An Early Account of Bering's Voyages

W EHEN the first news of the discovery of Alaska by Bering and Chirikov reached Russia in 1742 and 1743 only the bare facts of the shipwreck and death of the former and the return of the latter were allowed to leak out into the periodical press of contemporary Europe, with the result that very few people outside the government in St. Petersburg were in a position to evaluate properly Professor J. N. Delisle's pretensions of 1752 in his Nouvelles decouvertes au nord de la Mer du Sud and his curiously garbled account of Bering's expedition. Some of the facts were made known the following year, eleven years after the event, in the celebrated pamphlet Lettre d'un officier de la marine russienne, the authorship of which has been brilliantly and convincingly traced by General A. W. Greelyl to Lieutenant Sven Waxell, second in command under Bering on the St. Peter. The history of the expedition was still further elaborated in Gerhard Friedrich Mtiller's Nachrichten von Seereisen.2 Since then several more or less detailed accounts of these expeditions have been published, but until the appearance in 1922 of the first volume of Golder's Bering's Voyages3 very few of the original documents had been available to the public even in the Russian language. It is therefore highly interesting to find that the first official and circumstantial account of Bering's American voyage, during which he discovered Alaska, was published in a Danish translation as early as 1747, viz. Waxell's original report of November 15, 742, sent to the Russian Admiralty College immediately after the return from the disastrous wintering on the island where Bering, the leader of the expedition, and many of his followers lost their lives. Peder von Haven was a young Danish theologian who visited Russia during the years 1736 to 1739 as Admiral Bredal's secretary and later as private tutor in General Repnin's family. After his return to Copenhagen he published an account of his voyage, which the following year was translated into German under the title Reise in Russland (Copenhagen, I744). In 1744 he had another opportunity to go to Russia, this time as chaplain attached to the staff of the Danish ambassador, Karl von Holstein. On this visit he met his countryman, Captain Morten Spangberg, Bering's lieutenant, who told him about his own discoveries in the Kurile Islands and in Japan. It is safe to assume that Von Haven also obtained from Spangberg most of his other information about Bering's expeditions, including the Waxell report. On his return to Copenhagen early in 1747 Von Haven published a two-volume octavo (6% inches high x 4 inches wide) with the following title

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