Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
to the Elizabethan naval chronicler Richard Hakluyt, so that even Baffin Bay did not
appear on many English maps of the early nineteenth century.
On the Asian side of the Arctic, Russian traders had explored the Laptev Sea
coast by the mid-seventeenth century (Barr,
1991
) and reached the Sea of Okhotsk
by traveling overland. A Cossack group traveled to the Kolyma River in 1644 and
then sailed down it. In 1648, their boats rounded the East Cape (referred to as Mys
Dezhneva on Russian charts, after Semyon Dezhnev, a leader of the expedition)
reaching the Anadyr River, but these accomplishments were unknown until an
account was located in Yakutsk by G. Mueller, during Bering's overland journey
to Kamchatka in 1725 (Fisher,
1984
). A map of Siberia compiled by the Dutch
cartographer N. Witsen (dated 1687) drew on many Russian sources and provided
a wealth of detail on western Siberia (Okhuizen,
1995
). However, his account of
the eastern limit of the Asian coast indicates uncertainty and lack of knowledge
of the Cossack expedition. A chart included by Witsen depicted a sea ice limit at
about 75°N in the Barents Sea in the year 1676, apparently based on a voyage by an
English expedition under John Wood.
Russian exploration of the Arctic began to be nationally organized under Peter the
Great. In 1725, Vitus Bering, a native-born navigator in the service of the Russian
Navy, was appointed to find a Northeast Passage to the Pacific Ocean. G.F. Mueller
was a German working in the new Russian Academy of Sciences established by
Peter the Great. In reporting on Dezhnev's explorations in northeast Siberia, Mueller
recognized that climatic and ice conditions rendered the Northeast Passage imprac-
tical as a trade route. Bering's expedition traveled overland from Yakutsk to the Sea
of Okhotsk. Subsequently, he circumnavigated Kamchatka, reaching the Gulf of
Anadyr, St. Lawrence Island, and the fog-shrouded Bering Strait (the narrow, shal-
low channel separating Asia and Alaska). He sailed through the Bering Strait with-
out sighting Alaska, but in 1732, one of his vessels sailed off the coast of Alaska near
Nome (Barr,
1991
). Between 1733 and 1743, nearly 1,000 men participated in the
Great Northern Expedition to explore the possibility of a Northern Sea Route. Their
goal was to chart the north coast of Siberia in five sectors: from Archangel'sk to the
Ob River, and then east to the Yenisey River, the Taymyr Peninsula, the Lena River,
and the Anadyr River. Members of Bering's team included S. Chelyuskin (who
reached Asia's most northerly point) K.P. Laptev and D.Y. Laptev. Occasionally, as
in 1737, the explorations were favored by mild summer weather, but commonly sea
ice and fogs hampered them. Indeed, the severe ice conditions led to the abandon-
ment of interest in the sea route.
Russian mapping of the Asian-Arctic coast was well advanced by the mid-eigh-
teenth century. However, for Europeans and North Americans, the fact that Asia
and North America are separated by the Bering Strait was only established later by
James Cook. In 1778, Cook sailed into the Chukchi Sea, reaching Mys Shmidta. This
encouraged the Russians to explore Chukotka (eastern Siberia) with land parties in
the late eighteenth century. During 1820-1823, surveys were made by F. Anzhu of
the New Siberian Islands and by F. Wrangel of the north coast of Chukotka. The
