In 1855,
HMS Winchester and
HMS Barracouta are believed to have discovered the bay without exploring it, referring to it as
Hornet Bay and
Garnet Bay, respectively. On June 17, 1859, Governor-General
Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky of Eastern Siberia led his
corvette Amerika ("America") into the bay seeking shelter during a storm. He had the crew drop anchor at present-day Nakhodka. The next morning, he logged a inlet, naming it Nakhodka Bay. He ordered a map drawn that, for the first time, named the overall bay the Gulf of America (), after his ship, and applied the name to the peninsula that separates the Gulf of America from Nakhodka Bay. The first Russian settlement on the bay was established in 1906 and settled the following year. The village was named Amerikanka (, ) after the bay. Some initial arrivals refused to live in the settlement because they perceived its name as a reference to the United States. A port was developed at Nakhodka in the 1950s, followed by
Vostochny Port in the 1970s on the opposite side of the Gulf of America. In 1972, the
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic reapplied the name Nakhodka Bay to the entire Gulf of America, eliminating a perceived reference to the United States, a geopolitical rival of the Soviet Union, as part of a broader
renaming of geographical objects in the Russian Far East. The smaller inlet is now known as Bukhta Nakhodka (). ==References==