The Bering Sea, 1999. A wave-dashed shore ahead; leaden skies above. The way the rough sea was lifting and pitching and rolling our ship was not promising. I could just make out a bleak and deserted beach backed by lush knee-high vegetation, with a low, steep bank beyond. Somewhere there, 250 years ago, my naturalist hero Georg Wilhelm Steller weathered an awful icy winter, while around him shipwrecked shipmates died of scurvy -- among them his commander, Vitus Bering.
I had joined that 1999 expedition around the Bering Sea with one personal goal in mind -- to realize my dream of landing there on Bering Island and paying my respects at the great Dane's grave. It was not to be; the seas were too dangerous, with 2-meter waves crashing in monstrous surf making any attempt to land plain foolhardy.
To the west, hidden beneath storm clouds, lay the Kamchatkan Peninsula, and far beyond that, the Sea of Okhotsk from which Bering set out on his ill-fated expedition across the Pacific (see accompanying story). Still off-limits to foreigners in 1999, thanks to the military legacy of the Cold War, it beckoned as only somewhere so remote, unknown and historically fascinating could.