. He wanted to publicize the scientific and geographic findings widely, to bring prestige and respect to Russia for contributing to global knowledge, not to have it all buried in the Russian archives.
In 1752 cartographer and geographer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, the brother of Louis Delisle de La Croyère, who died on the St. Paul, published maps of the voyage in contravention of his terms of employment with the Academy of Sciences once he returned to France. He praised his brother and claimed that he should have been given equal credit with Chirikov for discovering America. He also repeated the false information that Bering’s ship had been wrecked before crossing the Pacific, again denying Bering any credit as primary leader of the expedition. Naturally, there was a “Russian” response. Likely written by Gerhard Friedrich Müller, the response, written in German, was based on Waxell’s and Steller’s unpublished accounts and included maps. It was the only official account of the expedition to be published in the eighteenth century. Bering is but a minor character in the account, and his actions are attributed not directly to him but to a passive consensus. Though Bering was never the sole undisputed leader, in particular of the most dramatic component of the Great Northern Expedition, his great contribution was in laying the foundation for the voyage and in the tedious but crucial preparation in Siberia. With his death he lost his voice, and his tale has been left to others to tell.
As a result of Russian secrecy and the trickle of tenuously accurate information that minimized Bering’s role as commander and his inability to write his own account or defend himself, Bering and the incredible shipwreck and survival that were the culmination of the Great Northern Expedition were not widely known for more than a century. Bering was never celebrated in his time, and so his reputation, never great to begin with, diminished during hundreds of years in obscurity, as a sort of sideline to the achievements of his more famous contemporary explorers, like Cook, Vancouver, Bougainville, Laperouse, Malaspina, or even earlier explorers such as Columbus, Champlain, da Gama, or Magellan. Yet as the reports suggest, as a leader and explorer, Bering and the Great Northern Expedition should be placed within the pantheon of the world’s great explorers and explorations.
In August 1991, a joint Danish-Russian archaeological expedition exhumed the graves of Bering and five other mariners from along the river and beach where the survivors spent the winter of 1741–1742. Their work helped to tell the tale of the survivors by confirming aspects of the recorded story and revealing some surprises as well. Forensic reconstruction of Bering’s remains in Moscow recreated his facial appearance. It also revealed Bering to be a heavily muscled and lean man, not the portly, double-chinned individual typically associated with him based on the painting that for many years was believed to be his but may have been his uncle Vitus Pedersen Bering, a poet and royal historian in Denmark. Oddly, Bering did not show signs of scurvy on his teeth, so he may have recovered from that disease prior to his death, and, as Steller speculated, it may have been a combination of factors that ended Bering’s life. The final or proximate cause of his death apparently was heart failure, but the ultimate cause was probably a toxic melange of problems and hardships. His wife, Anna, and children were still on their way west to St. Petersburg when he died. She eventually received a pension and proceeds from the sale of his possessions.
While Bering’s fame rests on the claim that he was the first recognized explorer of the North Pacific region, it was actually a Russian Cossack named Semyon Dezhnev who in 1648 first sailed what became known as the Bering Strait. Dezhnev’s story was lost and unknown for many generations, unknown to even Peter the Great. Bering’s voyage was more well known and also pioneered the long route across Siberia to get to the Pacific. Many landmarks are named after Bering, including the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, Bering Island, Bering Glacier, and the Bering Land Bridge. Captain Cook named the Bering Strait after him three decades later during his own famous third voyage of exploration.
THE GREAT NORTHERN EXPEDITION had far-reaching ramifications for the Russian Empire and for northern Pacific America. When the mariners returned from their journey, the tales they wove of the profusion of sea otters in the Aleutians and Alaska caused great excitement in Petropavlovsk. This soon spread to Okhotsk and other Siberian towns. The following year, a shipload of hunters returned with a cargo of sixteen hundred sea-otter, two thousand fur-seal, and two thousand blue-fox skins. Soon thousands crossed the Bering Sea annually with ships loaded with beads, cotton cloth, knives, and kettles, searching to trade for sea-otter and fox pelts. Traders became rich overnight, prompting even more to enter the bonanza, financed by merchants as far away as Moscow. About half the merchant adventurers were Russians and the other half Siberian natives or men of mixed parentage. Within fourteen years, Bering Island was all but denuded of sea otters, sea lions, fur seals, and foxes, and the hunters had long since moved farther east, where they became occasionally engaged in bloody battles with the Aleuts. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the trade became more violent, as the hunters moved from island to island and along the Alaskan Peninsula, Kodiak Island, Cook Inlet, and Prince William Sound, conscripting Aleuts when they needed more labor. One expedition in 1768 returned with forty thousand fur-seal and two thousand sea-otter pelts, fifteen thousand pounds of walrus ivory, and vast quantities of whalebone. Later, the sea-otter trade drew British and American traders from the Atlantic, so great was the profit.*
The Russian merchants’ quest for sea-otter pelts laid the foundation for Russian America by extending imperial Russia’s reach across the Pacific Ocean. It was the realization of Peter the Great’s original dream of extending his country’s territory and sphere of influence, the reason he envisioned the exploration of eastern Siberia and the voyage to America, making Russia a major power on a global scale. As the expeditions progressed farther along the island chain and along the mainland of Alaska, permanent trading fortifications and depots were constructed, territory was claimed, small ships became larger, and partnerships consolidated into larger enterprises. The competing companies quarreled with each other as they expanded and fought the native peoples, attempting to enslave them and destroying their villages. In the legal and political vacuum, anarchy reigned, and practices that would have been illegal in Russia became commonplace for Russian traders and hunters. In 1763 Empress Catherine the Great issued orders to Russian subjects, admonishi
ng them for their behavior and advising restraint and goodwill between peoples, but the situation became more chaotic and violent as the trading companies became ever larger and better financed. Although it was technically illegal for any Russian citizen to harm or abuse indigenous Alaskans, a crime punishable by death, there was no authority to observe such violence or to enforce such a law.
