17861776 Club
Pribylov follows barking seals through fog; the island his charts never showed is real
The navigator names the uninhabited land St. George after his ship, leaves twenty men to hunt, and sails north into the same murk.
Siberian merchants had spent three years searching the Bering Sea for the breeding grounds of northern fur seals — grounds that existed in Aleut oral tradition but had never been confirmed by Russian charts. On June 25, 1786, navigator Gavriil Loginovich Pribylov, commanding the ship St. George for a joint venture funded by Grigory Shelikhov and Pavel Lebedev-Lastochkin, followed the sounds of barking seals through fog and found an uninhabited island the Aleuts called Amiq. He named it after his ship, left more than twenty crew members behind to hunt, and sailed north — where he found a second island, St. Paul, roughly fifty miles away, the following year…
