Travels in Kamtschatka

Kamchatka, 29 September 1787. Barthélemy de Lesseps, the young interpreter of the La Pérouse expedition, watches the Boussole and the Astrolabe sail away. In his baggage are his commander's dispatches, which he must carry to France overland. Before him lies the whole of Siberia.

So begins a thirteen-month race. Rafts on the Bolshaya River, dog-sled caravans in the storm, a snow desert where the animals starve: the traveller presses on from ostrog to yurt, guided by the Kamchadals, received by the Koryaks, meeting the Chukchi chief Tmintel in his tent. He encounters nine shipwrecked Japanese, walks by night through a storm with only a compass, faints in a yurt buried under snow, and crosses a ledge above a sea breaking apart.

Then come Okhotsk and the wait for the thaw, the horses toward the cross of Yudoma, the land of the Yakuts, the Lena ascended against the current to Irkutsk, and the long road west by kibitka.

A tireless observer, Lesseps records everything: festivals and songs, shamans, hunting, the fur trade, the life of the peoples of the far North. His journal is both a tale of endurance and a vivid portrait of a world that Europe barely knew.

But will these dispatches ever reach Versailles?