Aleksei Ilyich Chirikov

About museum

Aleksei Ilyich Chirikov – a Russian nobleman, seafarer, captain-commander (1747). He was born on 13 December 1703 in the village of Luzhnoye (now in the Dubensky District of Tula Oblast). In 1715 he graduated from the Moscow Navigation School. In 1721 he graduated from the St. Petersburg Naval Academy, receiving the rank of under-lieutenant and an assignment to the Baltic Fleet of the Russian Armed Forces.  

In 1725 he was promoted to lieutenant and sent as an assistant to Vitus Jonassen Bering on the First Kamchatka Expedition (1725–1730). In 1733–1741 he was a participant and one of the leaders of the Second Kamchatka Expedition on the packet boats "Saint Peter" and "Saint Paul". On 15 July 1741 A. I. Chirikov, aboard the packet boat "Saint Paul", became the first European to reach the northwest coast of America.  

In 1746 he took part in compiling a map of Russian discoveries in the Pacific Ocean based on the results of the Kamchatka expeditions. From 1746 he served as director of the Naval Academy in Saint Petersburg. Chirikov was transferred to Moscow, where he headed the Moscow office of the Admiralty Board, but he soon died of tuberculosis and the effects of scurvy. He was married and had two sons and three daughters.