Fyodor Litke

Fyodor Litke

Count Fyodor Petrovich Litke (Russian: Граф Фёдор Петро́вич Ли́тке), born Friedrich Benjamin Lütke, (28 September 1797 – 28 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 Fyodor (or Fedor) P. Litke came from a family of Russianized 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. As a youth, Fyodor attended a Lutheran school and learned German, the language of his ancestors. 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, ISBN 0-912006-86-2, 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. 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 Cronstadt and rounding Cape Horn. He was accompanied in his venture by Capt. Mikhail Nikolaievich Staniukovich who was in command of the sloop Moller. During this voyage he described the western coastline of the Bering Sea, the Bonin Islands off Japan, and the Carolines, discovering 12 new islands.

In 1835 Fyodor Litke was appointed by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia as tutor of his second son, Grand Duke Constantine Nicholaievich of Russia.

Litke was the first one to come up with the idea of a recording tide measurer (1839). They were built and installed along the coastlines of the Arctic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean in 1841. Litke was one of the organizers of the Russian Geographic Society and its president in 1845–1850 and 1857–1872. He was appointed Chairman of the Naval Scientific Committee in 1846. Litke was a commander-in-chief and a military governor of the ports of Reval (today's Tallinn) and later Kronstadt in 1850–1857. In 1855, Litke became a member of the Russian State Council (Государственный совет in Russian; a legislative entity that predated the Duma, which came into existence only on 1906).

In 1873, Russian Geographical Society introduced the Litke gold medal. A cape, peninsula, mountain and bay in Novaya Zemlya, as well as a group of islands in Franz Josef Land, Baydaratskaya Bay, and the Nordenskiöld Archipelago and a strait between Kamchatka and Karaginsky Island, as well as two Russian icebreakers were named after him.