For centuries history books showed Vitus Bering as a soft-faced gentleman in a powdered wig, but in 1991 a Russian-Danish team exhumed his grave on a remote island and found a skull with a heavy, angular face. Historians now suspect the famous portrait shows his uncle. Born in Denmark in 1681, Bering joined Peter the Great’s new Russian Navy in 1704 and spent the Great Northern War mastering lightering, the unglamorous math of moving cargo from deep-draft ships to small boats. Passed over for promotion in 1721 and humiliated when his wife Anna Christina’s younger sister married a less experienced man who was already a rear admiral, he retired in 1724 to gain the rank of first captain, then was rehired the same day he reapplied. That rank put him in front of the dying Tsar, who sent him on the First Kamchatka Expedition to learn whether Asia and North America were joined.

Barred from the Amur River route by the Treaty of Nerchinsk, the expedition hauled anchors, sails, and rigging across Siberia by sledge, with Martin Spangberg’s men towing sleds through waist-high snow at a mile a day. Bering seized local winter flour reserves to feed his crew, built the St. Gabriel, sailed into the strait in 1728, saw the coast turn west, and turned back without sighting America. The Second Kamchatka Expedition swelled into the Great Northern Expedition, with its cost rising from about 12,000 to roughly 300,000 rubles and nearly 3,000 people. On July 16, 1741 his St. Peter sighted Mount St. Elias in Alaska, and he turned for home at once. Forensic work and Georg Steller’s journals point to heart failure, not scurvy, as the cause of his death in December 1741 after the ship ran aground in the Commander Islands.

• Survivors dug canvas-roofed pits in frozen sand and hunted sea cows and Arctic foxes to last the winter.
• Under Sven Waxell they broke up the 80-foot St. Peter and forged its nails into a 40-foot boat.
• Of 77 men on the St. Peter, 46 sailed back to Kamchatka with the charts and Steller’s manuscripts.
• Semyon Dezhnev sailed the strait 80 years earlier, but his report sat forgotten in a Yakutsk archive.
• James Cook, using Bering’s charts, named the strait after him out of professional respect.