Georg Wilhelm Steller — naturalist / explorer with roots in the Russian Empire
Georg Wilhelm Steller was born in Bavaria in 1709, studied theology and medicine at Wittenberg and Halle, and went to Russia in 1734 in search of the scientific career that Germany had not offered him. He worked his way into the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences and in 1737 was attached to the Great Northern Expedition.
He sailed with Vitus Bering on the St Peter in 1741 and was ashore on Kayak Island off Alaska for a single day — roughly ten hours, against his furious objections at the brevity. In that time he collected and described enough to give Europe its first scientific account of Alaskan natural history. On the return voyage and the winter that followed, shipwrecked on what is now Bering Island, he described the sea mammals of the North Pacific, treated the scurvy-stricken crew with plants he identified himself, and recorded Bering's final illness in an account that modern forensic work has borne out.
Four species carry his name: Steller's jay, Steller's eider, Steller's sea eagle, and Steller's sea cow — the last a vast sirenian of the Commander Islands that he alone described scientifically, and which was hunted to extinction within about twenty-seven years of his account of it. His is one of the few cases in which the entire scientific record of a large mammal rests on the notes of a single observer.
He died at Tyumen in Siberia in 1746, aged thirty-seven, on his way back to Saint Petersburg, and his major work De Bestiis Marinis appeared posthumously.
Tracing the roots — Saint Petersburg (Russia)
Steller's jay, Steller's sea eagle and the extinct Steller's sea cow all carry the name of a German working for the Russian crown.
German naturalist who entered Russian service and joined Bering's Great Northern Expedition, becoming among the first Europeans to describe the natural history of Alaska and the Bering Sea.
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Saint Petersburg (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.