The Wreck of the Sv. Nikolai


Book Description

In 1808 the Sv. Nikolai, owned by the Russian American Company, set sail from New Arkhangel (modern-day Sitka, Alaska) to explore and identify a site for a permanent Russian fur trading post on the mainland south of Vancouver Island. Heavy seas drove the ship aground in late December, forcing twenty-two crew members ashore, including Anna Petrovna Bulygin, the wife of ship captain Nikolai Isaakovich Bulygin. Over the next several months the shipwrecked crew clashed with Hohs, Quileutes, and Makahs, but with little knowledge of the country, the castaways soon found themselves owing their lives to the very tribes they had fought with upon arrival. The tribes captured and enslaved several of the crew members. In 1810 an American captain sailing for the Russian American Company ransomed the survivors. ø This volume combines two source accounts of the event. The first is the story of a Russian survivor, Timofei Osipovich Tarakanov, the expedition's leader after the shipwreck. The second is a Quileute account, preserved orally for nearly a century before being recorded in 1909. Combined, these wonderful accounts tell a tale of adventure with moments of high drama, heroism, a touch of comedy, and eventual tragedy.




The Wreck of the Sv. Nikolai


Book Description

In 1808 the "Sv. Nikolai," owned by the Russian American Company, set sail from New Arkhangel (modern-day Sitka, Alaska) to explore and identify a site for a permanent Russian fur trading post on the mainland south of Vancouver Island. Heavy seas drove the ship aground in late December, forcing twenty-two crew members ashore, including Anna Petrovna Bulygin, the wife of ship captain Nikolai Isaakovich Bulygin. Over the next several months the shipwrecked crew clashed with Hohs, Quileutes, and Makahs, but with little knowledge of the country, the castaways soon found themselves owing their lives to the very tribes they had fought with upon arrival. The tribes captured and enslaved several of the crew members. In 1810 an American captain sailing for the Russian American Company ransomed the survivors. This volume combines two source accounts of the event. The first is the story of a Russian survivor, Timofei Osipovich Tarakanov, the expedition's leader after the shipwreck. The second is a Quileute account, preserved orally for nearly a century before being recorded in 1909. Combined, these wonderful accounts tell a tale of adventure with moments of high drama, heroism, a touch of comedy, and eventual tragedy.




Alaska Shipwrecks 1750-2015


Book Description

ALASKA SHIPWRECKS 1750-2015 is an encyclopedic accounting of all shipwrecks and losses of life in the Alaska Marine environment. Compiled and written by Captain Warren Good with research assistance and extensive consultation provided by maritime historian Michael Burwell this book is filled with a wealth of information for those interested in Alaska maritime history and the multitude of associated tragedies. Included are details of all known wrecks including vessel information, crew member and passenger names, locations, first hand descriptions of events and sources of all information. In addition, comprehensive comments by Captain Warren Good further elaborate on the location and disposition of many of the disasters.




Exploring Washington's Past


Book Description

A traveler's guide to Washington state, focusing on historical sites. Sections on various regions describe local history, with entries on towns and sites offering information on festivals, museums, and historic districts. Contains b&w photos, and a chronology. c. Book News Inc.




The Great Ocean


Book Description

The Pacific of the early eighteenth century was not a single ocean but a vast and varied waterscape, a place of baffling complexity, with 25,000 islands and seemingly endless continental shorelines. But with the voyages of Captain James Cook, global attention turned to the Pacific, and European and American dreams of scientific exploration, trade, and empire grew dramatically. By the time of the California gold rush, the Pacific's many shores were fully integrated into world markets-and world consciousness. The Great Ocean draws on hundreds of documented voyages--some painstakingly recorded by participants, some only known by archeological remains or indigenous memory--as a window into the commercial, cultural, and ecological upheavals following Cook's exploits, focusing in particular on the eastern Pacific in the decades between the 1770s and the 1840s. Beginning with the expansion of trade as seen via the travels of William Shaler, captain of the American Brig Lelia Byrd, historian David Igler uncovers a world where voyagers, traders, hunters, and native peoples met one another in episodes often marked by violence and tragedy. Igler describes how indigenous communities struggled against introduced diseases that cut through the heart of their communities; how the ordeal of Russian Timofei Tarakanov typified the common practice of taking hostages and prisoners; how Mary Brewster witnessed first-hand the bloody "great hunt" that decimated otters, seals, and whales; how Adelbert von Chamisso scoured the region, carefully compiling his notes on natural history; and how James Dwight Dana rivaled Charles Darwin in his pursuit of knowledge on a global scale. These stories--and the historical themes that tie them together--offer a fresh perspective on the oceanic worlds of the eastern Pacific. Ambitious and broadly conceived, The Great Ocean is the first book to weave together American, oceanic, and world history in a path-breaking portrait of the Pacific world.