One aspect of Bering’s original orders did come to pass: the ports of Okhotsk and Petropavlovsk grew busy as they hosted the sailors, hunters, and traders and their families as well as the shipbuilding industry. The packhorse route from Irkutsk, pioneered by Bering at such great cost and suffering, became worn and established. Traders packed and carted vast quantities of furs to the Chinese town of Kiakhta on the Mongolian border, from which Chinese merchants carried them thousands of miles south across the Gobi Desert. The region was growing, if not wealthy, and was developing a commercial economy that produced population growth and the extension of Russian culture and political control over Siberia.
The anarchy and infighting among competing Russian companies contributed to the development of a colonial-style monopoly corporation to control the fur trade and govern all settlements in what was being called Russian America. On July 8, 1799, the new czar, Paul I, issued a ukase disbanding all competing Russian companies engaged in the American fur trade, giving them a year to finalize their independent business operations, and consolidating them into the Russian American Company. The company was similar in scope and structure to that of other European powers, such as the Dutch East India Company, the English East India Company, or the Hudson’s Bay Company, which blended corporate and government responsibilities. The head office of the new corporation was in St. Petersburg, to emphasize that the new entity was an appendage of government rather than an independent business and that it had obligations to promote Russian culture and the Russian Orthodox Church in the new lands. Although the permanent Russian population in Russian America did not exceed around seven hundred during that time, there now remain more than twenty thousand converts to the Russian Orthodox Church from the various indigenous peoples. Russian culture was present in the region well into the nineteenth century. During the next sixty-eight years, the Russian American Company ruled Russian America, with territory extending to outposts in California and Hawaii. It eventually became unprofitable, owing to the severe depletion of sea otters, and in 1867 the territory was sold to the United States for $7.2 million and became the state of Alaska.
“THEY PUSHED INTO A trackless region of storms, fogs, mists and rain; of strong and unknown currents; a wilderness of islands; mountainous shores; deep waters and exposed anchorages,” wrote George Davidson, president of the Geographical Society of the Pacific, in 1901. He observed that ships like the St. Peter and St. Paul would never have been permitted to leave port even a century ago. The food was nearly inedible by modern standards, the ships were crowded and filthy, and they had nothing to fight scurvy or other sicknesses. They sailed blind into the unknown and, sometimes, back again. It is hard to understate their bravery and determination, their sense of adventure and curiosity. That several of them kept records of their voyage and their plight even under the most trying conditions is nothing short of astonishing.
Although it remains the greatest, most extensive scientific expedition in history, spanning three continents over nearly ten years, the story of the Great Northern Expedition, and particularly its epic Pacific voyage, is not merely a tale of imperial hubris. It is a story of individuals faced with the power of nature, of the struggle and triumph over disaster, a testament of human ingenuity in the face of adversity, the failure and resurgence of leadership, fortitude in the face of horrible suffering, and the powerful urge to persevere and return home.
* By 1830 sea otters were extremely rare in Alaska, and the Russian government forbade the use of firearms to harvest them. After Alaska was purchased by the United States in 1867, however, the ban was lifted, and the animals were driven to near extinction again by the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1925 they were declared extinct, but from a few survivors they have begun a revival.
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Acknowledgments
As usual, a team of people combined their skills and talents to transform an idea into a manuscript, and then a manuscript into a book. I’d like to acknowledge most importantly my editor, Merloyd Lawrence, for helping to define and focus the project and for coming up with a great title. At Da Capo Press I’d like to acknowledge Lissa Warren and all the publicity and marketing team for their energetic efforts, Amber Morris, Annette Wenda, Trish Wilkinson, and cover designer Kerry Rubenstein. At Douglas and McIntyre I’d like to acknowledge Anna Comfort O’Keeffe, Howard White, and Kathy Vanderlinden. Also, thanks to Peter Schledermann for reading an early draft and giving me thoughtful comments and to mapmaker Scott Manktelow for again creating interesting maps. Thanks to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and Canada Council for the Arts for writer’s grants. And last but never least, my wife, Nicky Brink, for listening to endless talks on the latest chapters and for reading the first chapter drafts before the manuscript was even compiled into a single document, long before I dared show anything to anyone else. May you all be ever free of scurvy!
