Vitus Bering

Baptised in Denmark in August 1681, Vitus Jonassen Bering later became an officer in the Russian Navy under the name Ivan Ivanovich Bering. He led the First Kamchatka Expedition and then the Great Northern Expedition, charting the northeastern edge of Asia and pushing across to the western coast of North America. The work was grueling and the distances vast. He died on 19 December 1741 on what is now Bering Island, but the geography he mapped — the strait, the sea, the glacier, the lake — still answers to his name.