Turning the pages back... August 13, 1773 (08/09/98)

Turning the pages back...

August 13, 1773

Yurii Lysiansky lived an explorer's storybook life. Born in Nizhen, between Kyiv and Chernihiv, on August 13, 1773, he completed training at the Russian Imperial Kronstadt Naval Academy in 1786, and two years later, was fighting battles in the Baltic Sea as the empire struggled against Prussia and Sweden to control those waterways.

Together with an Estonian naval officer, Kruzenstern, Lysiansky organized the first Russian imperial expedition that sailed around the world. With two ships, the Neva and the Nadezhda, they set out in 1803.

As commander of the Neva, Lysiansky set the route of Kronstadt-Cape Horn-Hawaii-Alaska-Canton-Cape of Good Hope-Kronstadt. His numerous oceanographic and ethnographic findings, as well as the navigational charts he prepared, were first published in 1812, and appeared in English in 1914, in a book titled "Voyage Round the World on the Ship 'Neva' in 1803-1806."

Lysiansky died on March 6, 1837, in St. Petersburg. An island near the shore in the Sea of Okhotsk and a mountain on Sakhalin Island were named after him.

Source: "Lysiansky, Yurii," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).