In 1785, Catherine the Great launched an expedition to the Arctic with the level of secrecy you'd normally associate with a weapons programme. The goal: find a navigable Northeast Passage, size up Alaska's fur trade, and plant Russian claims across the region before Britain, France or Spain even knew what was happening. Nearly 150 men left St Petersburg in October 1785, heading overland through Siberia.

The man put in charge was Joseph Billings, a low-born English sailor in his mid-20s who had served as a teenager on Captain Cook's final voyage to the Aleutians. Britain and Russia were naval allies at the time, so it wasn't unusual for British officers to join the Russian service. Billings hired another Englishman, a polyglot named Martin Sauer, as translator — and Sauer's account is why we know any of this at all.

The expedition went badly in almost every way that didn't involve paperwork. Two purpose-built ships, Pallas and Yasashna, were pushed back by sea ice in June 1787 and abandoned the Passage attempt. A second try failed too. At Okhotsk they built two more ships; one, the Good Intent, wrecked in the harbour it never left, drowning a man. Billings then abandoned exploring America to march across the Chukotsk Peninsula on foot with seven men — a crossing his own officers questioned and members described as undergoing 'everything that is bad'. The group scraped through Chukchi villages short on food and fuel, often demanding hospitality and refusing to pay for it. Meanwhile the ships' company, mapping around St Lawrence Island and wintering in the Aleutians, contracted scurvy; their flagship was eventually scuttled. There was also an early casualty of politics: New Englander John Ledyard, mid-way through his own Jefferson-backed trek to the Bering Strait, was arrested in Irkutsk on Catherine's orders as a suspected (and almost certainly not actual) French spy.

But the expedition's real legacy was what it reported back. Naturalist Carl Heinrich Merck — of the future pharmaceutical family — collected 200 specimens across 120 species, 20 new to science, and members were shocked to find sea otter populations already collapsing after just a few decades of rapacious Russian hunting. Sauer predicted the species would barely exist in fifteen years. By the 1820s they were nearly extinct; after a brief recovery under Russian restrictions, the American purchase of Alaska in 1867 reignited the trade, and only international protection saved the otter from vanishing.

The team also documented atrocities against indigenous people. On Kodiak Island they confirmed that merchant Grigorii Shelikhov's men had massacred some 500 Koniaga people six years earlier and held women captive to force men into labour. The report condemned him, and he was denied his monopoly on the Alaskan fur trade.

Then came the espionage epilogue. Back in St Petersburg, Billings accused Sauer — who was holding the diaries, records and correspondence — of planning to publish the expedition's secrets before the Empress approved. Sauer nonetheless got out of Russia and published his narrative in England, which is how history learned about an expedition built to be forgotten.

For travellers drawn to the Russian Far East, Alaska and the Aleutians, this story is the origin point of much of what shaped those coastlines: the fur trade, the colonial violence, the sea otter's brush with extinction, and the obsession with an Arctic shortcut that still drives shipping geopolitics today.

Story based on original reporting by ExplorersWeb.