Russians in Alaska, 1732-1867


Book Description

This definitive work, the crown jewel in the distinguished career of Russian America scholar Lydia T. Black, presents a comprehensive overview of the Russian presence in Alaska. Drawing on extensive archival research and employing documents only recently made available to scholars, Black shows how Russian expansion was the culmination of centuries of social and economic change. Black s work challenges the standard perspective on the Russian period in Alaska as a time of unbridled exploitation of Native inhabitants and natural resources. Without glossing over the harsher aspects of the period, Black acknowledges the complexity of relations between Russians and Native peoples. She chronicles the lives of ordinary men and women the merchants and naval officers, laborers and clergy who established Russian outposts in Alaska. These early colonists carried with them the Orthodox faith and the Russian language; their legacy endures in architecture and place names from Baranof Island to the Pribilofs. This deluxe volume features fold-out maps and color illustrations of rare paintings and sketches from Russian, American, Japanese, and European sources many have never before been published. An invaluable source for historians and anthropologists, this accessible volume brings to life a dynamic period in Russian and Alaskan history. A tribute to Black s life as a scholar and educator, "Russians in Alaska" will become a classic in the field."




Empire Maker


Book Description

A native of northern Russia, Alexander Baranov was a middle-aged merchant trader with no prior experience in the fur trade when, in 1790, he arrived in North America to assume command over Russia’s highly profitable sea otter business. With the title of chief manager, he strengthened his leadership role after the formation of the Russian American Company in 1799. An adventuresome, dynamic, and charismatic leader, he proved to be something of a commercial genius in Alaska, making huge profits for company partners and shareholders in Irkutsk and St. Petersburg while receiving scandalously little support from the homeland. Baranov receives long overdue attention in Kenneth Owens’s Empire Maker, the first scholarly biography of Russian America’s virtual imperial viceroy. His eventful life included shipwrecks, battles with Native forces, clashes with rival traders and Russian Orthodox missionaries, and an enduring marriage to a Kodiak Alutiiq woman with whom he had two children. In the process, the book reveals maritime Alaska and northern California during the Baranov era as fascinating cultural borderlands, where Russian, English, Spanish, and New England Yankee traders and indigenous peoples formed complex commercial, political, and domestic relationships that continue to influence these regions today.







Russian Colonization of Alaska


Book Description

In Russian Colonization of Alaska, Andrei Val'terovich Grinëv examines the sociohistorical origins of the former Russian colonies in Alaska, or "Russian America," between 1741 and 1799. Beginning with the Second Kamchatka Expedition of Vitus Ivanovich Bering and Aleksei Ilyich Chirikov's discovery of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands and ending with the formation of the Russian-American Company's monopoly of the Russian colonial endeavor in the Americas, Russian Colonization of Alaska offers a definitive, revisionist examination of Tsarist Russia's foray into the imperial contest in North America. Russian Colonization of Alaska is the first comprehensive study to analyze the origin and evolution of Russian colonization based on research into political economy, history, and ethnography. Grinёv's study elaborates the social, political, spiritual, ideological, personal, and psychological aspects of Russian America. He also accounts for the idiosyncrasies of the natural environment, competition from other North American empires, Alaska Natives, and individual colonial diplomats. The colonization of Alaska, rather than being simply a continuation of the colonization of Siberia by Russians, was instead part of overarching Russian and global history.




Glorious Misadventures


Book Description

Two centuries ago, shortly after the U.S. was formed, a Russian expedition set its sights on the Pacific Northwest. It could have changed history. At the dawn of the nineteenth century two empires met on the far side of North America. Spain was the tired and hidebound colonial master of much of the Americas. Russia was the upstart, hungry for America's Pacific Northwest coast, a prize left unclaimed after the golden age of exploration. The dream of a Russian America became the goal of the Russian America Company, championed and led by Nikolai Rezanov, aristocratic adventurer and diplomat and courtier to Tsar Alexander I. At a time when John Jacob Astor was amassing his own fortune in the fur trade, Rezanov envisioned transforming fur-hunting stations on the Alaskan coast into the hub of a Pacific empire stretching from Siberia to California. The distances were vast-thousands of miles overland across the endless Russian steppes, thousands more by sea to Alaska and down to San Francisco bay. His men were unreliable-disorderly, dissolute, disease-ridden-and the dangers ever-present. Yet Rezanov persisted, and in 1806-just as Lewis and Clark were discovering the Columbia River to the north-he came close to realizing his dream. Had he done so, the history of the United States might have been very different. Owen Matthews brilliantly chronicles a hitherto untold story of adventure and colonial ambition, brought to life by vivid first-hand accounts and his own travels across Russia, recalling a time when dreams of glory pushed men to the limits of human endurance.




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