Eastern Pacific High Sea

This is the open northeastern Pacific west of Haida Gwaii, beyond the sheltered channels of the Inside Passage and at the edge of the Gulf of Alaska. Cold, rain-laden westerly winds and long ocean swells cross it, and storms are frequent through autumn and winter. The currents of the North Pacific bring nutrient-rich water toward the coast, so the sea supports salmon, halibut, whales, seals and sea otters, and the fishing grounds nearer shore fed the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian peoples. Haida and Tlingit canoe builders carved large seagoing canoes from cedar and travelled and raided along the coast, but the open water this far out was crossed only with care.

Europeans entered these waters in the eighteenth century. Vitus Bering and Aleksei Chirikov sailed from Kamchatka to the Alaskan coast in 1741, and Russian fur hunters followed for sea otter pelts. In 1774 the Spanish captain Juan Pérez sighted the coast of Haida Gwaii, and James Cook explored the northwest coast in 1778. The maritime fur trade grew from the 1780s, and in 1787 George Dixon traded along the islands that he named the Queen Charlotte Islands. Russian America, based at Sitka from 1799, extended its claim along the same coast.