AMERICA: THE FORGOTTEN FRONTIER
PROMYSHLENNIKI AND THE RUSSIAN FUR TRADE
Old Russian block house at Sitka, with “Baranov’s Castle” in background which burned in 1894.
The arrival of the first Europeans in Alaska, the Russians, grew largely out of their fur trading operations in Siberia. Trappers and traders called promyshlenniki began to extend European influence east from Moscow and Kiev toward Siberia in the late 1500s. For adventurers and entrepreneurs, Central Asia and Siberia represented the Russian frontier of the day, a land of opportunity similar to the American and Canadian frontiers of the 1700s and 1800s.
Like the American mountain men and French-Canadian voyageurs, the promyshlenniki sought furs that commanded dazzling prices in Europe and, especially, China. Sometimes they trapped the fur-bearing animals themselves; in Siberia sable was the most valuable. More often, they extracted tribute in the form of furs from the Asiatic tribes they encountered—distant relatives of the Native peoples they would later find in Alaska. This system, in which hostages were taken to enforce the tribute, later became a model for Russian operations in Alaska.
Pushing ever eastward as regions were trapped out, by the 1690s the promyshlenniki reached the Kamchatka Peninsula on Siberia’s Pacific coast. The imperial Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church extended their influence along trails and waterways opened up by these pioneers, especially during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great between 1689 and 1725. The tsarist government appointed agents to collect a 10 percent tax on the furs. In strategic places it established ostrogs, or citadels—fortified trading posts, which were isolated wilderness camps. In 1726, Okhotsk, Russia’s most important Pacific port until the early 1800s, was a tiny cluster of log sheds and dwellings, a chapel, and only 10 or 11 Russian households. (Later, St. Paul Harbor on Alaska’s Kodiak Island [founded in 1792] and New Archangel—today’s Stika, founded in 1804 and center of Russia’s American operations after 1808—were established as such remote outposts.)
In January 1725, shortly before his own death, Tsar Peter commissioned a naval expedition to explore Pacific waters north and east of Kamchatka. The emperor’s motives were more scientific and political than economic. He wanted to know if Asia and North America were joined by land, to determine the extent of Spain’s control in the Pacific, and to extend Russian power into the New World. But his order would have important economic consequences—it would inaugurate the Alaskan fur trade. Alaska’s European discovery was at hand.
FIRST CONTACTS: THE VOYAGES OF BERING AND CHIRIKOV
A sea otter. Drawing by John Webber, 1778.
Two ships set sail from the Siberian coast in June 1741 on an expedition commissioned by the Russian government. At the helm of the ill-fated St. Peter was Vitus Bering, a 60-year-old Danish captain who had served the tsar’s navy since he was 23. The St. Paul’s master and Bering’s second officer was Aleksei Chirikov. Aboard the St. Peter rode the temperamental but gifted German naturalist and physician Georg Wilhelm Steller; biologists still refer to “Steller’s sea lion,” “Steller’s jay,” “Steller’s eider,” and “Steller’s sea eagle” as a consequence of his fieldwork on the journey.
Bering had sailed these waters before. In 1728 he piloted the St. Gabriel through the strait that now bears his name, concluding that Asia and America were not joined. On that voyage, however, he never saw the fog-shrouded Alaska mainland. Disappointed when his findings were not deemed conclusive by European scientists or the Russian government, Bering successfully lobbied for the chance to lead another expedition.
On this second voyage, Bering and Chirikov lost contact in foul weather, never to meet again. Each maintained an eastward course, however, and in July both ships sighted southern Alaska. On July 16, Steller led a landing party on Kayak Island at Cape Saint Elias, just east of Prince William Sound. He quickly gathered a few plants and birds before being ordered back to the ship by Bering. Chirikov had sighted the islands of Southeast Alaska a day earlier, but the two small boats he sent ashore for fresh water never returned to the mother ship. Their fate has remained a mystery.
Their diets short on vitamin C, many of Bering’s crew became ill with scurvy—the captain included. Weak and exhausted by years of labor struggling with the imperial bureaucracy, Bering was anxious to get back to Kamchatka before the cold weather began. Instead of wintering in Alaska, as Steller advised, the explorer sailed for home. In heavy seas the St. Peter ran aground on a rocky island off the Siberian coast, since known as Bering Island. Twenty of the stranded sailors died of scurvy, including Bering, on December 8, 1741. Those remaining survived with Steller’s medical care and eventually built a 40-foot boat from the wreck of the St. Peter. They finally reached Kamchatka in the spring. Chirikov had already made a safe return in the previous October.
Bering’s voyage not only laid the basis for Russian claims to Alaska but also opened the fur trade. His crews brought back many pelts, among them 800 sea otter skins, more prized even than sable on Chinese markets because of their plush density. The fur-trading promyshlenniki immediately began to outfit trips to the Aleutians, and the fur rush was on. By the late 1700s—the era of Catherine the Great—the Russian fur trade became the richest fur enterprise in the world; a single sea otter skin might equal three times a man’s yearly income and profits were dazzling—100 percent on the average.
As for the otters, eventually they were hunted to near extinction—by the 1820s sea otters were scarce even as far south as Oregon and California. Harder hit was the “Steller’s sea cow,” which became extinct by 1768 because the fur traders had hunted them for food. Our only full description of the large, manatee-like beast is Steller’s.
IN THE RUSSIANS’ WAKE: BRITISH AND FRENCH EXPLORERS
The death of 21 French sailors in rip tides, Lituya Bay, 1786.
For decades following Bering’s 1741–42 expedition, Russia enjoyed uncontested control of Alaskan seas, and the lucrative fur trade remained a closely guarded secret. By the 1770s, however, the explorers of other nations began to penetrate the North Pacific. Spain was the first power to encounter Russia in the New World. But ultimately, Russia’s greatest challenge came from Britain and the new American republic.
In the late 1770s, British Captain James Cook sailed north under orders to find an ice-free passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Along the way he produced the first reliable charts of the Northwest Coast. (Cook’s best cartographer was the young William Bligh, later of Mutiny on the Bounty notoriety.)
In May 1778, Cook reached the bay since known as Cook Inlet, site of modern Anchorage, noting the region’s promise for the fur trade but doubting its value for Britain without discovery of a northern channel.
Searching for just such a passage, he sailed through the Bering Strait, but was stopped by ice in the Chukchi Sea. Turning southward, he charted the Aleutian Islands for two months. He then sailed for Hawaii where he was killed by Polynesian Natives.
Cook’s crew returned to Alaska in another futile search for the passage, and as they sailed for England via the China Sea made an astounding discovery. In Canton, they found that sea otter furs fetched astronomical prices. A ship’s officer wrote the “rage with which our seamen were possessed to return to Cook’s River (Cook Inlet) and buy another cargo of skins at one time was not far short of mutiny.”
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