Russian America

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Anatol
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Joined: Sun Apr 12, 2009 2:13 pm

Russian America

Post by Anatol » Mon Apr 11, 2022 8:25 pm

Now few people know that in the 18th century a fairly large part of the North American continent belonged to Russia.
Russian America (Russian: Русская Америка) was the name for the Russian Empire's colonial possessions in North America from 1799 to 1867. It consisted mostly of present-day Alaska in the United States, but also included small outposts in California, including Fort Ross, and three forts in Hawaii, including Russian Fort Elizabeth. Settlements were concentrated in Alaska, including the capital, Novo-Arkhangelsk (New Arkhangelsk), which is now Sitka.
In 1648 Semyon Dezhnev sailed from the mouth of the Kolyma River through the Arctic Ocean and around the eastern tip of Asia to the Anadyr River. One legend holds that some of his boats were carried off course and reached Alaska. However, no evidence of settlement survives. Dezhnev's discovery was never forwarded to the central government, leaving open the question of whether or not Siberia was connected to North America.
In 1725, Emperor Peter the Great called for another expedition. As a part of the 1733–1743 Second Kamchatka expedition, the Sv. Petr under the Dane Vitus Bering and the Sv. Pavel under the Russian Alexei Chirikov set sail from the Kamchatkan port of Petropavlovsk in June 1741. They were soon separated, but each continued sailing east.
On 15 July, Chirikov sighted land, probably the west side of Prince of Wales Island in southeast Alaska. He sent a group of men ashore in a longboat, making them the first Europeans to land on the northwestern coast of North America.
On roughly 16 July, Bering and the crew of Sv. Petr sighted Mount Saint Elias on the Alaskan mainland; they turned westward toward Russia soon afterward. Meanwhile, Chirikov and the Sv. Pavel headed back to Russia in October with news of the land they had found.
In November Bering's ship was wrecked on Bering Island. There Bering fell ill and died, and high winds dashed the Sv. Petr to pieces. After the stranded crew wintered on the island, the survivors built a boat from the wreckage and set sail for Russia in August 1742. Bering's crew reached the shore of Kamchatka in 1742, carrying word of the expedition. The high quality of the sea-otter pelts they brought sparked Russian settlement in Alaska.
Beginning in 1743, small associations of fur-traders began to sail from the shores of the Russian Pacific coast to the Aleutian islands.
As word spread of the potential riches in furs, competition among Russian companies increased. Catherine the Great, who became Empress of Russia in 1763, proclaimed goodwill toward the Aleuts and urged her subjects to treat them fairly. On some islands and parts of the Alaska Peninsula, groups of traders had been capable of relatively peaceful coexistence with the local inhabitants. Other groups could not manage the tensions and committed acts of violence. The growing competition between the trading companies, merging into fewer, larger and more powerful corporations, created conflicts that aggravated the relations with the indigenous populations.
As the animal populations declined, the Aleuts, already too dependent on the new barter-economy fostered by the Russian fur-trade, were increasingly coerced into taking greater and greater risks in the highly dangerous waters of the North Pacific to hunt for more otter. As the Shelekhov-Golikov Company of 1783-1799 developed a monopoly.
Though the Alaskan colony was never very profitable because of the costs of transportation, most Russian traders were determined to keep the land for themselves. In 1784 Grigory Ivanovich Shelekhov, who later set up the Russian-American Company that developed into the Alaskan colonial administration, arrived in Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island with two ships, the Three Saints (Russian: Три Святителя) and the St. Simon. Having established his authority on Kodiak Island, Shelekhov founded the second permanent Russian settlement in Alaska (after Unalaska, permanently settled since 1774) on the island's Three Saints Bay.
In 1790 Shelekhov, back in Russia, hired Alexander Andreyevich Baranov to manage his Alaskan fur-enterprise. Baranov moved the colony to the northeast end of Kodiak Island, where timber was available. The site later developed as what is now the city of Kodiak. Russian colonists took Koniag wives and started families whose surnames continue today, such as Panamaroff, Petrikoff, and Kvasnikoff. In 1795 Baranov, concerned by the sight of non-Russian Europeans trading with the natives in southeast Alaska, established Mikhailovsk six miles (10 km) north of present-day Sitka. He bought the land from the Tlingit, but in 1802, while Baranov was away, Tlingit from a neighboring settlement attacked and destroyed Mikhailovsk. Baranov returned with a Russian warship “Neva”(captain Lisyansky Y.F.) and razed the Tlingit village. He built the settlement of New Archangel (Russian: Ново-Архангельск) on the ruins of Mikhailovsk. It became the capital of Russian America – and later the city of Sitka.
As Baranov secured the Russians' settlements in Alaska, the Shelekhov family continued to work among the top leaders to win a monopoly on Alaska's fur trade. In 1799 Shelekhov's son-in-law, Nikolay Petrovich Rezanov, had acquired a monopoly on the American fur trade from Emperor Paul I. Rezanov formed the Russian-American Company. As part of the deal, the Emperor expected the company to establish new settlements in Alaska and to carry out an expanded colonisation programme.
By 1804, Baranov, now manager of the Russian–American Company, had consolidated the company's hold on fur trade activities in the Americas following his suppression of the local Tlingit clan at the Battle of Sitka. The Russians never fully colonized Alaska. For the most part, they clung to the coast and shunned the interior.
From 1812 to 1841, the Russians operated Fort Ross, California. From 1814 to 1817, Russian Fort Elizabeth was operating in the Kingdom of Hawaii. By the 1830s, the Russian monopoly on trade was weakening. The British Hudson's Bay Company was leased the southern edge of Russian America in 1839 under the RAC-HBC Agreement, establishing Fort Stikine which began siphoning off trade.
A company ship visited the Russian American outposts only every two or three years to give provisions. Ties with Americans were particularly advantageous since they could sell furs at Guangzhou, closed to the Russians at the time. The downside was that American hunters and trappers encroached on territory Russians considered theirs.
The Russo-American Treaty of 1824 recognized exclusive Russian rights to the fur trade north of latitude 54°40'N, with the American rights and claims restricted to below that line. This division was repeated in the Treaty of Saint Petersburg, a parallel agreement with the British in 1825 (which also settled most of the border with British North America). However, the agreements soon went by the wayside, and with the retirement of Alexandr Baranov in 1818, the Russian hold on Alaska was further weakened.
By the 1860s, the Russian government was ready to abandon its Russian America colony. Zealous over-hunting had severely reduced the fur-bearing animal population, and competition from the British and Americans exacerbated the situation. This, combined with the difficulties of supplying and protecting such a distant colony, reduced interest in the territory. After Russian America was sold to the U.S. in 1867, for $7.2 million (2 cents per acre, equivalent to about $127 million in 2021 terms), all the holdings of the Russian–American Company were liquidated.
The small sheet shows:
Chirikov А. I. see viewtopic.php?p= 16518
Baranov А.А. see viewtopic.php?p=18074
Lisyansky Y.F. see viewtopic.php?p=16854
Rezanov N.P. see viewtopic.php?p=18069
Shelekhov G.I. see viewtopic.php?p=18072
Kuskov I.A. see viewtopic.php?p=18077
LPR 2021; (6х77)r
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_America.
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