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Georg Wilhelm Steller

February 20, 2023

"Steller" redirects here. For other uses, see Steller (disambiguation). For the adjective relating to stars, see Stellar.

Georg Wilhelm Steller (10 March 1709 – 14 November 1746) was a German botanist, zoologist, physician and explorer, who worked in Russia and is considered a pioneer of Alaskan natural history.[1][2][3]

Several animals described by and named for Georg Steller, of whom no portrait is known to exist.

Biography

Steller was born in Windsheim, near Nuremberg in Germany, the son of a Lutheran cantor, Johann Jakob Stöhler (after 1715, Stöller), and studied at the University of Wittenberg. He then traveled to Russia as a physician on a troop ship returning home with the wounded. He arrived in Russia in November 1734. He met the naturalist Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt (1685–1735) at the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Two years after Messerschmidt's death, Steller married his widow and acquired notes from his travels in Siberia not handed over to the Academy.[4]

Steller knew about Vitus Bering's Second Kamchatka Expedition, which had left Saint Petersburg in February 1733. He volunteered to join it and was accepted. He then left St Petersburg in January 1738 with his wife, who decided to stay in Moscow and go no farther. Steller met Johann Georg Gmelin in Yeniseisk in January 1739. Gmelin recommended that Steller take his place in the planned exploration of Kamchatka. Steller embraced that role and finally reached Okhotsk and the main expedition in March 1740 as Bering's ships, the St. Peter and St. Paul, were nearing completion.

 
Steller's Arch on Bering Island

In September 1740, the expedition sailed to the Kamchatka Peninsula with Bering and his two expeditionary vessels sailing around the peninsula's south tip and up to Avacha Bay on the Pacific coast. Steller went ashore on the east coast of Kamchatka to spend the winter in Bolsherechye, where he helped to organize a local school and began exploring Kamchatka. When Bering summoned him to join the voyage in search of America and the strait between the two continents, serving in the role of scientist and physician, Steller crossed the peninsula by dog sled. After Bering's St. Peter was separated from its sister ship the St. Paul in a storm, Bering continued to sail east, expecting to find land soon. Steller, reading sea currents and flotsam and wildlife, insisted they should sail northeast. After considerable time lost, they turned northeast and made landfall in Alaska at Kayak Island on Monday 20 July 1741. Bering wanted to stay only long enough to take on fresh water. Steller argued Captain Bering into giving him more time for land exploration and was granted 10 hours. During his ten hours on land Steller noted the mathematical ratio of 10 years preparation for ten hours of investigation.[5]

While the crew never even set foot on the mainland, Georg Steller is credited with being one of the first non-natives to have set foot upon Alaskan soil. The expedition never made mainland landfall because of a stubbornness and a "dull fear". They left with only a sketch of what they think the mainland would look like. On a remarkable journey, Steller became the first European naturalist to describe a number of North American plants and animals, including a jay later named Steller's jay.

Of the six species of birds and mammals that Steller discovered during the voyage, two are extinct (Steller's sea cow and the spectacled cormorant) and three are endangered or in severe decline (Steller sea lion, Steller's eider and Steller's sea eagle). The sea cow, in particular, a massive northern relative of the dugong, lasted only 27 years after Steller discovered and named it. The sea cow had a limited population that quickly became victim of overhunting by the Russian crews that followed in Bering's wake.

Steller's jay is one of the few species named after Steller that is not currently endangered. In his brief encounter with the bird, Steller was able to deduce that the jay was kin to the American blue jay, a fact which seemed proof that Alaska was indeed part of North America.

 
A 2009 memorial to Steller in a riverside park in Tyumen, Siberia, where he had died of fever at age 37.

Although Steller tried to treat the crew's growing scurvy epidemic with leaves and berries he had gathered, officers scorned his proposal. Steller and his assistant were some of the very few who did not suffer from the ailment. On the return journey, with only 12 members of the crew able to move and the rigging rapidly failing, the expedition was shipwrecked on what later became known as Bering Island. Almost half of the crew had perished from scurvy during the voyage. Steller nursed the survivors, including Bering, but the aging captain could not be saved and died. The remaining men made camp with little food or water, a situation made only worse by frequent raids by Arctic foxes. The crew hunted sea otters, sea lions, fur seals and sea cows to survive the winter.[6] Despite the hardships the crew endured, Steller studied the flora, fauna, and topography of the island in great detail. Of particular note were the only detailed behavioral and anatomical observations of Steller's sea cow, a large sirenian mammal that once ranged across the Northern Pacific during the Ice Ages, but whose surviving relict population was confined to the shallow kelp beds around the Commander Islands, and which was driven to extinction within 30 years of discovery by Europeans.

