Ob Issledovanii Yuzhnykh Polyarnykh Stran: Pismo G. Mori Russkomu Poslanniku v Soyedinyonnykh Shtatakh Severnoi Ameriki [About the Research of South Polar Regions: A Letter of Mr. Maury to the Russian

£8,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Very rare: this parallel Russian-English publication was issued in just a handful of copies by the Russian Imperial Navy. American oceanographer and naval officer, Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806-73), provides the “the first ever proposal for international cooperation in polar research. Maury’s initiative also prompted the first ever international correspondence about polar cooperation, fourteen years before Carl Weyprecht launched his better known proposal” (Bulkeley). Dated “Observatory, Washington, 10th April 1861” (just two days before the beginning of the American Civil War), and addressed to Eduard Guillaume Baron de Stoeckl (1804-1892), then the Ambassador of the Russian Empire to the United States, the letter implores Stoeckl (and thus Russia) to take part in the organization of a joint exploratory expedition to the Antarctic, to “unbar the gates of the South.” Drawing on the results of his two-decade analysis of data concerning weather, winds and currents provided by numerous American and international naval and merchant ships, Maury believed that “the Antarctic winter is by no means as severe as that of the Arctic … No explorer has yet tried the Antarctic winter. There is, my investigations lead me to believe, no great difference between it and the Antarctic summer, and the erroneous impression that has fastened itself upon the public mind as to the extreme severity of winter about the South Pole has no doubt its root in the low summer temperatures that prevail there.”

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