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Reise um die Welt
1836 stellte Adelbert von Chamisso sein letztes Werk vor, die Reise um die Welt – vor fast zwei Jahrhunderten auf einem russischen Expeditionsschiff als Botaniker; unternommen zur Erkundung der kürzesten Verbindung von Europa nach Asien, vom Pazifik her. Auf der Brigg »Rurik« begleitete ihn während der Jahre 1815–1818 auch Ludwig York Choris als offizieller Zeichner und Maler, ein junger deutschstämmiger Russe, der in Paris später Bildbände veröffentlichte – illustriert mit Lithografien, die »Louis« Choris nach Zeichnungen fertigte – einer der größten Zeichner und Maler, die jemals den Pazifik bereisten. Die damals sensationelle Weltumseglung, die zweite in der russischen Geschichte, führte Chamisso von Kopenhagen über Teneriffa, Brasilien und Chile nach Alaska, San Francisco, Hawaii und in die südpazifische Inselwelt. In Chamissos »Klassiker« Reise um die Welt sind der anekdotische Reiseerzähler, der Naturforscher von enzyklopädischem Interesse, der aufklärerische Ethnologe und der enthusiastisch lebensbilanzierende Dichter vereint.
266 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1979
About the author
Adelbert von Chamisso
362 books42 followersLouis Charles Adélaïde de Chamissot, best known as Adelbert von Chamisso, was an officer in the Prussian army and a poet, born at the ancestral seat of his family, the château of Boncourt at Ante, in Champagne, France. Driven out by the French Revolution, his parents settled in Berlin, where in 1796 young Chamisso obtained the post of page-in-waiting to the queen, and in 1798 entered a Prussian infantry regiment as ensign.
His family was shortly thereafter permitted to return to France; he remained in Germany and continued his military career. He had little education, but sought distraction from the dull routine of the Prussian military service in assiduous study. In collaboration with Varnhagen von Ense, he founded (1803) the Berliner Musenalmanach, in which his first verses appeared. The enterprise was a failure, and, interrupted by the war, it came to an end in 1806. It brought him, however, to the notice of many of the literary celebrities of the day and established his reputation as a rising poet.
He had become lieutenant in 1801, and in 1805 accompanied his regiment to Hameln, where he shared in the humiliation of its treasonable capitulation in the following year. Placed on parole, he went to France, but both his parents were dead; returning to Berlin in the autumn of 1807, he obtained his release from the service early the following year. Homeless and without a profession, disillusioned and despondent, he lived in Berlin until 1810, when, through the services of an old friend of the family, he was offered a professorship at the lycée at Napoléonville in the Vendée.
He set out to take up the post, but drawn into the charmed circle of Madame de Staël, followed her in her exile to Coppet in Switzerland, where, devoting himself to botanical research, he remained nearly two years. In 1812 he returned to Berlin, where he continued his scientific studies. In the summer of the eventful year, 1813, he wrote the prose narrative Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow. This, the most famous of all his works, has been translated into most European languages (English by William Howitt). It was written partly to divert his own thoughts and partly to amuse the children of his friend Julius Eduard Hitzig.
In 1815, Chamisso was appointed botanist to the Russian ship Rurik, which Otto von Kotzebue (son of August von Kotzebue) commanded on a scientific voyage round the world. His diary of the expedition (Tagebuch, 1821) is a fascinating account of the expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. During this trip Chamisso described a number of new species found in what is now the San Francisco Bay Area. Several of these, including the California poppy, Eschscholzia californica, were named after his friend Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz, the Rurik's entomologist. In return, Eschscholtz named a variety of plants, including the genus Camissonia, after Chamisso. On his return in 1818 he was made custodian of the botanical gardens in Berlin, and was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences, and in 1819 he married his friend Hitzig's foster daughter Antonie Piaste (1800-1837).
Chamisso's travels and scientific researches restrained for a while the full development of his poetical talent, and it was not until his forty-eighth year that he turned back to literature. In 1829, in collaboration with Gustav Schwab, and from 1832 in conjunction with Franz von Gaudy, he brought out the Deutscher Musenalmanach, in which his later poems were mainly published.