Based on these and other observations, Steller later wrote De Bestiis Marinis ('On the Beasts of the Sea'), describing the fauna of the island, including the northern fur seal, the sea otter, Steller sea lion, Steller's sea cow, Steller's eider and the spectacled cormorant. Steller claimed the only recorded sighting of the marine cryptid Steller's sea ape.

In early 1742, the crew used salvaged material from the St. Peter to construct a new vessel to return to Avacha Bay and nicknamed it The Bering. Steller spent the next two years exploring the Kamchatka peninsula. Because of his sympathies for the native Kamchatkans, he was accused of fomenting rebellion and was recalled to Saint Petersburg. At one point he was put under arrest and made to return to Irkutsk for a hearing. He was freed and again turned west toward St. Petersburg, but along the way he came down with a fever and died at Tyumen.

His journals, which reached the academy and were later published by Peter Simon Pallas, were used by other explorers of the North Pacific, including Captain Cook.

 
A statue in Bad Windsheim commemorating Georg Wilhelm Steller

Discoveries and namesakes

Georg Steller described a number of animals and plants, some of which bear his name, either in the common name or scientific:

Steller Secondary School in Anchorage, Alaska is named for Steller.

The standard author abbreviation Steller is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[8]

Popular culture

  • In The Great North episode "Xmas With the Skanks Adventure" (s3e10 debuted 11 December 2022), Moon Tobin names a reindeer he finds "Wilhelm" after the zoologist

References

  1. ^ Daum, Andreas (2019). "German Naturalists in the Pacific around 1800: Entanglement, Autonomy, and a Transnational Culture of Expertise". In Berghoff, Hartmut (ed.). Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I. Berghahn Books. pp. 79–102.
  2. ^ Evans, Howard Ensign. Edward Osborne Wilson (col.) The Man who Loved Wasps: A Howard Ensign Evans Reader. in: Evans, Mary Alice. Big Earth Publishing, 2005. pp. 169. ISBN 1555663508
  3. ^ Nuttall, Mark. Encyclopedia of the Arctic. Routledge, 2012. pp. 1953. ISBN 1579584365
  4. ^ Egerton, Frank N. (2008). "A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 27: Naturalists Explore Russia and the North Pacific During the 1700s". Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. 89 (1): 39–60. doi:10.1890/0012-9623(2008)89[39:AHOTES]2.0.CO;2.
  5. ^ Collins, Henry B. Jr. "Georg Wilhelm Steller". Encyclopedia Arctica. Dartmouth. Retrieved 20 August 2022.
  6. ^ Littlepage, Dean. Steller's Island: Adventures of a Pioneer Naturalist in Alaska.
  7. ^ "Restella Pobed. | Plants of the World Online | Kew Science". Plants of the World Online. Retrieved 16 March 2021.
  8. ^ International Plant Names Index.  Steller.

