page_title: Georg Wilhelm Steller
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Georg Wilhelm Steller / Biography
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Арка Стеллера, Алеутский район This image is related to the protected area of Russia number 4110004 This template and pages using it are maintained by the Russian WLE team. Please read the guidelines before making any changes that can affect the database! Deutsch: Stellerbogen, Rayon Aleuten
context_page_description: Georg Wilhelm Steller was a German botanist, zoologist, physician and explorer, who worked in Russia and is considered a pioneer of Alaskan natural history.
context_section_description: Steller was born in Windsheim, near Nuremberg in Germany, son to a Lutheran cantor named Johann Jakob Stöhler (after 1715, Stöller), and studied at the University of Wittenberg. He then traveled to Russia as a physician on a troop ship returning home with the wounded. He arrived in Russia in November 1734. He met the naturalist Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt (1685–1735) at the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Two years after Messerschmidt's death, Steller married his widow and acquired notes from his travels in Siberia not handed over to the Academy.
  Steller knew about Vitus Bering's Second Kamchatka Expedition, which had left Saint Petersburg in February 1733. He volunteered to join it and was accepted. He then left St Petersburg in January 1738 with his wife, who decided to stay in Moscow and go no farther. Steller met Johann Georg Gmelin in Yeniseisk in January 1739. Gmelin recommended that Steller take his place in the planned exploration of Kamchatka. Steller embraced that role and finally reached Okhotsk and the main expedition in March 1740 as Bering's ships, the St. Peter and St. Paul, were nearing completion.
  In September 1740, the expedition sailed to the Kamchatka Peninsula with Bering and his two expeditionary vessels sailing around the peninsula's south tip and up to Avacha Bay on the Pacific coast. Steller went ashore on the east coast of Kamchatka to spend the winter in Bolsherechye, where he helped to organize a local school and began exploring Kamchatka. When Bering summoned him to join the voyage in search of America and the strait between the two continents, serving in the role of scientist and physician, Steller crossed the peninsula by dog sled.  After Bering's St. Peter was separated from its sister ship the St. Paul in a storm, Bering continued to sail east, expecting to find land soon. Steller, reading sea currents and flotsam and wildlife, insisted they should sail northeast. After considerable time lost, they turned northeast and made landfall in Alaska at Kayak Island on Monday 20 July 1741. Bering wanted to stay only long enough to take on fresh water. Steller argued Captain Bering into giving him more time for land exploration and was granted 10 hours. 
  During his ten hours on land Stellar noted the mathematical ratio of 10 years preparation for ten hours of investigation. While the crew never ever set foot on the mainland, Georg Steller is credited with being one of the first non-natives to have set foot upon Alaskan soil. The expedition never made mainland landfall because of a stubbornness and a "dull fear" They left with only a sketch of what they think the mainland would look like. On a remarkable journey, Steller became the first European naturalist to describe a number of North American plants and animals, including a jay later named Steller's jay.
  Of the six species of birds and mammals that Steller discovered during the voyage, two are extinct (Steller's sea cow and the spectacled cormorant) and three are endangered or in severe decline (Steller's sea lion, Steller's eider and Steller's sea eagle). The sea cow, in particular, a massive northern relative of the dugong, lasted only 27 years after Steller discovered and named it, a limited population that quickly became victim of overhunting by the Russian crews that followed in Bering's wake.
  Steller's jay is one of the few species named after Steller that is not currently endangered. In his brief encounter with the bird, Steller was able to deduce that the jay was kin to the American blue jay, a fact which seemed proof that Alaska was indeed part of North America.
  Although Steller tried to treat the crew's growing scurvy epidemic with leaves and berries he had gathered, officers scorned his proposal. Steller and his assistant were some of the very few who did not suffer from the ailment. On the return journey, with only 12 members of the crew able to move and the rigging rapidly failing, the expedition was shipwrecked on what later became known as Bering Island. Almost half of the crew had perished from scurvy during the voyage. Steller n
caption: Steller's Arch on Bering Island
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