Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

On arrival Bering had to build a vessel to take his most necessary naval stores and his shipbuilders across the sea of Ochotsk to Bolscheretzkoi, which, in her, he reached on the 2nd of September. From here he followed the shipwrights, who went on ahead to fell the trees, taking with them the provisions and stores, over the backbone of the isthmus and down the Kamchatka River to the mouth, a distance of some two hundred miles, the journey being very slow on account of the travelling being by dog-sledge. In short, it was not until the 4th of April, 1728, that is, more than three years after leaving St. Petersburg, that it was possible to put on the stocks the vessel in which the voyage to the north was to be made. But she took only three months to build, being launched on the 10th of July, when she was named the Gabriel.

Laden with stores for forty men during a year's voyage, she put to sea ten days afterwards, Bering keeping close to the coast so that he could map it as he went. On the 10th of August he was off the island of St. Lawrence, which he so named, as it was the day of that saint. In a day or two he had passed the East Cape without seeing the American coast, and had entered the Arctic Circle. And on the 15th he was well through the strait, out in the Arctic Ocean, in 67° 18´ off Serdze Kamen, a promontory behind which the coast trended to the west, as the Chukches had told him it did; and he assumed, and rightly so, though he had not gone far enough to prove it, that there was no land connection between Asia and America. Whereupon, as he had in his opinion accomplished his mission, seeing no need for wintering in those parts, he put the Gabriel about and was back in the Kamchatka River on the 20th of September, after a voyage of seven weeks in a vessel that took three months to build on a spot that took over three years to reach—the plan of campaign being much the same as that in which a mountain stronghold is advanced on across a desert, besieged for a few days, and captured by assault.

THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS

After wintering, Bering went off next year on a voyage due east in search of reported land, but, after some hundred and thirty miles out, he was blown back, and, rounding the south end of Kamchatka, put in at the River Bolschaia; thence he crossed to Ochotsk, whence he started for St. Petersburg, where he arrived after an absence of five years. Catherine was dead and another empress reigned in her stead, who was pleased and satisfied if no one else was, and the 21st of February, 1733, saw him starting again in the same laborious fashion to arrange other voyages as part of a great scheme for the exploration of Northern and North-eastern Asia. Some of these expeditions on the north coast have already been mentioned; Bering's particular task was to send Spangberg in search of Japan, while he and Tschirikof, in separate ships, went eastward to America. More stores and provisions went overland across Siberia than before; Spangberg got again frozen up on the Judoma and had to continue on foot to Ochotsk, where he found plenty of food owing to Bering having sent on ahead, in case of any such trouble, a hundred horses, each of them laden with meal. In June, 1738, Spangberg, in two newly-built vessels and the Gabriel, was off to Japan, to reach the Kuriles and return to winter in Kamchatka; but next year he arrived there all well and found to his astonishment that the Japanese knew as much about maps as he did. He was still more astonished on his return to be told by those high in office at St. Petersburg that he could not possibly have been there as they had not got it on their maps where he said it was, and, consequently, he was to go where he had been as soon as he could to make sure. He started on this voyage of verification, but circumstances were against him and he did not reach there; and his Japanese trip remained discredited until the Russian geographers knew better. His voyage thither had, however, used such a stock of provisions that it was two years before the deficiency could be made up, and it was actually the 4th of September, 1740, seven and a half years after leaving St. Petersburg, when Bering, in the specially-built St. Peter, and Tschirikof, in her sister the St. Paul, got off outward bound to America.

In about three weeks they were at Awatcha Bay on the east of Kamchatka, anchored in the fine harbour named Petropaulovsk after the two ships, and here they had to stay for the winter, so that they did not leave Russian territory until the 4th of the following June. A few days out the ships were separated in a fog and storm, and the St. Paul reached the American coast first, at Kruzof Island on the western shore of Sitka Sound. The St. Peter three days afterwards, on the 18th of July, drifted to the coast more to the northward, at Cape St. Elias near the mighty mountain of that name. In this neighbourhood amid much fog Bering stayed six weeks until he was blown out to sea, when, his men beginning to die from scurvy, he resolved to return to Kamchatka. It was a voyage of misfortune in a continual downfall, the men in want, misery, and sickness, continuously at work in the cold and wet, becoming fewer and fewer, so that there were not enough to work the ship properly. It ended on one of the Commander Islands by the vessel being lifted by the sea clear over a reef into calm water. Bering died—the island is named after him—and the survivors of the crew, building a boat from the materials of the St. Peter, arrived at Petropaulovsk on the 27th of August, bringing with them a quantity of sea-otter skins, which did more for discovery in those seas than any imperial expedition.

DRIVING THE FUR SEAL

As the sable had brought about the conquest of Siberia, so did the sea-otter lead to the seizure of the islands of the Bering Sea and the coasts of Alaska. Three years after the return of the survivors of the St. Peter, Nevodtsikof wintered on one of the Aleutian Islands, and in a few years the fur-hunters were at their exterminating work over the whole chain. In time the fur-seal attracted as much attention, and, with Pribylov's discovery, in 1786, of its rookeries on the islands named after him, the trade became of such increasing importance as to endanger in our time the peace of the world. Every one has heard of the wonderful haunts and habits of that strange eared seal which seems to have come from the south through the tropics to breed in the coldest limit of its range, now almost entirely on the Pribylovs and the Commanders; how it is pursued in skin boats and every sort of craft, and scared in long lines to slaughter by clapping of boards and bones and waving of flags and opening and shutting of gingham umbrellas, until it promises to become as extinct as Steller's sea-cow or as rare as the sea-otter.

Following Bering on the way to the north came Captain James Cook, in H.M.S. Resolution, who gave Bering's name to the strait. Cook sighted Mount St. Elias in May, 1778, and, cruising slowly along the coast with many discoveries and much accurate surveying, was off, and named, Cape Prince of Wales, the western extremity of America, on the 9th of August. He then crossed the strait and plied back until on the 18th he sighted and named Icy Cape in 70° 29´. Close to the edge of the ice, which was as compact as a wall, and seemed to be ten or twelve feet high at the least, he sought persistently for a passage through, but none was to be found; and after reaching 70° 6´ in 196° 42´ (163° 18´ W.) on the 19th, he turned westward to the Asiatic coast, along which he went until he sighted and named Cape North, as already stated. Then, blocked by ice, east, north, and west, he returned, passing Cape Serdze Kamen (Bering's farthest) and naming East Cape, confirming Bering's observation that it was the most easterly point of Asia.