Further reading

  • Leonhard Stejneger – Georg Wilhelm Steller, the pioneer of Alaskan natural history. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1936.
  • G. W. Steller – Reise von Kamtschatka nach Amerika mit dem Commandeur-Capitän Bering : ein Pendant zu dessen Beschreibung von Kamtschatka. St Petersburg, 1793. Full text
  • Georg Steller – Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741–1742 edited by O. Frost. Stanford University Press,1993. ISBN 0-8047-2181-5
  • Walter Miller and Jennie Emerson Miller, translators – De Bestiis Marinis, or, The Beasts of the Sea) in an appendix to The Fur Seals and Fur-Seal Islands of the North Pacific Ocean, edited by David Starr Jordan, Part 3 (Washington, 1899), pp. 179–218
  • Andrei Bronnikov (2009). Species Evanescens [Ischezayushchi vid] (Russian Edition). Reflections, ISBN 978-90-79625-02-4 (a book of poetry inspired by dramatic events of Steller's life).
  • Ann Arnold (2008). Sea Cows, Shamans, and Scurvy Alaska's First Naturalist: Georg Wilhelm Steller. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Andreas Daum (2019). "German Naturalists in the Pacific around 1800: Entanglement, Autonomy, and a Transnational Culture of Expertise", in Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I, eds. Hartmut Berghoff, Frank Biess and Ulrike Strasser. New York: Berghahn Books, 79–102.
  • Erich Kasten (2020) „Georg Wilhelm Steller: Scientist, Humanist, and Most Significant Ethnographer for the Itelmens of Kamchatka.” In: Writing the Arctic : German Representations of the Far North in the 18th and 19th century hrsg. von Jan Borm und Joanna Kodzik. Cambridge: Scholar Publishing. ISBN 978-1-5275-6022-2
  • Marcus Köhler: "Völker-Beschreibung". Die ethnographische Methodik Georg Wilhelm Stellers (1709–1746) im Kontext der Herausbildung der "russischen" ėtnografija. Saarbrücken 2008. (about Steller's importance for the development of modern ethnography as a science)
  • Dean Littlepage (2006). Steller's Island: Adventures of a Pioneer Naturalist in Alaska. The Mountaineer's Books. ISBN 1-59485-057-7
  • Barbara and Richard Mearns – Biographies for Birdwatchers ISBN 0-12-487422-3
  • Corey Ford, Where the Sea Breaks its Back, 1966. Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Books, 1992. ISBN 978-0-88240-394-6
  • Steller's 1741 expedition from Kamchatka is covered in Orcutt Frost's Bering: the Russian discovery of America (Yale University Press, 2004).
  • Steller is the subject of the second section of W. G. Sebald's book-length poem, After Nature (2002).
  • A somewhat fictionalized account of Steller's time with Bering is contained in James A. Michener's, Alaska.

External links

  • (in Russian) Commander (Komandorskie) Islands
  • (in Russian)
  • (in Russian) Poetry on Steller
  • (in German)
  • Extracts from De Bestiis Marinis, or, The Beasts of the Sea (1751)

Coordinates: 58°25′47″N 154°23′29″W / 58.42972°N 154.39139°W / 58.42972; -154.39139

