Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
Alaska had a kind of a birthday last week: the 253rd anniversary of landfall by voyagers from the Old World. I had pictured Vitus Bering leaving his ship the St. Peter in a floppy little velvet cap like you see in portraits of Christopher Columbus, standing in the front of the shoreboat with a rippling Russian flag, and jumping onto the beach at Kayak Island on July 19, 1741, claiming it for Empress Catherine the Great. But there was nothing romantic about Bering’s last voyage to the American shore and that landing in Alaska.
First of all, Bering didn’t have a little velvet cap. We’re not really sure if he wore anything on his head at all since there is only one painting of him. His likeness has been the recent focus of the Russian Institute of Forensic Medicine’s Professor Victor N. Zviagin who has reconstructed a bust from Bering’s skull excavated from Bering Island in 1991. Let that be a lesson to you: if you plan on being famous, get lots of pictures taken.
Second, Bering didn’t have any interest in exploring Alaska. He was a master mariner, not a scientist. He was instructed by the Royal Admiralty College to poke around the Siberian shoreline and see just how far off Russia’s shore Alaska was. He spent most of the time in his cabin because of advancing scurvy. And there’s nothing romantic about scurvy. Aside from the diarrhea and the malaise, your gums swell, turn black, and then your teeth loosen and start falling out. You’re so tired, you can’t work, you can’t supervise, you can’t think.
Bering wanted nothing to do with the landing. He was interested in getting back home to his wife Anna and their children in Vyborg, Finland. He had already retired from the Russian Navy once and was disheartened by the years it took to construct the boats for this expedition back in Russia. But to return home required fresh water. Seven men bearing empty water casks landed their yawl that fateful day on Kayak Island. Luckily for people who write history books, the 32-year-old German naturalist Georg Steller insisted on going along for the ride.
After finally acceding to Steller’s pleadings, Bering had somebody blow a sarcastic trumpet fanfare as the little party left the St. Peter. Other than that, Bering himself really wanted nothing to do with the landing. Leaving Lieutenant Sven Waxell to supervise the cask fillers, Steller and his Cossack servant Peter vigorously hiked and studied for six hours that day, recording plants (naming the salmonberry), animals (including Steller’s jay), and a human cache of food, providing history with the first documented European landfall in Alaska, the beginning of the “Russian-American period.”
As Bering had been afraid of, their journey was so much delayed that they ended up overwintering on an uncharted island (later to be named Bering Island). Bering never recovered and died December 8. If you’re looking for romance in the story of Captain Commander Vitus Johanssen Bering, you won’t find it in the historical literature. His life on the sea was hard, rough, and he died in an unmarked place away from his family from a disfiguring disease. May he rest in peace and you, take your Vitamin C.
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