Gerhard Friedrich Müller

Müller, one of the true founders of ethnography, was among many Germans recruited by Peter the Great to the scientific academy in St Petersburg, spending nearly 50 years in the country. He spent years mapping Siberia, and made prodigious efforts to write a scholarly history of Russia. He joined Bering’s second expedition to Siberia and Kamchatka, though he and his colleague Gmelin parted ways with it after a year. Pallas, Steller, Krasheninnikov and Amman were further scientific colleagues, and Linnaeus and Euler correspondents for decades. He visited Sloane in London, and had a damaging run-in with Lomonosov.