About the Author
Stephen R. Bown is author of The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen and White Eskimo: Knud Rasmussen’s Fearless Journey into the Heart of the Arctic, which won the William Mills Award for the best book on the Arctic in 2016. His award-winning books, including Scurvy and Madness, Betrayal, and the Lash, have led to him being called “Canada’s Simon Winchester.” He lives near Banff in the Canadian Rockies.
Selected Bibliography
Andreyev, A. I., ed. Russian Discoveries in the Pacific and in North America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Collection of Materials. Translated from the Russian by Carl Ginsburg, U.S. Department of State. Ann Arbor, MI: American Council of Learned Societies, 1952.
Anson, George. A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1740–1744. London: Ingram, Cooke, 1853.
Black, Lydia. Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004.
Bown, Stephen R. Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004.
Chaplin, Piotr. The Journal of Midshipman Chaplin: A Record of Bering’s First Kamchatka Expedition. Edited by Carol L. Urness et al. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2010.
Coxe, William. Account of the Russian Discoveries Between Asia and America. Ann Arbor, MI: Ann Arbor University Microfilms, 1966.
Curtiss, Mini. A Forgotten Empress: Anna Ivanovna and Her Era. New York: Frederick Unga, 1974.
Davidson, George. The Tracks and Landfalls of Bering and Chirikof on the Northwest Coast of America. San Francisco: Geographical Society of the Pacific, 1901.
Divin, Vasilli A. The Great Russian Navigator, A. I. Chirikov. Translated by Raymond H. Fisher. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1993.
Dmytryshyn, Basil, E. A. P. Crownhart-Vaughan, and Thomas Vaughan, eds. and trans. Russian Penetration of the North Pacific Ocean, 1700–1799: A Documentary Record. Vol. 2, To Siberia and Russian America: Three Centuries of Russian Eastward Expansion. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1988.
Dobell, Peter. Travels in Kamchatka and Siberia. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830.
Fisher, Raymond H. Bering’s Voyages: Whither and Why. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.
Frost, Orcutt. Bering: The Russian Discovery of America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
, ed. Bering and Chirikov: The American Voyages and Their Impact. Anchorage: Alaska Historical Society, 1992.
Gibson, James R. “Supplying the Kamchatka Expedition, 1725–30 and 1742.” In Bering and Ch
irikov: The American Voyages and Their Impact, edited by Orcutt Frost. Anchorage: Alaska Historical Society, 1992.
Golder, Frank Alfred. Bering’s Voyages: An Account of the Efforts of the Russians to Determine the Relation of Asia and America. Vol. 1, The Log Books and Official Reports of the First and Second Expeditions, 1725–1730 and 1733–1742. 1922. Reprint, New York: American Geographical Society, 2015.
. Bering’s Voyages: An Account of the Efforts of the Russians to Determine the Relation of Asia and America. Vol. 2, Steller’s Journal of the Sea Voyage from Kamchatka to America and Return on the Second Expedition, 1741–1742. Translated and edited by Leonhard Stejneger. 1922. Reprint, New York: American Geographical Society, 1968.
. Russian Expansion on the Pacific, 1641–1850. New York: Paragon Book, 1971.
Heaps, Leo, ed. Log of the Centurion: Based on the Original Papers of Captain Philip Saumarez on Board HMS Centurion, Lord Anson’s Flagship During His Circumnavigation, 1740–1744. London: Macmillan, 1973.
Hingley, Ronald. The Tsars: Russian Autocrats, 1533–1917. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968.
Hughes, Lindsey. Peter the Great: A Biography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
Jacobsen, N. Kingo, ed. Vitus Bering, 1741–1991: Bicentennial Remembrance Lectures. Translated by Richard Barnes. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Forlag, 1993.
Korb, Johann Georg. Diary of an Austrian Secretary of Legation at the Court of Tsar Peter the Great. Translated and edited by Count MacDonnel. London: Frank Cass, 1968.
Krasheninnikov, Stephen Petrovich. Explorations of Kamchatka: Report of a Journey Made to Explore Eastern Siberia in 1735–1741, by Order of the Russian Imperial Government. Translated by E. A. P. Crownhart-Vaughan. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1972.
Kushnarev, Evgenii G. Bering’s Search for the Strait: The First Kamchatka Expedition, 1725–1730. Edited and translated by E. A. P. Crownhart-Vaughan. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1990.
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