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Main geographic objects of Russia
Sakhalin Island
Sakhalin is an island off the east coast of Asia. The island is part of the Sakhalin Region. It is the largest Russian island. Sakhalin is washed by the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. Sakhalin is separated from the Asian mainland by the Tatar Strait (at the narrowest point (Nevelskoy Strait) with a width of 7.3 kilometers only, the strait freezes in the winter), and from the Japanese Island of Hokkaido by La Pérouse Strait.
The island’s name is derived from the phrase Sakhaliyan Ula, the Manchu name of the Amur river which can be translated as rocks of the black river. This name was printed on a map and misinterpreted as the island’s name, which it ultimately became. Its Japanese name, Karafuto, comes from Ainu kamuy kar put ya mosir, which means “the island a god has created at the estuary”. In 1805, an expedition led by Adam Johann von Krusenstern visited Sakhalin, studied its coasts and came to the conclusion that Sakhalin was a peninsula. In 1808, Japanese expeditions led by Mamiya Rinzō and Matsuda Denjuro discovered that Sakhalin was an island. Most of the European cartographers were skeptical about this discovery. For a long time, Sakhalin was depicted as an island on one maps, and as a peninsula on others. Only in 1849, an expedition of Gennady Nevelskoy settled the issue as the expedition’s naval warcraft Baikal navigated through the straight between Sakhalin and the mainland. The straight was later given Nevelskoy’s name.
