In February 1725, Peter commissioned the Dane to proceed to Kamchatka, the huge Siberian peninsula lying northeast of Japan, there to build a vessel and thence to sail north into the Arctic. If anyone could ascertain whether a physical connection existed between Siberia and North America, he had been assured, it would be the likes of Bering. The tsar, however, did not live to savour the fruit of this initiative, for within six months he lay dead at age fifty-three. His widow and successor, Catherine I, however, was quick to endorse the Dane’s appointment and she urged him to press forward in accordance with the directive dictated earlier by Peter – a commission that sparkles with naïveté:
I You shall cause one or two convenient vessels to be built at Kamchatka or elsewhere.
II You shall endeavor to discover, by coasting with these vessels, whether the country towards the north, of which at present we have no knowledge, is a part of America, or not.
III If it joins to the continent of America, you shall endeavor, if possible, to reach some colony belonging to some European power. In case you meet with any European ship, you shall diligently inquire the name of the coasts, and such other circumstances as it is in your power to learn. These you will commit to writing, so that we may have some certain memoirs by which a chart may be constructed.
The route taken by Vitus Bering in 1727–29 on his first journey of exploration into far northern Pacific in search of a gateway to the Northeast Passage.
Map by Cameron McLeod Jones.
On February 5, 1725, eight days after the tsar’s death, twenty-five sleighs pulled away from the Admiralty in St. Petersburg, in the tracks of an advance party that had quit the capital a fortnight earlier under the command of another Dane, Martin Spanberg. Bering, accompanied by an entourage of thirty-three carpenters, blacksmiths, sailors, and support staff, was at the start of an arduous twenty-one-month journey to the Pacific across seemingly endless Siberian stretches. Roads, for the most part, were non-existent and those available were primitive; numerous rivers had to be forded, many requiring the construction of rafts; settlements were few and far between. Freezing temperatures and deep snows brought misery in winter; unbearable heat and clouds of mosquitoes in summer. The first winter was especially harsh and one diarist noted that “the local people who have lived here more than twenty years say that it is the worst winter in memory.” The passage of the valiant travellers was made all the more laborious by the immense quantity of food and equipment they hauled.
Bering met upwith Spanberg’s advance party only after the two had arrived at the Pacific coast. The Siberian trek of the former was difficult enough, but his colleague’s journey was considerably more gruelling. The excessive cold suffered by Spanberg’s group was compounded by hunger, and a number of his men had perished en route. Bering gives us a sense of that passage:
He [Spanberg] arrived with his companions almost the first part of January, 1727, without, however, in any of the material, which he had left in four different places along the uninhabited trail. They had been on the road since November 4 and during that time had suffered greatly from hunger, having been compelled to eat the dead horses that had dropped by the wayside, the harnesses, their leather clothing, and boots. Fortunately they found at Yukoma Cross the 150 poods [1650 pounds] of flour which we had left behind when some of our horses gave out.[2]
By early January 1727, the reunited party was installed on the shores of the Okhotsk Sea, where it found a miserable collection of native huts and houses belonging to a handful of Russian colonists. Since leaving St. Petersburg, the expedition had travelled nearly five thousand miles, but another one thousand miles lay ahead before the final destination would be reached on Kamtchatka’s east coast. Despite exhaustion from taxing months of travel, work got underway in the construction of a vessel suitable for crossing the Sea of Okhotsk, that large body of water lying between the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Siberian mainland. Local boat-builders carrying out the work naturally favoured the design of their native boat, the shitik (from the word “to sew”). A rough-hewn tree trunk served as the base of this flat-bottomed vessel, to which wooden planks were “sewn” together by leather belts and fir rods, a primitive construction to say the least, but one that was effective in local river and coastal navigation. The single-mast, shallow draught Fortuna was soon launched, a vessel approximately forty-five feet long and twelve feet broad.
