| Traveling
overland, Russians first reached the Pacific
Ocean at the mouth of the Amur River in
1639. By the mid 17th century the
region that is now known as the Russian
Far East began to be depicted on Russian
and European maps. These maps, looking as
if they’d been created primarily on
JRR Tolkien’s accounts of Middle Earth,
showed major river systems and little else.
In fact it was in the form of a river, not
a peninsula, that Kamchatka made its world
debut on a Russian map created in 1667 (see
image 1.).
At this time it was still not clear to cartographers
that the Kamchatka River was located on
a peninsula. Indeed the whole of the
Russian Far East and Siberia was drawn in
the form of a large rectangle with virtually
no distinguishable land masses disturbing
it smooth external lines. Notice something
else odd about the first image? Look again,
the Kamchatka River is on the left as we
look at it, i.e. what we would consider
extreme western edge of the map. This is
because all old Russian maps oriented north
to the bottom of the page.
With increased interest in the region and
exploratory expeditions on the part of the
Russian Cossacks, the true nature of the
land where the Kamchatka River flows began
to take shape. In the 1680’s the first
Russian maps appear showing Kamchatka as
a peninsula (without naming it as such)
(see image 2.). A Dutch map from this same
period placed a small notation next to the
Kamchatka River, “Black forests abound”.
There is no surviving explanation of what
the cartographer might have been referring
to although it is interesting to speculate.
60 years later in 1741-43 the cartographic
work of Vitus Bering's Second Kamchatka
Expedition - which is credited with having
established the separation of the Asian
and North American land masses by a body
of water - sketched a more or less accurate
depiction of Kamchatka's external shape
onto the world’s maps (see image 3.).
If you're interested to learn more about
early exploration of the Russian Far East
and the Bering Voyage that charted the definitive
shape Kamchatka, try reading Journal
of a Voyage with Bering. |
