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censured Peter the Great’s selection of an oriental explorer. In
short, America has always respected Bering as a great explorer,
and oftentimes heralded him as one of the highest of heroes,
whatever may have been the varying phases of European thought on the
subject; and the reasons therefor, I think, are two-fold. In the
first place, the continent which Bering first separated from the
old world is yet a new country. Since its discovery, not only
exploration, but commercial exploration, or pioneering as we call
it, has been going on, and in this every one has taken his part or
mingled often with those who have. Presidents who were
pioneers, have been contemporaries with our times, while those who
have struggled on the selvage of civilization are numerous among
us, and their adventures as narrated in books are familiar stories
to our ears. Such a people, I believe, are much less liable to
listen to the labored logic of a critic against a man who carried his
expedition six thousand miles across a wilderness and launched
it on the inhospitable shores of an unknown sea, to solve a problem
that has borne them fruit, than others not similarly situated would
be. While the invariable rule has been that where the path-finder
and critic—unless the critic has been an explorer in the same field—
have come in collision, the latter has always gone to the wall, it is
easy to see that with a jury that have themselves lived amidst
similar, though possibly slighter, frontier fortunes, such a verdict is
more readily reached.
The other reason, which is not so commendable, is that few
Americans at large have interested themselves in the discussion,
or in fact knew much about it. True, the criticisms on the Eastern
continent have been re-echoed on this side of the water, and even
added to, but they have created no general impression worth
recording as such in a book that will undoubtedly have far wider
circulation than the discussion has ever had, unless I have
misjudged the temper of the American people to desire information
on just such work as Bering has done, and which for the first
time is presented to them in anything like an authentic way by
Professor Olson’s translation of Mr. Lauridsen’s work. I do not
wish to be understood that we as a nation have been wholly
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