PREFACE 



Scholars will be ever grateful to Bering for persuading 

 Steller to go with him on the St. Peter. Steller's account of his 

 experiences is the most interesting of all the papers that have 

 come down to us. The naval officers* log books contain the dry 

 facts of the voyage, but Steller's journal gives the spirit of it, 

 the "inside" story, the moral forces at work. The two records 

 supplement each other, sometimes even in matters of navigation, 

 and that is one reason why they are published together. 



There are still other reasons. Steller was the first trained 

 naturalist in the North Pacific, and he had opportunities for 

 observation that were denied to his successors. He was the only 

 scientist who saw a live sea cow. He studied the habits of the 

 blue fox and the sea otter before they were frightened away by 

 man. In all that relates to these animals as well as on other 

 phases of natural history which he records, Steller was, is, and 

 will be an authority. 



Steller's journal, which is in German, his native language, was 

 edited and published at St. Petersburg in 1793 by the naturalist 

 P. S. Pallas, both serially in Volumes 5 and 6 of his Neiie Nordische 

 Beytrdge and separately in booklet form (see the bibliography at 

 the end of the present volume). Steller's description of Bering 

 Island, which constitutes the end of the journal, Pallas had 

 already published in 1781 in Volume 2 of the same series. 



During the summer of 191 7 I located in the archives of the 

 Russian Academy of Sciences at Petrograd a manuscript copy 

 of the journal. It seems probable that it is a direct transcript 

 from the original. Pallas received the original in 1767 (or 1769), 

 so he tells us in his two prefaces,^ from Professor J. E. Fischer, 

 one of the Academicians who took part in Bering's expedi- 

 tion in Siberia, and had it copied. That the manuscript I 



^ Neue Nordische Beytrdge, Vol. 2, 1781, p, 256 ("einer andern kleinen 

 Handschrift desselben [Steller], welche ich noch im Jahr 1767 nach der 

 mir vom seligen Professor Fischer mitgetheilten Urschrift copiren Hess"); 

 ibid., Vol. 5, 1793, p. 131, or book form, p. 3 ("Dieses merkwurdige 



