North Pacific High Sea

The waters south of St Matthew Island lie far from the Alaskan mainland, in a part of the Bering Sea visited by storms and winter ice. Seabirds nest on the island's cliffs, and marine mammals gather around its shores. In 1809 a Russian fur-hunting expedition established a camp on St Matthew, an attempt to exploit the resources of an island that earlier Russian navigators had charted in the 1760s.