Lessons from History
Ship registries of the Russian-American Company (1799- 1867)
Grinev A. V.
At its founding in 1799, the Russian-American Company owned a small fleet of sailing vessels used for communication between the Russian settlements in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands and for maintaining connections to Okhotsk and Kamchatka. Ships were often lost to shipwrecks in the early 19<sup>th</sup> century. The company built new ships in Okhotsk and in the colonies, or bought them from foreigners, most often the Americans. Starting in the 1830s, some ships were ordered from Finnish and later German wharfs. All the ships used for circumnavigation were foreign-built. The overall number of the ships grew from a half dozen to 17 around 1840, and then dropped to a dozen, but their cargo capacity continued to grow. During the later period after 1850, the bulk of the fleet consisted of large three-mast barques, clippers and a few steamships
Key words: colonization of Alaska, Russian America, sailing fleet, shipbuilding, shipwrecks, the Russian-American Company
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Recommended bibliographic description
Grinev A. V., Ship registries of the Russian-American Company (1799- 1867),
Voprosy Istorii Estestvoznaniia i Tekhniki [Studies in History of Science and Technology],
2016, vol. 37, no. 2, p. 312-324
© Studies in the History of Science and Technology: Quarterly scientific journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2015)
ISSN 0205-9606. Индекс 70143
