Bering sighted the St. Elias Mountains in Alaska on July 16, and the
scientist Georg Wilhelm Steller led a landing party. This feat is credited with
the "official" discovery by Russia and the first reliable information on the
land. Bering established Russia's claim to northwestern North America. Sailing
west past the Aleutian Islands, the St. Peter was wrecked on the shore of
Bering Island, which they mistook for the coast of Kamchatka.
On 17 September, the ship continued its journey westward, but
was plagued first by stormy conditions and then by calm weather. For a time
around 10 November, south of the Aleutians, it was driven almost helplessly by
storms, snow squalls, and hailstorms. About 15 November, the crew once again
spied land. In fair weather and under full sail, the ship and its
desperately-weakened crew were driven toward the coast with no one in command
and no one at the oars. It was close to a miracle that on the night of 17
November, the crew managed to drop anchor only 300 fathoms from a stretch of
beach on an otherwise inhospitable island. On the beach, the crew tried to dig
holes to create shelter. On 9 December, a storm hurled the St. Peter and the
rest of its food supplies (mostly wheat and oats) up on the beach. It was here
that Vitus Bering died in a primitive log shelter on
19 December 1741. He was 60 years old, tired, sick, and
defeated.
Remarkably, the remnants of the St. Peter’s crew of 77 managed
to survive the winter. In spring of 1742, they built a 40 foot boat from the
wreckage of the St. Peter. The newly-built
boat, was launched with
great difficulty on 19 August 1742. On 23 August, the crew was
ready to sail after they had raised a wooden cross over Vitus
Bering’s grave. On 6 September, the boat and the 46 survivors
arrived in Petropavlovsk on Kamchatka. All the crew had
managed to bring back from Alaska were some sea otter skins.
To the sailor's amazement, these pelts turned out to be immensely valuable to
the Chinese - a single pelt could be worth three times the yearly pay of a
sailor! When word spread that Bering's crew had garnered a high price for sea
otter pelts from the Aleutians, hundreds of men came to hunt in the wholesale
slaughter of sea otters. The adventurers inflicted violence and bloodshed on the
Aleut people, sometimes holding families hostage to force the men to help with
the slaughter.
Russian trappers and fur traders had already begun to take advantage of
Alaska's wealth of natural resources by 1784, when Grigory Shelikhov established
the first permanent colony at Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island.
By 1786 Shelikhov was the leading fur merchant in
the Aleutians but needed an able manager for his enterprises. He found one in
Aleksandr Andreyevich Baranov, a Siberian fur merchant, who arrived on Kodiak in
1791. He soon moved the settlement from Three Saints Bay to Pavlovsk, on the
northern side of the island, which had a better harbor and abundant forests to
provide wood for construction. Pavlovsk is now the town of Kodiak.
In 1794, Catherine the Great acceded to Shelikhov's request to establish an
Orthodox mission there. The arrival of priests and missionaries eased some of
the tensions between the merchants and the Alaska Natives who were their main
source of labor. From that point until Alaska was purchased by the United
States, church and state were inextricably intertwined. Today, Orthodox
Christianity plays a major role in the lives of many Alaska Natives and others
in the Southeast, Southwest, and South Central regions.
Shelikhov died in 1795. His
son-in-law and successor, Nikolay Petrovich Rezanov, obtained in 1799 a charter
from the Russian ruler, Tsar Paul I, that granted his company, the
Russian-American Company, a monopoly of the American fur trade. It empowered the
company to take possession of all territories already occupied by Russians north
of 55° north latitude and to establish new settlements not only in that area but
also to the south, provided this did not cause conflict with other powers.
Wholesale slaughter of fur seals, whales, sea otters and walruses ravaged
this side of Alaska's assets. Russians dominated the trade, though Spain,
France, and England also had a hand in the business and a foot in the state's
southern panhandle. Unregulated exploitation of the fur resources by rival
companies led to a serious depletion of accessible fur areas and the killing and
enslavement of the peaceful Aleut natives. This led to the chartering of the
Russian American Company in 1799 under the management of Aleksandr Baranov, an
administrator previously hired by Shelikhov. Baranov was granted a
monopoly on trade in the region and given governmental authority. Under his
rule, there was a period of about 20 years of order and systematic exploitation
of the fur resources.
Baranov built settlements in the Aleutians; the most
important, Novo-Arkhangel’sk (New Archangel) was built in 1799. In 1802 the
Tlingit attacked and destroyed the fort. Baranov returned in 1804 and, aided by
a Russian warship, defeated the Tlingit. He then rebuilt Novo-Arkhangel’sk 4.8
km (3 mi) to the south, where it grew to become the city of Sitka,
the capital of Russian America. Elegant onion domes and colorful, stylized icons
bear witness to the influence of some of Alaska's earliest settlers.
The directors of the company
retired Baranov in 1818. He sailed for Russia, but died at sea on the way. His
retirement came in the last years of the company’s charter and ushered in a
new phase in the development of Russian America. Russian naval officers
succeeded him. When the charter was renewed in 1821, it stipulated that the
chief managers, or governors as they came to be called, had to be naval
officers.
The navy improved the colony’s
administration, considerably enlarging the bureaucracy. But unlike Baranov,
the naval officers had little interest in business. Also, the Russian navy was
unable to stem the intrusion of British and Americans into Alaska. An attempt
by the tsar to forbid all foreign vessels within 160 km (100 mi) of
Russian-claimed lands was met with protests from the British and United States
governments.
The dispute with the United States
was settled by a convention of 1824 setting 54°40’ north latitude as the
southern boundary of Russian territory. Russia agreed with Britain in 1825
that Russian claims would extend eastward to the 141st meridian, southward to
the 56th parallel, and southward from there along a narrow strip of land (the
Panhandle) on the Pacific coast. Russia gave both powers the right to trade
along the Alaska coast for ten years. That ended Russian expansion in America.
After skirmishes in Southeastern
between Russians and the Hudson’s Bay Company, Russia in 1839 leased to
Hudson’s Bay the Southeastern mainland south of Cape Spencer for ten years for
a nominal rent. In return, Hudson’s Bay promised to supply Alaska and
Kamchatka with food and manufactured goods. The lease was renewed in 1849.
By the mid-1850s, Russia was unable to manage its territories. Economics of the
time and the Crimean war had disastrous effects on Russian domestic affairs.
This along with the disappearance of the sea otter and fur trade brought about
the end of the Russian period.
