Витус Беринг — navigator / explorer с корнями из Russian Empire
Vitus Jonassen Bering was baptised at Horsens in Denmark in August 1681, sailed to the East Indies as a young man, and in about 1703 joined the Russian navy that Peter I was then building from nothing. He served through the Great Northern War and rose steadily over two decades, known in Russia as Ivan Ivanovich Bering.
In 1725 Peter I commissioned him to determine whether Asia and America were joined — the tsar signed the final instructions shortly before his death that January. The First Kamchatka Expedition took Bering and his lieutenants Martin Spanberg and Aleksei Chirikov across the whole width of Siberia overland, building ships on arrival. He sailed north from Kamchatka in July 1728 and passed through the strait that now bears his name. Fog prevented him from sighting the American coast, but he concluded the continents were separate and turned back — a judgment his superiors in Saint Petersburg received without enthusiasm.
His proposal for a second voyage was expanded by the Admiralty into the Great Northern Expedition of 1733–43, one of the largest scientific undertakings of the century: nearly a thousand participants across seven separate parties, tasked with charting the Arctic coast of Siberia and the American shore and documenting the botany, ethnography and astronomy of the whole region. Its naturalist was the German Georg Wilhelm Steller.
Bering sailed from the Kamchatka base of Petropavlovsk — named for his two ships, the St Peter and the St Paul — in June 1741 and was separated from Chirikov in a storm. He reached the Gulf of Alaska in August and sighted the mountain he named St Elias, then turned for home along the Aleutians with his crew failing from scurvy. The St Peter was wrecked in November on an uninhabited island off Kamchatka. Bering died there on 19 December 1741 and was buried in the sand above the beach. When his remains were exhumed in 1991, scurvy was ruled out as the cause; Steller's account of hunger, exhaustion and cold appears to have been accurate.
The expedition's own historian, Gerhard Friedrich Müller of the Saint Petersburg Academy, later found records in the Yakutsk archives showing that the Cossack Semyon Dezhnyov had sailed through the strait in 1648, eighty years before Bering. The name attached to the Dane regardless, along with the sea, the island and the land bridge.
"Denmark to Russian service, 1704"
История миграцииПрослеживая корни — Kamchatka (Russia)
The Bering Strait, the Bering Sea and Bering Island all carry the name of a Dane working for Russia.
Danish-born navigator who entered Russian service and led the Kamchatka expeditions commissioned by Peter the Great, establishing that Asia and America are separated and reaching the coast of Alaska. He died on the island that now bears his name.
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Kamchatka (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.