The Danish-born navigator Vitus Jonassen Bering, after a voyage to the East Indies, had joined the Russian Navy in 1703, serving in the Baltic Fleet during the Great Northern War.

He had served in 1710–1712 in the Azov Sea Fleet in Taganrog and taken part in the Russo-Turkish War.

He had married a Russian woman, and in 1715 had made a brief visit to his hometown of Horsens, never to see it again.

A series of explorations of the north coast of Asia, the outcome of a far-reaching plan devised by Peter the Great, had led up to Bering's first voyage to Kamchatka.

Under the auspices of the Russian government in 1725, he had gone overland to Okhotsk, crossed to Kamchatka, and built the ship Sviatoi Gavriil (St. Gabriel).

Aboard the ship, Bering pushed northward in 1728, until he could no longer observe any extension of the land to the north, or its appearance to the east.

He made an abortive search in the following year for mainland eastward, rediscovering one of the Diomede Islands (Ratmanov Island) observed earlier by Dezhnev.

Bering returns in the summer of 1730 to St. Petersburg.

During the long trip through Siberia along the whole Asian continent, he had become very ill.

Five of his children have died during this trip.