“Geodesist gvozdev was here in 1732” (eighteenth century cartographic traditions in the representation of the discoveries in Bering Strait)

Abstract

Abstract In 1732 a Russian naval expedition aboard the ship Sv. Gavriil led by geodesist M. S. Gvozdev reached Bering Strait and sighted and mapped the Diomede Islands and a section of the Alaskan coast in the area of Cape Prince of Wales. Gvozdev thus became not only the first person to determine incontestably that America was not joined to Asia, but also the first European to see any part of Alaska. Maps produced in 1743, incorporating Gvozdev's discoveries, had a major impact on the cartographic representations of this area thereafter, although since these manuscript maps remained classified by the Navy Department some imaginative (and erroneous) anomalies also continued to appear, even in Russian maps, for a number of decades. The author proposes that the Diomede Islands and Cape Prince of Wales by officially renamed the Gvozdev Islands and Cape Gvozdev respectively. (The translation is by William Barr, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon.)