The Bering Strait

charting a passage between two worlds

The strait that runs between the easternmost point of Asia and the western extremity of the Americas is not particularly wide – 35 kilometers at its narrowest point and 86 at its widest. But, if you consider how harsh nature is here, how forcefully the two oceans – the Arctic and the Pacific – batter one another as they meet here, how long the sunless winters endure, how quickly the cold summers flit by, how ice floes drift through the cold, grey water, you might feel that you are faced with an insurmountable barrier dividing two worlds. 

But, in fact, that is not how it was. During distant, primeval times, on several occasions the earth rose up and a bridge was formed linking America and Asia. This is how the ancestors of today’s Chukchi, Eskimos, and Aleuts made their way from Siberia to Alaska and then spread throughout the Americas. Then another thousand years passed, and the land bridge disappeared under the oceans. Two worlds were again divided. True, it is known that, during especially cold winters, when the Arctic froze over, the denizens of Chukotka set out toward the East and made their way to the not-so-distant lands of America. It is said that they do so even today. 

Nonetheless, for thousands of years, most people on Earth did not suspect that there was a place where Asia and America met. Native Americans and the peoples of Siberia lived their separate lives, never straying far from their habitual hunting and fishing grounds. Even after the New World appeared on their maps, Europeans had only the vaguest ideas about its northern extremities. What they knew of Asia was that, in the Far East, there was the vast and mysterious China, and that somewhere in the vicinity was the fairy-tale land of Jipangu – Japan. The remaining boundless expanses of Asia seemed like nothing but endless taiga, wandered by strange, fur-clad peoples. God only knew where this taiga came to an end. 

Exploration of the Americas and Siberia was first driven by the desire for gold and spices. Who needed cold lands covered with ice and snow? The Conquistadors advanced beyond Columbus’s foothold into Central and South America, in search of Aztec and Inca gold, hoping to find the fabled land of El Dorado. A little later, about a century after the discovery of America, the Cossacks, serving the tsars of Moscow, started to move east through Siberia. Kilometer by kilometer, they explored one river after another. Rivers were the roads into the impassable taiga. They provided sustenance, and along their banks were built tiny wooden fortresses – ostrogs – from which eventually sprung wealthy Siberian cities. 

In the 17th century, as English colonists were settling in along the eastern coast of North America, Russian Cossacks were pushing east across Siberia. They were not after gold, but furs, which in fact were worth their weight in gold and the primary source of pride and wealth for the tsars. But one need only look at a map to see that gradually fur ceased to be an end in and of itself. Early on, the Cossacks had conquered enough territory to bury Moscow in fur, yet the expeditions pressed forward.

Today, flying over Siberia, one can imagine how endless the vast stretches of forest and tundra must have seemed to its explorers, how insignificant they must have felt and how powerless they were in the face of wild Asiatic nature, where summers are marked by debilitating heat and it is hard to breathe from the swarms of gnats, and where winters are unimaginably cold, where the rivers are so wide they look like seas, and where the trees grow so tall they seem to touch the heavens. Some were driven here by thirst for personal gain, some were fleeing the law, others were hoping to be pardoned for past crimes, and some simply liked the free life, far from state authority. By the mid-seventeenth century, Cossack expeditions had conquered most of Siberia and were approaching the Far East. 

What brought Semyon Dezhnev – the man for whom the easternmost cape in Asia is named – to this place in 1648? He was born in a village not far from Veliky Ustyug, in northern European Russia. How did he wind up serving in a Cossack detachment, in search of walrus grounds in Chukotka and surrounding areas? Did he think about what a vast expanse separated him from the house he was born in? Or did his previous life seem to him something absolutely unreal, a thing of the past? 

What qualities did Semyon Dezhnev and his commander, Fedot Popov, possess? Were they insanely brave or insanely irresponsible when they decided to set out over the ocean in seven small ships called kochi? Why did they fail to turn back when two of the kochi were smashed on the rocks and two others disappeared? Why did they stubbornly head forward, rounding the cape that they called the Large Stone Nose? They did not suspect that they were passing between two continents and that later this would become Cape Dezhnev. 

