The story of the world's largest, longest, and best financed
scientific expedition of all time, triumphantly successful, gruesomely
tragic, and never before fully told
The immense 18th-century scientific journey, variously known as the
Second Kamchatka Expedition or the Great Northern Expedition, from St.
Petersburg across Siberia to the coast of North America, involved over
3,000 people and cost Peter the Great over one-sixth of his empire's
annual revenue. Until now recorded only in academic works, this 10-year
venture, led by the legendary Danish captain Vitus Bering and including
scientists, artists, mariners, soldiers, and laborers, discovered
Alaska, opened the Pacific fur trade, and led to fame, shipwreck, and
"one of the most tragic and ghastly trials of suffering in the annals of
maritime and arctic history."