Dezhnyov-Forgotten Explorer

David Drewry just gave a lecture on the Herculean efforts of Vitus Bering in mounting two expeditions to determine the eastern limits of the Russian Empire. That story alone is monumental in scope. Dr. Drewry ended his lecture, however, with a brief but tantalizing comment about a Russian explorer who discovered the Bering Strait eighty years before Bering ever sailed there. Semyon Dezhnyov sailed through the strait in the autumn of 1648.

I had never heard of this. I had to find out why this information was lost. I did a bit of internet research, and the best I can come up with is this explanation. In the 1640’s Dezhnyov, seeking furs sailing up and down the coasts of northeastern Siberia. He reported navigating through a strait separating two land masses and then engaged in more fur trapping and trading in northeast Siberia. He returned home a fabulously wealthy man. Apparently he did not regard his voyage as especially significant. He simply described his trip through the ocean pass writing, “We sailed around a large, rocky point.” He needed neither the money nor the recognition, so he never pressed the fact that he had discovered the passage separating Russia from North America. Dezhnyov’s discoveries were simply forgotten.

In the 1720’s Tsar Peter the Great wanted to know the extent of his empire and whether the eastern part of Siberia was connected to North America. Apparently the Tsar knew nothing of Dezhnyov’s voyages. Tsar Peter enlisted Vitus Bering, a Dane in the Russian Navy, to make explorations to answer his questions. Bering proceeded overland to what is now the Okhotsk Sea. At the coast he built ships and sailed north, discovering in 1728 what he thought was a strait separating Siberia and Alaska. He returned to St. Petersburg and made his report. Even so, he was not certain and wanted to sail farther east to confirm his speculations. Meanwhile Russian Naval vessels traversing the area continued to probe and returned to the strait as early as 1732. The first westerners to sight North America from the west were on the Gvozdev-Fyodorov voyage in 1732 from the “Bering Strait”. Tsar Peter’s successor Catherine I commissioned a huge expedition of thousands of sailors, soldiers, scientists, artist and naturalists led by Bering. The entourage was larger than most of the towns in which they stopped to camp along their land route to Siberia. Governors and mayors along their route reported being severely strained by the demand for food, housing and supplies of Bering’s horde of adventurers. They returned to the strait, explored the south coast of Alaska as far as Mt. Saint Elias and confirmed Bering’s discoveries. He died from scurvy in Alaska on December 19, 1741 and was buried with twenty-six of his crewmen, also victims of scurvy, on Bering Island.

For more information check.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Fyodorov_(na…

About the same time many overland fur trading expeditions found a better route to the east of Siberia—float down the Anyuy River to the area of the Okhotsk Sea. They found ruins in many places Dezhnyov had claimed that his crew had camped. Therefore, even though they believed Dezhnyov’s report, the traders found his sea route to be useless. The river proved to be a more reliable pathway to the east than the frozen ocean strait. It was not important to these traders to make a fuss about Dezhnyov’s priority since the route he discovered through the ice-bound Alaskan strait was of no practical use to them. The Dezhnyov discovery declined in importance and receded from memory.

One other factor prevented some authorities from granting that Dezhnyov had preceded Bering to the Alaskan strait. In the nineteenth century eight attempts to repeat Dezhnyov’s voyage failed, all blocked by sea ice. Some historians argued, therefore, that the explorer had simply fabricated his tale. Dezhnyov’s sea route was not successfully retraced until 1879 when Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld finally did it. He proved that a voyage through the strait was at least possible. Some historians began to change their minds.

Since the 1950’s scholars have discovered a number a documents in Russian archives that corroborate Dezhnyov’s story, so it has gradually gained acceptance. Recent worldwide climatological studies also suggest that the period of 1687-1688 had an extremely warm winter, and ice formation in the Bering Strait was at unprecedented low levels. Dezhnyov just got lucky. Nevertheless, tradition is hard to break, so we will probably continue to call this area the Bering Sea.

To read more about this, check out the link at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semyon_DezhnevLeggi altro