Ferdinand Petrovich Wrangell, a famous Russian navigator, traveller, and scientist-geographer, was born in 1796 in a family of a hereditary nobleman. His parents died when he was a little child and the boy was brought up by the closest relatives. In 1810 Ferdinand became a student of a naval college. After graduation in 1815 Wrangell got the warrant officer’s status and a job of watchman officer at the same time. When the famous Russian navigator-expeditor V.M. Golovin was organizing one of his expeditions, Wrangell went to St. Petersburg where he managed to be accepted as a crew member of the sloop “Kamchatka”. Ferdinand committed his first around-the-world cruise to Russian America in 1817-1819, and returned to Russia with the lieutenant rank and St. Anna’s order of the 2nd category. The newly obtained experience and knowledge let the young officer head the Kolyma detachment of an expedition devoted to a research of some area in Siberia which returned to St. Petersburg in 1824. Then Ferdinand Wrangell was rewarded with the order of St. Vladimir of the 4th category, and soon he happened to visit Kamchatka and Russian America again. In 1825 the navigator headed a Russian around-the-world expedition on the sloop “Krotkiy” which brought him the status of the second rank captain the St. Anna’s order of the 2nd category. In December of that year Ferdinand was also accepted as a member-correspondent of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and this period of life turned to be very productive for Wrangell – he acted as not only a great organizer but also a researcher. The scientific material he managed to gather teemed with valuable geographic and ethnographic data. Moreover, Wrangell was famous as a scientist outside Russia as well: in 1837 the British geographic society chose him to be a member-correspondent in their organization. Together with Fyodor Litke and Karl Ber, Ferdinand Wrangell was a founder of the Russian geographic society. In 1859 Wrangell was appointed to be the director of the Department of civil affairs, but he had to leave this position due to his health was getting worse. In 1864 he left for his country estate in Estonia and died there in 1870. An island in the Chuckchee Sea, several bays, straits in the northern sea way, functioning up to nowadays, were named after Ferdinand Wrangell. Note: Russian America is an informal name of Russian possessions in North America in the 18th-19th centuries (Alaska, part of the northern California, and the Aleutian Islands), explored by Russian travellers and sold to the United States of America in 1867. Source:
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Lavrentyeva Natalya