North Pacific High Sea

St Matthew and nearby Hall Island stand in the northern Bering Sea, isolated from the Alaskan mainland. Their coastal cliffs shelter colonies of seabirds, while winter pack ice surrounds the islands. Russian navigators charted the group in the 1760s, but it was not until 1809 that a fur-hunting party established a camp on St Matthew. The islands' remoteness made such stays difficult to sustain.