Semyon Dezhnyov - A Discovery and Its Re-Discovery

A Discovery and Its Re-Discovery

From at least 1575 European geographers had heard of a Strait of Anian connecting the Pacific and Atlantic. Some had it at the Bering Strait (map at right) and others had it running from the Gulf of California to Baffin Bay. It is not certain that Russians in Siberia had heard of it. The first Western map to show a Strait of Anian between Asia and North America was probably that of Giacomo Gastaldi in 1562. Many cartographers followed this until the time of Bering. The source is said to be an interpretation of Marco Polo, but otherwise the documents do not explain where the idea came from.

Dezhnyov was illiterate or semi-literate and probably did not understand the importance of what he had done. He certainly did not sail across to Alaska, prove that there was no land bridge to the north or south or compare his knowledge to that of learned geographers. Nowhere did he claim to have discovered the eastern tip of Asia, merely that he had rounded a great rocky projection on his way to the Anadyr.

Dezhnyov left reports at Yakutsk and Moscow but these were ignored, probably because his sea route was of no practical use. For the next 75 years garbled versions of the Dezhnyov story circulated in Siberia. Early Siberian maps are quite distorted but most seem to show a connection between the Arctic and Pacific. A few have hints of Dezhnyov. Dutch travelers heard of an ‘Ice Cape’ at the east end of Asia. Bering heard a story that some Russians had sailed from the Lena to Kamchatka. In 1728 Vitus Bering entered Bering Strait and, by reporting this to Europe, gained credit for the discovery. In 1736 Gerhardt Friedrich Müller found Dezhnyov’s reports in the Yakutsk archives and parts of the story began filtering back to Europe. In 1758 he published ‘Nachricten von Seereisen ....’, which made the Dezhnyov story generally known. In 1890 Oglobin found a few more documents in the archives. In the 1950s some of the originals that Muller copied were rediscovered in the Yakutsk archives.