Steller's History of Kamshatka Collected Information Concerning the History of Kamshatka, Its Peoples, Their Manners, Names, Lifestyles, and Various Customary Practices

Everything was of interest to Georg Wilhelm Steller, the Russian Academy of Sciences naturalist on Vitus Bering's second Kamchatka expedition, which discovered Alaska in 1741. Steller composed this manuscript on Kamchatka in 1743 and 1744, but it was published in German only posthumously. This first English translation is most valuable for its extensive descriptions of the natural and human worlds that Steller found in the mid-eighteenth century. He describes over thirty species and two genera of fish, and numrous species of birds, for the first time. 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 Native life forever. He makes unique observations of the economy of Kamchatka and the role of the Cossacks, and was the first scientist to suggest, based on direct observation, similarities in the ethnography and natural history of the Russian Far East and Alaska. Steller's breadth and depth in recording the natural and human world of eighteenth-century Alaska make this translation an important reference for readers interested in all aspects of North Pacific and Russian American history.Steller, Georg Wilhelm is the author of 'Steller's History of Kamshatka Collected Information Concerning the History of Kamshatka, Its Peoples, Their Manners, Names, Lifestyles, and Various Customary Practices', published 2003 under ISBN 9781889963495 and ISBN 1889963496.