Two Voyages of Exploration in the Antarctic Ocean, Volume II: Port Jackson, New Zealand, the Tuamotus and Tahiti
Modernized, illustrated English edition of Двукратные изыскания в Южном Ледовитом океане by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen (1819-1821).
Head south with Bellingshausen, whose Russian ships skirt the ice and sight Antarctica.
Read more ↓- about 240 pages
- Paperback
- English
- 19th century
Countries covered: Australia · New Zealand · French Polynesia
About this book
March 1820. In the ice of the South Pole, the sloop Vostok has lost sight of her companion, the Mirny. Alone, Captain Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen heads north among icebergs, snow and southern lights, until a storm breaks his bowsprit.
At the end of the road lie the green shores of Port Jackson. The two crews meet again there, exhausted and gnawed by scurvy. Governor Macquarie opens his doors, the astronomer Simonov pitches his observing tent, the copper sheathing and the bowsprit are repaired, and the Russians make the acquaintance of Bungaree, the Aboriginal chief of Broken Bay. Lieutenant Lazarev tells of his own crossing.
Then the expedition sets out again. The Tasman Sea costs the locksmith Goumin his life, Cook Strait opens its passages, and in Queen Charlotte Sound the Russians live for several days among the Maori: exchanges, barter, portraits by the painter Mikhailov. Next comes the steep island of Rapa, with its bold visitors and its ridge-top forts.
In the heart of the Pacific, the Tuamotu archipelago unrolls its rings of coral. Atoll after atoll, the expedition charts, names and christens these "Russian Islands", faces wary islanders, receives the chief Eri-Tatano on board, and takes in four lost boys. And already, on the horizon, the mountains of Tahiti rise into view.
A precise and curious officer's account, attentive to men as much as to lands, in which great Russian navigation meets the Pacific of Cook and Bougainville.
Product details
- Publisher
- Itinerarium Éditions
- Series
- South Pole
- The author
- Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen
- Date of the journey
- 1820
- Modern edition by
- Hélène Garnier
- Language
- English
- Format
- Paperback, 6 × 9 in (15.2 × 22.9 cm)
- Pages
- about 240
The author
Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen
Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen was born in 1778 on the island of Ösel (Saaremaa, now in Estonia), into a noble Baltic German family of the Russian Empire, and entered the Naval Cadet Corps at a very young age before graduating from the naval academy at Kronstadt. He earned his spurs on the first Russian circumnavigation (1803-1806), aboard Krusenstern's Nadezhda, then commanded ships in the Baltic and the Black Sea. In 1819, Tsar Alexander I entrusted him with the southern polar expedition of the Vostok and the Mirny, the latter commanded by Lazarev; it sailed around the Antarctic continent, charted Tuamotu atolls and returned to Kronstadt in 1821. He drew from it the account published in Saint Petersburg in 1831, then ended his career as an admiral and military governor of Kronstadt, where he died in 1852.
All books by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen →Sources
Bellingshausen's narrative was published in Saint Petersburg in 1831 by the printer I. Glazounov, in two parts accompanied by a separate atlas. Three witnesses were compared: this first edition, unabridged; a reissue published in Moscow in 1949; and the English translation published by the Hakluyt Society in 1945. The 1949 reissue was published with abridgements and alterations; the translation does not give the Russian text. The 1831 edition, digitized by the Russian State Library, is fully transcribed on Wikisource in its original spelling, but this transcription has not yet been proofread there. The text we selected for our work is therefore the first edition of 1831, read in its Wikisource transcription, based on the reference copy held by the Russian State Library.
The transcription was proofread and cleaned. The narrative is divided into numbered chapters, distributed between the two parts; this volume covers the end of Chapter III and Chapter IV of the first, which opens with a summary by the author under a few headings. Bellingshausen's twenty-three notes have been kept, as have the documents he quotes in his narrative, such as an inscription or a letter in English. The text thus established runs to about 36,000 words.
How we transform the text. This book is neither a literal translation nor a facsimile: it is a rewriting in today's language, carried out in three stages. Modernisation renders the text in contemporary English; each place and person receives a single modern form, and period terms (currencies, measures, titles) are kept, with a light gloss where needed. Clarification untangles the long sentences of the period, one idea per sentence, adding nothing and removing nothing. Shaping the narrative divides the text into titled chapters and restores its flow; repetitive passages are condensed, but no dated, numbered or named fact is removed. Each stage is followed by a review of fidelity to the original text.
| Status | Edition | Copy | Language | Note | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Selected | Двукратные изыскания в Южном Ледовитом океане и плавание вокруг света…, Saint Petersburg, I. Glazounov printing house, 1831, 2 parts and a separate atlas; part 1, [8], 397, [2] pp. | Russian State Library, transcription on Russian Wikisource; scans distributed by the Presidential Library and Wikimedia Commons | Russian | First edition, unabridged, in its original spelling; this volume covers the end of Chapter III and Chapter IV. | View |
| Set aside | Двукратные изыскания…, 2nd edition, Moscow, Geografgiz, 1949, edited by E. E. Shvede | Lib.ru, Klassika library (online transcription) | Russian | 1949 reissue, published with abridgements and alterations: it does not give the full text of 1831. | View |
| Set aside | The Voyage of Captain Bellingshausen to the Antarctic Seas, 1819-1821, Hakluyt Society, 2nd series, nos. 91-92, 1945, 2 vols. | Hakluyt Society record, with no online reproduction | English | English translation by several hands, edited by Frank Debenham: it does not give the author's Russian text. | View |
The journey mapped
In the Same Place, Through the Centuries
-
René Primevère Lesson, Voyage autour du monde entrepris par ordre du gouvernement sur la corvette La Coquille (1822-1825)
Barely three years after the Russians, the French corvette La Coquille, commanded by Louis Isidore Duperrey, anchors at Tahiti in 1823, then at Port Jackson and in New Zealand in 1824.
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Otto von Kotzebue, A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26 (1823-1826)
Otto von Kotzebue, a Russian naval officer who had already circled the globe aboard the Rurik, sets out again in 1823 aboard the Predpriyatie.
Read a free edition → -
Charles Darwin, Voyage d'un naturaliste autour du monde (The Voyage of the Beagle) (1831-1836)
Fifteen years after Bellingshausen, FitzRoy's Beagle nearly retraces his route.
Read a free edition → -
Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842)
With six ships, the first great scientific expedition of the United States, led by Charles Wilkes, sails from 1838 to 1842 the very waters of this volume: surveys in the Tuamotus and a stay at Tahiti in 1839, a call at Sydney…
The modern editor
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