The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  There were several reasons why this remote corner began to attract attention. The most important was the availability of furs, in order to pay for the tea of China. But the first group of Europeans to make their presence felt in the far north of the Pacific had not arrived by sea, even though they began to float their ships on the ocean. Russian expansion eastwards, in massive leaps and bounds across Siberia, brought to the shores of the Pacific fur traders who originated as far west as Suzdal, the ancient mother city of the principality of Muscovy. Curiosity about how these newly conquered lands were linked to the oceans grew along with increasing knowledge of the shoreline of eastern Siberia. The Russian rulers, above all Peter the Great, were keen to know whether the much-vaunted sea route around the top of Siberia into the Pacific Ocean was viable. The North-East Passage, which the English had tried to sell to Ivan the Terrible, was still a lure, all the more so as the Russians came close to the American landmass. Was there a passageway between Siberia and North America? If so, was it navigable? The benefits the Russian Empire might derive from a regular sea traffic towards China and Japan were incalculable.

  How and when the coasts of Siberia were explored remains a mystery. A Cossack named Semen Dezhnev claimed to have travelled by sea along the Pacific shores of Siberia, as far back as 1648.2 A patriotic Soviet historian wrote of the ‘exceptional bravery and fearlessness’ he showed, throwing aside any doubts about veracity, and sending him through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean.3 He certainly went somewhere, though probably not so far; and he wrote to the tsar from Yakutsk in 1662 begging to be recompensed for his efforts. He would have used a flat-bottomed boat at most seventy feet in length, with sails made of reindeer skin, held together by ropes, straps and pegs, since the native peoples of eastern Siberia did not have iron. Even the anchor was made of wood. In the eighteenth century this was the standard type of boat used by the Russians in the northern Pacific. These boats were manned by up to forty Russians and locals, and were known as the shitik, or ‘sewn boat’, from the verb shit’, ‘to sew’.4 Whether they were quite as ‘rickety’ as historians suppose is not clear: sewn boats had plied the Indian Ocean since time immemorial and in certain types of heavy sea their pliability was exactly what made them strong. Dezhnev attempted to gain the ear of the tsar’s advisers, and may have influenced Vladimir Atlasov, another Arctic explorer, who had lived in Yakutsk and was in Moscow with Dezhnev; Atlasov is said to have discovered the Kamchatka Peninsula that reaches southwards, pointing towards Japan; and Kamchatka became a source of furs and other tribute by 1697, when Atlasov mapped it out and wrote a detailed description of its inhabitants. He also won the admiration of Peter the Great for his description of Japan, though it had to be based on hearsay.5 Even if some of the accounts of these early voyages are not trustworthy, they do reveal a growing curiosity about the routes to the Pacific.

  The galloping expansion of Russia’s empire also brought Russian officials and colonists to the northern borders of the Qing Empire, which had taken control of China following the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644. At first the advantages for Russia seemed to lie in tribute payments imposed on the native peoples of Siberia, although there were rumours of silver mines somewhere along the river routes beyond Yakutsk.6 But the advantages of trade with China were also clear: if the Cossacks (the main colonists) could break into the Chinese market, they would make great profits for themselves as well as for the tsar. As far back as the 1650s clashes were occurring along the Amur River, which ever since then has been a source of tension between Russia and China; native peoples appealed to the Chinese for help, and Chinese armies advanced into the field. The Russians found it difficult to hold their own.7

  II

  In 1714 an influential adviser of Peter the Great, Fedor Stepanovich Saltykov, who was an expert on maritime affairs and was then living in London, wrote a series of Propozitsii (‘Propositions’), which he sent to the tsar in St Petersburg. Saltykov had travelled in Siberia with his father, and he was clear in his mind that an opportunity now existed to create a Russian empire in the Far East. He imagined that it would be possible to build a fleet of ships near the mouth of the Ob and Yenisei Rivers, which debouch into the Arctic Sea in central Siberia, and then to send the ships around Siberia looking for islands that could be brought under Russian sovereignty. Russia too was succumbing to the lure of eastern spices and gold:

