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Vitus Bering

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Geographers and explorers

   Vitus Bering
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   Vitus Bering

   Vitus Jonassen Bering (also, less correctly, Behring) ( August 1681–
   December 19, 1741) was a Danish-born navigator in the service of the
   Russian Navy, a captain-komandor known among the Russian sailors as
   Ivan Ivanovich. He was born in the town of Horsens in Denmark and died
   at Bering Island, near the Kamchatka Peninsula.

   After a voyage to the East Indies, he joined the Russian Navy in 1703,
   serving in the Baltic Fleet during the Great Northern War. In 1710–
   1712 he served in the Azov Sea Fleet in Taganrog and took part in the
   Russo-Turkish War. He married a Russian woman, and in 1715 he made a
   brief visit to his hometown, never to see it again. A series of
   explorations of the north coast of Asia, the outcome of a far-reaching
   plan devised by Peter the Great, led up to Bering's first voyage to
   Kamchatka. In 1725, under the auspices of the Russian government, he
   went overland to Okhotsk, crossed to Kamchatka, and built the ship
   Sviatoi Gavriil ( St. Gabriel). Aboard the ship, Bering pushed
   northward in 1728, until he could no longer observe any extension of
   the land to the north, or its appearance to the east.

   In the following year he made an abortive search for mainland eastward,
   rediscovering one of the Diomede Islands ( Ratmanov Island) observed
   earlier by Dezhnev. In the summer of 1730, Bering returned to St.
   Petersburg. During the long trip through Siberia along the whole Asian
   continent, he became very ill. Five of his children died during this
   trip. Bering was subsequently commissioned to a further expedition, and
   returned to Okhotsk in 1735. He had the local craftsmen Makar Rogachev
   and Andrey Kozmin build two vessels, Sviatoi Piotr ( St. Peter) and
   Sviatoi Pavel (St. Paul), in which he sailed off and in 1740
   established the settlement of Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka. From there,
   he led an expedition towards North America in 1741. A storm separated
   the ships, but Bering sighted the southern coast of Alaska, and a
   landing was made at Kayak Island or in the vicinity. Under the command
   of Aleksei Chirikov, the second ship discovered the shores of the
   northwestern America ( Aleksander Archipelago of present-day Alaska).
   These voyages of Bering and Chirikov were a major part of the Russian
   exploration efforts in the North Pacific known today as the Great
   Northern Expedition.
   Map of Siberia and Russian Far East made by Vitus Bering
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   Map of Siberia and Russian Far East made by Vitus Bering

   Bering was soon forced by adverse conditions to return, and he
   discovered some of the Aleutian Islands on his way back. One of the
   sailors died and was buried on one of these islands, and the group was
   named after him (as the Shumagin Islands). Bering became too ill to
   command his ship, which was at last driven to refuge on an uninhabited
   island in the Commander Islands group (Komandorskiye Ostrova) in the
   southwest Bering Sea. On 19 December 1741 Vitus Bering died here of
   scurvy, along with 28 men of his company. This island bears his name. A
   storm shipwrecked Sv. Piotr, but the only surviving carpenter, S.
   Starodubtsev, with the help of the crew managed to build a smaller
   vessel out of the wreckage. The new vessel had a keel length of only
   12.2 meters (40 feet) and was also named Sv. Piotr. Out of 77 men
   aboard Sv. Piotr, only 46 survived the hardships of the expedition
   which claimed its last victim just one day before coming into home
   port. Sv. Piotr was in service for 12 years, sailing between Kamchatka
   and Okhotsk until 1755. Its builder, Starodubtsev, returned home with
   governmental awards and later built several other seaworthy ships.

   The value of Bering's work was not fully recognized for many years, but
   Captain Cook was able to prove Bering's accuracy as an observer.
   Nowadays, the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, Bering Island, and the
   Bering Land Bridge bear the explorer's name.

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