Fyodor Petrovich Litke

Count Fyodor Petrovich Litke (Russian: Граф Фёдор Петро́вич Ли́тке, born Friedrich Benjamin Lütke; 28 September [O.S. 17 September] 1797 – 20 August [O.S. 8 August] 1882) was a Russian navigator, geographer, and Arctic explorer. He became a count in 1866, and an admiral in 1855. He was a Corresponding Member (1829), Honorable Member (1855), and President (1864) of the Russian Academy of Science in St.Petersburg. He was also an Honorable Member of many other Russian and foreign scientific establishments, and a Corresponding Member of the French Academy of Science in Paris.

Count Friedrich Lütke (Russified in Fyodor or Fedor Litke) came from a family of Baltic Germans. Count Litke’s grandfather was Johann F. Lütke, a German Lutheran preacher and writer on physical science and theology. In 1745, Johann Lütke went from Germany to Moscow as pastor of a Lutheran parish in order to spread Protestantism to Russia and Baltic provinces. As a youth, Fyodor attended a Lutheran German-speaking school. His maternal language was German and he always spoke Russian with a German accent. He remained a practicing Lutheran.

A book, in English, about Fyodor P. Litke, published in 1996 by The University of Alaska, entitled Fedor Petrovich Litke by A.I. Alekseev, , is a 262-page biography of this 19th-century Russian scientist. This book was originally published in Russian in Moscow in 1970.

Litke started his naval career in the Imperial Russian Navy in 1813. He took part in Vasily Golovnin's world cruise on the ship "Kamchatka" from 1817 to 1819, where one of his cremates was Ferdinand Wrangel. Then from 1821 to 1824, Litke led the expedition to explore the coastline of Novaya Zemlya, the White Sea, and the eastern parts of the Barents Sea. From August 20, 1826 to August 25, 1829, he headed the world cruise on the ship "Senyavin", sailing from Kronstadt and rounding Cape Horn. At the beginning, he was accompanied from Copenhagen and the Baltic Sea by Capt. Staniukovich who was in command of the sloop Möller. The scientific team included Heinrich von Kittlitz (ornithologist), Karl Heinrich Mertens (botanist) and Alexander Postels (mineralogist).

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