He died in Berlin at the age of 57. His grave is preserved in the Protestant Friedhof III der Jerusalems- und Neuen Kirchengemeinde (Cemetery No. III of the congregations of Jerusalem's Church and New Church) in Berlin-Kreuzberg, south of Hallesches Tor.
His family was shortly thereafter permitted to return to France; he remained in Germany and continued his military career. He had little education, but sought distraction from the dull routine of the Prussian military service in assiduous study. In collaboration with Varnhagen von Ense, he founded (1803) the Berliner Musenalmanach, in which his first verses appeared. The enterprise was a failure, and, interrupted by the war, it came to an end in 1806. It brought him, however, to the notice of many of the literary celebrities of the day and established his reputation as a rising poet.
He had become lieutenant in 1801, and in 1805 accompanied his regiment to Hameln, where he shared in the humiliation of its treasonable capitulation in the following year. Placed on parole, he went to France, but both his parents were dead; returning to Berlin in the autumn of 1807, he obtained his release from the service early the following year. Homeless and without a profession, disillusioned and despondent, he lived in Berlin until 1810, when, through the services of an old friend of the family, he was offered a professorship at the lycée at Napoléonville in the Vendée.
He set out to take up the post, but drawn into the charmed circle of Madame de Staël, followed her in her exile to Coppet in Switzerland, where, devoting himself to botanical research, he remained nearly two years. In 1812 he returned to Berlin, where he continued his scientific studies. In the summer of the eventful year, 1813, he wrote the prose narrative Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow. This, the most famous of all his works, has been translated into most European languages (English by William Howitt). It was written partly to divert his own thoughts and partly to amuse the children of his friend Julius Eduard Hitzig.
In 1815, Chamisso was appointed botanist to the Russian ship Rurik, which Otto von Kotzebue (son of August von Kotzebue) commanded on a scientific voyage round the world. His diary of the expedition (Tagebuch, 1821) is a fascinating account of the expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. During this trip Chamisso described a number of new species found in what is now the San Francisco Bay Area. Several of these, including the California poppy, Eschscholzia californica, were named after his friend Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz, the Rurik's entomologist. In return, Eschscholtz named a variety of plants, including the genus Camissonia, after Chamisso. On his return in 1818 he was made custodian of the botanical gardens in Berlin, and was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences, and in 1819 he married his friend Hitzig's foster daughter Antonie Piaste (1800-1837).
Chamisso's travels and scientific researches restrained for a while the full development of his poetical talent, and it was not until his forty-eighth year that he turned back to literature. In 1829, in collaboration with Gustav Schwab, and from 1832 in conjunction with Franz von Gaudy, he brought out the Deutscher Musenalmanach, in which his later poems were mainly published.
He died in Berlin at the age of 57. His grave is preserved in the Protestant Friedhof III der Jerusalems- und Neuen Kirchengemeinde (Cemetery No. III of the congregations of Jerusalem's Church and New Church) in Berlin-Kreuzberg, south of Hallesches Tor.
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May 12, 2020
The “Discovery” of the Marshall Islands
Adelbert Von Chamisso was born on January 30, 1781, the son of a French nobleman who fled to Germany in 1792 “to escape the guillotine.” At fifteen he became a page to the Queen Consort of Frederick William II, and two years later, he entered military service and stayed behind when his parents returned to a more moderate France in 1800. He wrote verses, first in French and then in German, and published the Muses Almanac in 1804–1806. In 1812 he entered the University of Berlin to study nature, and in 1815, on a lark, he applied for the position of botanist aboard what would be the second Russian expedition of discovery around the world. Due to the ill health of a formerly appointed naturalist, he was granted the position on board the Rurik.
Chamisso published A Voyage Around the World with the Romanzov Exploring Expedition in the Years 1815–1818 in the Brig Rurik in 1836, only two years before his death and long after the captain of the voyage, Otto von Kotzebue, published his account in 1821. The painter on board, Louis Choris, had published his magnificent Voyage pittoresque autour du monde in 1822. Chamisso’s account is a work of nostalgia. He harkens back to a more exciting time in his life, when he bore the hardships he endured at sea through the eyes of a younger and healthier man. In his foreword, he frankly asks, “But will the dew not have evaporated from the flowers, will not their fragrance have blown away?” He must have written his account of this voyage from meticulous logs, as it appears as fresh today, over two hundred years later. Much acknowledgement goes to Henry Kratz, the translator and editor, and to the University of Hawai‘i Press for reviving this account from history’s dustbins into the light of day and for speakers of English.
