6 AMERICAN DIPLOMATIC QUESTIONS 



1821, might have gone unchallenged by the world for many 

 years ; for, in those early times, very few merchant vessels 

 had occasion to visit those distant waters, and in general 

 little interest attached to their inhospitable shores; never- 

 theless, fleets of American whalers had even before that 

 time found their way north of the Aleutian Islands, follow- 

 ing the custom of making annual summer cruises there- 

 abouts in pursuit of whales, which were abundant in the 

 , cold waters of the Bering Sea. The Russian restrictions 

 / upon navigation in the northern Pacific Ocean seriously em- 

 barrassed those hardy sea-rovers from New Bedford and 

 Nantucket. Through their complaints to the State De- 

 partment in Washington, an American protest appeared 

 against these Russian assertions of sovereignty over so large 

 an expanse of ocean. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, 

 in a communication of February 25, 1822, to Mr. Poletica, 

 then Russian Minister at Washington, said: 



I. am directed by the President of the United States to inform 

 you that he has seen with surprise, in this edict, the assertion of 

 a territorial claim on the part of Russia, extending to the fifty- 

 first degree of north latitude on this continent, and a regulation 

 interdicting to all commercial vessels other than Russian, upon 

 the penalty of seizure and confiscation, the approach upon the 

 high seas within one hundred Italian miles of the shores to 

 which that claim is made to apply. ... It was expected before 

 any act which should define the boundaries between the United 

 States and Russia on this continent, that the same would have 

 been arranged by treaty between the parties. To exclude the 

 vessels of our citizens from the shore, beyond the ordinary dis- 

 tance to which the territorial jurisdiction extends, has excited 

 still greater surprise. 



Mr. Poletica replied February 28, only three days after 

 the receipt of Mr. Adams' communication: 



... I ought, in the last place, to request you to consider, sir, 

 ^that the Russian possessions in the Pacific Ocean extend, on the 

 northwest coast of America, from Behring Strait to the fifty-first 

 degree of north latitude, and on the opposite side of Asia, and 

 the islands adjacent, from the same Strait to the forty-fifth 

 degree. The extent of sea, of which these possessions form the 