The boat made two crossings to the peninsula’s southwest coast. The first transported tons of equipment and supplies, and the second carried Bering and the bulk of his party. The passages were completed by late August and now men and baggage had to be conveyed overland to the peninsula’s east side, a three-hundred-mile trek through volcanic mountain ranges.[3] Native Kamchadales and their dogs were mobilized and the traverse began. The initial passage through swampy valleys was difficult enough, but with the onslaught of winter’s freeze, conditions became even more acute. The expedition was hampered by gales, blizzards, and temperatures that fell as low as -50°F. “The wind began to blow with great violence, and drifting snow in great quantities, thickened the atmosphere so that we could not see a yard before us,” reads one account.[4]
At this point the legitimate question arises: why did Bering elect to undertake this arduous and time-consuming winter trek rather than simply circumnavigating the peninsula on board the Fortuna and continuing north on with his mission entirely by sea? The answer most probably lies in the vessel’s construction. Having put out to sea, Bering likely realized the vessel’s inadequacy for a circumnavigation of the Kamchatka Peninsula, much less a sail of the rough, stormy, and ice-strewn Arctic waters. Bering’s apparent lack of management in the construction of the vessel has raised questions about his feelings toward the entire Siberian venture. Was his heart truly in it? Soviet scholar Yuri Semyonov offers an intriguing observation in Siberia: Its Conquest and Development, albeit one in reference to Bering’s second expedition to the Pacific at age fifty-seven (and one that smacks of nationalistic fervour):
He did not trust his first vessel and one can imagine that he did not feel more comfortable on the second one, which was built in Kamchatka. He lacked that organic “Siberian” sympathy with nature, that capacity for adapting oneself to one’s surrounding, which the Russians possessed in such large measure. Very significant in this connection is a remark in the diary of his companion, Steller. Steller says that Bering wished that the whole affair could be entrusted to “a young and impetuous man from the country” [i.e., a Russian] …[5]
After a series of trials and mishaps, the party at last reached its destination at the lower part of Kamchatka. Here a new vessel was constructed, one larger and more substantially built than the Fortuna. The hull of the Saint Gabriel was reinforced with iron that had been brought in from Tobolsk and it was equipped with canvas and cordage delivered from St. Petersburg. On July 13, 1728, Bering put out to sea with a forty-man crew and headed north. The tsar’s commission would now be fulfilled: if Russia was connected to America, he would soon know, and if an entrance to the Northeast Passage existed, it was his to realize.
In the weeks that followed, the Gabriel steadily followed the coastline, fighting fogs and drenching rains and enduring the depressing omnipresent dampness. A month after setting out, they passed an island to their starboard which Bering named St. Lawrence Island in honour of the day. They were less than a hundred miles from Cape Chukhotski, Eurasia’s eastern tip; the Bering Strait lay dead ahead and Alaska was less than three days away. But they did not realize this and with the coastline unfailingly veering west, Bering became certain that they had passed along the waters separating Russia from America and that they were at the start of the Northern Sea Route. Winter comes early to those parts and that year the weather turned foul in late summer — they had either to prepare to spend the winter there or to return to Kamchatka. The men had been at sea steadily for over a month, beset by a particularly thick and depressing fog and conditions on board had grown grim and unhealthy. Enough
was enough — the explorer ordered a return home “because the coast did not extend farther north and no land was near … and therefore it seemed to me that the instructions of His Imperial Majesty of illustrious and immortal memory had been carried out.” He was returning home satisfied that the two continents were unconnected … had fog not enveloped his ship he would have had a good view of close-by Alaska.
