Rinzo explored the coast of Sakhalin. During the Crimean War a British fleet failed to capture Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. In 1860 Russia annexed the southeast corner of Siberia from China. The Pacific opened to trade and imperialism After Captain Cook large numbers of European merchant vessels began to enter the Pacific. The reasons for this are not completely clear. On Cook's third voyage furs bought at Nootka were sold in China at a 1,800 percent profit - enough to pay for a trading voyage. The first to do this was James Hanna from Macao in 1785. Robert Gray in 1787 was the first American. This Maritime fur trade reached its peak about 1810, drew many ships into the Pacific and drew Canadians and Americans to the coast. The first Pacific whaling ship left London in 1788 and by the nineteenth century there were hundreds of whaleships in the Pacific each year. Clipper ships cut the sailing time from Europe to the Pacific. England founded a colony in Australia in 1788 and New Zealand in 1840. After about 1800 England began to replace the Dutch Republic along the Asian coast. Hong Kong became a colony in 1839 during the First Opium War, which was also the first time that a large European military and naval force appeared in the Pacific. European ships and sailors disrupted life on the Pacific islands. Most of the Pacific islands were soon claimed by one European power or another. See also Colonisation of Oceania Europeans in Oceania References Bibliography Camino, Mercedes Maroto. Producing the Pacific: Maps and narratives of Spanish exploration (1567-1606) (Rodopi, 2005). Daum, Andreas. "German Naturalists in the Pacific around 1800: Entanglement, Autonomy, and a Transnational Culture of Expertise". In Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I, ed. Hartmut Berghoff, Frank Biess, and Ulrike Strasser. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019, 79-102. Delaney, John. Strait Through: Magellan to Cook & the Pacific, (Princeton University Library, 2010). Website devoted to the exploration of the Pacific Ocean Online Dodge, Ernest Stanley. Beyond the Capes; Pacific Exploration from Captain Cook to the Challenger, 1776–1877 (Little, Brown, 1971). Engstrand, Iris HW. "Seekers of the 'Northern Mystery': European Exploration of California and the Pacific." California History 76.2-3 (1997): 78-110 online. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders - A Global History of Exploration, (2006). Guest, Harriet. Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges and the Return