historical context to help understand Steller’s writing. By the time he arrived in St. Petersburg in 1734, Russia had, starting in the late sixteenth century, expanded its influence eastward across the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, bringing some ten million square kilometers of inhospitable territory, rich in natural resources and inhabited by various indigenous peoples, under Moscow’s control.
Fig. Intro.1. Sweetvetch (Wikipedia, Hedysarum hedysaroides).
Though the Russian government tried to control settlement, administration, trade, and economic growth, it was the people who came and who were already there that shaped Siberian development. The first men (and they were almost exclusively men) to open up the region to settlement were the freebooting Cossacks and the independent Russian promyshlenniks who hunted and trapped fur-bearing animals.1 They were followed by peasant settlers, dissident religious communities, and involuntary settlers—that is, convicts, political exiles, and prisoners of war dispatched to the region for “safekeeping” by the central authorities. There were the sluzhivs—state employees who encompassed both civil administrative officials and military personnel sent to protect Russia’s vital interests. And since the czar was the nominal head of the Russian Orthodox Church, every ostrog2 had either a chapel or a church that was supported by the government, as were the ecclesiastical personnel. The relationship between the natives and the invaders was one of conflict and coexistence. Some natives served voluntarily as guides and interpreters, and socializing and marriage took place between Russians and non-Russians, but much of this contact was unwelcome and painful for the indigenous people. As Hartley summarizes, “The opening up of Siberia in the seventeenth century and the expeditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were extraordinary feats of courage and endurance, but at the same time they were violent and traumatic, both for the participants and for the indigenous people with whom they came in contact” (xviii).
In theory, the czar wielded absolute authority over Siberia; in practice, the conquest, exploitation, administration, and defense of Siberia were supervised by two intertwined bureaucracies. One was centered in Moscow—the Siberian Office,3 emerging slowly and haphazardly with no grand master plan. These officials were collectively in charge of the daily operations—they supervised appointments and the activities of the top Siberian officials, formulated rules for their personal behavior and treatment of the indigenous population, devised plans for permanent settlements, established yasak4 quotas, and developed ways to protect their investment in Siberia.
The other level of administrative bureaucracy was dispersed throughout Siberia, far removed from central authority and so remote it might take two years for an official to reach his destination. It was headed by scores of voevods5 with their own assistants, stationed in strategically located, fortified outposts. In addition to controlling all the supplies, they essentially had the power of life and death over those within their jurisdiction. Particularly in the remote regions of northeastern Siberia, trustworthy men were less willing to serve, and the corrupt ones were removed only when their abuses became unbearable. A voevod received generous remuneration, but he also expected to receive the essentials from the local inhabitants. All the native subjects were required to give him gifts on the holidays, and his subordinates also expected to receive their share. So indigenous people were under an enormous burden. It is understandable that they frequently expressed their anger (Dmytryshyn, Crownhart-Vaughan, and Vaughan, 18–20, 22; Hartley, xvi–xvii).
While the challenges and tensions of this conquest of Siberia were likely unknown to or ignored by the Europeans eager to receive any knowledge about foreign lands, what news trickled into Europe about the area was enthusiastically read and disseminated. An announcement about the Second Kamchatka Expedition, later named the Great Northern Expedition and, like the First Kamchatka Expedition, headed by the Danish captain Vitus Bering, appeared in the Neue Leipziger gelehrte Anzeigen of November 1733, while Steller was still in Halle. Since Halle is not very far from Leipzig and one of his professors was closely connected to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (Hintzsche, Quellen 1:xix), it is very likely that Steller heard of this enormous undertaking before leaving Halle in August of 1734 and possible that he resolved then to join it. Spanning ten years between 1733 and 1743 and involving directly or indirectly more than three thousand people with an estimated cost of 1.5 million rubles or one-sixth the income of the Russian government, its greatness lay in its size, the distance it had to go across the Northern Hemisphere, and the complexity of its goals.
Any systematic exploration and scientific discovery of Siberia was due in large part to Peter the Great, who, in order to implement his vision of expanding the Russian Empire, drew foreign scholars to Russia to create a scientific academy in St. Petersburg, inaugurated in 1725, that resembled those he had visited in Europe. Young and mostly German-speaking scholars initially formed the core of the academicians. One of their tasks was to organize and eventually accompany scientific expeditions to the unexplored lands east of the Urals. The German physician and naturalist Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt’s journey from 1720 to 1727 to western and central Siberia marked the beginning of research into geography, mineralogy, botany, zoology, ethnography, and philology in this region as well as opening up the area to trade and economic development.
The possible existence of a land bridge between northeastern Asia and North America, posed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as a way of answering questions about the common origin of humans, among other interests, prompted Peter the Great to mount the First Kamchatka Expedition (1728–1730) after an initial expedition of two geodesists in 1719 had failed. After also failing to reach the North American coastline, Bering proposed a Second Kamchatka Expedition whose primary goals were to search for a sea route to North America and Japan and to survey the northern and eastern coast of Siberia. Under Czarina Anna these goals were greatly expanded into investigating the flora, fauna, minerals, and peoples of Siberia and opening up access to developing Siberia’s resources. What had initially been a huge undertaking became for Bering an even bigger logistical nightmare. Because Russia viewed this expedition as providing information that would give it the strategic upper hand, especially in comparison to its neighboring countries, no one on the expedition was to reveal anything about its purpose or findings. It was this imposed secrecy that is largely responsible for the fact that much of the information gathered was published only much later, some of it not until today. Some of the information may still be lying unread or even undiscovered in the archives; some, unfortunately, may be lost forever.
Not surprisingly, these overly ambitious goals fell somewhat short, but amazingly much was actually achieved: the European discovery of Alaska (i.e., the Aleutian Islands and part of what is today known as Southeast Alaska) and the Commander Islands, notably Bering Island; a detailed cartographic assessment of the northern and northeastern coast of Russia and the Kurile Islands; considerable groundbreaking ethnographic, historic, and scientific research into Siberia and Kamchatka; and the refuted existence of a northeast passage and of the legendary land mass in the North Pacific.
In order to fulfill all these objectives, the expedition was divided into three independent detachments: (1) the Northern, charged with exploring the eastern sea route from the mouth of the Ob River to the Pacific; (2) the Pacific; and (3) the Academic. The Pacific or Maritime group was further divided into two. The first, led by Bering himself, was to sail to Kamchatka from Okhotsk and from there search for the legendary “Joao-da-Gama-Land,” named after the Portuguese explorer who claimed to have discovered a land mass north of Japan. Then they were to sail farther east to the coast of North America. The other division, under the command of the Danish captain Martin Spangberg, was to investigate and chart the sea route from Okhotsk to Japan and China.
Steller eventually joined the third contingent—the Academic group, composed of a small number of scientists. The leaders—Professor Gerhard Friedrich Müller (history and ethnography), Johann Georg Gmelin (natural history), and Louis de l’Isle de la Croyère (astronomy and geodetics)—left St. Petersburg in August 1733, traveling together to Tobolsk, the
