His name covers the map: the Bering Sea, the Bering Strait, a glacier, an island. But when forensic scientists exhumed his grave in 1991, the bones didn't match the famous portrait. The round face history attached to Vitus Bering for centuries probably belonged to his uncle. It is the ultimate historical identity theft, and a fitting twist for a man whose real achievements were nothing like the legend.

This episode follows the Danish-born logistics officer humiliated at the family dinner table when his younger brother-in-law outranked him, who quit the Russian Navy in spite, crawled back broke five months later, and then accepted a dying tsar's impossible mission: drag iron, canvas, and cannon 6,000 miles across frozen Siberia to map the divide between Asia and America. Shipwreck, scurvy, and a lifeboat built from the wreck of his own vessel complete a story where the firsts belonged to others, and the endurance belonged to him.

• In-law humiliation as rocket fuel: the failed promotion and spite retirement that primed him for the mission
• Why they walked: the treaty that closed the rivers and forced a 6,000-mile overland nightmare
• One mile a day: sledges, blizzards, desertions, and the brutal mathematics of 18th-century logistics
• Dismantling the coffin: how castaways rebuilt the wrecked St. Peter into a 40-foot lifeboat
• Not first, but remembered: Dezhnev, Gvozdev, and why the naming rights went to the organizer