Vitus (Jonassen) Bering

Navigator, born in Horsens, C Denmark. He led an expedition in the Sea of Kamchatka (1728) to determine whether the continents of Asia and America were joined. In 1733 he was given command of the 600-strong Great Northern Expedition to explore the Siberian coast and Kuril Is, and in 1741 sailed from Ohkotsk towards the American continent, finally sighting Alaska. He was wrecked on the island of Avatcha (now Bering I), where he died. Bering Sea and Bering Strait are named after him.

Vitus Jonassen Bering (also, less correctly, Behring) (August 1681–December 19, 1741) was a Danish-born navigator in the service of the Russian Navy, a captain-komandor known among the Russian sailors as Ivan Ivanovich. He was born in the town of Horsens in Denmark and died at Bering Island, near the Kamchatka Peninsula.

After a voyage to the East Indies, he joined the Russian Navy in 1703, serving in the Baltic Fleet during the Great Northern War. A series of explorations of the north coast of Asia, the outcome of a far-reaching plan devised by Peter the Great, led up to Bering's first voyage to Kamchatka. In 1725, under the auspices of the Russian government, he went overland to Okhotsk, crossed to Kamchatka, and built the ship Sviatoi Gavriil (St. Gabriel). Aboard the ship, Bering pushed northward in 1728, until he could no longer observe any extension of the land to the north, or its appearance to the east.

In the following year he made an abortive search for mainland eastward, rediscovering one of the Diomede Islands (Ratmanov Island) observed earlier by Dezhnev. In the summer of 1730, Bering returned to St. Petersburg. Bering was subsequently commissioned to a further expedition, and returned to Okhotsk in 1735. A storm separated the ships, but Bering sighted the southern coast of Alaska, and a landing was made at Kayak Island or in the vicinity. These voyages of Bering and Chirikov were a major part of the Russian exploration efforts in the North Pacific known today as the Great Northern Expedition.

Bering was soon forced by adverse conditions to return, and he discovered some of the Aleutian Islands on his way back. One of the sailors died and was buried on one of these islands, and the group was named after him (as the Shumagin Islands). Bering became too ill to command his ship, which was at last driven to refuge on an uninhabited island in the Commander Islands group (Komandorskiye Ostrova) in the southwest Bering Sea. On 19 December 1741 Vitus Bering died here of scurvy, along with 28 men of his company.

The value of Bering's work was not fully recognized for many years, but Captain Cook was able to prove Bering's accuracy as an observer. Nowadays, the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, Bering Island, and the Bering Land Bridge bear the explorer's name.