Vitus Bering Trivia
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48 free Vitus Bering trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Vitus Bering trivia quiz covers the Danish-born officer of the Russian Navy who led two enormous expeditions across Siberia to the Pacific and gave his name to a strait, a sea, an island, a glacier and a vanished land bridge. The easy questions are ones most people can reason out: his nationality, the tsar who sent him east, the two continents his strait separates, the naturalist who sailed with him and the animal that was hunted to extinction within 27 years of being described on his voyage. The harder end is for exploration buffs: the Danish town where he was born, why he briefly retired from the navy in 1724, the ships he built at Okhotsk and on the Kamchatka River, the day in 1728 he turned back short of proving Asia and America were separate, the Cossack who had sailed the strait eighty years before him, the mountain his crew sighted in July 1741, the naturalist's ten hours ashore on Kayak Island, how many of the St. Peter's 77 men survived the winter, and the British captain who put Bering's name on the strait. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for Bering, his expeditions and the places named after him before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Explorers, Alaska and Russian History quizzes next.
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Q 01In which country was Vitus Bering born?
Denmark
Denmark. He went to sea as a boy, joined the Russian navy as a young officer and spent the rest of his career in Russian service under the name Ivan Ivanovich Bering.
Q 02The survivors of Bering's last voyage brought home pelts of which animal, setting off Russia's fur rush to Alaska?
Sea otter
Sea otter. Hunters followed Bering's route from island to island toward America, and Russia went on to claim Alaska until it sold the territory to the United States in 1867.
Q 03Whose navy did Bering join in 1704?
Peter the Great's
Peter the Great's. The tsar was building a fleet almost from nothing and hired foreign seamen to officer it; Bering joined as a sub-lieutenant and stayed for 37 years.
Q 04Where had the young Bering voyaged just before he joined the Russian navy?
East Indies
East Indies. He came back from the voyage to Amsterdam, where a Norwegian-born admiral in Russian service met him and recruited him.
Q 05Why did Bering briefly retire from the Russian Navy in 1724?
Embarrassment at his low rank
Embarrassment at his low rank. Passed over while others were promoted, he left the navy in 1724, yet within months he was back in service as a captain of the first rank.
Q 06Which two continents was Bering ordered to determine were separated by sea?
Asia and North America
Asia and North America. He sailed through the strait between them in 1728 but in bad weather never saw the far shore, so the Admiralty called his proof inconclusive and sent him back.
Q 07Which animals plagued Bering's shipwrecked crew on their island, raiding the camp day and night without fear?
Arctic foxes
Arctic foxes. They stole even iron tools, and the men killed them by the dozen and stacked the bodies to plug the gaps in their huts.
Q 08Which Pacific port town did Bering's party reach overland before sailing to Kamchatka?
Okhotsk
Okhotsk. Crossing Siberia to reach it took the expedition almost two years by river boat, sledge and packhorse, and it still had to build a ship there to cross to Kamchatka.
Q 09What was the ship Bering built on the Kamchatka River and sailed north in 1728?
St. Gabriel
St. Gabriel. Four years after Bering turned her back, another Russian crew took the same ship across the strait and made the first Russian sighting of Alaska without him.
Q 10Which island did Bering sight and name in August 1728 after the saint whose feast day it was?
St. Lawrence
St. Lawrence. Sighting it meant the ship was entering the strait that now bears Bering's name, though nobody aboard knew how close the far shore was.
Q 11Why did Bering turn back in August 1728 without ever sighting Alaska?
He feared wintering on a hostile coast
He feared wintering on a hostile coast. The land had stopped running north, so he judged his orders fulfilled, though one of his two lieutenants urged him in writing to press on.
Q 12Which islands did Bering sight on 16 August 1728, a saint's day that gave them their name?
Diomede
Diomede. The two islands lie only about four kilometres apart, but the date line runs between them, so the Russian one is almost a full day ahead of the American one.
Q 13Which 17th-century Russian had sailed through the strait some 80 years before Bering?
Semyon Dezhnev
Q 21Roughly how long was Steller allowed ashore in Alaska in July 1741?
Ten hours
Ten hours. Steller wrote bitterly that ten years of preparation had bought him ten hours of exploration, yet in that time he gathered the first scientific record of Alaska's plants and animals.