Kratz’s introduction begins,
Magellan’s expedition traversed the Pacific in the early sixteenth century, and his path around the world was followed by Sir Francis Drake and others, but the vast expanse of the South Seas remained terra incognita to Europeans for a long time thereafter. The lush palm-studded islands of Polynesia and Melanesia and the blazing atolls of Micronesia slumbered on for a couple of centuries, unseen by European eyes, unmolested by European guns, uncorrupted by European mores. While Luther defied Pope and Empire, while Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, while Louis XIV basked in the magnificence of Versailles, while England, France, Spain, Holland and Portugal divided up the American continents among themselves, indeed, while Washington’s army shivered at Valley Forge, the South Sea islanders continued to live in thatched huts and worship idols even as their ancestors had done for centuries before.
Who could have put it better?
Chamisso traces the path of the voyage via the Canary Islands to the coast of Brazil around Cape Horn to Chile to Easter Island before arriving in Kamchatka, Russia, in the summer of 1816. The ship provisioned there before sailing north to St. Lawrence Island and still farther north to what is now called Kotzebue Sound. The purpose of the voyage was to discover a northwest passage between the Arctic Circle and what is now Canada. The explorers had found only ice when, in the first days of September and with winter approaching, they turned back by way of what is now Unalaska Island in the Aleutian group before arriving in San Francisco, then under Spanish rule. It is only when the voyagers sail again westward to the “Sandwich Islands” that the heretofore mostly matter-of-fact narrative of dark seas, rock and ice turns to the lush greens and blues of the “South Seas.”
The expedition reached Hawai‘i in November 1816, thirty-seven years after the natives killed Captain Cook and during the last years of Chief Kamehameha’s rule. Hawaiian life would change radically after the chief’s death, with the kapu system abolished due to the influence of American missionaries. Chamisso, writing with the benefit of hindsight, states that he begged the captain to allow him to stay another year to gather fauna and flora and to record the culture and language before it became too late. Alas, Captain Kotzebue denied this request, and in mid-December, the ship departed for the Marshall Islands.
The trade winds rapidly swept them twenty-four hundred miles south-westward to the Radak atolls within a period of two weeks. They would sojourn in Radak for three and a half months, visiting Mejit, Wotje, Maloelap, Aur, Likiep, Ailuk and Utirik. Though the native peoples had probably experienced the occasional Spanish galleon or American whaler, the Rurik was the first ship of discovery containing an educated class prepared to record what they saw.
Here the narrative turns flowery with Chamisso’s descriptions of the “Radakians,” as he calls them:
Their own gentleness and goodness allowed them to have confidence in the more powerful strangers. We became friends without reservation. In them I found pure, uncorrupted customs, charm, grace, and the gracious bloom of modesty.
It was during this period that Louis Choris drew his romantic sketches of what he saw as an idyllic if isolated lifestyle. It was in the Radak chain that he met Kadu, “one of the finest characters I have met in my life, one of the people I have loved most….” Kadu, an Eastern Carolinian from Woleai, had drifted up in his proa and had settled among them. He quickly decided to join the Russian voyage and to abandon his two wives and daughter. The explorers headed north in the spring of 1816, provisioned at Unalashka (now Unalaska) and again attempted to locate the nonexistent northwest passage. However, foul weather and the captain’s ill health required that they abandon the attempt. They returned to Radak by way of Hawai‘i, where Kadu found that his wives had taken others during his absence. Citing love for his daughter as reason to stay, he relinquished his goal to return to his homeland and disembarked the ship for good.
The Rurik sailed on to Guam and Manila, where it underwent major repairs, and then returned home by way of the Cape of Good Hope.
In his introduction, Katz explains that Chamisso lived some twenty-one years after his return. His experiences aboard the Rurik provided a degree of prestige and allowed him employment as a botanist at the Schöneberg herbarium in Berlin. He married shortly thereafter. Toward the end of his life, his poetry became popular, and he published a complete edition of his poems in 1836. May history look kindly upon this first gentle soul who diligently recorded life aboard a brig that traveled the world. Its mission, a vain attempt to find what did not exist, may have failed. However, Chamisso’s humanity, and that of those aboard, has left us a solid and memorable record of what life ashore was like during that time.
