215th Anniversary of the First Russian Circumnavigation

The Neva ship in the St. Paul harbor. Engraving made on Lisyansky’s drawing
The Neva ship in the St. Paul harbor. Engraving made on Lisyansky’s drawing

Today is the 215th anniversary of the first Russian circumnavigation by Ivan Krusenstern and Yury Lisyansky on the ships "Hope" and "Neva".

On August 7, 1803 the expedition left Kronstadt, heading for Copenhagen. Then it followed the route: Falmouth (the United Kingdom) — Santa Cruz de Tenerife (the Canary Islands) - Florianopolis (Brazil) — Easter Island — Nukuhiva (the Marquesas Islands) — Honolulu (the Hawaiian Islands) — Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky — Nagasaki (Japan) — Hokkaido (Japan) — Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk — Sitka (Alaska) — Kodiak (Alaska) — Guangzhou (China) — Macau (Portugal) — Saint Helena Island —Corvo and Flores (the Azores) — Portsmouth (UK). On August 17, 1806 the expedition returned to Kronstadt.

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Lisyansky’s route
Lisyansky’s route

"Russian navigators have never gone so far... They had to go from the sixtieth degree north to the same degree south, bypass the cap-horn breathing storms, and survive the scorching heat... But their curiosity and desire to see distant countries was so great that if you take all the hunters who came to me with requests for their appointment to this trip, I could equip many large ships with selected sailors of the Russian fleet", wrote I. Krusenstern in his book "Circumnavigation ".

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Admiral Ivan F. Krusenstern
Admiral Ivan F. Krusenstern

The expedition discovered new islands and "erased" non-existent ones from the maps, defined the coastline of North America and Japan, and measured latitude and longitude of many geographical objects. The travelers gathered a lot of ethnographic information and compiled Chukchi and Ainu dictionaries. Their studies of ocean temperature, salinity, currents, and tides later became one of the foundations of oceanography, and weather observations in different parts of the globe were important for the development of climatology. Ivan Krusenstern and Yuri Lisyansky’s works, published as a result of the expedition and containing a lot of information about little-explored lands, aroused great interest in Europe and were soon translated into Western European languages.

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Portrait of Lisyansky by Borovikovsky
Portrait of Lisyansky by Borovikovsky

For the first time sailors and officers got a unique experience of long-distance voyages that had provided the basis for further geographical discoveries under the Russian flag. In particular, the "Nadezhda" crew consisted of Thaddeus Bellingshausen, a future discoverer of Antarctica, and Otto Kotzebue, a navigator who later made another trip around the world, but he headed the expedition.