Struck: [St. Petersburg], 1806.
Description: bronze medal, 38 x 28 mm.
Condition: extremely fine.

Awarded by Alexander I to the Krusenstern voyage participants

An unusually fine example of the rare medal struck for the successful voyage of Krusenstern on the Nadezhda and Lisyansky on the Neva to the Pacific, the first Russian circumnavigation.

Although dispatched chiefly to establish diplomatic ties with Japan – with little success – the voyage is now studied more closely for its important survey of the Pacific, most notably the time spent at Nuka Hiva and in Hawaii in 1804, and for the voyage made by the Neva to the Northwest from their base in Kodiak, Alaska.

Russian ambitions for the Pacific had been rattling around St. Petersburg since the time of Peter the Great, but all of the plans were repeatedly shelved, most famously the proposed expedition of Grigory Mulovksy and Cook voyage veteran James Trevenen, who had hoped to sail in the late 1780s but were thwarted by the renewed outbreak of the Russo-Swedish War.

Krusenstern had sailed with Mulovsky as a young officer and spent some six years serving in the Royal Navy in the 1790s as his own apprenticeship in such ambitious voyaging, but it was only the accession of Emperor Alexander I in 1801 that brought the plan to fruition. Much in the manner of many of his peers (George III and Cook; Louis XVI and La Pérouse; Napoleon and Baudin), it was Alexander’s personal interest in the plan which finally got the project begun in earnest, although a rival proposal by Rezanov and the Russian-American Company complicated matters significantly, especially as the Company was near bankrupt in 1802. After much political wrangling the Krusenstern and Rezanov proposals were combined into an overly ambitious plan that would seek to simultaneously open up Pacific trade and seek a Japanese treaty. At the same time a smaller second ship commanded by Lisyansky, the Neva, was commissioned with serious scientific ambitions that were effectively destroyed when he ended up serving as a Russian gunboat on the American coast, famously at the Battle of Sitka. Lisyansky would become a stern critic of the Russian colonial government.

As was often the case with such medals the two sides are executed by different artists. Here, the obverse portrait of the Emperor was apparently by Vasily Bezrodny (1783—after 1859) while the reverse, featuring the depiction of the Nadezhda, was by the better-known Carl Leberecht (1749—1827) who was the German-born Chief Medallist to the Russian Court at St. Petersburg.

Silver examples are known (in Greenwich, for example), but either version does seem to be very rare in commerce. The presumption is that the silver medal was given to higher ranking officers and sailors, the bronze to the rest of the crew, but I have not seen this confirmed. The reported number of officers and crew on both ships was only 129, which may explain the medal’s scarcity.

References: Diakov, Medals of the Russian Empire, 305.1; Howgego; Royal Museums Greenwich (online); Smirnov (1908), 353/a.