Joseph Kopeć was a Polish general who took part in the resistance to the Russian annexation in Kościuszko Uprising (1791–1795). After being wounded in battle against the Russian army in 1792, he was imprisoned and sent into exile to Kamchatka. He travelled through Siberia to the port of Okhotsk and then to Bolsheretsk in Kamchatka where he met two Kamchadales who took part in Benyowsky’s mutiny at Bolsheretsk and in his famous escape to Macao. Finally, in 1994 Kopeć reached Nizhne-Kamchatsk after being shipwrecked on Simushir, one of the Kurile Islands. While in Kamchatka, he became friends with with Vasili Olesov, a Russian ship’s captain who presented Kopeć a copy of a map he had made of Asia and Northwestern America. Kopeć published the diary of his perigrinations in 1837 in Wroclaw and then again in 1863 in Berlin (this edition was accompanied with a map with his itinerary).

The manuscript is preserved in the Czartoryski’s Library in Cracow, but the map itself is missing. According to the staff of the National Library in Warsaw, the manuscript map (in two versions) was found in 1970 in the cellars of the library in a package comprising a number of German maps. How this block of maps found it’s way to Warsaw during or just after World War II remains a mystery. Unfortunately, both maps disappeared from the National Library in the following years. I was fortunate enough to order it’s microfilms about forty years ago and my remarks on both manuscript maps in the presented article are based on the contents of the above mentioned microfilms. I have reconstructed both maps in their original dimensions (1500 x 1000 mm) and presented them as a gift to the Central Maritime Museum in Gdańsk.