Audio tour Tyumen. Kamchatka expeditions

What is Siberia? By the end of the 17th century even Russian scientists had no any idea about it. The “Drawing Map of Siberia”, compiled by Semyon Remezov in 1699-1701 and fragments from the records of Cossack expeditions, did not answer the questions. What peoples inhabited Siberia? What grew there? What animals lived there? The search for clues began during the reign of Peter I, when the emperor signed the Nominal Decree in 1724 on the establishment of the Academy of  Sciences and Arts, after which the study of unexplored lands became  academic - travelers conducted  a comprehensive study of the flora, fauna, history, geography, ethnography of the region. Who were those people who dedicated their lives to exploring the unknown lands?

Vitus Bering (1681-1741) made a huge contribution to the study of Siberia and the Far East. He made two Kamchatka expeditions with his team in 1725-1730 and 1733-1743. Interestingly, out of five years of the expedition, it took travelers 2 years to get from St. Petersburg to Okhotsk, and from Okhotsk to Kamchatka the journey took a little more than two months.

The second expedition was tragic. The great explorer did not survive and died in 1741 while wintering on the island, which later was named in his honor..

The professor of the Academy of Sciences Gerhard Friedrich Miller (1705–1783), who headed the Academic detachment of the Second Kamchatka (or Great Northern) Expedition, tried to broaden the knowledge about Siberia. . During the expedition he collected a lot of material that helped to form an idea of ​​the history, ethnography, archeology and the current state of Siberia. . He collected the material that helped to form an idea of the history, ethnography, archeology of Siberia and its current state.

In the same detachment  there was a German physician and naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709-1746) who came from Germany in 1734. He set off on a voyage to the shores of America in the status of an adjunct (or graduate student) of Natural History and Botany at the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He spent the winter on Bering island (Commander Islands). He was entrusted with the mission - to rediscover these lands for the scientific world. He collected, dried and described 54 plants on the island and told the world about such marine mammals as the sea lion (also known as Steller's northern sea lion), sea ape (or sea otter), fur seal and giant dugong (a relative of the sea cow). Interestingly, none of the naturalists-scientists, except for Steller, could see that animal alive, as it was exterminated in the middle of the 18th century. But Steller immortalized the only image of the sea cow in the picture drawn by the scientist from life. He discovered dozens of "new or virtually unknown" plants on St. Elijah Island (now Kayak) off the coast of North America which became the landing site for Bering's second expedition.

True, all the discoveries of the scientist were published only after his death: the work "On sea animals" in 1753, "Description of the land of Kamchatka" - in 1774 and "Travel from Kamchatka to America together with the captain-commander Bering" in 1793.   Steller's name is immortalized in the names of a mountain and a glacier in the Gulf of Alaska, a bay and a river on Attu Island and in the names of several plants and animals.

What was the path of the great explorers? Let's walk along the key sites of the expedition and make our own journey.