Russia and North America

Following Vitus Bering’s second exploratory voyage, which sighted land on the North American continent in 1741, the Russians began to venture from Asia across the North Pacific Ocean to the Aleutian Islands, and later the Alaskan mainland. “Russian America” eventually came to include territory in Alaska and, briefly, in California and the Hawaiian Islands. The Russian colonies in America, as Russian America was officially called, were overseen between 1799 and 1867 by the Russian-American Company (RAC), a chartered Saint Petersburg-based joint-stock fur trade company that descended from a merger of several Siberian-based merchant-run enterprises but was also modeled loosely on contemporary West European colonial companies. Under the oversight of the RAC, Russian employees and Alaska Native hunters (mostly the Unangan Aleut and the Alutiiq of Kodiak Island) controlled the marine fur trade of the North Pacific, in the process changing its ecology. After the Russians, in the early nineteenth century, advanced from their previous colonial center on Kodiak Island to the Alaska Panhandle area inhabited by the Tlingit, Novo-Arkhangel’sk (present-day Sitka, Alaska) became Russian America’s administrative capital. It was also arguably the Russian Empire’s best-functioning port in the Pacific. As such, Sitka became an important port of call for numerous Russian and foreign voyages. Beginning in 1804, Russian America became a destination for Russian circumnavigation voyages originating in the Baltic: these voyages inevitably made stops in ports around the world, including the Atlantic. In December 1866, Russia’s government decided to sell Russian America to the United States, concluding the sale in March 1867. Diplomatic relations between the United States and the Russian Empire were, on the whole, cordial from the formation of the United States up through the transfer of Alaska, mainly because of a common strategic adversary—the British Empire. Then again, on the Northwest Coast of North America, from the 1830s on, the RAC often cooperated rather than competed with the British Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), even “loaning” the HBC Russian territory in the Alaska Panhandle in exchange for provisioning Sitka from British Columbia. This localized cooperation was designed to be at the expense of the two companies’ smaller American competitors and the Native American hunters and trappers. A secret treaty protected RAC and HBC territories in North America from the hostilities of warfare during the Crimean War (1853–1856). But the awareness of the vulnerability of Russian America to naval attack, brought into focus by that war, helped convince Russian officials to terminate their experiment in overseas colonialism.