A Voyage to St. Petersburg

In the summer of 1850 Benjamin Eastman, a sixteen-year old boy from New York City, is asked by his clergyman father to deliver a bundle of books to cousins in St. Petersburg, Russia. It will be his first time away from home. He boards the sailing vessel Chicora in Boston, and on his first day at sea he opens a letter from his mother in which are her prayers and hopes for her eldest son's safe return. Benjamin records the details of the voyage in a journal, which includes the ship's daily positions and weather. As the ship enters European waters there is much to see- islands, headlands, castles, ships of all descriptions, and lighthouses. Finally, Benjamin encounters the bewildering formalities faced by foreigners entering Imperial Russia. The book includes a letter Benjamin Eastman wrote in 1856 to his younger brother in New York. In it he describes a voyage in the ship Nazarene in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.