Fedor Plenisner

[close] Colonel Fedor Plenisner (d. c.1778) was a Latvian explorer and official in Russian service. He was born in Courland.

From 1730 to 1735 he served in the Life Guards Cavalry in the rank of corporal. In 1737, he was sent to the port of Okhotsk, where in 1738 he was appointed as a subofficer to the expedition of Vitus Bering. In 1741, in the packet boat St. Peter, he sailed to the northwest coast of America and spent the winter on Bering Island, where he came to the conclusion that many thousands of years ago, a great isthmus had connected the old and new continents. During the expedition, he made sketches of the coast from Okhotsk to Petropavlovsk and the Gulf of Alaska and made illustrations of marine animals and fish. In 1742 he returned to Kamchatka.

Plenisner was later seconded to an expedition which surveyed the Aleutian Islands and the Alaskan Peninsula in 1762. In 1764, he was appointed Commander of the Okhotsk region. In February 1772, he appeared before a tribunal in Irkutsk to account for his failure to report the mass escape from Bolsheretsk in Kamchatka led by the Hungarian adventurer, Maurice Benyokszky. He was found to have been negligent and relieved of his post.

He retired to Tobolsk and then, in 1776, to St. Petersburg, where he died.