Georg Wilhelm Steller
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- For the adjective relating to stars, see stellar.
Georg Wilhelm Steller (March 10, 1709 - November 14, 1746) was a German botanist, zoologist, physician and explorer, who worked in Russia and present-day Alaska.
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[edit] Biography
Steller (Piotr) was born in Windsheim, near Nuremberg, son to Johann Jakob Stöhler (after 1715, Stöller) and studied at the University of Wittenberg. He then traveled to Russia to work at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, arriving in November 1734.
Steller was appointed as naturalist on Vitus Bering's Second Kamchatka Expedition, to chart the Siberian coast of the Arctic Ocean and search an eastern passage to North America. He left Saint Petersburg in January 1738, eventually reaching Okhotsk on the east coast in August 1740. It was here that he met Bering for the first time at the Bering Straits. Hints of rumours of their encounters among the crew ensure that these encounters did not come to light until much later when his memoirs were found.
In September the expedition sailed to the Kamchatka Peninsula. Steller spent the winter in Bolsheretsk, where he helped to organize a local school. He was then appointed to join Bering on the voyage to America. The expedition landed in Alaska at Kayak Island on Monday, July 20, 1741, staying only long enough to take on fresh water. During this time Steller became the first European naturalist to describe a number of North American plants and animals, including a jay later named Steller's Jay.
On the return journey the expedition was shipwrecked on what later became known as Bering Island. Here Bering died, and almost half of the crew perished from scurvy. The remaining men settled with little food or water only to survive the winter, the camp plagued by Arctic Foxes. During this time Steller mourned and could not will himself to eat, and only did so on the advice of the crew physician. He also wrote De Bestiis Marinis, describing the fauna of the island, including the Northern Fur Seal, the Sea Otter, Steller's (or Northern) Sea Lion, Steller's Sea Cow, Steller's Eider and Spectacled Cormorant. Both the Sea Cow and the Cormorant were later hunted to extinction. Steller claimed the only recorded sighting of the marine cryptid Steller's Sea Ape.
In the spring the crew constructed a new vessel to return to Avacha Bay and nicknamed it The Bering. Steller spent the next two years exploring the Kamchatka peninsula. He was recalled to Saint Petersburg but caught a fever on the journey and died at Tyumen.
His journals did reach the Academy and were published by Peter Simon Pallas and were later used by other explorers of the North Pacific, including Captain Cook.
A somewhat fictionalized account of Steller's time with Bering is contained in James A. Michener's novel Alaska.
There is a secondary school in Anchorage, Alaska named after him: see Steller Secondary School.
Animals and plants named after Georg Steller include:
- Steller's Eider
- Steller's Jay
- Steller's Sea Cow
- Steller's Sea Eagle
- Steller's Sea Lion
- Cryptochiton stelleri, the Gumboot chiton
- Artemisia stelleriana, a species of wormwood
[edit] References
- Barbara and Richard Mearns - Biographies for Birdwatchers ISBN 0-12-487422-3
- Leonhard Stejneger - Georg Wilhelm Steller, the pioneer of Alaskan natural history. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard university press, 1936.
- Georg Steller - Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742 edited by O. Frost. Stanford University Press,1993. ISBN 0-80472181-5
[edit] Sources
- Steller's 1741 expedition from Kamchatka is covered in Orcutt Frost's Bering: the Russian discovery of America (Yale UP, 2004).
- An English translation of Steller's De bestiis marinis (1751) is online here
- Steller is also the subject of the second section of W. G. Sebald's book-length poem, After Nature (2002).