  If an open passage can be found to the coasts of China and Japan, your empire will receive great wealth and profit for the following reason. Ships are sent to eastern India from all realms such as England and Holland and others, and must cross the Equator twice, when they go out and when they return. Because of the great heat in those places many of their people die and there are severe food shortages if they are on their voyage for a prolonged period of time. Thus upon the discovery of a [northern] sea route such as this, they will all wish to use it … For trading purposes your empire is closer than any other realm.

  Foreign shipping using this route should be monitored, and of course taxed, as it passed Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean; Saltykov observed how much income this type of tax produced at both the Danish Sound and Gibraltar. Silver was to be had both in Japan and in Siberia, where Saltykov had actually seen abandoned silver mines. Trade ‘by water’ would be possible with China and the East Indies, bringing gold, porcelain, silk and many other luxury products to Russia, which would become as wealthy as Holland or England. The tsar certainly gave thought to these proposals, saying in 1711 that:

  as soon as he has peace and leisure to apply his mind to it, he will search out whether it is possible for ships to pass by way of Novaya Zemlya into the Tartarian Sea; or to find out some port eastward of the River Ob, where he may build ships and send them, if practicable, to the coast of China & Japan.8

  The illusion persisted that Arctic waters were safer and easier to suffer than the tropical waters through which European ships passed en route to the Indies.9

  Peter the Great did find the peace and leisure to apply his mind to all this, but only at the very end of his life. One of his very last acts before he died in 1725 was to order Vitus Bering, a Danish captain in his service, to build boats in Kamchatka and ‘to sail on these boats along the shore which runs to the north and which (since its limits are unknown) seems to be a part of the American coast’. The aim was ‘to determine where it joins with America’, and if possible to visit a European settlement along the American coast, in the hope of learning more about the geography of the region and drawing an accurate chart. Typically, Tsar Peter also ordered the Senate ‘to find among the apprentices or assistant master-builders one who could build there a deck ship along the lines of the big ships here’; and, should there be no navigators in Russia with experience of the Pacific, two men should be brought from Holland ‘who know the sea in the north and as far as Japan’. As it happened, Bering had experience of the East Indies, having served in the VOC, and was strongly recommended by the Senate and by two admirals.10 This, after all, was the remarkable tsar who had reputedly laboured in (and had certainly observed) the Dutch shipyards in the hope that he could make Russia too into a great naval power.

  That said, the focus of Peter’s maritime ambitions remained far from the Pacific. The Black Sea was one area where he hoped to extend Russian naval power, but his major interest lay in the Baltic, which became his home when he established his new capital at St Petersburg. More than anything, he was determined to push back Swedish control of large tracts of the Baltic, and the Great Northern War at the start of the eighteenth century eventually – after some checks – brought Russia dominion over the Baltic.11 Bering had served in the Great Northern War, but being sent to Siberia, even as captain of a minuscule fleet, was not the reward he sought. Still, he obeyed orders even after the tsar died and even though the first, and in some respects most arduous, part of his journey was the interminable trek across Siberia to the newly established Russian fort and trading station at Okhotsk. The trading
station had access to the Sea of Okhotsk that lies west of the Kamchatka Peninsula, and is bounded by the Kuril Islands, strung out north-eastwards from the northern tip of the Japanese island of Hokkaido.12 It also had enough facilities to build a shitik, of the type mentioned earlier, and a second boat was built in Kamchatka. Considering that the number of Russians in the trading stations was still very small, just a few hundred, the ability to put ships together, even if they would hardly have won praise from a Dutch or English captain, was impressive. Bering did manage to sail some way into the strait that bears his name, but he was still unsure whether he had identified a passageway into the Arctic Ocean, or simply a large inlet set into a continuing coastline that linked Asia to America. Fog made progress difficult and he turned back, against the advice of his Russian deputy, Chirikov, who has therefore won the plaudits of Soviet historians for being the man with true vision. A second expedition in 1729 was no more successful, although the work of his crew, including the mapping of previously unvisited shores, should not be underestimated.13