Q 22Which large marine mammal, described by Steller in 1741, was extinct within 27 years?
Sea cow
Sea cow. Steller's sea cow was a giant relative of the dugong whose meat was prized, and the hunters who followed Bering's route had killed the last of them by 1768.
Q 23Which type of North American bird did Steller become the first European to describe?
A jay
A jay. Steller saw that it resembled the American blue jay he knew from a book of plates, and took it as proof that the expedition had reached the New World.
Semyon Dezhnev. He rounded the tip of Asia in 1648, but his report lay in a Siberian archive until 1736, so the credit and the strait's name went to Bering.
Q 14What rank did Bering receive in December 1731 after the first expedition?
Captain-commodore
Captain-commodore. The Russian title is also translated captain-commander, which is why the islands where he was wrecked and died are called the Commander Islands.
Q 15Which empress was on the Russian throne while Bering planned the second expedition?
Anna Ivanovna
Anna Ivanovna. Under her ministers Bering's simple plan for a second voyage swelled into the Great Northern Expedition, a ten-year enterprise involving some 3,000 people.
Q 16Which country did Martin Spanberg's ships reach in 1739, sailing south from Kamchatka along the Kuril Islands?
Japan
Japan. The country was closed to foreigners, yet the villagers who met Spanberg's crews traded rice, fruit and cloth with them and treated them with courtesy.
Q 17Which Kamchatka city, founded by Bering in 1740, shares its name with his two ships?
Petropavlovsk
Petropavlovsk. The name joins St. Peter and St. Paul, the saints for whom both his two ships and the settlement's first church were named.
Q 18How did American Lynne Cox cross the Bering Strait from Alaska to Soviet territory in 1987, during the Cold War?
By swimming
By swimming. She spent about two hours in the icy water, and Mikhail Gorbachev praised her at a treaty signing that year for showing how close the two peoples live.
Q 19Which mountain did the St. Peter's crew sight on 16 July 1741?
Mount Saint Elias
Mount Saint Elias. The 5,489-metre peak rising behind the coast was the proof, after nearly ten years of preparation, that the expedition had reached America.
Q 20What was the purpose of the landing Bering allowed in Alaska in July 1741?
Fresh water
Fresh water. Steller went ashore on Kayak Island with the watering party, and remarked sourly that they had come all that way only to fetch American water.
Q 24Which island group did Bering discover on his way back and name after a dead sailor?
Shumagin Islands
Shumagin Islands. Nikita Shumagin died as his shipmates carried him ashore, the first man the voyage lost to scurvy; within weeks most of the crew were too weak to work the ship.
Q 25Who took command of the St. Peter when Bering became too ill from scurvy?
Sven Waxell
Sven Waxell. The lieutenant was sick with scurvy himself, yet he held the crew together through the winter after the wreck and brought 45 men home the following August.
Q 26What did archaeologists digging on Bering Island in 1991 report finding, 250 years after the explorer died there?
His grave
His grave. The team identified one of the skeletons it dug up near the wreck site as Bering's, and scientists later rebuilt his face from the skull.
Q 27How did Bering's shipwrecked crew get home?
By self-built boat
By self-built boat. They broke up the wrecked ship, built a smaller vessel from her timbers and sailed it home to Kamchatka in August 1742, nine months after they were cast ashore.
Q 28What did Steller gather on shore to treat scurvy among Bering's crew, at first to the officers' scorn?
Herbs and berries
Herbs and berries. With fresh scurvy grass picked at an island stop he had the bedridden Bering back on deck in about a week, yet the officers refused him men to gather enough for the whole crew.
Q 29Which captain, commanding Bering's sister ship, sighted the Alaskan coast in July 1741 shortly before Bering did?
Aleksei Chirikov
Aleksei Chirikov. He made his landfall far to the south-east of Bering's, in what is now the Alaska panhandle, and nursed his ship home to Kamchatka that October with the water almost gone.
Q 30Which Russian had actually sighted Alaska before Bering, in the 1730s?
Mikhail Gvozdev
Mikhail Gvozdev. In 1732 he reached the American side of the strait in the very ship Bering had built for his first voyage, a feat still unknown in the capital when Bering's new orders were written.