Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Chapter XIV.
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an amiable good-for-nothing, who highly prized a good
table and a social glass, but cared as little as possible
for scientific pursuits. When, as a young man, he
studied theology in Paris, his father found it necessary
to send him to Canada, where he assumed his mother’s
name, La Croyère, and for seventeen years lived a
soldier’s wild life, until his brothers, on the death of the
father, recalled him from his exile. In St. Petersburg
his brother instructed him in the elements of astronomy,
sent him upon a surveying expedition to Lapland, and
finally secured him a position as chief astronomer of
Bering’s second expedition. This was a great mistake.
Louis de l’Isle de la Croyère very unsatisfactorily filled
his position. His Academic associates Müller and Gmelin
had no regard for him whatever, and hence under the
pressure of this contempt, and as a result of this irregular
and protracted life in a barbaric country, La Croyère,
having no native power of resistance, sank deeper and
deeper into hopeless sluggishness. His astronomical
determinations in Kamchatka are worthless. His
Russian assistants, especially Krassilnikoff, did this part of
the work of the expedition.
As early as 1730, Bering, as we have seen, came into
unfortunate relations with Joseph De l’Isle, and this state
of affairs afterwards grew gradually worse. In 1731, the
Senate requested the latter to construct a map of the
northern part of the Pacific in order to present
graphically the still unsolved problems for geographical
research. He submitted this map to the Senate on the
6th of October, 1732, that is, two years and a half after
Bering’s proposition to undertake the Great Northern
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