Voyage Round the World in 1803

Title

Voyage Round the World in 1803

Creator

Date

1812

Format

Description

Full title: Voyage round the world in 1803. 4. 5. and 1806 by order of His Imperial Majesty Alexander I, on the ship Neva, under the command of Fleet Captain- Lieutenant, now Captain First Rank and Cavalier, IUrii Lisianskii.

The Russians were among the last of the European voyagers to circumnavigate the globe. While the voyages did have military, exploratory, and scientific goals, the primary purpose of these trips from
St. Petersburg was to provision the Russian American Company headquarters in the then Russian American port of Sitka (Alaska). In August of 1802 Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern (1770-1846) was named the commander of the Nadezhda that would undertake a full-scale expedition to the North Pacific Ocean. He in turn offered the position of second-in-command to Lisianskii, whom he knew as
a loyal and accomplished officer. In August of 1803 the two ships left Kronshtadt. In June of 1804 they reached the Hawaiian Islands. The two ships parted company on June 10, when Kruzenshtern headed for Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka and Lisanskii was ordered to head for Russian America.
However, Lisianskii sailed first to the Big Island to see the place where Captain Cook had died. By June 19 he was meeting with King Tomari (Kaumualii) on Kauai; by the 20th Lisianskii set sail for Kodiak, discovering the island bearing his name in the Northern Hawaiian Islands. Other important contributions of this voyage were ethnographic descriptions, the collection of artifacts, and several word lists from Nuku Hiva, the Hawaiian Islands, as well as from the islands of Kodiak and Unalaska, the Bay of Kenai, and Sitka Sound. The UH copy bears the signature of Lisianskii on p. VI of the first volume. The bookplate tells us that this two-volume set was originally held in the Sevastopol Officers' Library in the Crimea. UH acquired this copy in 1949

Is Part Of

Russian Collection, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Library