In 1741, the ship of the Danish officer Vitus Bering, who was in the Russian service, crashed in the Bering Sea during an expedition across the Pacific Ocean around the summit of the American continent.
275 years ago, the expeditionary detachment of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences of the Great Northern Expedition completed its field research
In terms of geographical coverage and the richness of the scientific results obtained, the Great Northern Expedition in 1733-1743 can be compared with the three round-the-world voyages of James Cook in 1768-1779. The only difference is that the Russian expedition was mainly on land, and its budget was an order of magnitude less than that of Cook.
When Cook was young
The Great Northern Expedition, which historians also call the Second Kamchatka, or Siberian-Pacific, or Siberian, had a very specific goal: to finally decide the question of whether there is an isthmus between Asia and North America or a strait separates them. Cook's expeditions were also aimed at a specific result: they were looking for the southern continent (Antarctica), which, according to the scientific concepts of that time, was supposed to balance the globe, and the Northwest Passage was the shortest way from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean bypassing America from the north.
The tasks of the expeditions in both countries were set by the naval departments (in England – the Admiralty, in Russia – the Admiralty Collegium, one of the nine ministries that existed at that time in the empire). The admirals set tasks, of course, with the full approval of the higher authorities; in Russia – Empress Anna Ioannovna, about whom we know only bad things from the school history course and who, as it turns out, was a far-sighted colonizer, a geopolitician in modern terminology.
In both cases, the main goal of the expeditions ended up being secondary. The scientific leader of the academic detachment Gerhard Miller found in the archive of Tobolsk the reports of Semyon Dezhnev, who, even during the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, passed the Bering Strait (as this strait between Asia and America would later be called), so Vitus Bering was breaking, as they say, into an open door. And Cook did not find either the Northwest Passage or Antarctica (Captain 2nd Rank Bellingshausen and Lieutenant Lazarev were the first to see her from their ships only in 1820).
Both expeditions cost the treasury round sums. The expenses for the Great Northern Expedition amounted to 360 thousand rubles. silver ($ 4 million at the current exchange rate). Apart from the rest, only the purchase, re-equipment and loading of all the necessary sloop “Endeavor” for Cook's maiden voyage cost 12 thousand pounds sterling (slightly more than $ 1 million at the current exchange rate), and only five ships participated in his three voyages, two of which were larger than the Endeavor.
But it was money well spent. In terms of the scale of the scientific material obtained, both expeditions – both Russian and English, the first of which began when James Cook was only five years old, were undoubtedly the most significant scientific expeditions of the 18th century.
Scientific rearguard
As part of the Russian expedition, seven detachments worked with their chiefs, who were subordinate to the head of the entire expedition, Admiral Vitus Bering. Among them was an academic detachment led by astronomer Ludovic Delisle and historian Miller. Later, Delisle, who went to the end of the world with a heartfelt friend, a certain Roquefort, left the academic detachment and joined Bering's retinue (his friend Roquefort was arrested in Kazan and expelled from Russia at the very beginning of the expedition), and the botanist Johann was added to the leadership of the detachment to help Miller Gmelin. However, already in the second year of the expedition, Bering freed the academicians from subordination to him, and in the future the academic detachment acted autonomously.
Figuratively speaking, after the Ural ridge, the fist of the Great Northern Expedition unclenched and with spread fingers (expedition troops) combed the Asian part of the Russian Empire east to Chukotka and Primorye, north to the coast of the Arctic Ocean, moving along the channels of the Northern Dvina, Ob, Yenisei, Lena, Kolyma, Anadyr, Indigirka, and in the south – along the Amur. Looking ahead, it should be said that the head of the academic detachment, Academician Miller, had one assignment of a not entirely scientific nature – to study in the local archives all documents concerning the border with Qing China along the Amur River, which he successfully completed, giving Russian diplomats extra trump cards for negotiations on the final outline border.
In total, more than 2 thousand people were involved in the expedition, of which about 500 were specialists, the rest were their service personnel. At the forefront of the expedition were geodesists and cartographers, a scientific detachment aimed at more academic research – history, ethnography, anthropology, botany, zoology, geography, geology, moved in the rearguard and also, as needed, was sprayed along different routes, guided by purely scientific interest. In this, the leadership of the academic detachment was given complete freedom.
Academician Miller and Academy professor Gmelin were young people, the first at the beginning of the expedition was 28 years old, the second – 24 years old. Delisle was twice their age, he did not get along with his young colleagues in the same detachment, he himself left there under the command of Admiral Bering. He died of scurvy, like Bering, in 1741 while sailing to the shores of America.
