It is evident that if Bering had sailed along the coast which the Chukchis said extended to the westward, instead of going off shore, away from it, he would have confirmed that part of their testimony, and given high probability to the assumption of their correctness in the rest.
As it was, he left the question in a state so unsettled as to be a subject of debate for nearly half a century; even authorities so friendly as Dr. Campbell assuming with great confidence that Bering's conclusions as to the separation of the two continents were erroneous. It was not until the voyages of Captain Cook and his associates were given to the world in 1784 that the matter was settled beyond controversy.
Even in regard to the details of his voyage it was only through Bergh's publication of Chaplin's logbook of the voyage in 1823, that the public were informed as to what Bering did, and it was only in 1847 that the unmutilated, but still ambiguous Report of 1730 was accessible even in Russian typography.
We find that all the authorities who published in the last century copies of Bering's map and accounts of his expedition arrived at what Lauridsen calls an "interesting misunderstanding."
This misunderstanding was that he had sailed along the Chukchi coast, as above suggested, and that his farthest point was in latitude 67° 18' on the coast of northeastern Siberia.
How was it possible that men of such exceptional intelligence as Du Halde and D'Anville and Müller, and Hazius, and Euler and Campbell were all so deceived?
The facts are as follows:
(1) The verbatim Report of the voyage, the logbook of the expedition, Bering's chart in its entirety, were inaccessible to the public for many years; the chart has never been fully engraved for publication.
(2) The fragments of the Report which were circulated in print were ambiguous in their language or erroneously modified; while the published reductions of the chart which got into print were misleading, or even erroneous.
(3) Two conflicting versions of the manuscript chart were circulated and appear to have been officially sent out. That which appears to be the later of the two is in some details quite erroneous and at variance with Bering's report as printed and with the facts derived from Chaplin's logbook, these two constituting the only authentic original information which has yet reached the public in printed form. But these two sources of correct data about the expedition were not printed until long after the charts had been widely circulated, while the extracts from the Report which appeared in print, even under so friendly an editor as Dr. Campbell were so modified as to support rather than expose the original error. How this arose there may be something in the Russian archives to explain, or, if not, the case seems insoluble. Whatever conclusion one arrives at, it is difficult to acquit Bering of all responsibility for the misconception, if, as Lauridsen claims, he was responsible for the chart of Du Halde in the form it was engraved.