Bering, on his return from his historic landings in North America, suffering from scurvy like many of his crew, had steadily became too ill to command the ship, passing control to Sven Waxell.

Storms, however, mean that the crew of Saint Peter had soon been driven to refuge on an uninhabited island in the Commander Islands group (Komandorskiye Ostrova) in the southwest Bering Sea.

Bering dies on December 8, 1741, on the uninhabited island near the Kamchatka Peninsula, which is later given the name Bering Island in his honor.

Bering's death, like that of twenty-eight men men of his company, is commonly assumed to have been the result of scurvy (although this has since been contested; alternately, according to "Bering" by Orcutt Frost, p. 7, Bering had died of heart failure); certainly, it had afflicted him in the final months.

The situation is still dire for Bering's expedition (now headed by Waxell); many of the members, including Waxell, are still ill and the Saint Peter is in poor condition.

...the Commander Islands.

These maritime expeditions, unlike fur trading ventures in Siberia, require more capital than most promyshlenniki can obtain.

Merchants from cities such as Irkutsk, Tobolsk, and others in European Russia, become the principal investors.

An early trader is Emilian Basov, who trades at Bering Island in 1743, collecting a large number of sea otter, fur seal, and blue arctic fox furs.

Basov mounts four expeditions to Bering Island, which is the largest of the Commander Islands, and nearby Medny Island.

He makes a fortune, inspiring many other traders.

Ships had typically stopped at the Commander Islands During the early decades of the maritime fur trade in order to slaughter and preserve the meat of Steller's Sea Cows, whose range is limited to those islands.

A large sirenian mammal which grows up to seven point nine meters (twenty-five point nine feet) long and weighs up to three tons, the Steller's sea cow had been discovered in the Commander Islands in 1741 by the German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller, who was traveling with Vitus Bering.

A small population lived in the Arctic waters around Bering Island and nearby Copper Island.

However, prior to the arrival of Europeans they lived all along the North Pacific coast.

The population of sea cows had been small and limited in range when Steller first described them. (Steller had stated they were numerous and found in herds, but zoologist Leonhard Hess Stejneger will later estimate that at discovery there had been less than fifteen hundred remaining, and thus had been in immediate danger of extinction from overhunting by humans.)

They are quickly driven to extinction by the sailors, seal hunters, and fur traders who have followed Bering's route past the islands to Alaska, who hunt them both for food and for their skins, which are used to make boats.

They are also hunted for their valuable subcutaneous fat, which is not only used for food (usually as a butter substitute), but also for oil lamps because it produces neither smoke nor odor and can be kept for a long time in warm weather without spoiling.

Steller's sea cow is extinct by 1768, less than thirty years after its discovery.

The Spectacled cormorant becomes extinct around this date.

The species was first identified by Georg Steller in 1741 on Vitus Bering's disastrous second Kamchatka expedition.

He described the bird as large, clumsy and almost flightless—though it was probably reluctant to fly rather than physically unable—and wrote "they weighed 12–14 pounds, so that one single bird was sufficient for three starving men."

Though cormorants are normally notoriously bad-tasting, Steller says that this bird tasted delicious, particularly when it was cooked in the way of the native Kamtchadals, who encased the whole bird in clay and buried it and baked it in a heated pit.

Apart from the fact that it fed on fish, almost nothing else is known about this bird.

The population declined quickly after further visitors to the area started collecting the birds for food and feathers, and their reports of profitable whaling grounds and large populations of Arctic foxes and other animals with valuable pelts led to a massive influx of whalers and fur traders into the region; the last birds were reported to have lived around 1850 on Ariy Rock islet, off the northwestern tip of Bering Island.

In 1743 Emilian Basov had landed on Bering Island to hunt sea otter, beginning the island's documented human habitation as well as ecological destruction.

Promyshlenniki began to island-hop across the Bering Sea to the Aleutian islands and ultimately Alaska.

In 1825 the Russian-American Company transferred Aleut families from Attu Island to Bering Island to hunt, and another group of Aleut and mixed-race settlers followed the following year, thus establishing the first known permanent human habitation on Bering Island.