Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742

Steller, Georg

Travel

Stanford University Press

The European discovery of the northwest coast of America is fully and dramatically recorded in this journal, an invaluable historical and scientific source document. It is also a gripping narrative of human conflict, of nature as the overwhelming adversary, of terror and pain and death, and of final deliverance. In the service of the Russian tsarina, the German naturalist Steller accompanied the great Danish explorer Vitus Bering on a voyage that survived shipwreck and unimaginable hardship to mark the beginning of Alaska's recorded history. This book is a new translation and annotation of Steller's journal of that voyage and the first to be based completely upon a surviving copy of Steller's manuscript dated 1743 (previous translation had been based on a 1793 edition). The journal is the best known of Steller's writings, not so much because of events along the way, or its biological and anthropological observations, not even because of the momentous sight of the Alaskan coast and the subsequent landings, but because of the harrowing events of the return voyage. Thirty-two men of the 78 who set sail died, including Bering himself; 46 survived shipwreck in the winter of 1741-42 on a treeless, uninhabited island, and returned finally to home port on Kamchatka in a small vessel built from timbers of the wrecked ship. On the island, Bering and his lieutenant had become too ill to function and Steller found himself taking the lead in organizing work parties, finding antiscorbutic plant and animal food, nursing the six, and cheering the depressed―actions that kept all from perishing.

Steller's classic work, published in Latin in 1751 and in German in 1753, contains the only scientific description from life of the Steller's sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), as well as the first scientific descriptions of the fur seal or "sea bear" (Callorhinus ursinus), Steller's sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus), and the sea otter (Enhydra lutris). Steller's sea cow was a sirenian, or manatee, inhabiting the North Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea. It was first discovered by Europeans in 1741 and rendered extinct by 1768. It was a 30-foot long, plant-eating aquatic mammal, weighing up to 12 tons, that lived in large herds on the coasts of Alaska and Kamchatka. Steller made his observations as part of Vitus Bering's second voyage, during which the crew was shipwrecked for 9 months on Bering Island, from November 1741 to August 1742.

De bestiis marinis

History

Zea E-Books

Everything was of interest to Georg Wilhelm Steller, who the Russian Academy of Sciences appointed as naturalist to Vitus Bering's second Kamchatka expedition. Steller arrived in Kamchatka in 1740, sailed with Bering to discover Alaska in 1741, and composed his handwritten manuscript on Kamchatka in 1743 and 1744. That manuscript was finally published in German thirty years after his death, and this first-ever English translation of that German edition is most valuable for its descriptions of the natural and human worlds that Steller found in the mid-eighteenth century. Steller's extensive natural history includes special contributions to the study of fish, in which he described over thirty new species and two new genera, and to ornithology, which also includes the first descriptions of numerous species. His careful observations of Kamchatka's Native peoples add to the small and invaluable collection of ethnographic and linguistic descriptions made during the initial acculturation process and the growth of a new economy based on the fur trade, which changed their lives forever. Steller's observations of the economy of Kamchatka and the role of the Cossacks is refreshingly frank. He was the first scientist to suggest, based on direct observation, similarities between the ethnography and natural history of the Russian Far East and that of the newly discovered Alaska. Steller's breadth and depth in recording the natural and human world of eighteenth-century Alaska make this new translation an important reference for readers interested in all aspects of North Pacific and Russian American history.

Steller's History of Kamchatka: Collected Information Concerning the History of Kamchatka, Its Peoples, Their Manners, Names, Lifestyles, and Various ... Library Historical Translation Series)

Americas

University of Alaska Press

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