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Russian Alaska was the period between 1733 and 1867 in which Russia controlled the territory that today is the United States state, Alaska. The first written accounts indicate that the first Europeans to reach Alaska came from Russia. One legend holds that the first Russian settlement in Alaska was founded when boats from a 1648 expedition of Semyon Dezhnev, which was meant to go to the Anadyr River, were carried off course and carried to Alaska. There is no evidence, however, of such a settlement or settlements. It is possible that Dezhnyev and Fedot Alekseev, a Russian merchant, became the first people to sail into the Arctic from the Pacific through what is now the Bering Strait.[citation needed] His discovery was never forwarded to the central government, leaving the question of whether or not Siberia was connected to North America. In 1725, Peter I of Russia called for another expedition. As a part of the 1733-1743 second Kamchatka expedition, the St. Peter, captained by Dane Vitus Bering, and the St. Paul, captained by Russian Alexei Chirikov, set sail from Russia at the Kamchatkan port of Petropavlovsk in June 1741. They were soon separated, but each continued sailing east. On July 15, Chirikov sighted land, probably the west side of Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska.[1] He sent a group of men ashore in a longboat, making them the first Europeans to land on the northwestern coast of North America.
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