User:Sitekm2972/Great Northern Expedition

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Lead
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Planning and Preparation
They had originally planned to make one journey in a small boat to survey they coast of the rivers Lena and Yenisei. ['''The expedition was originally under the control of Bering. Bering's main goal was to discover a passage or strait between America and Asia. During Bering's first expedition he did not complete this goal.''' ]

'''There could be more added to this section. The source should have more'''

['''Bering's deputy and successor, Alexi Chirkov or Aleksei Chirikov, was designated navigator of the expedition, as he was a Russian naval officer who had attended school for mathematics and navigation. ''']

The academic component
['''Though aboard the St. Paul with Vitus Bering, Georg Wilhelm Steller was a naturalist by trade and contributed an considerable amount to the scientific observation and recording on the expedition. In his time on the journey, he sampled and recorded many plant and bird species that Europeans had never been exposed to. He was the first European to encounter and document the Aleut people. ''']

European Discovery of Alaska
In June 1741, the ships St. Peter and the St. Paul set sail from Petropavlovsk. Six days later they lost sight of each other in a thick fog, but both vessels continued to sail east.

On July 15, Chirikov sighted land, probably the west side of Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska. He sent a group of men ashore in a long boat, making them the first Europeans to land on the northwestern coast of North America. When the first group failed to return, he sent a second, which also vanished. Chirikov weighed anchor and moved on. Bering's first encounter with Aleuts at the Shumagin Islands. Drawing by Sven Waxell, the mate of Bering's ship St. Peter.

On roughly July 16, 1741, Bering and the crew of St. Peter sighted a towering peak on the Alaska mainland, Mount Saint Elias. Bering was anxious to return to Russia and turned westward. He later anchored his vessel off Kayak Island while crew members went ashore to explore and find water. Georg Wilhelm Steller, the ship's naturalist and physician, hiked around the island and documented the plants and wildlife. [He notes in his manuscripts of signs of the natives of Kamchatka, and that the crew left them an iron kettle, a pound of tobacco, a Chinese pipe, and a piece of Chinese silk in a "cellar" that was found on the island.] He also first recorded the Steller's jay that bears his name. {'''There was a "sea cow" that was named after Steller that could be interesting to note. It has its own wiki page too.''' Steller's sea cow}

Chirikov and the St. Paul headed back to Russia in October with news of the land they had found.

Bering's ship was battered by storms, and in November his ship was wrecked on the shore of Bering Island, which many of the crew thought to be the coast of Kamchatka. Steller attempted to treat the crew's scurvy with local leaves and berries he had gathered, but officers dismissed him. Steller and his assistant were some of the few voyagers who did not suffer from scurvy. On the return journey, with only 12 members of the crew able to move and the rigging rapidly failing, the expedition was shipwrecked on what later became known as Bering Island. Almost half of the crew had perished during the voyage. Bering was among the crew to fall sick with scurvy and died on December 8, 1741. The stranded crew wintered on the island, with 28 crew members dying. When weather improved, the 46 survivors built a 40-foot (12 m) boat from the wreckage and set sail for Petropavlovsk in August 1742. Bering's crew reached the shore of Kamchatka in 1742, carrying word of the expedition. The sea otter pelts they brought, soon judged to be the finest fur in the world, would spark Russian settlement in Alaska.