Ivan Petrov ( eng. Ivan Petrof / Petroff , 1824 [1] or 1842 [2] - 1896) is an American soldier, writer, translator and explorer of Alaska of Russian origin. His travel notes remain quoted and often the only information on the state of affairs in Alaska after its sale .
| Ivan Petrov | |
|---|---|
| English Ivan Petrof / Petroff | |
| Birth name | Ivan Ivanovich Petrov |
| Date of Birth | 1824 or 1842 |
| Place of Birth | St. Petersburg |
| Date of death | 1896 |
| A place of death | Philadelphia |
| Citizenship |  Russian Empire  USA |
| Occupation | research traveler , translator |
| Father | Ivan Petrov |
| Mother | Sophia Lanin / Lanen |
| Spouse | Emma Stanfield |
| Children | daughter Olga |
| Miscellaneous | explorer alaska |
In his honor are named Petrov Bay on the island of Kouyu ( southeastern Alaska ) and the Petrov Glacier on the Kenai Peninsula .
Content
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 Origin
- 1.2 In the USA
- 1.3 Alaska exploration
- 1.4 sunset career
- 2 memory
- 3 Proceedings
- 4 notes
- 5 Literature
- 6 References
Biography
Origin
Little is known about Petrov’s life, since he preferred not to talk about himself, and the information is contradictory.
He was born in St. Petersburg in the family of the military Ivan Petrov and his wife Sophia Lanin (or Lanen [3] ) [4] . At an early age, he lost his father, an officer who died in the Crimean War [3] . He entered the cadet school, hoping to build a military career, but thanks to his penchant for learning languages, he was transferred to the faculty of Oriental languages in order to become a military translator in the future [1] [2] . Due to poor health, he left the military field and took up the sciences.
At the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, Petrov helped compose the Sanskrit Dictionary to Professor Otton Nikolayevich Bötlingk [4] , and studied Sanskrit , Armenian antiquities and literature. In the years 1847-1848 he accompanied Professor Maria Ivanovich Brosse on a two-year expedition to Georgia and Armenia to study epigraphic monuments. To popularize the results of the study, Brosse sent Ivan Petrov to France with excerpts and articles from a report for the French scientific world. Petrov planned to stay to study the culture of the American peoples, to assist Professor St. Iler [2] , but did not get a seat and in the summer of 1861 boarded the ship to the USA [1] [3] .
In the USA
In the USA, Petrov first worked in the French-language newspaper Le Courier des Etats Unis . Then he enlisted in the army, rose to the rank of lieutenant, was wounded twice and awarded for courage. According to the stories of Petrov’s daughter, he enlisted in the army under the name John Mayer. This name, indeed, appears in the documents, noting “a 21-year-old Russian from St. Petersburg who recruited in 1863 as a volunteer and deserted a little over a year later in 1864 ” [4] . According to some documents, in 1867 Petrov was arrested on the island of Vancouver for secondary desertion [4] , but then was released and sent by an interpreter to the Kenai Peninsula to the old redoubt of St. Nicholas [3] to establish contact with the Russian-speaking population [1] . After the sale of Alaska, Ivan Petrov became a US citizen [5] .
Contemporaries described him as “a tall, thin blond, silent and restrained, but also a bright, intelligent and professional translator ” [3] . All his life, Petrov was filled with an adventure spirit [6] .
In 1865-1870 he worked in the Russian-American company in the Gulf of Cook [1] [2] . Since 1874, he collaborated with Hubert Hove Bancroft and became the author of the book " The History of Alaska from Bancroft" [1] .
In 1876, Ivan Petrov settled in San Francisco , married an American Emma Stanfield, who gave birth to a daughter Olga [4] .
By 1878, Petrov was a sought-after foreign journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle [4] . Readers of the newspaper in which he published notes on the Russian-Turkish war on his behalf convicted Petrov of misappropriating articles in European newspapers [3] , which undermined his reputation as a journalist in San Francisco [4] .
In 1878, Petrov translated travel notes of Russian travelers [7] , studied documents in Sitka , which, according to historian Terrence M. Cole, turned out to be fake [8] .
Alaska Exploration
Since 1880, Petrov was appointed Alaska Census Commissioner. In June, he sailed north from the shores of San Francisco to Pribylov , Aleutian , Shumagin islands, and on July 13 sailed a kayak along the Yukon River [3] .
Petrov traveled extensively in Alaska, visited places previously uncharted by Europeans, and later prepared the 189-page “ Report on the Population, Industry, and Resources” [9] of Alaska, published in 1884 [4] . At that time, no one knew exactly the size of Alaska, there were no roads, but only a few Indian trails, there were only two army posts (in Sitka and on Wrangel Island ), the post office came to Sitka once a month, there were no newspapers and municipal government [ 3] . In his work as a scribe, Petrov could only rely on himself, to listen to the words of the merchants, captains of whalers, clergy, and missionaries. For his tirelessness in overcoming vast distances by water and on foot, Petrov received the nickname "Hollow Legs" ( Eng. Hollow Legs ) [3] .
Petrov's contribution is determined by his ethnographic , botanical , zoological , geological records, and mapping . He showed ethnographic and linguistic abilities, developed his classification of local peoples, highlighting people of mixed origin - Creoles [10] . In total, Petrov covered a distance of 14 thousand kilometers on kayaks and kayaks , enumerated 33,426 people (430 Europeans, 1756 Creoles, 17617 Inuit , 2145 Aleuts , 3927 Atabascans of Alaska , 6763 Tlingit , 788 Haida ). The governor of Alaska in 1885-1889, Alfred P. Swiniferd Called Petrov the most qualified person in his position, and the historian Ted Hinckley ( Eng. Ted C. Hinkley ) put it this way [3] :
If Petrov had about a dozen competent workers and the best land and water vehicles, he could have done his job in five years.