February 20, 2023
georg, wilhelm, steller, steller, redirects, here, other, uses, steller, disambiguation, adjective, relating, stars, stellar, this, article, includes, list, general, references, lacks, sufficient, corresponding, inline, citations, please, help, improve, this, . Steller redirects here For other uses see Steller disambiguation For the adjective relating to stars see Stellar This article includes a list of general references but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations July 2022 Learn how and when to remove this template message Georg Wilhelm Steller 10 March 1709 14 November 1746 was a German botanist zoologist physician and explorer who worked in Russia and is considered a pioneer of Alaskan natural history 1 2 3 Several animals described by and named for Georg Steller of whom no portrait is known to exist Top Steller s sea eagle Steller s jay Middle Steller s eider Steller sea lion Bottom Steller s sea cow extinct sketch by J F Brandt Contents 1 Biography 2 Discoveries and namesakes 3 Popular culture 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External linksBiography EditSteller was born in Windsheim near Nuremberg in Germany the son of a Lutheran cantor Johann Jakob Stohler after 1715 Stoller and studied at the University of Wittenberg He then traveled to Russia as a physician on a troop ship returning home with the wounded He arrived in Russia in November 1734 He met the naturalist Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt 1685 1735 at the Imperial Academy of Sciences Two years after Messerschmidt s death Steller married his widow and acquired notes from his travels in Siberia not handed over to the Academy 4 Steller knew about Vitus Bering s Second Kamchatka Expedition which had left Saint Petersburg in February 1733 He volunteered to join it and was accepted He then left St Petersburg in January 1738 with his wife who decided to stay in Moscow and go no farther Steller met Johann Georg Gmelin in Yeniseisk in January 1739 Gmelin recommended that Steller take his place in the planned exploration of Kamchatka Steller embraced that role and finally reached Okhotsk and the main expedition in March 1740 as Bering s ships the St Peter and St Paul were nearing completion Steller s Arch on Bering Island In September 1740 the expedition sailed to the Kamchatka Peninsula with Bering and his two expeditionary vessels sailing around the peninsula s south tip and up to Avacha Bay on the Pacific coast Steller went ashore on the east coast of Kamchatka to spend the winter in Bolsherechye where he helped to organize a local school and began exploring Kamchatka When Bering summoned him to join the voyage in search of America and the strait between the two continents serving in the role of scientist and physician Steller crossed the peninsula by dog sled After Bering s St Peter was separated from its sister ship the St Paul in a storm Bering continued to sail east expecting to find land soon Steller reading sea currents and flotsam and wildlife insisted they should sail northeast After considerable time lost they turned northeast and made landfall in Alaska at Kayak Island on Monday 20 July 1741 Bering wanted to stay only long enough to take on fresh water Steller argued Captain Bering into giving him more time for land exploration and was granted 10 hours During his ten hours on land Steller noted the mathematical ratio of 10 years preparation for ten hours of investigation 5 While the crew never even set foot on the mainland Georg Steller is credited with being one of the first non natives to have set foot upon Alaskan soil The expedition never made mainland landfall because of a stubbornness and a dull fear They left with only a sketch of what they think the mainland would look like On a remarkable journey Steller became the first European naturalist to describe a number of North American plants and animals including a jay later named Steller s jay Of the six species of birds and mammals that Steller discovered during the voyage two are extinct Steller s sea cow and the spectacled cormorant and three are endangered or in severe decline Steller sea lion Steller s eider and Steller s sea eagle The sea cow in particular a massive northern relative of the dugong lasted only 27 years after Steller discovered and named it The sea cow had a limited population that quickly became victim of overhunting by the Russian crews that followed in Bering s wake Steller s jay is one of the few species named after Steller that is not currently endangered In his brief encounter with the bird Steller was able to deduce that the jay was kin to the American blue jay a fact which seemed proof that Alaska was indeed part of North America A 2009 memorial to Steller in a riverside park in Tyumen Siberia where he had died of fever at age 37 Although Steller tried to treat the crew s growing scurvy epidemic with leaves and berries he had gathered officers scorned his proposal Steller and his assistant were some of the very few who did not suffer from the ailment On the return journey with only 12 members of the crew able to move and the rigging rapidly failing the expedition was shipwrecked on what later became known as Bering Island Almost half of the crew had perished from scurvy during the voyage Steller nursed the survivors including Bering but the aging captain could not be saved and died The remaining men made camp with little food or water a situation made only worse by frequent raids by Arctic foxes The crew hunted sea otters sea lions fur seals and sea cows to survive the winter 6 Despite the hardships the crew endured Steller studied the flora fauna and topography of the island in great detail Of particular note were the only detailed behavioral and anatomical observations of Steller s sea cow a large sirenian mammal that once ranged across the Northern Pacific during the Ice Ages but whose surviving relict population was confined to the shallow kelp beds around the Commander Islands and which was driven to extinction within 30 years of discovery by Europeans Based on these and other