Without doubt, one of the reasons I enjoyed this book so much is that I find myself, also late in life, reminiscing over the years I spent in these same picturesque atolls. Just over two hundred years have passed since that historic Russian voyage and nearly a quarter of that since I first stepped foot upon those shores as a young Peace Corps Volunteer. The adventures that, like Chamisso, I had amid these same charming people will last me the rest of my life, and I have felt a similar need to tell the story of what I experienced. See Man Shark: The Legends of Ḷainjin Book One at geraldrknight.com.
Von Chamisso, Adelbert. A Voyage Around the World with the Romanzov Exploring Expedition in the Years 1815–1818 in the Brig Rurik, Captain Otto von Kotzebue. Translated and edited by Henry Kratz. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1986.
Adelbert Von Chamisso was born on January 30, 1781, the son of a French nobleman who fled to Germany in 1792 “to escape the guillotine.” At fifteen he became a page to the Queen Consort of Frederick William II, and two years later, he entered military service and stayed behind when his parents returned to a more moderate France in 1800. He wrote verses, first in French and then in German, and published the Muses Almanac in 1804–1806. In 1812 he entered the University of Berlin to study nature, and in 1815, on a lark, he applied for the position of botanist aboard what would be the second Russian expedition of discovery around the world. Due to the ill health of a formerly appointed naturalist, he was granted the position on board the Rurik.
Chamisso published A Voyage Around the World with the Romanzov Exploring Expedition in the Years 1815–1818 in the Brig Rurik in 1836, only two years before his death and long after the captain of the voyage, Otto von Kotzebue, published his account in 1821. The painter on board, Louis Choris, had published his magnificent Voyage pittoresque autour du monde in 1822. Chamisso’s account is a work of nostalgia. He harkens back to a more exciting time in his life, when he bore the hardships he endured at sea through the eyes of a younger and healthier man. In his foreword, he frankly asks, “But will the dew not have evaporated from the flowers, will not their fragrance have blown away?” He must have written his account of this voyage from meticulous logs, as it appears as fresh today, over two hundred years later. Much acknowledgement goes to Henry Kratz, the translator and editor, and to the University of Hawai‘i Press for reviving this account from history’s dustbins into the light of day and for speakers of English.
Kratz’s introduction begins,
Magellan’s expedition traversed the Pacific in the early sixteenth century, and his path around the world was followed by Sir Francis Drake and others, but the vast expanse of the South Seas remained terra incognita to Europeans for a long time thereafter. The lush palm-studded islands of Polynesia and Melanesia and the blazing atolls of Micronesia slumbered on for a couple of centuries, unseen by European eyes, unmolested by European guns, uncorrupted by European mores. While Luther defied Pope and Empire, while Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, while Louis XIV basked in the magnificence of Versailles, while England, France, Spain, Holland and Portugal divided up the American continents among themselves, indeed, while Washington’s army shivered at Valley Forge, the South Sea islanders continued to live in thatched huts and worship idols even as their ancestors had done for centuries before.
Who could have put it better?
Chamisso traces the path of the voyage via the Canary Islands to the coast of Brazil around Cape Horn to Chile to Easter Island before arriving in Kamchatka, Russia, in the summer of 1816. The ship provisioned there before sailing north to St. Lawrence Island and still farther north to what is now called Kotzebue Sound. The purpose of the voyage was to discover a northwest passage between the Arctic Circle and what is now Canada. The explorers had found only ice when, in the first days of September and with winter approaching, they turned back by way of what is now Unalaska Island in the Aleutian group before arriving in San Francisco, then under Spanish rule. It is only when the voyagers sail again westward to the “Sandwich Islands” that the heretofore mostly matter-of-fact narrative of dark seas, rock and ice turns to the lush greens and blues of the “South Seas.”
The expedition reached Hawai‘i in November 1816, thirty-seven years after the natives killed Captain Cook and during the last years of Chief Kamehameha’s rule. Hawaiian life would change radically after the chief’s death, with the kapu system abolished due to the influence of American missionaries. Chamisso, writing with the benefit of hindsight, states that he begged the captain to allow him to stay another year to gather fauna and flora and to record the culture and language before it became too late. Alas, Captain Kotzebue denied this request, and in mid-December, the ship departed for the Marshall Islands.