By March 1730, the exhausted Dane was back in St. Petersburg and had submitted his report to the fledgling Academy of Science, to the Admiralty, and to the Senate. He had crossed Siberia, he had overseen in the wilderness the construction of two ships and, per the tsar’s instructions, he had determined that “the country through the north … is [not] a part of America.” In the process he had given the state five years of his life — surely a heroic achievement worthy of high recognition. Alas, this was not to be. The authorities received the report with skepticism and dissatisfaction, the consensus being that no concrete proof was offered of the continents’ separation. Had Bering continued to follow the coastline after it veered west a further seven hundred miles or so to the Kolyma River there would be no denying that the White Sea and the Pacific are connected by a continuous coastline and that America was indeed a separate continent. The anticipated reward of 1,000 rubles was denied Peter’s appointed man. Adding salt to the wound, Bering’s salary was left unpaid for over a year and he was refused a request for promotion to rear admiral. Poor man: the injustice of it all.
One by-product, if you will, of the Dane’s ventures into the Siberian Arctic was a surge of awareness in the country’s Pacific holdings. A series of explorers followed Bering’s footsteps, with Ivan Feodorov and Michael Gvosdyov being among the most notable. In 1732 they sailed on board Bering’s Gabriel to become the first Russians to set foot in Alaska. The more St. Petersburg learned of its far distant holdings and of America, the greater its enthusiasm for continued exploration of Pacific and Arctic Ocean. The focus, however, soon shifted from furs and scientific inquiry to geopolitical considerations. In 1733, for example, one St. Petersburg study spoke for the first time of Korea as part of a Far Eastern political complex. Japan came onto the horizon — European commercial relations with that country were in nascent days, and Russia was not going to find itself excluded. Interest grew in intensity, and despite the indifference that greeted Bering at the conclusion of his first expedition, he was given a mandate for a fresh expedition east, one that would “benefit of her Imperial Majesty and to the glory of the Russian Empire.” The newly throned Empress Anna endorsed the enterprise.
In spring 1733, the fifty-three-year-old persevering Dane set out once more from St. Petersburg to travel across Siberia. By the time his first expedition had been completed, a hundred or so men had become involved; by the time his second one was terminated, three thousand men would be drawn into the work. The initial budget for the new expedition was 10,000 rubles; ultimately, over 300,000 rubles were spent. It took the vast party seven years to complete the traverse, to establish a base of operations, and to construct two vessels. The lengthy duration of the passage was due in large measure to time-consumptive ancillary explorations and to scientific studies of flora and fauna — all part of the program. What began as a fresh attempt to chart Siberian Arctic shores and the northwest coast of America had developed, as Professor Golder notes in Bering’s Voyages, into “one of the most elaborate, thorough, and expensive expeditions ever sent by any government at any time.”[6]
Once established on the Sea of Okhotsk, work got started on the construction of two substantial ships, the Saint Peter and the Saint Paul, vessels significantly better suited for their tasks than those of the previous expedition — eighty feet in length with twin masts, the hulls were strongly reinforced with iron strapping. Bering commanded the Saint Peter and its sister ship was under Captain Alexsei Chirikov, a veteran of the first expedition. Chirikov was considerably younger than the Dane, but he was well-educated, with a strong sense of curiosity, and had some scientific training. By autumn 1740, the expedition had crossed the Okhotsk, rounded the tip of Kamchatka and established itself on the east coast at what was to become Petropavlovsk, the peninsula’s capital.
In the following spring, the two ships put out to sea and headed southeast to America, where it was planned to explore the coastline south; the further investigation of the Northeast Passage would come later. But best of plans can go astray and these certainly did — shortly after moving out, the ships became enveloped for days by impenetrable fog within which they simply lost one another. Extensive circling about in search of the other came to naught and the two captains, each in his own time, gave up the hunt and moved out on his own.
A couple of weeks later, Chirikov found himself at latitude 55°21', halfway down the Alaskan panhandle, south of Sitka, today’s fourth-largest Alaskan city, where he made the first Russian contact with American natives. After a series of adventures the Saint Paul returned to Kamchatka on October 19. Along the way, Chirikov took to his bunk, physically incapacitated, his lungs permeated with tuberculosis. Before reaching home, he expired.
