Petropavlovsk-Kamcatskij Kamchatskaya Oblast Russia

The remainder of the party had sailed on August 22 for Kamchatka.

Had the route been charted, they should have sailed around the peninsula and made port on its eastern coast; instead, they land on the west and make a grueling trip from the settlement of Bolsheretsk in the southwest, north to the Upper Kamchatka Post and then east along the Kamchatka River to the Lower Kamchatka Post.

This Shpangberg's party had done before the river froze; next, a party led by Bering had completed this final stint of approximately five hundred and eighty miles over land without the benefit of the river; and finally, in the spring of 1728, the last party to leave Bolsheretsk, headed by Chirikov, reaches the Lower Kamchatka Post.

The outpost is six thousand miles from St. Petersburg and the journey itself (the first time "so many [had] gone so far") has taken some three years (Frost, Orcutt William, ed. (2003), Bering: The Russian Discovery of America, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press).

The lack of immediate food available to Spangberg's advance party had slowed their progress, which hastens dramatically after Bering's and Chirikov's group arrives with provisions.

As a consequence, the ship they have constructed (named the Archangel Gabriel) had been readied for  launch  as soon as June 9, 1728,from its construction point upriver at Ushka.

Fully rigged and provisioned by July 9 the Gabriel on July 13 sets sail downstream, anchoring offshore that evening.

Bering's party begins their first exploration on July 14, hugging the coast in not a northerly direction (as they had expected) but a northeasterly one.

The Gabriel, not before a storm forces hasty repairs, is back at the mouth of the Kamchatka River, fifty days after it had left.

The mission is at its conclusion, but the party still needs to make it back to St. Petersburg to document the voyage (thus avoiding the fate of Admiral Semyon Dezhnyov who, unbeknown to Bering, had made a similar expedition eighty years previously).

The Fortuna, which had sailed round the Kamchatka Peninsula to bring supplies to the Lower Kamchatka Post, returns in the spring of 1729 to Bolsheretsk; so, shortly after, does the Gabriel.

The delay had been caused by a four-day journey Bering had embarked upon directly eastwards in search of North America, to no avail.

An earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 9.3 occurs off the shore of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula on October 16, 1737.

Tsunamis up to sixty meters (two hundred feet) high follow in the Pacific Ocean.

The two other ships, delayed by the Nadezhda's hitting a sand bank—then being beaten by a storm, such that it is forced to stay at Bolsheretsk—arrive on October 6 to their destination, Avacha Bay in southeastern Kamchatka.

Several buildings had been constructed there on Bering's orders the year before, and the explorer is now able to found the port of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in the bay.

The town's location on the sheltered Avacha Bay and at the mouth of the Avacha River will see it develop to become the most important settlement in Kamchatka.

Bering, over the winter of 1740-41, has recruited for the trip ahead naturalist Georg Steller and completed the report he had promised to send.

At the same time, however, the murder of several Russians under Bering's command by native tribesmen had prompted him to send armed men to the north, with orders not to use force if it could be avoided.

Apparently it could not, because the detachment kills several native Koryaks in the settlement of Utkolotsk and enslaves the remainder, bringing them back south.

Steller is horrified to see the Koryaks tortured in search of the murderers.

His ethical complaints, like Chirikov's more practical ones before him, are suppressed.

From Petropavlovsk, Bering leads his expedition east towards North America in May, with Chirikov in the St. Paul and Vitus Bering in the St. Peter.

They are separated by a storm some time after June 20 and will never see each other again.

Chrikov, with water critically low, on October 12, 1741, returns to Petropavlovsk.

The Bering party had by April 1742, ascertained that they were on an island, and decided to construct a new vessel from the remnants of the ship in order to return home.

It is ready by August, and successfully reaches Avacha Bay later in the month.

Here, the party  discovered that Chirikov had led a rescue mission during 1741 that had come within miles of the stranded group.

Only forty-six o of seventy-seven men aboard Saint Peter have survived the hardships of the expedition, which claims its last victim just one day before coming into home port.

Its builder, Starodubtsev, returns home with government awards and will later build several other seaworthy ships.

Bering was neither the first Russian to sight North America (that having been completed by Gvozdev during the 1730s), nor the first Russian to pass through the strait which now bears his name (an honor that goes to the relatively unknown seventeenth century expedition of Semyon Dezhnev).

Reports from his second voyage will be jealously guarded by the Russian administration, preventing Bering's story from being retold in full for at least a century after his death.

Bering's achievements, both as an individual explorer and as a leader of the second expedition are regarded as substantial nonetheless.

Asa consequnce, Bering's name has since been used for the Bering Strait (named by Captain James Cook despite knowledge of Dezhnev's earlier expedition), the Bering Sea, Bering Island, Bering Glacier and the Bering Land Bridge.

Russian maritime fur trading in the northern Pacific begins after the exploration voyages of Bering and Chirikov in 1741 and 1742, which have demonstrated that Asia and North America are not connected but that sea voyages are feasible, and that the region is rich in furs.

Private fur traders, mostly promyshlenniki, launch fur trading expeditions from Kamchatka, at first focusing on nearby islands such as ...

Clerke has continued the Cook expedition's exploration of the Northern Pacific coast, searching for a navigable Northwest Passage.

The expedition had then proceeded to the Pacific coast of Siberia.

James King, one of his subordinates, writes that Clerke's illness has reduced him to skeletal thinness.

Clerke dies on his thirty-eighth birthday (August 22,1779) en route to Kamchatka from tuberculosis.

He is buried in Kamchatka on August 29, 1779.

Clerke's second in command, John Gore, takes command and leads the expedition home to Britain.