Vitus Bering in Alaska. First European contact with Eskimos in the North Pacific.
1741

Watercolor 14" x 21"


When Peter the Great took the throne in 1695, Russia claimed all of northern Asia from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean, but had no real knowledge of its eastern territories. Peter was resolved to rectify this ignorance, and in particular to determine whether Asia and North America were connected. Vitus Bering, a Danish captain in the Russian navy, was commissioned to lead two scientific expeditions to Russia’s Pacific coast. To accomplish the mission he first had to transport all the materials needed to build and supply the ships across more than four and a half thousand miles of endless steppes, rugged mountains, swamps, muskeg and un-bridged rivers, fly infested in summer and bitterly cold in winter. The first expedition took three and a half years. On the first voyage Bering sailed north from Kamchatka to just above the Arctic Circle, proving in his own mind that the two continents were not connected.

The second voyage duplicated all of the hardships of the first. After years of preparation and a repetition of the horrendous journey to the east, in June of 1740 two new and larger ships, the SAINT PETER and SAINT PAUL were launched. In June of 1741 they sailed from Petropavlosk but were separated in a storm soon after and did not meet again. After 43 days at sea, on July 17, the crew of the ST.PETER sighted the St.Alias mountains in Alaska. Bering was tired and ill with scurvy, and worried by the uncertainty of their position, the poor condition of their provisions, and their distance from home. He wasted no time ashore except for wood and water, then turned back towards Kamchatka. The weather, which had not been good, began to worsen, and by mid August the men were becoming ill and Bering was too sick to stand. For the next two and a half months, with dispirited and indecisive leadership, the crew battled cold, constant westerly gales, and men began to die. By November there was almost no one well enough to work the ship, and on November 6 the ST.PETER finally drove ashore on a small island that now carries Bering’s name, and where he died on December 8. The men who survived the winter built a boat from the remains of the ST.PETER and sailed it to Petropavlosk the following spring.

In August 1741, off Bird Island, the SAINT PETER was visited by two Inuit in kayaks, the first recorded meeting with this native group on the American coast.