Feeding the Russian Fur Trade: Provisionment of the Okhotsk Seaboard and the Kamchatka Peninsula, 1639–1856

Introduction

INTRODUCTION The importance that Klyuchevsky, one of nineteenth-century Russia's foremost historians, attributed to Russian expansion when he called the history of Russia "the history of a country being colonized" is noteworthy. In both the Old World and the New, European colonial expansion extended trade and settlement. Two prominent theaters of settlement were Siberia and Canada, which at the same time were the main sources of furs, a staple of trade. The lucrative trade in furs for the European market was the primary object of Russian expansion eastward from the upper Volga River over the Urals and through Siberia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and of French and English expansion westward from the upper St. Lawrence River and Hudson Bay through Rupert's Land in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Russian promyshlenniks (fur hunters) were drawn across Siberia by the sable and into Alaska by the sea otter; French coureurs de bois and their English counterparts were drawn across the Canadian West by the beaver. Both movements utilized well-developed drainage networks, founding posts at strategic river junctions and portages. In the early nineteenth century the two movements, in the forms of the RussianAmerican Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, met on the Northwest Coast (Map 1). Although the two occupations were thus similar in several respects , there were fundamental differences. Because of Siberia's larger size and higher latitude, the climate, especially in Eastern Siberia, was MAP 1. Siberia vis-a-vis Canada. INTRODUCTION xvii more continental and hence more severe than that of Western Canadaa circumstance which created much greater difficulties for agriculture. Also, the buffalo, the primary source of pemmican, which to a large degree provisioned the Canadian fur trade, had no Siberian equivalent. Indian com (maize), an item in the diet of the Canadian fur traders around the Great Lakes, was also lacking in Siberia. Reindeer were far fewer in number and much more limited in range than the bison of North America. Thus, the fur traders of Siberia could not depend upon game as a major source of food, although they did utilize the abundance of fish, especially on the shores of the far North Pacific. In addition, Siberia , even without Alaska (Russian America), had a much greater longitudinal extent than Western Canada; hence it was more remote from European Russia than was the Canadian West from the St. Lawrence Valley.* Together, then, these circumstances created for the occupation of Siberia in general and for the fur trade in particular a serious problem of food supply, especially on the Pacific littoral. Here on the Okhotsk Seaboard and the Kamchatka Peninsula the Russians were beset with a chronic question of how, in such a harsh and distant region, to provision not only fur traders but also state servitors,** missionaries, convicts , serfs, and scientific expeditions. For the first time since Muscovy had begun "gathering lands" in the fifteenth century, Russian expansion faced a critical situation of food supply. Thus the problem of provisionment profoundly conditioned Russian occupation and exploitation of the Russian Far East and clearly distinguished it from French-English occupation and exploitation of the *In terms of the Canadian fur trade of the Hudson's Bay Company one should properly speak of England as the home base. Even so, the distance from London (headquarters of that company) to the westernmost post of the Pacific Northwest was substantially less than the distance from St. Petersburg (headquarters of the Russian-American Company) to the easternmost post of Alaska. Moreover, it was possible to communicate between England and Western Canada by sea via the direct, rapid, and cheap route from London across the North Atlantic to York Factory on Hudson Bay, whereas the Russians were unable to use the Northern Sea Route off the Arctic coast of Siberia effectively until the advent of the modem icebreaker. ** State servitors (sluzhilie lyudi) were mainly military personnel (especially Cossacks) but also noblemen and others who owed civil or military service to the state in return for land. xviii INTRODUCTION Canadian West. The matter was vital to Russia's success in the North Pacific sphere of international rivalry, as well as to pursuit of the fur trade. This book concerns the food supply problem primarily as it affected the Okhotsk Seaboard and the Kamchatka Peninsula from the beginning of Russian settlement in the mid-seventeenth century until the decline of the region in the mid-nineteenth century...