  There was still an enormous amount to learn about the configuration of the northern Pacific, which remained well into the eighteenth century one of the least known areas of the oceans. One of Bering’s deputies, Captain Spanberg, was invited to explore the chain of islands leading towards Japan, which was still unwilling to open its doors to any foreign traders apart from the Dutch.14 Spanberg was in Okhotsk in 1735, building a pair of ships and making ready a third, older one. Setting out in June 1738, Spanberg’s flotilla stood off Japan a year later. Despite official hostility to foreigners, both the locals and the officials who came on board were quite friendly, and the Russians were able to obtain gold coins, rice, fish and tobacco. The officials took Japanese politeness to an extreme, bowing and kneeling – indeed, they stayed on their knees so long that the captain finally felt he had to tell them to rise. Once in Spanberg’s cabin, the officials were impressed by the Russian food they were offered and quaffed Russian brandy with pleasure. But Spanberg knew how these brief encounters could turn from friendship to violence, and soon set sail for Kamchatka.15 Although a further attempt to reach Japan failed, Spanberg had added a great amount to Russian knowledge of the northern Pacific, making it possible to lay more precise plans for the creation of a Russian dominion over the Kuril Islands and beyond.

  Since the Pacific was not a high priority back in St Petersburg, Russian penetration of the northern Pacific in the second half of the eighteenth century depended in high degree on the initiative of individual merchants, some of them Russians of modest origins, born as peasants or into Cossack military families, who had managed to heave themselves up the social ladder, some of them Greeks who had taken up residence in Muscovy.16 Small companies acquired ships and sent them out from the Pacific coasts of Siberia in search of furs; the Russian Senate became increasingly interested in the taxes that could be obtained from the fur trade, and by 1748 merchants were petitioning the Senate for monopolistic rights over patches of territory rich in furs. The Senate was only too happy to fall in with these plans, some of which proved very lucrative: one expedition produced nearly 22,000 roubles for the imperial treasury, one third of the value of the fur cargo.17 Most expeditions produced more than 1,000 roubles for the treasury, and they penetrated deeper and deeper into areas not previously visited by Europeans, all the way to Alaska. Plenty of ships were wrecked in the difficult conditions of the Far North, but by 1770 the profits were getting larger and larger. This was partly the result of the policies of Empress Catherine II, who encouraged free trade from the 1760s onwards. The Soviet historian of these merchants saw in this ‘the power of bourgeois economic development’, though she admitted that private trade was already well established before 1760. After all, eastern Siberia, mainly inhabited by native peoples who were not reduced to serfdom, was a very long way from the centres of government power or the estates of the great aristocratic families. The remote frontier offered freedom and the chance to carve out wealth, whether from land or trade.18

  Not just demand but confidence was growing. One ship that spent several years at sea was the Sveti Pavel or St Paul, operated by three merchants; it travelled to the Kuril Islands in 1770 and to the Aleutians in 1771, where the Russians befriended the native Sannakh islanders, with whom, as so often, relations were good at first, but then turned sour. The Russians’ interpreter was found dead in his yurt. The islanders attacked. The ship’s captain, Solviev, hurried off deeper into the Aleutian Islands, where the crew gathered information about the many furry animals to be found – beavers, bears, deer, wolves, squirrels and otters. The crew were back in Okhotsk in July 1775, carrying 150,000 roubles’ worth of furs, though thirty out of seventy-one fur-hunters who had set out had not survived the voyage.19 These experiences were replicated again and again, puncuated by special moments such as an encounter between Captain Cook and the Russians, when Cook gave the Russians a telescope as a special ‘token of their visit to those islands’.20

