Sea of Okhotsk - History

History

Russian explorers Ivan Moskvitin and Vassili Poyarkov were the first Europeans to visit the Sea of Okhotsk (and, probably, the island of Sakhalin) in the 1640s. The Dutch captain Maarten Gerritsz Vries in the Breskens entered the Sea of Okhotsk from the south-east in 1643, and charted parts of the Sakhalin coast and Kurile Islands, but failed to realize that either Sakhalin or Hokkaido are islands.

The first and foremost Russian settlement on the shore was the port of Okhotsk, which relinquished commercial supremacy to Ayan in the 1840s. The Russian-American Company all but monopolized the commercial navigation of the sea in the first half of the 19th century.

The Second Kamchatka Expedition under Vitus Bering systematically mapped the entire coast of the sea, starting in 1733. Jean-François de La Pérouse and William Robert Broughton were the first non-Russian European navigators known to have passed through these waters other than Maarten Gerritsz Vries. Ivan Krusenstern explored the eastern coast of the Sakhalin in 1805. Mamiya Rinzō and Gennady Nevelskoy determined that the Sakhalin was indeed an island separated from the mainland by a narrow strait. The first detailed summary of the hydrology of the Okhotsk sea was prepared and published by Stepan Makarov in 1894.

During the Cold War, the Sea of Okhotsk was the scene of several successful U.S. Navy operations (including Operation Ivy Bells) to tap Soviet Navy undersea communications cables. These operations were documented in the book Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. The sea (and surrounding area) were also the scene of the Soviet PVO Strany attack on Korean Air Flight 007 in 1983. The Soviet Pacific Fleet used the Sea as a ballistic missile submarine bastion, a strategy that Russia continues.

In the Japanese language, the sea has no traditional Japanese name despite its close location to the Japanese territories and is called Ohōtsuku-kai (オホーツク海), which is a transcription of the Russian name. Additionally, Okhotsk Subprefecture, Hokkaidō which faces the sea, also known as Okhotsk region (オホーツク地方, Ohōtsuku-chihō?), is named after the sea.

The Sea of Okhotsk was a hotbed for whaling in the middle of the 19th century. Beginning in 1845, American whaleships began hunting right whales in the southeastern part of the Sea of Okhotsk near the Kurile Islands. The first bowheads were caught in 1847. From 1849 bowheads dominated the catch. Between 1850 and 1853 the majority of the fleet focused their efforts on bowheads in the Bering Strait region. Following poor catches there, whaleships began shifting their attention to the stock of bowhead whales in the Sea of Okhotsk. In 1854 alone some 160 vessels visited the region. Next year more than 130 ships. The next year, in 1856, nearly 150 ships sailed to the Okhotsk. By 1857, the number of ships had declined to a little over 100. With declining catches from 1858 to 1860 the fleet shifted its focus back to the Bering Strait region. Many of the ships converged on the Shantar Islands, anchoring within the archipelago's many sheltered bays. On July 28, 1854 the New Bedford ship Isabella reported 94 ships in sight from her deck. A few days later, the Lexingtonof Nantucket reported one hundred whaleboats were about chasing whales. Ships continued to hunt whales in the Sea of Okhotsk until the early 20th century.