The other level of administrative bureaucracy was dispersed throughout Siberia, far removed from central authority and so remote it might take two years for an official to reach his destination. It was headed by scores of voevods5 with their own assistants, stationed in strategically located, fortified outposts. In addition to controlling all the supplies, they essentially had the power of life and death over those within their jurisdiction. Particularly in the remote regions of northeastern Siberia, trustworthy men were less willing to serve, and the corrupt ones were removed only when their abuses became unbearable. A voevod received generous remuneration, but he also expected to receive the essentials from the local inhabitants. All the native subjects were required to give him gifts on the holidays, and his subordinates also expected to receive their share. So indigenous people were under an enormous burden. It is understandable that they frequently expressed their anger (Dmytryshyn, Crownhart-Vaughan, and Vaughan, 18–20, 22; Hartley, xvi–xvii).
While the challenges and tensions of this conquest of Siberia were likely unknown to or ignored by the Europeans eager to receive any knowledge about foreign lands, what news trickled into Europe about the area was enthusiastically read and disseminated. An announcement about the Second Kamchatka Expedition, later named the Great Northern Expedition and, like the First Kamchatka Expedition, headed by the Danish captain Vitus Bering, appeared in the Neue Leipziger gelehrte Anzeigen of November 1733, while Steller was still in Halle. Since Halle is not very far from Leipzig and one of his professors was closely connected to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (Hintzsche, Quellen 1:xix), it is very likely that Steller heard of this enormous undertaking before leaving Halle in August of 1734 and possible that he resolved then to join it. Spanning ten years between 1733 and 1743 and involving directly or indirectly more than three thousand people with an estimated cost of 1.5 million rubles or one-sixth the income of the Russian government, its greatness lay in its size, the distance it had to go across the Northern Hemisphere, and the complexity of its goals.
Any systematic exploration and scientific discovery of Siberia was due in large part to Peter the Great, who, in order to implement his vision of expanding the Russian Empire, drew foreign scholars to Russia to create a scientific academy in St. Petersburg, inaugurated in 1725, that resembled those he had visited in Europe. Young and mostly German-speaking scholars initially formed the core of the academicians. One of their tasks was to organize and eventually accompany scientific expeditions to the unexplored lands east of the Urals. The German physician and naturalist Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt’s journey from 1720 to 1727 to western and central Siberia marked the beginning of research into geography, mineralogy, botany, zoology, ethnography, and philology in this region as well as opening up the area to trade and economic development.
The possible existence of a land bridge between northeastern Asia and North America, posed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as a way of answering questions about the common origin of humans, among other interests, prompted Peter the Great to mount the First Kamchatka Expedition (1728–1730) after an initial expedition of two geodesists in 1719 had failed. After also failing to reach the North American coastline, Bering proposed a Second Kamchatka Expedition whose primary goals were to search for a sea route to North America and Japan and to survey the northern and eastern coast of Siberia. Under Czarina Anna these goals were greatly expanded into investigating the flora, fauna, minerals, and peoples of Siberia and opening up access to developing Siberia’s resources. What had initially been a huge undertaking became for Bering an even bigger logistical nightmare. Because Russia viewed this expedition as providing information that would give it the strategic upper hand, especially in comparison to its neighboring countries, no one on the expedition was to reveal anything about its purpose or findings. It was this imposed secrecy that is largely responsible for the fact that much of the information gathered was published only much later, some of it not until today. Some of the information may still be lying unread or even undiscovered in the archives; some, unfortunately, may be lost forever.
Not surprisingly, these overly ambitious goals fell somewhat short, but amazingly much was actually achieved: the European discovery of Alaska (i.e., the Aleutian Islands and part of what is today known as Southeast Alaska) and the Commander Islands, notably Bering Island; a detailed cartographic assessment of the northern and northeastern coast of Russia and the Kurile Islands; considerable groundbreaking ethnographic, historic, and scientific research into Siberia and Kamchatka; and the refuted existence of a northeast passage and of the legendary land mass in the North Pacific.
In order to fulfill all these objectives, the expedition was divided into three independent detachments: (1) the Northern, charged with exploring the eastern sea route from the mouth of the Ob River to the Pacific; (2) the Pacific; and (3) the Academic. The Pacific or Maritime group was further divided into two. The first, led by Bering himself, was to sail to Kamchatka from Okhotsk and from there search for the legendary “Joao-da-Gama-Land,” named after the Portuguese explorer who claimed to have discovered a land mass north of Japan. Then they were to sail farther east to the coast of North America. The other division, under the command of the Danish captain Martin Spangberg, was to investigate and chart the sea route from Okhotsk to Japan and China.
Steller eventually joined the third contingent—the Academic group, composed of a small number of scientists. The leaders—Professor Gerhard Friedrich Müller (history and ethnography), Johann Georg Gmelin (natural history), and Louis de l’Isle de la Croyère (astronomy and geodetics)—left St. Petersburg in August 1733, traveling together to Tobolsk, the seat of the Siberian Office. De la Croyère traveled separately from there, in March 1735 meeting up with Müller and Gmelin in Irkutsk, the center of Russian trade with China and an important stopping place for the expedition. Even though the local authorities, in this case the Irkutsk Provincial Government, were legally mandated to provide the researchers all the aid they required, neither boats nor food supplies were ready for the trip down the Lena to Yakutsk; thus, these three members took the opportunity to sail across Lake Baikal and to investigate the region from the eastern shore to the Chinese border, returning to Irkutsk for the winter.
They were finally able to continue their journey in 1736, getting as far as Yakutsk, where they were to meet Bering and travel together to Kamchatka, but they were again stuck without transportation and food supplies to get them to Okhotsk and then Kamchatka. Because of poor health, Müller and Gmelin eventually received permission to return to St. Petersburg, finally arriving in 1743. Before leaving Yakutsk, Müller and Gmelin had given the student Stepan Krasheninnikov detailed instructions for fulfilling his role as the preliminary researcher on Kamchatka. Beginning in 1737 Krasheninnikov studied mostly the southern part of the peninsula. He spent ten years as a member of the expedition, eventually became a professor at the Academy of Sciences, and was commissioned to write up the results of both his and Steller’s research about Kamchatka, which appeared in 1755, the year of Krasheninnikov’s death, with the title Opisanie Zemli Kamchatki or Description of Kamchatka.
By the end of 1737, Steller had been sent to assist Müller and Gmelin, receiving his instructions (found after this introduction) from them in Yeniseysk. Per these instructions, every three months Steller was to send to the Academy of Sciences written descriptions and drawings of everything he had investigated and of any preserved specimens, all cataloged, as well as an accounting of all his activities. These were then to be forwarded to the Academy of Sciences. In addition to his research, Steller carried heavy administrative obligations for the formidable logistics of the whole enterprise, the scope of which is also spelled out in the instructions. Number 2, for example, identifies the five people in his party for whom Steller had the responsibility, to be augmented in Irkutsk by three sluzhivs to serve as escorts and additional helpers. It was up to Steller to look out for them all, to stand up for them if they encountered problems, and, above all, to see to it that they received their meager pay and rations, preferably on time. Since both pay and provisions had to first be requested from various government agencies and shipped out where they were to be allotted, a horrendous amount of paperwork had to be constantly generated, sent out, and followed up with more.
Further tasks, also requiring much paperwork, were the