West of the Revolution (the Russian)

[alice malice]

West of the Revolution is Saunt’s attempt to take in what was
happening at other places in North America at the moment that the 13
colonies—which together represent just four percent of the continental
landmass—were declaring their independence from England. He begins his
story with an episode surely unfamiliar to many readers: Russian
expansion across the Bering Strait in the 1770s. But this is not mere
contrarianism. Rather, Saunt explains that even as the British
colonies on the other side of the continent drifted further apart from
their mother country, Russian sailors were pushing into the Aleutian
Islands in search of fur-bearing game such as foxes and especially sea
otters; the pelts then traveled back across the ocean for eventual
export to China, where this “soft gold” was prized by royal officials
in Beijing. The effects of this Russian thrust closely mirrored the
disastrous results of other European incursions elsewhere in North
America: thousands of Indians died from imported diseases or at the
hands of the determined and brutal newcomers like Captain Ivan
Solov’ev, who in one particularly bloody episode, Saunt recounts,
“blew up a fortified structure sheltering three hundred Aleuts and cut
down the survivors with guns and sabers.”

http://theamericanscholar.org/beyond-the-colonies/#.U-I3qGNnU38
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l