After serving with the navy in significant but non-combat roles during the Great Northern War, Bering resigned in 1724 to avoid the continuing embarrassment of his low rank to his wife; and upon retirement was promoted to first captain.

Bering departed from Saint Petersburg in February 1725 as the head of a 34-man expedition, aided by the expertise of Lieutenants Martin Spanberg and Aleksei Chirikov.

[nb 2] Vitus Bering was born in the port town of Horsens in Denmark to Anne Pedderdatter and her husband Jonas Svendsen (a "customs inspector and churchwarden") and was baptized in the Lutheran church there on 5 August 1681.

[3] Between 1696 and 1704, Bering travelled the seas, reaching India and the Dutch East Indies while also finding time to complete naval officer training in Amsterdam.

[5] On 8 October 1713, Bering married Anna Christina Pülse; the ceremony took place in the Lutheran church at Vyborg, only recently annexed from Sweden.

[5] The omission proved particularly embarrassing when, in 1724, Anna's younger sister Eufemia upstaged her by marrying Thomas Saunders, already a rear-admiral despite a much shorter period of service.

[5] By 2 October 1724, Bering (retaining the rank of first captain he had secured earlier in the year) was back on the sea, commanding the ninety-gun Lesnoe (Russian: Лесное, "Forest").

On 14 February they were reunited in Vologda, and, now travelling together, headed eastwards across the Ural Mountains, arriving in the small city of Tobolsk (one of the main stopping points of the journey) on 16 March.

He asked for 24 more from the garrison, before upping the request to 54 after hearing that the ship the party required at Okhotsk—the Vostok (Восто́к, "East")—would need significant manpower to repair.

As a result, the party ran behind schedule, reaching Surgut on 30 May and Makovsk in late June before entering Yeniseysk, where the additional men could be taken on; Bering would later claim that "few were suitable".

On 7 July, Spanberg left with a detachment of 209 men and much of the cargo; on 27 July apprentice shipbuilder Fyodor Kozlov led a small party to reach Okhotsk ahead of Spanberg, both to prepare food supplies and to start work repairing the Vostok and building a new ship, the Fortuna (Russian: Фортуна, "Fortune"), needed to carry the party across the bay from Okhotsk to the Kamchatka peninsula.

[10] The lack of immediate food available to Spanberg's advance party slowed their progress, which hastened dramatically after Bering's and Chirikov's group arrived with provisions.

As a consequence, the ship they constructed—the St. Gabriel (Святой Гавриил, Sviatoi Gavriil)—was ready to be launched as soon as 9 June 1728 from its construction point upriver at Ushka.

The rapidly advancing ice prompted Bering to make the controversial decision not to deviate from his remit: the ship would sail for a few more days, but then turn back.

[11] The expedition was neither at the most easterly point of Asia (as Bering had supposed) nor had it succeeded in discovering the Alaskan coast of America, which on a clear day would have been visible to the east.

The mission was at its conclusion, but the party still needed to make it back to St. Petersburg to document the voyage (thus avoiding the fate of Semyon Dezhnyov who, unbeknownst to Bering, had made a similar expedition eighty years previously).

It had been a long and expensive expedition, costing 15 men and souring relations between Russia and her native peoples: but it had provided useful new (though not perfect) insights into the geography of Eastern Siberia, and presented useful evidence that Asia and North America were separated by sea.

[14] Though Bering seems to have been primarily interested in landing in North America, he recognised the importance of secondary objectives: the list of which expanded rapidly under the guidance of planners Nikolai Fedorovich Golovin (head of the Admiralty); Ivan Kirilov, a highly ranked politician with an interest in geography, and Andrey Osterman, a close adviser of the new Empress, Anna Ivanovna.

Owen Brazil, a Moscow native but of Irish descent, was selected as the expedition's quartermaster and was placed in charge of packaging and storing supplies, such as fudge, sausages and biscuits.

[2][13] Given on 16 October 1732, they amounted only to recreating his first expedition, but with the added task of heading east and finding North America (a feat which had in fact just been completed by Mikhail Gvozdev,[16] though this was not known at the time[13]).

Bering and a small advance party left Tobolsk in later February, stopping at Irkutsk to pick up gifts for the native tribes they would later encounter; it arrived at Yakutsk in August 1734.

The main grouping, now under Chirikov's command left Tobolsk in May 1734, but had a more difficult trek and one which required harsh discipline be imposed to prevent desertions.

Whilst Spanberg headed east to Okhotsk, Bering waited in Yakutsk where he partied for a long time, preparing two ships on the Lena (one would be captained by Vasili Pronchishchev and the other first by Peter Lassenius and later by Dmitry Laptev).

Nevertheless, Bering soon found he was quickly bogged down in Yakutsk; two parties sent east to find a better route to the Okhotsk Sea were both failures (the second coming far closer than it realised), and yet this was information the expedition desperately needed.

By the end of 1737 the St. Gabriel had been refitted; additionally, two new ships—the Archangel Michael (Архангел Михаил, Arkhangel Mikhail) and the Nadezhda (Надежда)—had been constructed and were rapidly readied for a voyage to Japan, a country with which Russia had never had contact.

Delayed by the Nadezhda's hitting a sand bank and then being beaten by a storm, such that it was forced to stay at Bolsheretsk, the two other ships arrived in their destination of Avacha Bay in south-eastern Kamchatka on 6 October.

The foundation of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, including warehouses, living quarters and a beacon had been built there on Bering's orders few months before, and now the explorer named the settlement after his vessels.

At the same time, however, the murder of several Russians under Bering's command by native tribesmen prompted him to send armed men to the north, with orders not to use force if it could be avoided.

A storm separated the ships, but Bering sighted the southern coast of Alaska, and a landing was made at Kayak Island or in the vicinity.

[2] Like 28 men of his company, Bering's death was commonly assumed to have been the result of scurvy (although this has since been contested[nb 2]); certainly, it had afflicted him in the final months.