Baron Ferdinand Friedrich Georg Ludwig von Wrangel (, tr. ; – ) was a Baltic German explorer and officer in the Imperial Russian Navy, Honorable Member of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, a founder of the Russian Geographic Society. He is best known as chief manager of the Russian-American Company, in fact governor of the Russian settlements in present-day Alaska. In English texts, Wrangel is sometimes spelled Vrangel, a transliteration from Russian, which more closely represents its pronunciation in German, or Wrangell. Biography Wrangel was born in Pskov, into the noble Baltic German Wrangel family and was a distant nephew of Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich von Wrangel. He graduated from the Naval Cadets College in 1815. He participated in Vasily Golovnin's world cruise on the ship Kamchatka in 1817–1819 and belonged to the cohort of Baltic-German navigators who were instrumental in Imperial Russia's maritime explorations. Kolymskaya expedition He was appointed in 1820 to command the Kolymskaya expedition to explore the Russian polar seas. Sailing from St. Petersburg, he arrived at Nizhnekolymsk on 2 November 1820, and early in 1821 journeyed to Cape Shelagskiy on sledges drawn by dogs. He sailed afterward up Kolyma River, advancing about 125 miles into the interior, through territory inhabited by the Yakuts. On 10 March 1822, he resumed his journey northward, and traveled 46 days on the ice, reaching 72° 2' north latitude. He left Nizhnekolymsk on 1 November 1823, and returned to St. Petersburg on 15 August 1824. He established that north of the Kolyma River and Cape Shelagsky there was an open sea, not dry land, as people thought. Together with Fyodor Matyushkin and P. Kuzmin, Wrangel described the Siberian coastline from the Indigirka River to the Kolyuchinskaya Bay in the Chukchi Sea. (See Northeast Passage.) His expedition made a valuable research in glaciology, geomagnetics, and climatology and also collected data about natural resources and native population of that remote area. Krotky world voyage Having been promoted to commander, Wrangel led the Russian world voyage on the ship Krotky in 1825–1827. Governor of Russian Alaska He was appointed chief manager of the Russian-American Company in 1829, effectively governor of its settlements in North America (present day Alaska). Wrangel was the first of a series of bachelor appointees to the office of governor who had to find a wife before assuming the duties in America, the Russian American Company rules having been changed in 1829.