Russian-Australian relations in the nineteenth century

Abstract

The story of Russia's trans-Siberian penetration of the North Pacific is a long and famous one. At the same time that sixteenth-century Western European seafarers were uncovering the Western shores of the Atlantic, Russian exp explorer-traders, from the expedition of Stroganov in 1558, were getting far beyond the Urals and as early as 1638 had reached the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk. Within the next twenty years the river Amur was being explored and the first trading-treaty between Russia and China had been drawn up. The expedition of Dezhnev (1648) had made it pretty cI ear that straits from the Arctic to the Pacific separated Asia from North America. In 1697-98 Atlasov explored Kamchatka. Soon there were quite a number of Russian trading posts round the Sea of Okhotsk and the Kamchatkan Peninsula. Russian settlements in the East had no link with the West beyond that of the interminable post-horse changes of the Siberian overland route. It looked as if Russia's destiny would be that of a great land-locked European-Northern-Asian state. But at least, by the end of the seventeenth century, Russia's hold on the Pacific side of North-Eastern Asia was strongly estabIished.