Barratt Glynn R. Tahiti and Alaska : Russian policies and strategies of Nowadays, Russian submarines complete that voyage in a week or less, passing of course beneath the Russian or Canadian High Arctic ice cap1. In the early s, Russian vessels were at sea eleven, even thirteen, months depending on the winds, the time of year, and chosen route between St Petersburg and Russian settlements along the Northwest Coast and the Aleutian Islands chain.
The voyage was extremely wasteful of material, vessels, and men. Fir hulls deteriorated in warm waters ; illness struck at Russian crews in South America2 ; morale was often low even before Cape Horn was sighted. Yet by more than thirty ships had been despatched from Kronstadt to the cold, fur rich littorals of North America.
But then, only the British government had military and economic interests of comparable breadth in that remote part of the globe and, hence, a comparable need to guard those interests3. Confronted by the need to halt Bostonian and other foreign Β« pilfering Β» of furs within the territories that it governed and exploited as an agency of State, the Russian American Company Board, under massive Navy pressure, banned all sales or deliveries of peltry to non-Russians on the Russian Northwest Coast in and again in New England ship-masters and other foreigners ignored the bans, so the Company looked for imperial assistance.
No doubt, the Company had undertaken more than it had power or resources to accomplish, but its own disgrace would shame the nation. Both politically and economically, therefore, it was essential to enlarge the Navy's role in regions that were theoretically under the Company's control5. By the second, the Company was granted a monopoly of fur hunting, trading, and fishing in those areas and on the islands of the Kuril and Aleutian chains for a further twenty years6.
The tsar was ill-advised in this attempt to claim exclusive rights to Β« all commerce, whaling, and fishery, and all other industry on all islands, posts, and gulfs, including the whole Northwestern shoreline of America, It was predictable that the United States and Britain would protest in formal terms. Gur'ev of the ministry of State finance, on 3 June , Β« protests against what it calls the expansion of imperial possessions Β»8.