Messerschmidt as a forerunner
The Great Northern Expedition was a continuation of Bering's First Kamchatka Expedition in 1727–1729. Then he did not manage to go to the Chukchi Sea, although Bering himself decided that he had found the place where “Asia converges with America” is the closest thing. The expedition of the academic detachment was also not planned from scratch, its leaders had a predecessor – Daniil Gottlieb Messerschmidt.
A doctor from Danzig and a well-educated person, he was invited to Petersburg in 1718, was awarded an audience with Peter I, who, after a conversation with Messerschmidt, sent him to Siberia “to find all kinds of rarities and pharmaceutical things: herbs, flowers, roots and seeds. and other related items in medicinal formulations ”.
Messerschmidt's journey was the first Russian scientific expedition to Siberia; it lasted eight years, from 1719 to 1727. In Western and Eastern Siberia, right up to Irkutsk, Messerschmidt collected an extensive herbarium of the Siberian flora and, in addition to it, a lot of “all sorts of rarities.” In addition to botanical and zoological research, he was engaged in geology, anthropology, paleontology, archeology, ethnography, became the discoverer of the Yenisei petroglyphs and even attempted to decipher the ancient Khakass language.
He was the first to describe the permafrost in Siberia, finding in it well-preserved remains of mammoths. Discovered deposits of graphite, coal, salt in the Nizhnyaya Tunguska area. His collection of stone sculptures of the Bronze Age still adorns the Kunstkamera collection. His ethnographic materials were also varied: clothing and jewelry, tools and weapons, musical instruments and handicrafts of the Tatars, Kalmyks, Samoyeds, Tungus, Votyaks and other Siberian peoples. During the expedition, he made 332 latitude determinations, described 149 minerals and salts, more than 400 plant species and 257 animal species. This list can be continued for a long time.
If you think about it, the cyclopean scope of scientific research of the scientist who worked alone is striking. At the beginning of the expedition, when Messerschmidt was accompanied by only two soldiers, he was lucky: he joined the convoy of the embassy of General Lev Izmailov, whom Peter sent to China to establish trade relations. In Tobolsk, where the scientist parted with the embassy, there were literate exiled Swedish officers who already knew the local conditions and helped him in the future. In the Yalutorovsky prison in the upper reaches of the Tobol River Messerschmidt bought for 12 rubles. boy Ivan Putintsev is 14 years old, and on that the staff of his expedition was completed.
According to Vernadsky, the travels of Messerschmidt “begin the natural-scientific study of Russia, they are the founders of that great collective scientific work, which continues uninterruptedly and successively to this day, growing more and more both in its strength and in the width of the interests captured.” True, the pathos of Vernadsky's words fades if we recall the fate of the scientific materials collected in Siberia by Dr. Messerschmidt. It was unrealistic to process them alone, and it was in such a situation that the scientist fell upon his return to the capital.
He left here under Peter, and came in a period of timelessness. Catherine I had just died, Menshikov and Dolgorukiy clashed in a battle for power (for the actual regency under the minor Peter II), a series of palace intrigues began, one of the minor consequences of which was the cessation of funding for Messerschmidt's expedition to deliver cargo with scientific samples from Siberia and their cameral processing. As a result, the first publications of Messerschmidt appeared only in the late 1740s, when the last members of the academic detachment of the Great Northern Expedition returned to the capital. And the fully expeditionary works of Messerschmidt were published only in 1960 as a monument from the history of Russian science.
Nevertheless, when preparing the academic detachment within the framework of the Great Northern Expedition, the lessons of Messerschmidt were taken into account, and the main reason for the success of the second Russian scientific expedition to Siberia was that it had sufficient field support with scientific forces and sufficient funding.
Science requires sacrifice
As mentioned above, the academic expeditionary detachment had three chiefs at once: the astronomer Delil, the historian Miller and the naturalist Gmelin. The expedition included professional artists (“drawing masters”), all four were St. Petersburg Germans, who played the role of a camera. The role of senior research workers of the expedition was performed by the professors and associates of the Academy of Sciences assigned to the detachment, and the junior research workers – by the students of the Academy. In total, there were about two dozen scientists on the expedition, the most famous of them in our time are associate Georg Steller and student Stepan Krasheninnikov.
As Vernadsky wrote, “Steller was one of the noblest personalities whom the German soil gave to the rising Russian national consciousness.” But to an uneducated person, Steller is now known primarily thanks to the Steller's cow described by him, now extinct, and then the largest marine mammal from the group of sirens after whales (although, in addition to the cow of his name, Steller described three more species of large marine mammals, then unknown to science and now also extinct , or rather exterminated by man in record time).
