Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
In the middle of the 18th century, during their territorial progression to the east, the Russians, upon reaching the strait that separates Siberia from Alaska, decided to go further and explore the northern region of the Pacific.
What would become known as the Great Northern Expedition – conceived in the reign of Pedro I, “the Great,”,and carried out by the Danish Vitus Bering – had as its starting point Okhotsk, on the Kamchatka peninsula, and one of its main intentions was the recognition of the entire region up to the “João-da-Gama-Land,” or “Gamaland,” i.e., the Land of João da Gama.
This legendary territory was believed to lie somewhere between Kamchatka and the American continent. Many maps were printed over the next 150 years, depicting real or imaginary islands between Hokkaido and Kamchatka, confusing, for example, the Kuril Islands with the “Land of the Company” and the “Island of the State” (so named, in 1643, by the Dutch navigator Maarten Gerritsz Vries), or with the “Terra Esonis” or the “Gamaland” itself, but all of them – and this seems very clear – with a common characteristic: the famous Atlas (1643) that João Teixeira Albernaz I drew in Seville on the basis of secret documents that came into his hands in the 1630s was his exclusive source of inspiration.
Among this precious material was the outline of an elongated coastal zone in the North Pacific that João da Gama may have seen, or even visited, as well as a substantial part of the well-known North American west coast – which the place-names in all its extension prove – well that shifted to the northwest.
We are also shown the mythical – or perhaps already recognized by João da Gama himself – the Strait of Anián, which separated Asia (Eastern Tartary) from America (Anián). Crossing the North Pacific in the 1580s, Gama may have landed in the Kuril Islands, and possibly some of the Aleutian Islands, and even a territory henceforth speculatively mapped as “Gamaland” in much of the cartography of subsequent times. (Photo: Joaquim Magalhães de Castro)
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