Vitus Bering

2. The famous Danish watch brand is also named Vitus Bering.
3. Vitus Bering was born and raised in Denmark, received a naval education in the Netherlands, but served in the Russian Navy, except for a few years of adolescence.
4. Like many foreigners in the Russian service, Bering came from a noble but corrupt family.
5. Bering joined the ranks of the four captains of the Russian fleet at that time for eight years. True, to become a first-class captain, he had to resign.
6. The first Kamchatka expedition was the first expedition in the history of Russia, which had only scientific purposes: to study and map the seashore and to open the strait between Eurasia and America. Prior to that, all geographic surveys were conducted as a secondary part of the campaigns.
7. Bering was not the initiator of the first expedition. He ordered Peter to be equipped and sent. Bering was invited to the leadership of the Admiralty, which the emperor was not against. He wrote instructions to Bering in his own handwriting.
8. It would be more appropriate to call the Bering Strait the Semyon Dezhnev Strait, which was discovered in the XVII century. However, Dezhnev's speech remained in the bureaucratic millstones and was found only after the Bering expeditions.
9. The naval part of the first expedition (passage from Kamchatka to the Bering Strait, sailing in the Arctic Ocean and back) lasted 85 days. It took Bering and his team 2.5 years to travel by land from St. Petersburg to Okhotsk. But a detailed map of the road from the European part of Russia to Siberia was drawn up with a description of the roads and settlements.
10. The expedition was very successful. The map of the coasts and islands drawn up by Bering and his subjects was very clear. Usually this was the first map of the North Pacific drawn by Europeans. Reprinted in Paris and London.
11. Kamchatka was very poorly studied in those days. To reach the Pacific Ocean, the expedition’s cargo was transported by dogs over a distance of more than 800 kilometers across the peninsula from land. To the southern end of Kamchatka, about 200 km from the place of transport, they could be traversed by sea.