Travels in Kamtschatka, During the Years 1787 and 1788, Volume 1

In the summer of 1787, a young Frenchman named Jean-Baptiste de Lesseps embarked on one of the most arduous journeys in the known world: a solo traverse of the remote Kamchatka Peninsula, that vast and frozen extremity of the Russian Empire where few Europeans had ever ventured. This volume, published in 1790, records his extraordinary passage through a land of volcanoes and snow, across rivers swollen with snowmelt, through isolated ostrogs where the Kamtschadale people lived in ways unchanged for centuries. Lesseps had originally served as an interpreter aboard the expedition of Count de La Pérouse, but when the French frigates sailed without him, he found himself stranded on Russia's Pacific coast with no choice but to winter in Petropavlovsk and then undertake an epic overland journey to Europe. The result is a vivid, often startling portrait of a place that existed at the edge of the world: its brutal climate, its hot springs and frozen rivers, its seal-hunting people and fur-trading officials. Lesseps writes with the wonder of a man who knows he is witnessing something that may not survive the arrival of greater empires. This is travel writing as it once was: dangerous, transformative, and alive with the shock of the truly unknown.