Between 1855 and 1874,
American whaleships anchored under Medvezhy to obtain shelter from storms and retrieve wood. They also used it as a staging point to send out smaller
whaleboats to capture
bowhead whales in
Uda and
Tugur Bays. They called it
Elbow Island. On the night of 11 October 1858, the bark
Phoenix (323 tons), of
Nantucket, under Captain Bethuel Handy, of
Cotuit, was wrecked on the west side of the island during a gale. Captain Handy and about a dozen men later crossed the frozen Shevchenko Strait and traveled along the coast to Chumikan at the mouth of the Uda River where native hunters took them inland to the Russian military settlement of Udskoye, where they spent the winter; ==References==