Kamchatskiy Zaliv

Kamchatka Bay opens on the Pacific side of the peninsula around the mouth of the Kamchatka River. The river mouth gave vessels access to the Lower Kamchatka settlements and became a departure point for Russian voyages into the northern Pacific. Its importance rested on the connection between a coastal anchorage, the inland river route and the sea beyond the peninsula.

In 1728, Vitus Bering sailed from the Kamchatka River with Aleksei Chirikov on an expedition intended to determine whether Asia and America were joined. Peter I had personally prepared instructions for the enterprise shortly before his death. The voyage carried the explorers northward toward the strait later named for Bering. Ships leaving this river entered waters that eighteenth-century observers distinguished from neighbouring stretches of the coast. Georg Wilhelm Steller's description called the sea between the river mouth and the Kronotsky headlands the Kamchatka Sea. The bay thus belonged to a locally differentiated maritime landscape while serving as a gateway for the expanding geographical investigations of the Russian state.