g had served an apprenticeship with
the East India Company. It is more than probable that he first met his
royal patron while he was in this service. While other expeditions to
explore America had but to cross the sea before beginning their quest,
Bering's expedition had to cross the width of Europe, and then the
width of Asia, before it could reach even the sea. Between St
Petersburg and the Pacific lay six thousand miles of mountain and
tundra. Caravans, flat-boats, and dog-trains must be provided to
transport supplies; and the vessels to be used at the end of the land
journey must be built on the Pacific. The explorers were commissioned
to levy tribute for food and fur on Tartar tribes as their caravans
worked slowly eastward. Bering's first voyage does not concern
America. He set out from Kamchatka on July 9, 1728, with forty-four
men, and sailed far enough north to prove that Asia and America were
not united by any Gamaland, and that the strait now bearing his name
separated the two continents; but, like the tribes of Siberia, he saw
signs of a great land area on {15} the other side of the rain-hidden
sea. Out of the blanketing fog drifted trees, seaweed, bits of broken
boats. And though Bering, like the English navigator Drake, was
convinced that no Gamaland existed, he was confronted by the learned
geographers, who had a Gamaland on their maps and demanded truculently,
whence came the signs of land?

In March 1730, within one month of the time he returned to St
Petersburg, Bering was again ordered to prepare to carry out the dead
emperor's command--'to find and set down reliably what was in the
Pacific.' The explorer had now to take his orders from the authorities
of the Academy of Sciences, whose bookish inexperience and visionary
theories were to hamper him at every turn. Botanists, artists, seven
monks, twelve physicians, Cossack soldiers--in all, nearly six hundred
men--were to accompany him; and to transport this small army of
explorers, four thousand pack-horses were sent winding across the
desert wastes of Siberia, with one thousand exiles as guides and
boatmen to work the boats and rafts on the rivers and streams. Great
blaring of trumpets marked the arrival and departure of the caravans at
the Russian forts on the way; and if the savants, whose {16} presence
pestered the soul of poor Bering, had been half as keen in overcoming
the difficulties of the daily trail as they were in drinking
pott