  III

  Rather as the Spaniards had originally seen their American empire as a source of funds for the struggle against the Turks, the tsars saw their assertion of sovereignty over the many peoples of eastern Siberia, and beyond that the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, as a way of funding their dreams of empire within Europe. There was a certain attraction in claiming to rule over parts of Europe, Asia and America, placing Russia notionally on a par with the multi-continental empires of Spain and Portugal. A memorandum by Counts Vorontosov and Bezborodko, of 1786, made the point explicitly: ‘The north-west coast of America and the islands in the archipelagoes between there and Kamchatka, and from that peninsula to Japan, were discovered long ago by Russian seafarers … According to a generally accepted rule, the first nation to discover an unknown land has the right to claim it.’21 The great advantage the Russians possessed was that they were the pioneers in European penetration into the region; the great disadvantage was that overland trade was slow and cumbersome, and better suited to carrying tribute and tax receipts than vast amounts of goods, while maritime routes seemed impractical until the North-East Passage was brought into being – if it ever would be. Still, a ‘United American Company’ came into existence in 1797, and was transformed into the ‘Russia–America Company’ two years later.22 It lay under ‘imperial protection’, with the full approval of Tsar Paul I, but the basic model was that of the many East India Companies that the Russians knew well from contact with their Baltic and North Sea neighbours. In view of the autocratic system of government in tsarist Russia, the freedom of action of the merchants taking part in this venture was counterbalanced by the supervision of a government department.

  The merchant who did most to bring it into being, Grigory Ivanovich Shelikov, had already died by then, but he had been a fur-trader in the Pacific, living for some years on Kodiak Island, which is now part of Alaska. Of course, Alaska was not understood as the roughly square chunk of icy land that now forms a state within the Union; what interested the Russians was the opportunity to hunt sea otter along the coastline down to and beyond Sitka, a 600-mile strip of land that still acts as a barrier between Canada and the Pacific. Shelikov astutely described his plans to a colleague while Catherine the Great sat on Russia’s throne:

  The main end of my enterprise has been to bring newly discovered waters, lands and islands into our empire before other powers occupy and claim them, and to undertake new ventures to augment the glory of our empress and bring profit both to her and our fellow-countrymen.23

  Catherine, and then Paul, were far more occupied with relations with western Europe than with the Pacific; but they were aware that what happened in the Pacific might have significant repercussions in the West: the presence of the British and the Spaniards along the coast of California made it certain that contact would be made with European ships and trading stations as Russia consolidated its hold on the north and on supplies of high-quality fur for the Chinese and other markets. By 1800 traders from Great Britain and the
United States were pumping vast numbers of skins along their maritime pipeline to Macau, while the Russians were still trying to trade with the Chinese through stations along the Amur River. But the cost of transport from Alaska to the Amur trading stations proved prohibitive; it made more sense for fur merchants in northern China to trek all the way down to Canton to obtain furs because the British, the Americans and the Spaniards were flooding Canton with sea otter skins, with the result that prices were forced down. Moreover, the cost of sending tea to Europe by sea was a small fraction of the cost of sending it to St Petersburg overland.24

  Much would depend on the quality of seamanship available out east; yet the hopes that had brought Okhotsk and other settlements into being were disappointed. One Russian admiral complained bitterly that the sailors based at Okhotsk knew far too little about the character of the difficult seas they were supposed to navigate, whose difficulties began at Okhotsk itself, where shifting sands and shallow waters made entry into the harbour a challenge. The quality of shipbuilding was also, he said, well below the standard of the Baltic or the Black Sea. About fifty vessels had been built at Okhotsk by the 1790s, and by then it was possible to find iron nails to bolt the planking together, but these were not to the standards that Peter the Great had been trying to establish. By the start of the nineteenth century the shipyards at Okhotsk contained rotting ships – a Russian commentator likened Okhotsk to a naval museum.25