THE RUSSIAN AMERICAN COMPANY AND ITS TRADING RELATIONS WITH FOREIGNERS IN ALASKA UNTIL 1839 by John Duncan Lawrence Mcintosh B.A., University of British Columbia, 1962 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts In the Department of Slavonic Studies We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard The University of British Columbia January, 1969 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his represen• tatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is two-fold - to trace the development of Russian American Company relations with for• eigners in Alaska and to assess the effects of foreign trade there on the competitive position of the company. The closing year for this study, 1839» is the year in which the Russian American Company made definite arrangements to receive much of its provisions from the Hudson's Bay Company in order to resolve its long-standing problem of supply. As to the first aspect of this theme, this account of Russian American Company foreign relations follows in broad outline the existing works dealing with the history of the company. However, some corrections and new material based on a careful study of unpublished sources in America and the Soviet Union have been added concerning the details of foreign visits to Alaska. Various subject relevant to the development of foreign trade are considered: its beginnings, the evolu• tion of company and government attitudes to relations with foreigners, and the development-'o'f Hudson's Bay Company trade in the area. The financial, prosperity of the Russian American Company is reassessed and revised downwards on the basis of some relatively unexploited archival material, with the in• flationary decrease in the value of the paper ruble being taken into account. Particular attention is paid to the events leading up to the lease of the Alaska panhandle (lisi^re) in 1839 in order to determine the essential significance of the agreement in terms of the foreign trade and further development of the Russian American Company. The main conclusions of the thesis can be stated brief• ly as follows. Although small in comparison with the total income and expenditure in the colony, foreign trade was abso• lutely necessary to the survival of the company in Alaska unless and until some reliable alternative source of vital provisions and supplies could be devised. The final decision to regularize and perpetuate the Russian American Company's dependence on foreign trade signified a final acceptance of the view that there was no feasible alternative. Whether this view was completely valid cannot be answered definitely on the basis of the available evidence. It seems clear that the decision was not made on the basis of economic feasibility or political considerations alone. In any case the principal result of the lease agreement was that the Russian American Company's prospects for economic progress or even for holding its own financially practically disappeared. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author expresses his gratitude to Professor Cyril Bryner of the Slavonic Studies Department at the University of British Columbia for his patient encouragement and assistance, and to Professor Georgii Andreievich Novitskii of the History Faculty, Moscow State University, for valuable advice on source material. Special apprecia• tion is due to the University of British Columbia Committee of World University Service for providing the opportunity, through their exchange programme, to carry out study and research in the U.S.S.R. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction i I The Historical Background to Foreign Trade in Novo Arkhangelsk 1 II Foreign Trade in Novo Arkhangelsk and the Russian American Company, 1803 - 1817 17 III Foreign Trade in the Colony in the Light of Russian American Company Income During the First Charter Period 43 IV Foreign Trade in the Colony 1818 - 1825 and the Tsar's Decree of 1821 53 V The Russian American Company Crisis of the Mid-1820»s: External and Internal Aspects 59 VI The Hudson's Bay Company Undermines American Trade in Sitka, 1821 - 1837 70 VII The Lease of the Lisiere. 1839 100 Conclusion 111 Notes on the Source Material 114 Bibliography 117 INTRODUCTION The following study is based on an examination of virtually all of the published and unpublished sources in English and Russian dealing with the history of the Russian American Company. The exchange programme arranged by the University of British Columbia Committee of World University Service provided the opportunity for me to do study and re• search in Soviet libraries and archives. However, unexploited or new material on Russian America turned out to be limited in quantity and value. For a description of the documents and works consulted the readerssis referred to the notes on source material on page 114 of this paper. There may be a few rele• vant documents in the archives of the Soviet Foreign Ministry; however access to that archive is especially difficult for a foreign student to obtain. The purpose of this work is not to write a general company history, although the choice of subject matter has favoured the inclusion of a considerable amount of background narrative. Instead it is my intention to trace the develop• ment of Russian American Company trading relations with Ameri• can and British visitors to Alaska and to assess the signifi• cance of the trade in relation to the company's potential for prosperous growth. For several reasons this account is not taken beyond the lease of the Alaska panhandle (or lisiere) to the Hudson's Bay-Company in February, 1839. Although trade between the ii companies continued until the sale of Alaska in 1867> it had entered a new phase after the lease - that of a regularized, settled business arrangement. The post-lease period has been covered quite well by D. C. Davidson's article1 which concen• trates its attention on the commercial features of inter• company relations after 1839. The lease served to resolve the supply problem of the Russian American Company by commit• ting the Russian fur enterprise to a reliance on the Hudson's Bay Company for food supplies and land furs. Davidson11 and J. S. Galbraith111 have considered the arrangement to have been to the advantage of both parties. Two facts led me to question this interpretation. Firstly, the total amount of of peltry received declined substantially after 1839.1V. Secondly, there is some evidence that monetary returns from fur sales also deereased.V Consequently I have reexamined the role of foreign trade in the history of the Russian Ameri• can Company and particularly the lease agreement to find out whether the lease was really in the company's long term 1D. C. Davidson, "Relations of the Hudson's Bay Com• pany with the Russian American Company on the Northwest Coast, 1829-1867," The British Columbia Historical Quarterly 5, No. 1, 1941, PP. 33 - 48. X10p. cit. 111J. S. Galbraith, The Hudson's Bay Company as an Imperial Factor. lvP. Tikhmenev, Istoricheskoe obozrenie ... Rossisko- amerikanskoi kompanii 1, p. 327, vol. 2, p. 221. vNational Archives of the U.S.A., Microfilm Publications, o iii interest. To answer this question, one must consider the cevelopment of each company and of the inter-company rela• tions which led up to the settlement so as to determine the context in which each side had to bargain. Graphs are used where possible to show trends in com• pany income. The effect of the inflationary loss in value of the paper ruble is illustrated so as to correct the impression of prosperity which uncritical use of some company statistics would suggest. Since this is both an account of the development of foreign trade in Alaska and an examination of its basic sig• nificance, it was convenient to arrange the paper chrono• logically. Records of the Russian American Company. Board of directors to governor, I848, p. 595. The table referred to covers only the years 1844 - 1847. CHAPTER I THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO FOREIGN TRADE IN NOVO ARKHANGELSK For a period of over a century, Imperial Russia ruled over the huge territory now known as the State of Alaska. During the latter sixty-eight years of Russian dominion, the Russian American Company exercised monopoly rule over the area in the name of the Tsar. Before examining the trading relations of the company we should recall briefly the early history of Alaska's dis• covery and exploration in order to understand the conditions under which the Russian American Company developed. By the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Russians had completed their rapid expansion eastward across Siberia and had established settlements on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. When they first reached the extreme eastern part of Asia, they found the Chukchi, whom Tompkins describes as having "vague ideas about their own neighbour• hood and extremely meager information on what lay beyond it." The Soviet historian M. Chernenko puts the situation somewhat more positively, stating that by the beginning of the eigh• teenth century Russians had already obtained "a certain R. Tompkins, Alaska, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1945, p. 19. 2 amount" of evidence as to the position of the North American continent, its conditions and tribes owing to the ancient o trading ties of the Chukchi with the inhabitants of Alaska.