ADELBERT VON CHAMISSO AS A NATURALIST. 255 



Lieutenant Otto von Kotzebue, commander, on board the Rurik, in 

 the roads of Copenhagen. 



A happily decisive turning-point in Chamisso's career was 

 reached with this event. In these days of steamboats and rail- 

 roads, and journeys around the world in eighty days, we can 

 hardly conceive of the importance that was then attached to a 

 voyage like that of the Rurik, and how it would give definite 

 direction and working material to the traveler for his lifetime. 

 Ehrenberg, whose discoveries in the region of the minutest life 

 quite eclipsed his voyages, was a single exception to this rule. 

 The whole of Chamisso's subsequent scientific work may be re- 

 garded as the carrying out of what he began on this voyage. It 

 lasted three years, and led from Plymouth to Teneriffe, Brazil, 

 and around Cape Horn to Chili ; to Salas y Gomez, past the island 

 world of the south seas, to the Radak chain of the Marshall Islands ; 

 thence northward to Kamtchatka through Bering Strait into the 

 Frozen Sea and back to the Aleutian island of Unalaska, where 

 preparations were made for the polar voyage in the following 

 summer. In the mean time the expedition went south again to 

 California, the Sandwich Islands, and Radak ; thence northward 

 again to Unalaska, whence the attempt was made to penetrate 

 the ice. At this point the original and real object of the voy- 

 age had to be given up. Kotzebue Sound, Eschscholtz Bay, and 

 the Chamisso Islands are reminders within the Arctic Circle of 

 this abortive enterprise, of which the voyage around the world 

 was the only part realized. On the return the Rurik visited 

 the Sandwich Islands for the second and Radak for the third 

 time ; then sailed by Guajan, one of the Marianne Islands, to Ma- 

 nila, around the Cape of Good Hope, and past St. Helena, to 

 Europe. In London Chamisso met Cuvier and Sir Joseph Banks, 

 the companion of Cook on his first voyage. On the 3d of Au- 

 gust, 1818, the Rurik anchored in the Neva opposite Count 

 Romanzoff 's house in St. Petersburg. The expedition was broken 

 up, and Chamisso was left in possession of what he had collected. 

 He declined the invitation to remain in Russia, and returned to 

 Berlin. 



Chamisso crossed the line four times during this voyage, ap- 

 proached both poles, and made himself at home in the wastes 

 where the ice rises to mountains, in the rude yurts of the tawny 

 fish-eaters of the icy sea, as well as in the palm-crowned splendors 

 of the tropics and among the airy huts of the graceful lotus-eaters 

 of the south seas. Including Europe, he set his foot on the four 

 quarters of the earth, and by a most remarkable coincidence went 

 over SchlemiPs journey ; and just as Schlemir's boots could not 

 take him over the wide intervening waters to Australia, Kotze- 

 bue would not venture to take his cranky vessel through the 



