3-006-175 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

The caloches inhabitants of Sitka Island (northwest coast of America), 19th century. One of 65 lithographs that were included in the volume of maps published after the round-the-world voyage of the corvette Seniavin commissioned by Tsar Nicholas I and carried out in 1826-29 under the command of Captain Fedor Litke (the Russian version of the name of Count Friedrich Lu¨tke, a Baltic German). The expedition began in Kronstadt (the main imperial Russian naval base near Saint Petersburg where Russian circumnavigations typically began and ended); it then traveled around Cape Horn to the Pacific Ocean. This voyage was one of many Russian scientific naval surveys in the first part of the 19th century.