Exploring and Mapping Alaska: The Russian America Era, 1741-1867 (Rasmuson Library Historic Translation) - Hardcover

Postnikov, Alexey; Falk, Marvin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1602232512 ISBN 13: 9781602232518

Verlag: University of Alaska Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Russia first encountered Alaska in 1741 as part of the most ambitious and expensive expedition of the entire eighteenth century. For centuries since, cartographers have struggled to define and develop the enormous region comprising northeastern Asia, the North Pacific, and Alaska. The forces of nature and the follies of human error conspired to make the area incredibly difficult to map.
Exploring and Mapping Alaska focuses on this foundational period in Arctic cartography. Russia spurred a golden era of cartographic exploration, while shrouding their efforts in a veil of secrecy. They drew both on old systems developed by early fur traders and new methodologies created in Europe. With Great Britain, France, and Spain following close behind, their expeditions led to an astounding increase in the world’s knowledge of North America.
Through engrossing descriptions of the explorations and expert navigators, aided by informative illustrations, readers can clearly trace the evolution of the maps of the era, watching as a once-mysterious region came into sharper focus. The result of years of cross-continental research, Exploring and Mapping Alaska is a fascinating study of the trials and triumphs of one of the last great eras of historic mapmaking.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alexey V. Postnikov is a research fellow in the Russian Academy of Sciences. Marvin Falk is professor and curator of rare books emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Lydia T. Black (1925–2007) was professor of anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and contributed nearly seventy books and articles to the study of Russian America and Native Alaska culture.

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Exploring and Mapping Alaska

The Russian America Era, 1741–1867

By Alexey Postnikov, Marvin Falk, Lydia Black

UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 University of Alaska Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60223-251-8

Contents

Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
I: The Russian Advance Toward the Pacific Ocean, 
II: Are America and Asia Joined?, 
III: Mapping the Distribution of Water and Land in the North Pacific (1750–1800), 
IV: The Exploration and Cartography of Russian America (1799–1867), 
V: The Sale of Alaska and the International Expedition to Effect a Telegraph Link between North, 
America and Europe via Siberia, 
Conclusion: Russian Heritage and the Influence of Geographic Explorations in Alaska, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Russian Advance Toward the Pacific Ocean

On his 1507 world map, the cartographer Martin Waldseemueller (1470–1518) showed the American continents separated from Asia by an expanse of ocean, thus predicting the existence of the still unknown Pacific Ocean with an opening to the north. Just five years later the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa, crossing the Isthmus of Panama, discovered the Pacific Ocean. It took an additional two centuries before a strait opening to the Arctic Ocean was proven through the discovery of northwestern America by Russian pioneers and seamen who cut the difficult trail through Siberia to the Far East.

In North America the Asian Pacific side differed substantially from the European Atlantic side. The Atlantic Ocean separates the Old and the New Worlds by an immense expanse of water, whereas the northern Pacific Ocean separates Eurasia from North America by a mere fifty-three miles at the Bering Strait. Although the eastern shores of America may have been reached by Irish monks and Vikings, there were no sustained contacts between the inhabitants of Europe and the Americas before Columbus.

In contrast, Eurasia and North America were joined together during the ice ages by a landmass now called the Bering Land Bridge. The first people to penetrate America did so from northeastern Asia and gradually populated both American continents. What became the Bering Strait formed as a result of postglacial melting, flooding the land bridge. In the course of millennia, close trade and cultural relations continued to be maintained across Bering Strait.

Thus, in this special ethnohistoric region — Beringia — contact between the Old and New Worlds was continuous, though the rest of the world had no knowledge of it. Starting in the mid-eighteenth century, Russian pioneers, fur hunters(promyshlenniki), and traveling scientists also came to North America, securing the expansion of the Russian state eastward. There are substantial differences between these developments and the first contacts between the Spanish and the Indians of the Caribbean islands.

Members of the Christopher Columbus expedition suddenly found themselves in a totally foreign ethno-cultural environment. They interacted with the Natives who, according to the then-prevalent Christian teaching, had no rightful place on this earth. This was held to be evidence that they were not human and thus justified the genocide of local Native populations by the "civilized" Europeans.

Russians, too, shed a great deal of Native blood in their conquest of Siberia and later movement a farther east, but the nature of this movement and their relationship with local populations was different. The process of colonizing Siberia, Kamchatka, the Aleutian Islands, and coastal Alaska by Russia lasted almost three centuries. Due to the length of this period, Russian pioneers, promyshlenniki, and Cossacks integrated with the natural and ethnic environment of the regions they moved into. The several generations of these pioneers who replaced each other over time not only lived next to and with the Natives, but actively exchanged information with them.

Geographic information was needed for the continuing eastward advance. Local place names were particularly important, as they provided a means of orientation in an unknown territory. They were diligently collected by the pioneers and in many instances gradually became accepted as their own. Because of this, Native geographic names, though often in distorted form, can be found on modern maps of Siberia, the Aleutian Islands, and Alaska.

As early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Russians moving toward the east occupied territories beyond the Urals, which separate Europe from Asia. Siberia was joined to Russia as a result of Ermak's incursions of 1581–1585. The settling of the immense expanses of Siberia was accomplished by people from many different social strata of the Russian population. Cossacks, fugitive serfs, small-time entrepreneurs, and noblemen moved to the east, into the virgin, sparsely populated localities where they were free to be their own bosses. They overcame harsh natural conditions and actively interacted with local tribes and nations who helped them adapt to the environment in their new home and showed them how to use the natural resources.

Resettlement of ordinary Russian people generally took place in a peaceful manner. Governmental initiatives established a Russian administration, imposed iasak (head tax) upon the local population, and recovered precious metals for the benefit of the state. Sometimes the local nomadic and hunting populations offered armed resistance, but there were also instances where Natives voluntarily joined Russians to defend against hostile attacks by their neighbors or to gain support in feudal and kin group conflicts. These processes were not accompanied by the extermination and dislocation of local populations as was the case with the Indians of North America in the course of European colonization moving inland from the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean.

The history of inhabitation of Siberia is well reflected in modern historical and geographical literature. Russian pioneers reached the Pacific Ocean coast early. In 1639 a detachment led by Ivan Moskvitin traveled down the Ulya River to the Sea of Okhotsk. The following year Cossacks from his detachment sailed north on the ocean to the mouth of the Okhota River and south to the Shantar Islands. While sailing to the south, the Cossacks learned about the Amur River and the Natives inhabiting the area, who were then called Gilyak (Nivkh in modern nomenclature). The Okhotsk ostrog (fortified outpost) was founded in 1647. This ostrog would play an important role in the future.

In 1648, Fedot Alekseev and Semyon Dezhnev, advancing east along the coast of the Arctic Ocean from the Kolyma, passed through Bering Strait. It was then that the Russians first discovered the northeastern extremity of Asia, the closest point to America. Dezhnev named it Bolshoi kammnoi nos (Great Rocky Promontory), where "a goodly number of Chukchi live." He reported that across from this promontory were two islands inhabited by "the toothed ones" (labret-wearing people, Eskimos). By "Bolshoi kamennoi nos" did Dezhnev mean the entire Chukotka Peninsula? From Dezhnev's report it is evident that he received some information about the Chukotka Peninsula from the local inhabitants, the Yukagir and the Chukchi. He also learned from them that in Chukotka "the shore ice is not carried out to sea every year."

Following the official incorporation of the Amur region into Russia, 1649–1652, the attention of the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Alaska Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1602232512
• ISBN 13: 9781602232518
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 525
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar