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In 1815, the Russian vessel
Rurik set off on a three-year voyage through the Pacific and Arctic oceans in a quest to find the world's most elusive geographic feature, the Northwest Passage. Financed by a wealthy Russian count and commanded by a fame-seeking captain, the vessel carried four extraordinary observers of the natural world, including an Indigenous navigator from the Caroline Islands named Kadu.
The
Rurik failed in its mission, yet, as award-winning Pacific historian David Igler masterfully demonstrates, the crew's pursuit of "natural history" throughout the voyage and during its decades-long afterlife embodied a search for knowledge through science, artistic representation, and oral tradition. Failure to achieve a great discovery was common in the great age of scientific voyaging, but explorers, natural philosophers, and traveling artists grew adept at turning their explorations into documented achievements by claiming, publishing, and promoting a range of significant findings. No expedition did this more successfully than the crew of the
Rurik. Much of their produced knowledge derived directly from the Indigenous communities they encountered in the Pacific. The men aboard the ship conveyed their discoveries through various mediums. Artist Ludwig Choris documented the experience in the first lithographic compendium of a Pacific expedition. Navigator Kadu informed his Marshall Islander elders and peers of the wonders and dangers he encountered. Naturalists Adelbert von Chamisso and Johann Eschscholtz produced an astonishing range of scientific studies for both scholarly and public audiences. Meanwhile, Captain Otto von Kotzebue defended his failure to locate the Northern Passage by claiming other geographic findings.
Featuring rare color images created during the voyage,
All Species of Knowledge reveals the intimate and daily practice of shipboard natural history, the role expeditions played in enlightening societies around the world, and the multiple meanings of failure and discovery in the pursuit of knowledge.
List of contents
- Introduction: Grand Ambitions for a Motley Crew
- 1: Claiming Discoveries from St. Petersburg to the Bering Sea
- 2: Kadu's Voyage and a Second Attempt at the Northern Passage
- 3: Depicting Sites of Colonialism
- 4: Studying Species and Indigenous Knowledge
- 5: The Afterlife of a Voyage: Networks and Claiming Discoveries
- Conclusion: Failures, Discoveries, and Legacies in Natural History
About the author
David Igler is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His books include
The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (OUP, 2013), which won the Sally and Ken Owens Award of the Western History Association and the John Lyman Book Award for U.S. Maritime History of the North American Society for Oceanic History, and
Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920.
