Editing Sea of Okhotsk (section)

===European exploration and settlement===
Russian explorers [[Vassili Poyarkov]] (1639) and [[Ivan Moskvitin]] (1645)  were the first Europeans to visit the Sea of Okhotsk,<ref name=ushakov>{{ill|Pavel Ushakov (hydrobiologist)|lt=Pavel Ushakov|ru|Ушаков, Павел Владимирович}}, ''Sea of Okhotsk'', In: ''Морской сборник'', Issue 1, 1940, [https://books.google.com/books?id=AnZAAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA69 pp.69-92]</ref> and probably the island of Sakhalin in the 1640s.<ref>{{citation|first=John J. |last=Stephan|publisher=Clarendon Press |year=1971
|title=Sakhalin: a history|page=11}}</ref> The Dutch captain [[Maarten Gerritsz Vries]] in the ''Breskens'' entered the Sea of Okhotsk from the south-east in 1643, and charted parts of the Sakhalin coast and Kuril Islands, but failed to realize that either Sakhalin or Hokkaido are islands. During this period, the sea was sometimes known as the '''Sea of Kamchatka'''.<ref>{{citation |last= |first= |editor-last=Smellie |editor-first=William |editor-link=William Smellie |display-editors=0 |contribution=[[:File:EB1 Plate LXXXVII Fig. 2 World.png|Plate LXXXVII. Fig. 2. World.]] |title=[[:s:EB1|Encyclopaedia Britannica]] |edition=1st |volume=II |date=1771 |location=Edinburgh |publisher=[[Colin Macfarquhar]] }}.</ref>

The first and foremost Russian settlement on the shore was the port of [[Okhotsk]], which relinquished commercial supremacy to [[Ayan, Russia|Ayan]] in the 1840s. The [[Russian-American Company]] all but monopolized the commercial navigation of the sea in the first half of the 19th century.

The [[Second Kamchatka Expedition]] under [[Vitus Bering]] systematically mapped the entire coast of the sea, starting in 1733. [[Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse|Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse]] and [[William Robert Broughton]] were the first non-Russian European navigators known to have passed through these waters other than Vries. [[Ivan Krusenstern]] explored the eastern coast of Sakhalin in 1805. [[Mamiya Rinzō]] and [[Gennady Nevelskoy]] determined that Sakhalin was indeed an island separated from the mainland by a narrow strait. The first detailed summary of the [[hydrology]] of the Sea of Okhotsk was prepared and published by [[Stepan Makarov]] in 1894.