Russian America

Furs across the strait

In 1728 Vitus Bering, a Dane in Peter the Great’s service, sailed through the strait now named after him. On his second voyage, in 1741, he reached the Gulf of Alaska and the Aleutians; he died on the way back, but survivors brought news of the rich furs there.^[1]

Merchants followed. The company of Grigory Shelikhov and Ivan Golikov, formed in 1781, set out to found colonies on the American coast, and from 1791 Aleksandr Baranov ran its operations from Kodiak Island.^[2]

A company that governed

In 1799 Tsar Paul I gave the merged fur companies a 20-year charter as the Russian-American Company, with exclusive trading rights in North America north of 55° and responsibility for governing the Russian settlements there.^[2] It had its own flag, Russia’s white, blue and red with the imperial eagle and the company’s name on a ribbon; it is in the Flags of former countries gallery.

Baranov founded a fort near present-day Sitka in 1799, but the Tlingit destroyed it in 1802. In 1804 he moved the company’s headquarters there from Kodiak as New Archangel, after a battle with the Tlingit.^[3] Agreements with the United States, Spain and Britain around 1824 confirmed the company’s hold on the coast north of 54°40′.^[2]

California and Hawaii

As sea otters grew scarce in Alaska, the company looked south. In 1812 Ivan Kuskov arrived on the northern California coast with 25 Russians and 80 Unangan (Aleuts) and built Fort Ross, 145 km north of San Francisco, to hunt otters and grow food for Alaska.^[5] It was the southernmost Russian colony in North America, on the homeland of the Kashia Pomo; the company sold it in 1841.^[4][5]

In Hawaii a company agent, Georg Anton Schäffer, went far beyond his orders. He promised the Kauai chief Kaumualiʻi Russian protection against Kamehameha I, and Hawaiian workers built a fort on the Waimea River that for a time flew the Russian flag. St Petersburg rejected the deal, and in 1817 Schäffer had to flee.^[7]

The end

Revenues fell as rivalry with Britain grew, and Russia let the company’s charter lapse in 1862.^[2] Five years later it sold Alaska to the United States, and on 18 October 1867 the flags were changed at Sitka.^[6][3]