Briefly about G.F.Muller

Gerhard Friedrich Muller. Voyages et decouvertes faites par les Russes le long des cotes de la mer Glaciale & sur l'ocean oriental. 2 vols. Amsterdam, 1766.

Gerhard Friedrich Muller was born in Herford [sic], Westphalia, in 1705, and died in Moscow in 1783. A brilliant student of history, he came to Russia in 1725 and became a lecturer at the Academy in St. Petersburg. By 1731 he was a professor and conference secretary in the Academy of Sciences. Muller accompanied Johann Georg Gmelin on his great overland scientific expedition to Siberia (1733-43). The Academy of Sciences tasked Muller with describing the history of those peoples encountered on the expedition and making observations on their religion, social order, customs, commerce, military and political institutions, languages, costumes, and the regions in which they dwelt. Although he had to leave the expedition in 1738 because of illness, he remained in Siberia and continued his research in the archives of more than twenty cities, assembling a massive amount of documentation on earlier explorations. The materials he brought back to St. Petersburg included original documents, records, and sundry artifacts sufficient to sustain his writing about Siberia for the following thirty-five years. His exhaustive nine-volume Sammlung russischer Geschichte established Muller as the leading Russian historian of his era. His works on Siberia contain invaluable information about the political structure and economic potential of the region that other contemporary accounts lacked.

The full title of this two-volume work is Voyages and Discoveries Made by the Russians along the Coasts of the Arctic Sea and the Eastern Ocean, toward Japan as well as America: in Addition, the History of the Amur River and Adjacent Lands Since the Russian Conquest: with the New Map Which Presents These Discoveries and the Course of the Amur, Based on Authentic Memoirs published by the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, & There Corrected. The work originally was published in Russian in 1758 in ten issues of the monthly journal Ezhemesiachnyia sochineniia. It was translated into English and published in London in 1761 and 1764. The German version appeared in Muller's Sammlung russischer Geschichte. The French translation presented here appeared in 1766.

Muller dedicated the work to Peter the Great, writing:

Without you it would not exist. The discoveries with which it is filled are the happy fruit of the great visions that constantly occupied your soul. Benefactor, Father, Creator of your immense Empire.

The first several pages of the book continue in this vein, praising Peter I for assuming responsibility for the exploration of the vast unknown reaches of Siberia and the Far East for the universal benefit of human knowledge. The work chronologically traces the history of sea and land expeditions from the early seventeenth century down to Muller's contemporaries. This concise yet detailed chronicle provides insights into the missions, accomplishments, and failures of the various expeditions, particularly Bering's voyage to America in 1741-42.