The trade winds rapidly swept them twenty-four hundred miles south-westward to the Radak atolls within a period of two weeks. They would sojourn in Radak for three and a half months, visiting Mejit, Wotje, Maloelap, Aur, Likiep, Ailuk and Utirik. Though the native peoples had probably experienced the occasional Spanish galleon or American whaler, the Rurik was the first ship of discovery containing an educated class prepared to record what they saw.
Here the narrative turns flowery with Chamisso’s descriptions of the “Radakians,” as he calls them:
Their own gentleness and goodness allowed them to have confidence in the more powerful strangers. We became friends without reservation. In them I found pure, uncorrupted customs, charm, grace, and the gracious bloom of modesty.
It was during this period that Louis Choris drew his romantic sketches of what he saw as an idyllic if isolated lifestyle. It was in the Radak chain that he met Kadu, “one of the finest characters I have met in my life, one of the people I have loved most….” Kadu, an Eastern Carolinian from Woleai, had drifted up in his proa and had settled among them. He quickly decided to join the Russian voyage and to abandon his two wives and daughter. The explorers headed north in the spring of 1816, provisioned at Unalashka (now Unalaska) and again attempted to locate the nonexistent northwest passage. However, foul weather and the captain’s ill health required that they abandon the attempt. They returned to Radak by way of Hawai‘i, where Kadu found that his wives had taken others during his absence. Citing love for his daughter as reason to stay, he relinquished his goal to return to his homeland and disembarked the ship for good.
The Rurik sailed on to Guam and Manila, where it underwent major repairs, and then returned home by way of the Cape of Good Hope.
In his introduction, Katz explains that Chamisso lived some twenty-one years after his return. His experiences aboard the Rurik provided a degree of prestige and allowed him employment as a botanist at the Schöneberg herbarium in Berlin. He married shortly thereafter. Toward the end of his life, his poetry became popular, and he published a complete edition of his poems in 1836. May history look kindly upon this first gentle soul who diligently recorded life aboard a brig that traveled the world. Its mission, a vain attempt to find what did not exist, may have failed. However, Chamisso’s humanity, and that of those aboard, has left us a solid and memorable record of what life ashore was like during that time.
Without doubt, one of the reasons I enjoyed this book so much is that I find myself, also late in life, reminiscing over the years I spent in these same picturesque atolls. Just over two hundred years have passed since that historic Russian voyage and nearly a quarter of that since I first stepped foot upon those shores as a young Peace Corps Volunteer. The adventures that, like Chamisso, I had amid these same charming people will last me the rest of my life, and I have felt a similar need to tell the story of what I experienced. See Man Shark: The Legends of Ḷainjin Book One at geraldrknight.com.
Von Chamisso, Adelbert. A Voyage Around the World with the Romanzov Exploring Expedition in the Years 1815–1818 in the Brig Rurik, Captain Otto von Kotzebue. Translated and edited by Henry Kratz. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1986.
December 14, 2023
CALATORIE IN JURUL LUMII - Adelbert von Chamisso
“Aici începe călătoria de explorare și descoperiri a lui Rurik.
La 8 martie 1816 am ieșit din Golful Concepcion, iar la 19 iunie am intrat în Golful Avacea din Kamceatka . Timp de trei luni și 11 zile s-a aruncat ancora nu mai o data - pentru scurt timp pe Insula Paștelui.
Am luat contact cu băștinașii numai în treacăt pe insula Paștelui, în insula Penrhyn și în grupul Radak și n-am văzut alte uscaturi decât în cele enumerate mai sus “ (Din Chile in Kamceatka)
“Aici începe călătoria de explorare și descoperiri a lui Rurik.
La 8 martie 1816 am ieșit din Golful Concepcion, iar la 19 iunie am intrat în Golful Avacea din Kamceatka . Timp de trei luni și 11 zile s-a aruncat ancora nu mai o data - pentru scurt timp pe Insula Paștelui.
Am luat contact cu băștinașii numai în treacăt pe insula Paștelui, în insula Penrhyn și în grupul Radak și n-am văzut alte uscaturi decât în cele enumerate mai sus “ (Din Chile in Kamceatka)
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