A preliminary version of the report at number 40 was published at the beginning of 1881 and contained a general map of Alaska with the marked route of Petrov: Kodiak , Shumaginsky Islands , Sanak , Belkovsky , Unalashka , Unimak , Atka , Pribylova and St. Michael Islands . He also deviated from the route up the Yukon and Kuskokuim rivers [11] .
After 1880, Petrov lived in Kodiak , where in 1883-1887 he served as an assistant at customs. In 1890, he took over as head of the census in Alaska [3] .
Sunset Career
In 1892, during the census, he was invited as a translator to the US Department of State on the division of the territorial waters of the Bering Sea between the UK and the USA [12] . After preparing the documents, it turned out that Petrov translated the amended texts to please the United States [4] . This put an end to Petrov’s career and raised questions for his previous works [6] .
Ivan Petrov lived his life under the name of his mother in Pennsylvania , making a living with translations and short stories [3] . He died in 1896 under Philadelphia [3] .
Memory
Petrov Bay on the island of Kuyu ( southeastern Alaska ) and the Petrov Glacier on the Kenai Peninsula are named after Ivan Petrov [13] .
Whatever the attitude towards Ivan Petrov, his travel notes remain quoted and often the only information about the state of affairs in Alaska after its sale. Ivan Petrov himself was certainly a talented person who did a titanic work [3] .
Proceedings
- Journal of a trip to Alaska ( English Journal of a Trip of Alaska ), 1878.
- Map of Alaska and surrounding regions ( English Map of Alaska and Adjoining Regions ), 1880.
- Map of Alaska and surrounding regions ( English Map of Alaska and Adjoining Regions ), 1882.
- Report on the Population, Industry, and Resources of Alaska ( English Report on the Population, Industries, and Resources of Alaska ) in 8 volumes, 1884.
- Petrov's documents : letters, Bancroft library.
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 5 6 Alexey Postnikov, Marvin Falk. Exploring and Mapping Alaska: The Russian America Era, 1741-1867 / Lydia Black . - University of Alaska Press, 2015 .-- T. 17 .-- S. 453. - 525 p. - (Historical translation series).
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 Richard A. Pierce. New Light on Ivan Petroff, Historian of Alaska // The Pacific Northwest Quarterly. - University of Washington, 1968. - No. 1 . - S. 1-10 .
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Laurel, Bill. Alaska's Misterious First Census-Taker . - Aunt Phil's Trunk: Bringing Alaska's history alive !. - Publication Consultants, 2016 .-- 336 p.
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Explorers of Katmai Country: Ivan Petroff (1842-1896) - Katmai National Park & Preserve (US National Park Service ) . www.nps.gov. Date of treatment September 5, 2017.
- ↑ Stuart Banner. Alaska . - Possessing The Pacific. - Harvard University Press, 2009 .-- S. 300 .-- 400 p.
- ↑ 1 2 A Special Agent's Treachery: False Information Incorporated , New York Times (11/14/1892).
- ↑ John S. Galbraith. Bibliography . - Hudson's Bay Company, 1821-1869. - University of California Press, 1957. - T. 1. - 974 p.
- ↑ Walter R. Borneman. Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land . - Zondervan, 2009 .-- S. 117 .-- 640 p.
- ↑ Ivan Petroff. Population and Resources of Alaska: Letter from the Secretary of the Interior, Transmitting a Preliminary Report Upon the Population, Industry, and Resources of Alaska / United States. Dept. of the Interior. - US Government Printing Office. - T. 40 .-- 86 p. - (House executive document).
- ↑ Paul Schor. The First American Census of Alaska: Appropriation of the Territory and Assignation of Natives by Statistics . - Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation. - Oxford University Press, 2017 .-- 320 p.
- ↑ Baker, Marcus. Petrof, 1880 . - Geographic Dictionary of Alaska. - US Government Printing Office, 1906. - S. 55. - 690 p.
- ↑ The North American Review Volume 0161 Issue 469 (December 1895) . ebooks.library.cornell.edu. Date of appeal September 12, 2017.
- ↑ Ulysses Sherman Grant, Daniel F. Higgins (jr.). Petrof Glacier . - Coastal Glaciers of Prince William Sound and Kenai Peninsula, Alaska. - US Government Printing Office, 1913. - S. 66. - 75 p.
Literature
- Foster, John Watson. Diplomatic Memoirs . - Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909. - T. II. - S. 40–41.
- Haycox, Stephen. Alaska: An American Colony . - University of Washington Press, 2006 .-- S. 183.
- Sherwood, Morgan B. The enigmatic Ivan Petroff // Exploration of Alaska 1865-1900. - Yale University Press (reprint. The University of Alaska Press 1992), 1965 .-- S. 59.
- Richard A. Pierce New Light on Ivan Petroff, Historian of Alaska // The Pacific Northwest Quarterly. - University of Washington, 1968. - January ( No. 1 ). - S. 1-10 .
Links
- Ehler, Landis. Explorers of Katmai Country: Ivan Petroff (1842–1896) . National Park Service blog .
- A special agent's treachery . New York Times (November 14, 1892).
- Richard A. Pierce . New Light on Ivan Petroff, Historian of Alaska , The Pacific Northwest Quarterly .