BERING'S STRAITS.
1732.
1741. Bering.
By the middle of August he had passed beyond the easternmost point of Asia, and was standing out into the Arctic Ocean, when he turned on his track and sailed south. Neither in going nor in returning did he see land to the east, the mists being too thick. He had thus established the limits of the Russian Empire, but he had not as yet learned of the close proximity of the American shores. His discoveries did not get any cartographical record till Kiriloff made his map of Russia in 1734, using the map which Bering had made in Moscow in 1731. The following year (1732), Gvosdjeff espied the opposite coast; but it was not till 1741 that Bering sailed once more from the Asiatic side to seek the American coast. He steered southeast, and soon found that the land seen by Da Gama, and which the Delisles had so long kept on their maps, did not exist there.
Aleutian Islands.
Thence sailing northward, Bering sighted the coast in July and had Mount St. Elias before him, then named by him from that saint's day in the calendar. On his return route some vague conception of the Aleutian Islands was gained, the beginning of a better cartography, in which was also embodied the stretch of coast which Bering's associate, Chirikoff, discovered farther east and south.
Northern Pacific.
In 1757 Venegas, uninformed as to these Russian discoveries, confessed in his California that nothing was really known of the coast line in the higher latitudes,—an ignorance that was the source of a great variety of conjectures, including a large inland sea of the west connecting with the Pacific, which was not wholly discarded till near the end of the century, as has already been mentioned.