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Lieut. Peter Lassenius, with a surveyor, first mate,
and also about fifty men—had most difficult tasks to
accomplish. The former was to cruise from the mouth
of the Lena, along the whole coast of the Taimyr
peninsula, and enter the mouth of the Yenisei. The
latter was to follow the Arctic coast in an easterly
direction to the Bering peninsula, cruise along its coast,
and ascertain the relative positions of Asia and
America, and, if it was a geographical possibility, to sail
down to the peninsula of Kamchatka. He also had
instructions to find the islands off the mouth of the
Kolyma (the Bear Islands). From this it is evident
that Lassenius’s expedition was of the greater
geographical interest. Moreover, it had to do with one of
the main questions of Bering’s whole activity—the
discovery and charting of the North Pacific—and hence
it is not a mere accident that Bering selected for this
expedition one of his own countrymen, or that he
assigned the charting of northeastern Asia and the
discovery of America and Japan, to chiefs of Danish birth,
Lassenius and Spangberg. Nothing is known of the earlier
life of Lassenius. In service he was the oldest of
Bering’s lieutenants. Shortly before the departure
of the expedition, he was taken into the Russian fleet,
and Gmelin says of him, that he was an able and
experienced naval officer, volunteered his services to the
expedition, and began his work with intrepidity. All
attempts to trace his birth and family relations have
proved fruitless.
On the 30th of June, 1735, both expeditions left
Yakutsk, and thus the charting of the whole of the
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