Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742

The European discovery of the northwest coast of America is fully and dramatically recorded in this journal, an invaluable historical and scientific source document. It is also a gripping narrative of human conflict, of nature as the overwhelming adversary, of terror and pain and death, and of final deliverance. In the service of the Russian tsarina, the German naturalist Steller accompanied the great Danish explorer Vitus Bering on a voyage that survived shipwreck and unimaginable hardship to mark the beginning of Alaska's recorded history. This book is a new translation and annotation of Steller's journal of that voyage and the first to be based completely upon a surviving copy of Steller's manuscript dated 1743 (previous translation had been based on a 1793 edition). The journal is the best known of Steller's writings, not so much because of events along the way, or its biological and anthropological observations, not even because of the momentous sight of the Alaskan coast and