United states founded

For much of its history, the Kamchatka Peninsula in remote northeastern Russia has remained largely unknown to the outside world. The first Europeans to set foot on Kamchatka, Semyon Dezhnev and Fedot Alexeyev, arrived there in the mids, and the first permanent settlement was established in by Vladimir Atlasov.

Although Russians maintained a constant presence on Kamchatka from that time forward, no one knew much about its geographic relationship to the rest of the world.

Roots of Investigation

In the s, Peter the Great commissioned Vitrus Bering to determine whether a strait existed between Eurasia and America and to map Russia’s northeastern territories.

Bering’s journeys throughout the North Pacific revealed that the Kamchatka Peninsula extended southward from the Chukotka region, the area situated directly across from Alaska via the Bering Strait, and pointed down toward the northernmost of the Kirile Islands, which themselves led down t