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Lisyansky (Лисянский) Yuri Fyodorovich
(1773 — 1837)

Yuri Lisyansky was born into an aristocratic Ukrainian family and chosen as a young child for a naval career. He began it as a fifteen-year-old midshipman, when he saw intense military action during Russia’s war with Sweden. He was soon sent to England to learn naval skills and tactics. As a British seaman, he sailed in 1794 for North America where he fought the French from Nova Scotia to the West Indies. During 1795-1796 he traveled through the young United States, meeting George Washington in Philadelphia and visiting Savanna, Boston, and Halifax before returning to England in 1797. On an English vessel he sailed to the Cape of Good Hope and traveled several hundred miles into the African interior before sailing for Madras and Bombay in 1798. He returned to Russia in 1800 permanently affected by tropical illnesses and battle injuries.

In August 1802 Lisyansky was named co-commander of the first Russian voyage to circle the globe. Its purposes were to re-supply trading posts and missions in Alaska, to chart the North Pacific, and to collect scientific data. Lisyansky purchased two ships in London in September 1802 which were brought back to Russia for outfitting. They then sailed in August 1803, rounded Cape Horn, and reached Easter Island in the Pacific the following April. The expedition parted company at the Marquesas in the South Pacific, with Lisyansky heading northeast to Hawaii and Alaska and his companion northwest for China and Kamchatka.

Lisyansky stopped only about ten days in Hawaii in June 1804 before heading on to Kodiak Island in southwestern Alaska, where the expedition spent a month. In August 1805 it crossed to the Russian settlement at Sitka, in southeastern Alaska, for which Lisyansky had brought a shipload of supplies. After spending the autumn at Sitka, he crossed in November 1804 back to Kodiak to spend the winter and the spring of 1805. In June 1805 he returned to Sitka for the summer, leaving on September 1, 1805, for China. The expedition then traveled from Canton, across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope, arriving back in Europe in June 1806.

Although the round-the-world-voyage described here was the pinnacle of Lisyansky’s career, he returned from it in broken health. He was awarded an annual pension of three thousand rubles and in 1807 was put in charge of all the private yachts of the Tsar, but had to retire altogether in 1809. He devoted his remaining years to writing his account of the voyage and to private life, dying in 1837 at St. Petersburg.

Ukraine, 1998, Yuri Lisyansky, map

Ukraine, 1998.08.13, Kiev. Ship

Ukraine, 1998.08.13, Nezgin, Ship

Russia, 1998, 225th birth anniv of Lisyansky

Russia, 2003, Bicentenary of Kruzenstein and Lisyansky expedition

Ukraine, 1998, YuriLisyansky

USSR, 1973, Yuri Lisyansky