The northeastern islands of the ice land in North America were reached on the second expedition, on the return from which the navigator died
283 years ago (1741) the Danish navigator in the service of the Russian Tsar Peter I Vitus Bering discovers a peninsula Alaska – today the 49th state of the USA. In a large-scale Russian expedition led by him, many northern islands between Japan and America were discovered and geographically marked.
It all started back in 1725 in search of a sea route to the New Continent. At that time, Bering, attracted as a young man by the Russian Tsar, was 44 years old. He and his crew became the first Europeans to set foot in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, then inhabited by Native Americans and other tribes.
In 1825, Peter I ordered: “Two ships should be built in Kamchatka or elsewhere. With these ships to sail past the lands to the north to reach America.’
The first expedition of captain-commander Vitus Bering was with a small crew. By the time they reached the Pacific coast, crossing Siberia by river, horse and dog sled, 15 sailors died of cold and deprivation, others deserted. Next is a transition through the Kamchatka Peninsula. Three years after the beginning of the difficult journey, the sailors managed to build a small ship called “Saint Gabriel”, with which they surveyed and mapped the Northeast Asian coast. The ship reached the southern coast of the Chukotka Peninsula and the islands around it, passed through the strait, later named Beringov after the captain, and failed to see the coast of North America in the distance to the east.
In the 5th year from the beginning of the expedition, the sailors returned to Petersburg without having completed the main task, but Captain Bering had already prepared relatively accurate maps of the North-Eastern Pacific coast, which was a huge achievement of the spirit of discovery of the time.
On the idea of Vitus Bering and with the approval of the Russian Tsar, in 1833 the second Kamchatka expedition began – this time with 6 thousand sailors and scientific workers. All of them are led by the Dane. This is the largest group of people in world history who set out to survey the Earth’s geography in one of its most inaccessible territories.
In the Far East near the city of Okhotsk, after three years of transition, the sailors built two large ships – “St. Peter” and “St. Paul”.
At the beginning of June 1841, the two ships with crews of 75 men set off for the East. In “St. Peter” the captain is Vitus Bering, in “St. Paul” – Chirikov. That same month, the two ships separated forever, lost in a thick fog. Bering headed northeast, continuing to map first the islands around Canada, then around the Alaska Peninsula. In August, the captain sees one of the peaks in Alaska.
Heading back to the Asian coast, the ship is overtaken by a fierce storm and cast adrift on an uninhabited ice island. Vitus Bering died there on December 19, 1841 at the age of 60. Later, the island was named after him, and the group of islands around it were called Komandorski.
The Bering Sea was named after the great Vitus Bering, the strait separating Asia and North America was named Bering. In honor of the captain, a glacier, three peaks, bays, capes, an island, a peninsula, a river, a lake, a village are named.
126 years after the discovery of Alaska by the Danish geographer and discoverer, in 1867 the United States bought this land of just over 1.7 million square kilometers from Russia for 7.2 million US dollars. On October 18 of the same year, Alaska was declared a US state.
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