Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Chapter VIII.
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river-mouths, and to erect light-houses, establish magazines for
convenient relays, and procure provisions and other
necessaries,—very excellent directions, all of which,
however, were so many meaningless words after they had left
the government departments. Our age, which still has
in mind the Franklin expeditions—the English parallel—
is able to form an idea of these gigantic demands, and yet
the Senate did not hesitate to load the organization of all
this upon the shoulders of one man. Bering was made
chief of all the enterprises east of the Ural Mountains.
At the Obi and the Lena, at Okhotsk and Kamchatka,
he was to furnish ships, provisions, and transportation.
But in spite of all that was vague and visionary in
these plans, they had nevertheless a certain homogeneity.
They were all nautical expeditions for nautical
purposes and nautico-geographical investigations. Then the
Academy added its demands, making everything doubly
complicated. It demanded a scientific exploration of all
Siberia and Kamchatka,—not only an account of these
regions based on astronomical determinations and geodetic
surveys, on minute descriptions and artistically executed
landscape pictures, on barometric, thermometric, and
aerometric observations, as well as investigations in all
the branches of natural history, but it demanded also a
detailed presentation of the ethnography, colonization,
and history of the country, together with a multitude of
special investigations in widely different directions.
The leading spirits in these enterprises were two young
and zealous Germans, the chemist Johann Georg Gmelin
and the historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller,
twenty-eight and twenty-four years of age respectively, members
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