A Russian fur company once built a fort in Hawaii and named Bodega Bay
Russia's first joint-stock company chased sea otter pelts from Alaska to Baja California. Along the way it renamed a California bay after its patron, stranded a crew among Olympic Peninsula nations, built a fort in Hawaii whose agent tried to topple the kingdom, and struck a deal with John Jacob Astor over guns.
Emperor Paul I chartered the Russian-American Company in 1799, granting it a trade monopoly across Russian America north of 55 degrees. Its headquarters moved from Irkutsk to Saint Petersburg in 1801, and nobles soon replaced the merchants who first held its shares. Count Nikolai Rumyantsev, the commerce minister, funded Russia's first naval voyage around the world from 1803 to 1806, partly in a failed bid to open Chinese ports to Russian furs.
Alexander Baranov, the first chief manager, founded New Archangel, today's Sitka, in 1804. The company forcibly conscripted Aleut and Alutiiq men for three-year stints because they were superb otter hunters, and hired them out on American ships. One such voyage returned to Kodiak in 1804 with 1,800 pelts, and between 1805 and 1812 Baranov's hunters gathered over 22,000 on ten American vessels off California. Russia's own sailors were scarce, partly because serfdom kept peasants bound to the land.
Blocked from Guangzhou, the company shipped furs to Okhotsk, from where caravans could take over a year to reach Kyakhta to swap them for Chinese tea, cotton and porcelain. Worried that American traders were selling firearms to Alaskan natives, it signed a four-year pact with Astor in 1812; he promised to stop the gun sales in return for exclusive supply rights. The War of 1812 wrecked the scheme.
Ambitions stretched south. The Russians ran Fort Ross in California between 1812 and 1842 and called Bodega Bay Rumyantsev Bay. A ship sent in 1808 to scout a post in Oregon Country wrecked in gales; its crew fought the Hoh, ended up bound to the Makah until an American captain bought their freedom, and lost seven people. In Hawaii, agent Georg Anton Schäffer built Fort Elizabeth in 1817 before his solo attempt to overthrow the kingdom collapsed.
Source: Russian-American Company
