Friedrich Plenisner

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Friedrich Plenisner ( Russian Фридрих (Федор) Христианович Плениснер , Friedrich Christianowitsch Plenisner; * October 1711 in Riga ; † 1778 in Saint Petersburg ) was a German-Baltic Tsarist officer and explorer in northeast Siberia . He was a participant and organizer of several research expeditions.

Life

Originally from Courland , the pleniser started his military career and served from 1730 to 1735 as a corporal in the riding regiment of the Life Guard (Конный лейб-гвардии полк) in Saint Petersburg. He was then exiled to Siberia and in 1737 was commander of the artillery of the only Russian Pacific port in Okhotsk . In 1741 he took part in Vitus Bering's Second Kamchatka Expedition as a cartographer and draftsman . With the St. Peter , the flagship of the expedition, he reached Alaska in late July 1741 . On the way back, the ship got into severe storms and ran onto a reef off Bering Island . The team, which was badly affected by scurvy , had to spend the winter here. There were numerous deaths, Bering died in December. It was not until the following summer that the survivors were able to cross to Kamchatka in a boat made from the remains of St. Peter . On the expedition, Plenisner had made sketches of the coasts from Okhotsk to Petropavlovsk and the Gulf of Alaska . He had also drawn numerous marine animals . It is believed that the only original sketches of Steller's manatee were made by him. In 1742 Plenisner was pardoned and traveled to Moscow .

From 1745 to 1759 Plenisner was an officer in a Yakut infantry regiment, and in 1761 was the commander of Anadyrski Ostrog in Chukotka . He was given the task of naturalizing the Chukchi into the Russian Empire, ending their feuds with the Koryaks and promoting further geographical discoveries around Chukotka. He was joined by Nikolai Daurkin , a native Chukchi who had received a good education in Yakutsk and acted as an interpreter and mediator between cultures. In 1763 Plenisner himself undertook an expedition along the Anadyr River to its mouth. He was also involved in organizing Iwan Sindts († 1779) expedition to map the coastlines of Northeast Asia and Northwest America. 1768–1770, when Plenisner was already in charge of the Okrug of Kamchatka, he sent Daurkin to the Bear Islands with the surveyors I. Leontjew, I. Lyssow and A. Pushkarev . Plenisner managed to gather extensive information from reliable sources about the islands of the Bering Strait and Alaska.

In 1772, Plenisner fell out of favor. He was accused of infidelity and negligence in preventing smallpox , which had raged in Kamchatka in 1768. In 1778 he died impoverished in Saint Petersburg.

The Plenisner Hills in the Valdez-Cordova Census Area of Alaska remember him as an explorer.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d А. С. Зуев: Плениснер, Фридрих (Фредерик) Христианович in the history dictionary of Siberia , 2009
  2. ↑ Orcutt William Frost: Bering. The Russian Discovery of America . Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2003, ISBN 0-300-10059-0 , pp. 246 ff . (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  3. ↑ Hans Rothausch: Die Stellersche Seekuh: Monograph of the extinct Nordic giant sea cow (PDF; 3.21 MB). Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2008, ISBN 978-3-8370-1793-9 , p. 63 f.
  4. ^ Diana Ordubadi: The Billings Saryčev Expedition 1785–1795 . V & R unipress, Göttingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-8471-0509-1 , p. 60 ff . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  5. ↑ Ryan Tucker Jones: Empire of Extinction. Russians and the North Pacific's Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741-1867 . Oxford University Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-934341-6 , pp. 134 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
personal data
SURNAME Plenisner, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Плениснер, Фридрих Христианович (Russian name); Плениснер, Федор Христианович
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chukchi-Russian explorer and interpreter
DATE OF BIRTH October 1711
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga
DATE OF DEATH 1778
Place of death St. Petersburg