Sea Cows, Shamans, and Scurvy: Alaska's First Naturalist: Georg Wilhelm Steller

Sea Cows, Shamans, and Scurvy: Alaska's First Naturalist: Georg Wilhelm Steller

By Ann Arnold

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On June 4, 1741, Georg Wilhelm Steller set sail from Avacha Bay in Siberia on the St. Peter, under the command of Vitus Bering. The crew was bound for America on the last leg of an expedition whose mission was to explore, describe, and map Russia’s vast lands from the Ural Mountains across Siberia to the Kamchatka Peninsula, and possibly lay claim to the northwest coast of America – if they could find it, for no European had ever reached America by this route. Officially, Steller was the ship’s mineralogist, but in practice he was its doctor, minister, and naturalist as well. Appointed to the expedition in 1737 by the Academy of Science in St. Petersburg, he was sworn to secrecy concerning any discoveries.
 
 
Making judicious use of Steller’s richly detailed journals and liberal use of illustrations and maps, Ann Arnold allows the reader to join Steller on this fascinating voyage and its final dangerous mission, which left half the crew dead and the rest suffering from scurvy.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
ISBN-13: 9780374399474
ISBN-10: 0374399476
Published on 10/28/2008
Binding: Hardcover
Number of pages: 240

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Sea cows Shamans and Scurvy/ Alaska's first naturalist Goreg Steller is a 213 paged Biography. The author and illustrator is Ann Arnold. The genre is a non fiction and is based on a boy that had a breathing disability and was dead for two weeks until he lit out a loud cry. 5 years later he in rolled in a private school and was the top in his class on several subjects but when it came to out of school he had trouble making friends and had a lonely childhood. At the age of twenty he got a scholarship to study medicine and religion at Written Berg University and on December 13,1712 he set of on his first voyage to Kamchatka to study life forms and the animals and how they live. On The way there he wrote notes about the sea but then he realized that all of his crew get scurvy from the lack of vitamin D including Gorge Stellar but when they got to Kamchatka there was a pack of blue foxes and they were trying to steal the crews stuff and the crew sat down made himself comfortable and watch the blue fox show. One question that I would like to ask Gorge Steller is,”why did you help Karina even though he did not help the crew and on top of that he did not have scurvy and he made the people that had scurvy do his work and did not get anything in return.