different masters. Then, perusing volumes 1 and 3 of the Quellen, we discovered that in letters to personages of higher rank Steller himself signs off as “Ihr ergebener (your devoted) Knecht,” while the standard formula to a person of equal status used by him and by others is “Ihr ergebener Diener.” So it turned out to be a question of rank in the eye of the beholder—Steller outranked Berckhan; thus, his servant presumably outranked Berckhan’s. Another, rather amusing, example of the importance of rank is found in the sample ledger in appendix B. To our regret we did not find a better equivalent to Euer Wohlgeboren (literally, you, well-born person) geruhten zu nehmen (the servility of which made us both grin and cringe) than “you, sir, deigned to take.” The importance of class distinctions in czarist Russia is borne out by the bizarre practice of classifying documents according to who was addressing whom, a donoshenie being one from a lower- to a higher-ranked individual, a trebovanie the opposite (Glossar, Quellen 1:332), and a vedenie a rank-neutral official communication from an institution to another or to a person (Glossar, Quellen 5:420).
The most frustrating puzzles were posed by two presumably German words, one of which, Caper, meaning pirate, seemed to cast aspersions on one of Steller’s drivers, while the other, jutschen, seemed to be a nonexistent verb. Both words turned out to be disguised Russian, which we began to suspect on discovering that Steller occasionally confused letters in the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets. For example, he consistently misspelled Russian zimov’e (hut, way station) as Simobhio (our b being the Russian v). So, conjecturing that Caper’s C might be a Russian S, we found the Russian word sapër, meaning a sapper, a soldier in an engineering battalion, comparable to a Seabee in the US Navy. The verb jutschen, on the other hand, appears to be Steller’s germanization of Russian v’iuchit’, to load a horse.
The greatest translation challenge by far was the pre-Linnaean nomenclature for the 155 plants Steller mentions in his travel journal. Retired botanist Eckehart J. Jäger graciously took on the huge task of identifying these plants by their current scientific names. According to Jäger (email, March 10, 2015), Steller knew that many of the plants he found had not yet been described and were thus new to science. In fact, from his excursions around Halle and St. Petersburg, Steller could not have known about 85 percent of the plants growing between Lake Baikal and Kayak Island on the west coast of the Pacific. Since in 1740 scientific names for plants had not yet been standardized by Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum of 1753, Steller used working names that were useful for comparing with known Central European plants, often with short annotations of important characteristics. Steller did describe some of the plants he collected more extensively in his Catalogus plantarum, 1740 (Flora Ochotensis), but he often used different names from those in this travel journal. To give an idea of the huge amount of work that went into tracking down the present-day identity of these plants, our bibliography includes a separate list of references that Jäger used. Even though Steller was to investigate and describe everything concerning natural history (Instruction 1), botany was his first love, and he happily took every chance to go botanizing, whether up on a mountain or across a river filled with chunks of ice. He was particularly fond of gentians, saxifrages, louseworts, buttercups, and primroses, which he often described as pulchra (Latin [L], beautiful) or even as perpulchra (L, exceedingly beautiful), sometimes even recommending them as ornamentals (Jäger).
As Steller described the various rivers, he listed the fish found in them as well as in Lake Baikal. He seemed most interested in the subsistence and commercial value of these fish. We lacked the help from a fisheries expert in identifying each of the twenty-eight fish Steller mentioned, though he often used Russian names, some of which were close enough to the modern Russian that we could eventually find the scientific name. The species of salmon were the easiest, the whitefish the toughest to figure out. Steller offered one amusing though erroneous theory that the rigidity of the Eurasian ruffe’s dorsal fin kept it from swimming upriver against the current. Like the plants, Steller described the fish in Latin.
In the journal, Steller mentions fewer than twenty birds, sometimes with the German names, more often with a sketchy description. Luckily, a well-known Anchorage ornithologist, the late Heinrich Springer, could identify them for us or come up with a best guess. In the letter to Schumacher (December 24, 1739, Quellen 3:41; see appendix C) requesting birdshot, Steller gives a plausible explanation for the misleading low count. Having only small bullets, which tear small birds apart, he could stuff just one in twenty of the some three hundred birds he had examined and described to that point. Since he wrote this before he even left Irkutsk, it is safe to assume that he encountered and identified more birds than he recorded. Touchingly, however, when Steller reported that Berckhan had shot a young loon, he also commented that they “were surprised to hear the mother lament her young with the most pitiful cries” (chap. 14, July 13).
Quotes from the letters and documents Steller wrote and received during 1739 and 1740 are our translations, too. Dates throughout all the volumes of Quellen refer to the Julian calendar then in use in Russia (Hintzsche, pers. comm., January 2018). To convert to the Gregorian, eleven days should be added (Hintzsche, Quellen 4.2:823). Because the headings Steller applied to sections in the journal often seemed arbitrary, likely identifying notebooks used rather than sections traveled, we have replaced those with headings identifying segments of the journey. Where appropriate, we have supplied what information was available in Hintzsche’s Personenregister (Quellen 2:490–507) to persons mentioned in the text. On pages—for example, in chapter 14—where the manuscript contained so many lacunae that the integrity of the text was questionable, we have retained Hintzsche’s markings of [. . . .], noting other smaller omissions individually.
Notes
1. Contract workers drawn largely from the serf and townsman class who fished and hunted for furs in Siberia and later in Russian America.
2. L. Stejneger, Georg Wilhelm Steller: The Pioneer of Alaskan Natural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 135.
3. “Pressure of duties does not permit me to spend too much time in perfecting [my papers]. . . . I therefore set out my porridge in carefully made earthen vessels. If the vessel is an offense to anyone, he will perform for me and others a most friendly service if he will pour it all into a gold or silver urn.” Quoted in D. Littlepage, Steller’s Island: Adventures of a Pioneer Naturalist in Alaska (The Mountaineer’s Books, 2006), 203.
4. Sluzhiv, from the verb sluzhit’, to serve. A general term applied to state employees in both civil and military service, mostly peasants and posadskie but also including Cossacks and streltsy, who were sent to Siberia to protect Russia’s vital interests. Hintzsche, Glossar, Quellen 1:331–32; Dmytryshyn in A. Wood, ed., The History of Siberia (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1991), 22; L. Kokaurov, pers. comm., November 2017.
WE GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE HELP AND SUPPORT OF many people in our third Steller translation project. Foremost among them are Dr. Wieland Hintzsche, discoverer of lost documents and editor-in-chief of Quellen zur Geschichte Sibiriens und Alaskas aus russischen Archiven, and his wife and staunchest supporter, Dr. Elisabeth Hintzsche, a physician and the president of the International Georg-Wilhelm-Steller Society, which they founded twenty-two years ago together with scholars from the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Under the auspices of the society, the Hintzsches have organized annual “German-Russian Encounters” in Halle, at which international scholars explore and share a multitude of topics related to the eighteenth-century history of Siberia and Alaska. While Elisabeth has been the driving force behind these and other regular Society-sponsored events, Wieland has shepherded the documents he located in Russian archives into print (fifteen volumes so far). His single-handed transcription of Steller’s manuscripts in itself has been a monumental task we stand in awe of. For their devotion to Steller and all the encouragement given us, we salute and thank them both.
We owe Dr. Dr. h. c. Eckehart J. Jäger,