68 VITUS BERING. 



mouths, and to erect light-houses, establish magazines for 

 convenient relays, and procure provisions and other 

 necessaries, — very excellent directions, all of which, how- 

 ever, were so many meaningless words after they had left 

 the government departments. Our age, which still has 

 in mind the Franklin expeditions — the English parallel — 

 is able to form an idea of these gigantic demands, and yet 

 the Senate did not hesitate to load the organization of all 

 this upon the .shoulders of one man. Bering was made 

 chief of all the enterprises east of the Ural Mountains. 

 At the Obi and the Lena, at Okhotsk and Kamchatka, 

 he was to furnish ships, provisions, and transportation. 



But in spite of all that was vague and visionary in 

 these plans, they had nevertheless a certain homogeneity. 

 They were all nautical expeditions for nautical pur- 

 poses and nautico-geographical investigations. Then the 

 Academy added its demands, making everything doubly 

 complicated. It demanded a scientific exploration of all 

 Siberia and Kamchatka, — not only an account of these 

 regions based on astronomical determinations and geodetic 

 surveys, on minute descriptions and artistically executed 

 landscape pictures, on barometric, thermometric, and 

 aerometric observations, as well as investigations in all 

 the branches of natural history, but it demanded also a 

 detailed presentation of the ethnography, colonization, 

 and history of the country, together with a multitude of 

 special investigations in widely different directions. 

 The leading spirits in these enterprises were two young 

 and zealous Germans, the diemist Johann Georg Gmelin 

 and the historian Gerhard Friedrich Miiller, twenty- 

 eight and twenty-four years of age respectively, members 



