Pomor Kotch off the Chukchi Peninsula.
1647

Watercolor 14" x 21"


The region known as Pomorie, the shores around the Barents and White Seas, was first settled by Russians about the same time the Norse were establishing bases in Iceland and Greenland. The Pomors were trappers and fishermen, and their boats were developed specifically for sailing in ice-infested waters. Small, flat bottomed boats were built for inshore and river use, but larger round bilge hulls were designed for longer voyages. The Pomor gradually extended their territories into the rich fur bearing lands to the east. Eventually they would occupy all of eastern Russia, and in the search for furs and trade would carry Russian territorial claims into the New World. The Bering Sea was finally entered in 1647 when an expedition organized by Fedot Popov and Aleksei Usov, and led by Semeon Dezhnev, set out to reach the mouth of the Anadyr River by sailing around the Chukchi Peninsula. Popov and Usov were descendants of a long line of merchants and navigators from the White Sea, and their vessel was a kotch of similar lineage developed in the Pomorie for the polar seas. For another twenty years this voyage was duplicated, and gradually knowledge of a great land to the east across the sea became part of local folklore.