THEY ALSO SAILED (Continued from Page 1±)
But it was not the reaching of America from the west which stirred the imagi
nation of the Siberian homefolk. Nor was it the stor;/ of terror at sea. Instead
they wondered at the garments of the returned voyagers, the rude coats of rich
brown fur which had a silvery sheen when stroked. Here, thought the fur-conscious
promyshleniki, on seeing the otter skins, is something better than sable*
THEY ALSO SAILED
Captain-Commander Vitus Bering has named in his honor the Commander (Koman
dorsky) Islands on which he was wrecked, Bering Island on which he died, Bering
Sea on which he sailed, Bering Strait through which he passed, and Bering River and
Bering Glacier which he never saw.
Long before Peter the Great penned his brief orders for Bering to follow the
Asiatic coastline until it merged with America, one of his Siberian subjects dis
covered that it could not be done: he tried and found the continents separated by
water. Recognizing the importance of his discovery, he scrawled a report and sub
mitted it to the military governor at the Siberian city of Yakutsk. The governor
filed and forgot.
A lifetime later a browsing bureaucrat found the yellowing document.,- It was j
I signed Semjon Deshnev, and told of a strange trip. Deshnev, a.Cossack, had looked I
| long at the great north-flowing Lena River. One spring he decided to follow it.
; With a few companions in an open boat less than 2^ feet long, he rode north on the \
| rushing waters of the summer thaw and somehow managed to survive the rapids and the j
| hostile natives. The river broadened into a bay, the bay opened into the Arctic
j Ocean, and the cruising Cossack turned east. He followed the treeless, tundra
| covered coast for weeks and months, sailing toward the rising sun. Then, still fol-j
| lowing the coast, he found the sun rising at his leftj and one day it rose behind j
j him. He had rounded the easternmost tip of Asia, passed through the straits that
j Bering breached but never saw. j
Today the last land of Asia is called Cape Deshnev. But because of a bureau- j
I crat’s blunder, the strait Semjon Deshnev discovered bears another’s name.
Four years after Bering rounded Cape Deshnev and nine years before he turned j
j his back on Mount St. Elias, a seafaring geodesist named Michael Gvosdev saw Ameri- j
! ca. He mistook the continent for an island. * j
Gvosdev was in charge of charts on a Russian amphibious operation against the j
| natives of north Siberia, The entire campaign was under the command of a Cossack I
j named Shestakof, who planned a land attack against the mainland’natives and a naval j
| assault on the coastal peoples. The whole thing fouled up badly: Shestakof’s
1 small army was ambushed and the commander was killed. The naval force wandered
I around in the Bering for a few days and tried to land at an island, presumably Big j
[ Diomede. The natives wouldn*t let them ashore. Later the one-ship task force put j
j in at Little Diomede. The captain of the ship was ill and command fell to the sur- ;
j veyor Gvosdev. When the weather cleared and Gvosdev saw a long low coastline to
j the east, he decided to call off the war and go exploring.
j For several days, according to his journal, he followed the shores of the big j
i island, never suspecting it was America. He saw dwellings on the sandy beach, and j
I a few natives. But apparently he saw few animals, for when the water shoaled up
| and he turned back, his accounts of the great island aroused little excitement
j among the promyshleniki. Russians sometimes refer to the Diomedes as Gvosdev’s
i Islands, but not even a reef officially bears the name of Michael Gvosdev, first
] white man to sight Alaska.
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t,
CONTINUED NEXT WEEK