H.H. Keyserling (1866–1944), also known as Count Henry Hugo Keyserling or The Whaler, was part of the noble

Baltic German Baltic Germans ( or , later ) are Germans, ethnic German inhabitants of the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, in what today are Estonia and Latvia. Since Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–1950), their resettlement in 1945 after the end ...

Keyserlingk family dating back to the 12th century. (The Keyserlingk surname frequently appears as Keyserling and sometimes as Kejzerling.) His complete name was Heinrich Jeannot Otto Hugo Eugen von Keyserlingk. H.H. Keyserling was born in what today is the Baltic country of

Lithuania Lithuania, officially the Republic of Lithuania, is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, bordered by Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, P ...

. He inherited the family estate, called Staniuny, after his older brother, Eugen, who had first rights, declined the estate. After graduating in 1888 from the Imperial Russian Naval Academy in St. Petersburg, Henry joined the Imperial Navy and served in the Pacific. In 1892 he left the navy and learned whaling while working incognito as a sailor aboard a Norwegian whaling ship. Keyserling subsequently negotiated a whaling concession with Korea. He also negotiated a 21-year whaling concession with Russia covering various areas of the Siberian coastline. Keyserling operated his whaling business from the late 1800s until the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, when his ships were captured by Japan and he received no compensation. In 1906 he founded a company in

Vladivostok Vladivostok ( ; , ) is the largest city and the administrative center of Primorsky Krai and the capital of the Far Eastern Federal District of Russia. It is located around the Zolotoy Rog, Golden Horn Bay on the Sea of Japan, covering an area o ...

called the Pacific Ocean Shipping Company (also known as Steam Navigation of H.H. Keyserling) that carried freight and passengers from Vladivostok to the

Kamchatka peninsula The Kamchatka Peninsula (, ) is a peninsula in the Russian Far East, with an area of about . The Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk make up the peninsula's eastern and western coastlines, respectively. Immediately offshore along the Pacific ...

and places in between. Keyserling is believed to have owned between 5 and 10 steamships at the beginning of World War I. Two of his ships are known to have been named Oleg and Georg. During the

Bolshevik revolution The October Revolution, also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution (in Soviet historiography), October coup, Bolshevik coup, or Bolshevik revolution, was the second of two revolutions in Russia in 1917. It was led by Vladimir L ...

Keyserling had his steamships requisitioned by Russia without compensation.Tønnessen, Johan Nicolay and Johnsen, Arne Odd, ''History of Modern Whaling'', University of California Press, pp. 132, 263, 1982.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Keyserling, H.H. 1866 births 1944 deaths Baltic-German people from the Russian Empire People in whaling