all lands.

By conquest, Peter had extended the bounds of his empire from the Ural
Mountains to the seas of China. By discovery, what remained to be
done? France and England had acquired most of the North American
continent. Spain and Portugal claimed South America; and Spain had
actually warned the rest of the world that the Pacific was 'a closed
sea.' But there were legends of a vast domain yet undiscovered. Juan
de Fuca, a Greek pilot, employed, as alleged, by Spanish explorers
between 1587 and 1592, was reported to have told of a passage from the
Pacific to the Arctic through a mountainous forested land up in the
region of what is now British Columbia. Whether Juan lied, or mistook
his own fancies for facts, or whether the whole story was invented by
his chronicler Michael Lok, does not much matter. The fact was that
Spanish charts showed extensive unexplored land north of Drake's New
Albion or California. At this time geographers had placed on their
maps a vast continent called Gamaland between America and Asia; and, as
if in corroboration of this fiction, when Peter's Cossacks struggled
doggedly across {13} Asia, through Siberia, to the Pacific, people on
these far shores told tales of drift-wood coming from America, of
islands leading like steps through the sea to America, of a nation like
themselves, whose walrus-hide boats sometimes drifted to Siberia and
Kamchatka. If any new and wealthy region of the world remained to be
discovered, Peter felt that it must be in the North Pacific. When it
is recalled that Spain was supposed to have found in Peru temples lined
with gold, floors paved with silver, and pearls readily exchanged in
bucketfuls for glass beads, it can be realized that the motive for
discovery was not merely scientific. It was one that actuated princes
and merchants alike. And Peter the Great had an additional motive--the
development of his country's merchant shipping. It was this that had
induced him to establish the capital of his kingdom on the Baltic. So,
in 1725, five weeks before his death--one of the most terrible deaths
in history, when remorse and ghosts of terrible memories came to plague
his dying hours till his screams could be heard through the palace
halls--he issued a commission for one of the greatest expeditions of
discovery that ever set out for America--a commission to Vitus {14}
Bering, the Dane, to explore the Pacific for Russia.

Like Peter the Great, Vitus Berin