For a brief moment, the isolated port of Petropavlovsk became an active front in the Crimean War. The ensuing battle was more farcical than heroic. The Crimean War is usually considered a Black Sea conflict, but it actually took place on several frontiers of the Russian empire, including the Baltic and White Seas. In the summer of 1854, the Pacific squadrons of three nations—Russia, Great Britain, and France—fought the most unusual and anachronistic action of the war on the distant and forbidding Kamchatka Peninsula. The ships, tactics, and commanders involved in that battle seemed more appropriate for Admiral Horatio Nelson’s...