Three Accounts of the Vasil'ev-Shismarev Expedition of 1819-1822

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This expedition has received almost no attention in our English histories of Alaska, and so far I have not seen it mentioned in the Russian. Bancroft (p. 526) said, "No report of the expedition is extant," and neither Andrews (The Story of Alaska) or Hulley (Alaska, 1741-1953) mention it at all. Dall in Alaska and its History devotes only 62 words to it, without documentation, in a chronological listing of historical events (pp. 331, 332).

My first step in this search was to consult the Arctic Bibliography, which did not yield any results. My next step was to consult Wickersham's Bibliography of Alaskan Literature, 17241924, where I found three items, Nos. 6287, 6291, and 6292 pertaining to the journey. The first one is the long account that I mentioned in my letter to Peter-- an account of the two-year voyage of the Good Intent written by K. K. Hillsen, who was under Shishmarev. It contains valuable ethnographic and historic information about Alaska, St. Lawrence Island and Siberia. The second item contains only progress reports in 1820 of a few pages. No. 6292, I discovered, is a considerably shortened version of Hillsen's account written in German.

Of the above, we shall translate the Hillsen article and the progress reports, but there are two other articles that I want to include , and which I found purely by accident. During my incarceration in the Library of Congress last fall I checked the tables of contents of all journals that I thought might contain articles about the expeditions to Bering Strait: Morskoi Sbornik, Otechestvennye zapiski - [under.] 6287 Hillsen [set] in this (in which Hillsen's three-part article appeared), Sievernyi arkhiv, Vasiliev in this [under] 6291 -Syn otechestva, and Zapiski Gidrograficheskago Departamenta, etc., and the more recent journals and state and national ethnographic and historical series. In Zapiski Gidr. Dep. for 1851 I found the article, "Svedeniia o Chukchakh, Capt. Shishmarev," which contains his observations of the Chukchi in his journey of 1821.

Then, by pure change, I discovered Vassili Berkh's Khronologicheskaia istoriia vsiekh puteshestvii v sievernyia poliarnyia strany (Chronological history of all voyages to the Arctic), volumes I and II, 1821, 1823, in an uncatalogued collection of books that had come to the Smithsonian Libraries from William H. Dall's estate. I had inquired about Dall's manuscript collection, now in the Smithsonian, and the librarian Mr. Marquardt gave me permission to look through Dall's wonderful collection of books, which has now been broken up and is in the process of being catalogued.

I had never heard of this publication before (Berkh's history of the discovery of the Aleutians is well known and has even been translated). In volume two of the Chronological history of the voyages are good summaries of various northern expenditions up to the date of publication, including Vasiliev's and Shishmarev's two-year voyage.

At that time I had not see Lada-Mocarski's Bibliography of Books on