Laurel Bill on Alaska Story Time with Aunt Phil, Bering finds Alaska
Laurel Bill on Alaska Story Time with Aunt Phil, Bering finds Alaska
Vitus Bering, homeward bound after seeing Alaska for the first time, died on Bering Island on Dec. 8, 1741. Alaska author/historian Laurel Downing Bill shares how his reaching the Great Land changed the course of Alaska history forever.
It’s believed by most, that after dinosaurs, bison and woolly mammoths roamed the Great Land, successive waves of settlers from Asia crossed into Alaska. During the last ice age, which occurred around 12,000-15,000 years ago, the shallow seas now separating Asia from North America near the present-day Bering Strait dropped about 300 feet and made a 1,000-mile-wide grassy, treeless plain that linked the continents. Called the Bering Land Bridge, or Beringia, after Vitus Bering, this gateway allowed humans to enter the Americas across this grassland.
These ancestors of modern-day Alaska Natives, who arrived as early as 30,000 to 10,000 years ago, established maritime villages that evolved over the centuries into productive hunting and fishing settlements.
When European explorers rounded the coasts of Alaska in the early 18th century, they discovered the country inhabited by Eskimos in the north, west and Prince William Sound areas; Aleuts in the southwest; Athabascans in the Interior and Cook Inlet areas; and Tlingit and Haida Indians in the southeast.
In 1728, Danish-born navigator Vitus Bering, sailing for the Russian Navy of Czar Peter the Great, made his way through the narrow waterway that separates the Seward Peninsula of Alaska from the Chukotka Peninsula in Siberia. He came close to the Alaska coast, but bad weather prevented him from making an official sighting.
He mounted a second voyage to Alaska with an additional ship in 1741. The first sighting took place on July 15, when the St. Paul, under the command of Bering’s second-in-command, Aleksei Chirikov, reached Prince of Wales Island. Bering’s own ship, the St. Peter, sighted Mount St. Elias and Kayak Island the next day.
Bering and many of his companions died of scurvy during the trip, but some survivors returned to Russia with pelts of fox, fur seal and sea otter. News spread fast, and soon Russian adventurers began pouring into Alaska to trap furs. By 1745, hunting and trading vessels from Siberia were obtaining fur pelts from the Aleuts along the Aleutian Chain.
The Russian traders, unskilled in hunting sea mammals, used bribery and coercion with the Aleuts, often taking hostages and demanding their ransom be paid in fur. The Aleuts repeatedly resisted. Aleuts on Unmak and Unalaska destroyed four Russian vessels in 1763. But the fur traders quashed that opposition, and by 1784, Grigorii Shelikhov had founded the first permanent white settlement in Alaska on Kodiak Island. It didn’t take long for the once abundant fur seal population to drop drastically following the arrival of the greedy Russian fur traders.
An interesting fact about Bering came to light in 1991 after his body was unearthed. For centuries historians believed he was a short, round man and history books have portrayed him as such. However, following the discovery of his remains, it was found that his facial features were quite different. The Institute of Forensic Medicine in Moscow created a bust of what Vitus Bering actually looked like and it doesn’t resemble the photo we are accustomed to seeing at all. It now is believed that the short, stocky man pictured in our history books was actually the portrait of Vitus Pedersen Bering, uncle to Bering’s mother!
This episode of Alaska Story Time with Aunt Phil aired on CBS Anchorage affiliate KTVA Channel 11 Daybreak on Dec. 7, 2015.
Alaska history
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