In the meantime, Bering had altered course for the North. At first he was beset by continued fog, but on July 6 that changed when the fog suddenly cleared and the skies opened up into dazzling blue, revealing a brilliant congregation of snow-covered peaks soaring almost vertically to heights of over seventeen thousand feet. He was at 60° where today the boundary line dividing Alaska and Canada reaches the coastline. The Dane named the tallest mountain of the range Mount Saint Elias, a sight which is as inspiring to modern-day travellers as the one that greeted the weary explorers over 250 years ago. For them, however, it was not simply glittering nature; it was a reward for the years of gruelling toil and a justification for the explorations. And then, as suddenly as it had cleared, the fog redeveloped and once more shrouded all. Bering was confident that he had discovered Alaska, but he was even more pleased that now, having executed his commission, he could return home. He couldn’t wait; he had enough of rain and fog, of the restless and fickle sea, and of unpredictable winds.
The crew of the Saint Peter, on the other hand, after thirty-two days of steady sailing, was desperately anxious to set foot ashore, particularly the scientists on board who itched to explore the new land. In his anxiety to quit the place, Bering would have none of that and he ordered a sail for home. Only after strongest protest of his fellow officers and scientists did he acquiesce and grudgingly permit a brief ten-hour shore leave. Bering, himself did not go ashore; “the discoverer of Alaska” never set foot on it — nor did he know that Chirikov already had weeks earlier.
With shore leave expired and his unfulfilled mates back on board, the impatient Dane turned the Saint Peter about and made for Kamchatka. The return passage was anything but happy. Shortly after quitting Alaska’s mainland, dreaded scurvy struck the unfortunate crew with a vengeance, killing twelve and affecting most of the rest. Then, when they were beyond the farthest point of the Aleutian archipelago, a violent gale struck with overwhelming force. The weakened crew was unable to cope with the frightful situation and Bering decided that their only salvation was to beach the ship on one of the nearby islands. The Saint Peter was driven ashore and in the process it broke upon the rocks. And there, through long, dark, and frigid weeks, the stranded men wintered in appalling conditions. The island teemed with fox and since the animals had never encountered humans, their natural curiosity made them increasingly bold and vicious. Quite fearless, they approached so close that the men were forced to beat them off with clubs. Scores of these animals were killed and so plentiful were they that the pelts not only provided the crew with winter protection, but the stuff was used as caulking for the huts they had constructed, expensive building material, indeed. As one man after another died off from the ravages of scurvy, the solidly frozen ground made burial impossible and the bodies were simply dragged away some distance. Survivors were long haunted by the terrible spectacle of foxes fighting over and playing wi
th the corpses.
The island’s abundant animal life sustained the men, most of whom survived to tell the tale of their ordeal. In late spring, after months of creative toil, they managed to construct from the wreckage of the Saint Peter a small, rudimentary vessel in which they sailed off and eventually reached their starting point at Petropavlovsk. As the bedraggled, fur-clad sailors stepped ashore they were greeted by their surviving colleagues from the Saint Paul. Bering was not among them. The old man had succumbed to scurvy months earlier, unaware that he was not the discoverer of the strait that bears his name — a simple Siberian trader had traversed it some eighty years earlier.
Argue as one might over Bering’s successes or failures, there is no denying that his two expeditions left Russia not only with a greater appreciation of Siberia, the Arctic, and the Pacific shores, but now the country’s gaze had been turned east; Peter the Great’s east–west strategic vision was on its way to realization. China, Korea, and Japan would soon be feeling the hot breath of the lumbering Russian bear awakening at their side.
* * *
The mid-seventeenth century was universally a boom-time for the fur trade, no more evident than in Peter’s Russia. Hunters, traders, and Cossacks pushed eastward along Siberian waterways in search of fresh hunting grounds. In encouraging this movement, the ever-inquisitive tsar ordered that records and maps be carefully detailed of new geographic finds and it is from these sources that we learn of the earliest Russian penetration of Arctic Siberia, the land of the Chukchi and Koryaks.
Arctic Obsession Page 13
