French explorers and adventurers, as we have seen, penetrated from the
basin of the St. Lawrence to the north and west until they touched the
southern extension of Hudson Bay (James's Bay), discovered Lake
Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan Rivers, the upper Missouri and the whole
course of the Mississippi, and finally recorded the existence of the
Rocky Mountains.
Parallel with these movements the British discovered the broad belt of
sea between Greenland and North America and the whole area of Hudson
Bay. After the French had ceased to reign in North America, the
British were to reveal the great rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean,
the coasts and islands of the Arctic Ocean, the Yukon River, and the
coasts and islands of British Columbia and Alaska.
The first Europeans, however, to reach Alaska were Russians led by
Vitus Bering, a great Danish sea captain in the Russian service.
Bering was born in 1680 at Horsens, in the province of Aarhuus, E.
Denmark, and entered the service of Peter the Great, who was desirous
of knowing where Asia terminated and America began. Bering discovered
the straits which bear his name in 1728, and in 1741 was wrecked and
died on Bering's Island. Captain James Cook, the British discoverer of
Australia and of so many Pacific islands, completed the work of Bering
in 1788 in charting the north-west American coast right into the
Arctic Ocean.
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