#17 - JRL 8206 - JRL Home
From: "Wallace Kaufman" <taconia@earthlink.net>
Subject: Bering Correction
Date: Wed, 12 May 2004

Dan O'Neill's review of Frost's Bering biography misleads readers by saying about the former land bridge betwee America and Russia, "Unknown in Bering's own lifetime - though he sailed above it many times - this submerged landscape now carries the name Beringia . . . " Truth is that Bering sailed over it only once (a round trip) as he passed through the strait in 1728 but he did not know he had sailed through a strait since in fog he never saw America. On his second expedition in 1741 he did reach the Alaskan coast at Kayak Island but refused to let his scientist-physician, Steller, go ashore on the mainland. In fact, Bering was not the first explorer for Russia to reach the American coast. Capt. Alex Chirikov, a better sailor whose ship had been separated from Bering's in a storm, reached Alaska and made contact with natives several days before Bering reached Kayak. The Bering Strait and probably Alaska were probably discovered and recorded long before Bering's first voyage by Russian Cossacks, but the records of Semen Dezhnev's 1648 voyage were isolated in Siberian archives and rediscovered only when Bering's second expedition passed through. The verification of the strait and the actual siting of the American side occurred after Bering's 1728 expedition when, in 1732, a Russian named Mikhail Gvozdev, using one of Bering's old boats, explored the strait and "Big Land" opposite the Russian shore. Bering gets credit largely for being the commander of the two royally sanctioned expeditions, but truth to tell, native Russians achieved the significant landfalls.