That last bit, like the rest of A Life on Blank Paper, was written around 2002 or so, and was based on my experiences accompanying the archaeology expedition of 1991, supplemented by as much historical record and scholarly research as was available at the time.
In the summer of 2008, I think it was, purely by chance I heard about Danish academics who were conducting research on that nation's wayward son, and not long thereafter I met them in their university office in Amager, near central Copenhagen. The pair, a Danish-born man and a Russian-born woman, claimed they had obtained a host of Bering's papers from Russian archives. From them they claimed to have filled many of the holes in the komandorskiye's biography, and brought clarity to some of the obscure passages.
Apparently, the 34-year-old heroic captain of the Russian navy didn't take a 12-year-old Finnish bride, after all. Upon discovering America, he really wasn't so mean to the German botanist Steller - he was more in command of St. Peter than previously believed. And the oil painting that for a couple centuries was assumed to be our hero, but was debunked by Prof. Zvyagin's physical reconstruction of Bering's skull - that face was our hero's after all!
In fact, the duo said, Zvyagin's two renderings were "too heroic." They claimed his results were "influenced" by the expedition's hosts, ultimately the Soviet security apparatus, the KGB. Nor were the graves the expedition found those of St. Peter's crew, but rather the remains from the subsequent shipwreck of a Russian sealer. The entire 1991 expedition, in their opinion, was at best a complete failure; at worst, they implied, it was all pretty much a fraud. If everything really was on the up-and-up, they asked me, Why didn't Zvyagin take DNA samples? Fair question. But their assumptions about the expedition are not correct - their research never bothered to interview any of the archaeologists or scientists who participated in it! Makes me wonder about their own influences.
Suffice to say, academics always have been, and obviously still remain, the bane of Vitus Bering's existence. I've had an eye out for the website they said would "soon" be published - it may be online, I haven't seen it. Somewhere in my old notebooks I have their names, I'm looking forward to catching up on their findings. I am in no position to challenge their assertions - I leave that to somebody else. Perhaps Horsens Museum will someday weigh in.