Student Stepan Krasheninnikov was a soldier's son, who received his initial education at the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy in Moscow, where his peasant son Mikhailo Lomonosov, the peasant's son of the same age, studied a few years later. For his academic success, Krasheninnikov was enrolled in the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1732, and Lomonosov was enrolled in students there and for that reason in 1736. But then they passed their universities in different ways: Lomonosov – in the German universities of Marburg and Freiberg, Krasheninnikov – in Siberia in the academic detachment, first under the leadership of Gmelin, and then independently in Kamchatka. Upon his return from the expedition in 1745, on the day when Lomonosov became an academician, Krasheninnikov received the rank of associate professor and only 15 years later became an academician.
The best of the best students of the Academy of Sciences were selected for the academic detachment, and Lomonosov with the Pomor convoy went to Moscow several years earlier, it is not known how his fate would have developed. The academic expedition suffered losses over 13 years of work: one of its leaders (Delisle), an associate Steller and two students died, the fate of three more is unknown, there is no information left about them in the archives. It is only known that in exchange for those who left because of illness and death, new students and associates were sent to the expedition. Little is known about the service personnel, if someone fell ill or died, he was simply replaced by someone from the local population, since there were plenty of exiled Swedish prisoners of war in these parts then, and even among the administration and immigrants in the Russian forts (cities) in Siberia could find helpers.
More details about the academic detachment of the Great Northern Expedition and other academic expeditions of that time can be found in the wonderful work “Lomonosov and the Academic Expeditions of the 18th Century” by the staff of the Institute of the History of Natural Science and Technology named after V.I. S. I. Vavilov of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the St. Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences Olga Alexandrovskaya, Vera Shirokova, Olga Romanova and Nadezhda Ozerova. It is available online, is richly illustrated with life drawings and original prints and is well worth a look.
Verstaendliche, praktische, gute
The almost entirely German composition of the Russian scientific expedition is striking, and the students of the academy at that time were mainly St. Petersburg and Moscow Germans. It is also known that Mikhail Lomonosov, gaining weight in the academy under Elizaveta Petrovna and patron at court in the person of her favorite Ivan Shuvalov, publicly fought against “German dominance” in the academy and in science and education in general. Gerhard Miller especially got it from him, however, on a specific issue that had nothing to do with the Siberian expedition – the Norman theory of the origin of Russian statehood. The point here was not science, Mikhail Lomonosov, being an intelligent man, perfectly understood his scientific wrongness, he cared about the national pride of the Russian people and it was this argument that he repeatedly put forward in opposition to the reinforced concrete historical documents that Miller provided for his part.
As for the further expeditionary activities of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, its plan was drawn up personally by Lomonosov. He planned five large expeditions at the same time. The first was to repeat the path of the academic detachment in Siberia. The second is to explore the north-west of the European part of Russia and the South Urals. The third is the Volga region to the Caspian Sea, its shores and the sea itself (including sailing along it). The fourth is the western Volga region, the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia. Fifth – Southern and Western Siberia, up to the Irtysh.
All five planned Great Academic Expeditions by Lomonosov, as historians of science now call them, started in the same year 1768, that is, after the death of Mikhail Vasilyevich. They were designed for six years each, completed according to plan (plus or minus one year) and were very successful in terms of scientific results. After them and the Great Northern Expedition, comparatively small white spots remained on the map of the empire, which scientists cleaned up in the next, XIX century.
The only problem was that four of Lomonosov's five Great Academic Expeditions were led by three Germans and one Swede (Pallas, Gmelin, Guldenstedt and Falk). Only the second of the above expeditions was led by the adjunct Ivan Ivanovich Lepekhin, who during its course in 1771 was elected an academician and later became its indispensable secretary. Probably, Lomonosov would have been gladdened by the fact that among the junior scientific staff of all expeditions there were a total of 20 students, and only three of them were St. Petersburg Germans, the rest were Russians.
But this was the kind of science we got under Peter the Great – mostly German, and it remained the same for a long time. Only at the end of the 19th century did Lomonosov's dream come true, and the “dominance of German science” was over. True, not entirely, students of leading Russian universities who chose a scientific career were obliged to take internships at foreign universities, mostly German. And many young people who wanted to get a good technical education entered them immediately. Only after the First World War did our science establish official contacts with British and American science, but already on an equal footing, as they say, and not from the position of a student and a teacher.
There is nothing shameful for domestic science in its German past. In the history of modern science, it is generally recognized that in this period of the history of civilization in the field of exact and natural sciences, first Italians were in the lead, then the French, and since the 18th century German science confidently emerges as the leaders, which only in the 20th century lost its leadership to American science. So there was a lot to learn from the Germans, and they turned out to be patient teachers.
Asya Petukhova
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