Description

This three-volume work traces the circumnavigation in 1815‒18 of the Russian brig Riurik from the Russian imperial capital of Saint Petersburg through the southern Pacific Ocean to the Bering Strait and Arctic Ocean. This voyage had two purposes: to explore relatively unknown parts of Oceania in the South Pacific, and to search for the Northeast Passage north of Eurasia that might provide a route from Alaska back to Europe via the Arctic Ocean. The work is inscribed to Count Nikolai Rumiantsev, a powerful imperial Russian chancellor of the early ...