observations Steller later wrote De Bestiis Marinis On the Beasts of the Sea describing the fauna of the island including the northern fur seal the sea otter Steller sea lion Steller s sea cow Steller s eider and the spectacled cormorant Steller claimed the only recorded sighting of the marine cryptid Steller s sea ape In early 1742 the crew used salvaged material from the St Peter to construct a new vessel to return to Avacha Bay and nicknamed it The Bering Steller spent the next two years exploring the Kamchatka peninsula Because of his sympathies for the native Kamchatkans he was accused of fomenting rebellion and was recalled to Saint Petersburg At one point he was put under arrest and made to return to Irkutsk for a hearing He was freed and again turned west toward St Petersburg but along the way he came down with a fever and died at Tyumen His journals which reached the academy and were later published by Peter Simon Pallas were used by other explorers of the North Pacific including Captain Cook A statue in Bad Windsheim commemorating Georg Wilhelm StellerDiscoveries and namesakes EditGeorg Steller described a number of animals and plants some of which bear his name either in the common name or scientific Steller s eider Polysticta stelleri Steller s jay Cyanocitta stelleri Sea otter Enhydra lutris Steller s sea eagle Haliaeetus pelagicus Short tailed albatross Steller s sea cow Hydrodamalis gigas Steller sea lion Eumetopias jubatus Steller s sculpin Gumboot chiton Cryptochiton stelleri Hoary mugwort Artemisia stelleriana Stellera L Thymelaeaceae Stellerite a mineral in the zeolite group Restella Pobed Thymelaeaceae 7 Steller Secondary School in Anchorage Alaska is named for Steller The standard author abbreviation Steller is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name 8 Popular culture EditIn The Great North episode Xmas With the Skanks Adventure s3e10 debuted 11 December 2022 Moon Tobin names a reindeer he finds Wilhelm after the zoologistReferences Edit Daum Andreas 2019 German Naturalists in the Pacific around 1800 Entanglement Autonomy and a Transnational Culture of Expertise In Berghoff Hartmut ed Explorations and Entanglements Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I Berghahn Books pp 79 102 Evans Howard Ensign Edward Osborne Wilson col The Man who Loved Wasps A Howard Ensign Evans Reader in Evans Mary Alice Big Earth Publishing 2005 pp 169 ISBN 1555663508 Nuttall Mark Encyclopedia of the Arctic Routledge 2012 pp 1953 ISBN 1579584365 Egerton Frank N 2008 A History of the Ecological Sciences Part 27 Naturalists Explore Russia and the North Pacific During the 1700s Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 89 1 39 60 doi 10 1890 0012 9623 2008 89 39 AHOTES 2 0 CO 2 Collins Henry B Jr Georg Wilhelm Steller Encyclopedia Arctica Dartmouth Retrieved 20 August 2022 Littlepage Dean Steller s Island Adventures of a Pioneer Naturalist in Alaska Restella Pobed Plants of the World Online Kew Science Plants of the World Online Retrieved 16 March 2021 International Plant Names Index Steller Further reading EditLeonhard Stejneger Georg Wilhelm Steller the pioneer of Alaskan natural history Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press 1936 G W Steller Reise von Kamtschatka nach Amerika mit dem Commandeur Capitan Bering ein Pendant zu dessen Beschreibung von Kamtschatka St Petersburg 1793 Full text Georg Steller Journal of a Voyage with Bering 1741 1742 edited by O Frost Stanford University Press 1993 ISBN 0 8047 2181 5 Walter Miller and Jennie Emerson Miller translators De Bestiis Marinis or The Beasts of the Sea in an appendix to The Fur Seals and Fur Seal Islands of the North Pacific Ocean edited by David Starr Jordan Part 3 Washington 1899 pp 179 218 Andrei Bronnikov 2009 Species Evanescens Ischezayushchi vid Russian Edition Reflections ISBN 978 90 79625 02 4 a book of poetry inspired by dramatic events of Steller s life Ann Arnold 2008 Sea Cows Shamans and Scurvy Alaska s First Naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller Farrar Straus and Giroux Andreas Daum 2019 German Naturalists in the Pacific around 1800 Entanglement Autonomy and a Transnational Culture of Expertise in Explorations and Entanglements Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I eds Hartmut Berghoff Frank Biess and Ulrike Strasser New York Berghahn Books 79 102 Erich Kasten 2020 Georg Wilhelm Steller Scientist Humanist and Most Significant Ethnographer for the Itelmens of Kamchatka In Writing the Arctic German Representations of the Far North in the 18th and 19th century hrsg von Jan Borm und Joanna Kodzik Cambridge Scholar Publishing ISBN 978 1 5275 6022 2 Marcus Kohler Volker Beschreibung Die ethnographische Methodik Georg Wilhelm Stellers 1709 1746 im Kontext der Herausbildung der russischen etnografija Saarbrucken 2008 about Steller s importance for the development of modern ethnography as a science Dean Littlepage 2006 Steller s Island Adventures of a Pioneer Naturalist in Alaska The Mountaineer s Books ISBN 1 59485 057 7 Barbara and Richard Mearns Biographies for Birdwatchers ISBN 0 12 487422 3 Corey Ford Where the Sea Breaks its Back 1966 Anchorage Alaska Northwest Books 1992 ISBN 978 0 88240 394 6 Steller s 1741 expedition from Kamchatka is covered in Orcutt Frost s Bering the Russian discovery of America Yale University Press 2004 Steller is the subject of the second section of W G Sebald s book length poem After Nature 2002 A somewhat fictionalized account of Steller s time with Bering is contained in James A Michener s Alaska External links Edit in Russian Commander Komandorskie Islands in Russian Steller Georg Wilhelm in Russian Poetry on Steller in German German National Geographic magazine about the diary of Steller Extracts from De Bestiis Marinis or The Beasts of the Sea 1751 Coordinates 58 25 47 N 154 23 29 W 58 42972 N 154 39139 W 58 42972 154 39139 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Georg Wilhelm Steller amp oldid 1139847661, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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