What did Dezhnev think when he realized that only 12 men remained alive out of the entire expedition and that all of his commanders had perished? Did he grieve over his lost comrades? Did he rejoice that all the honors would fall to him? Was he wondering how he would survive yet another unbearable winter or how they would sail up the Anadyr River, against the current, to places already settled by Cossacks?

We can only guess at the answers to these questions. However, despite the amazing feats of the Cossacks, toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, Eastern Siberia was still a land of mystery. It more or less belonged to Russia, but no one was quite sure exactly where these possessions were and where this land ended. In 1724, when Peter the Great wrote instructions for the First Kamchatka Expedition, he issued an order to verify whether the lands north of Kamchatka were truly called America. The straits through which Semyon Dezhnev and Fedot Popov’s kochi had sailed a half century earlier had seemingly vanished. A new expedition was setting out, and it was being led by someone who had little in common with his Cossack predecessors: Vitus Bering (1681-1741), a Danish-born sailor who had “served in the East Indies,” as he was recommended to Peter, before entering into the service of Russia. 

What had compelled Bering to leave his native Denmark and set out for Russia, which must have seemed to him no less alien and distant a place than Chukotka had seemed to the Cossacks? Perhaps he dreamed of achieving success that would have been out of his grasp had he remained at home. From the reports of his contemporaries, it appears that Bering was not someone capable of decisive action. Everyone remarked on his piety, meekness, and humility – rare qualities in a trailblazer. Nobody mentioned daring. It all seemed to boil down to the fact that Bering simply painstakingly and dutifully followed orders. If the Russian emperor commanded him to clarify whether the lands of America were north of Kamchatka, then that was what he had to do. Although, if we think about it, perhaps in the calm and thorough execution of this orders, which were unprecedented in sweep, lies the very essence of daring, the daring of a man who twice crossed all of Siberia in order to study its eastern reaches. 

But once Bering set out on his expedition, it took three years for him to reach the Far East and bring all the equipment needed there. Only then did the ships set sail. The First Kamchatka Expedition (1725-30), as it later turned out, skirted Kamchatka and Chukotka and passed through the strait that would later be named for its “discoverer.” But neither Bering nor his crew understood what they had done. They merely made certain that there were no American lands up ahead, and then they decided to turn back, afraid that their ships would be damaged by ice. 

In 1733, Bering was once again sent on a mission. Now his goal was no less than a study of the coast of the Arctic Ocean and an expedition to America. Again, years were needed to reach the Far East. During this time, several detachments under Bering’s command would attempt to reach the north via the rivers of Siberia. Two of his commanders were tried for “conduct unbecoming.” What offenses had they committed on the banks of the Ob? Some died, others were somehow delayed in their travels, and for several years they could not manage to set sail before the approach of winter. Could Bering have been dragging his feet on purpose? 

But Bering did progress toward Kamchatka and in 1741 he was sailing the North Pacific. By then he had turned 60 – a ripe old age in those days. The commander complained to those around him that he no longer had the strength to carry out his mission, but he nonetheless continued to walk, ride, and eventually sail onward. Bering’s ships reached the coast of America, charted the Aleutian Islands – and then became lost. The ships were not able to find one another in unknown waters amidst a terrifying autumn storm. Bering’s ship turned back and, in the fall of 1741, after lengthy travail, stopped at an island that is also now named for him. 

It was here that the exhausted commander ended his days. He died standing in a pit half filled with sand – he had climbed into it in an attempt to save himself from the cold. Did he feel pride and satisfaction at having carried out his mission to pinpoint the location of the American coast, a mission ordered by a tsar who had long since died? Did he have a premonition that the sea, the strait and the island would all bear his name? Did he reminisce about Copenhagen or the warmth of India? Or, closing his eyes and gradually weakening, did he just listen to the relentless crashing of mighty ocean waves?