The Castricum under Maarten Gerritsz Vries was the first recorded European vessel to reach this part of the Kurils, arriving in 1643[3] while exploring Hokkaido and the surrounding area for the Dutch East India Company (VOC).

[3][9] Urup is first clearly shown on an official Japanese map of 1644, identifying it as part of the territories of the Matsumae clan, a feudal domain of Edo Japan.

G.F. Muller’s Voyages & Découvertes faites par les Russes (Amsterdam, 1766) contained a list and description of the Kuril Islands, including Urup whose people were said to trade with the Japanese but were not under their control.

The same year, in an effort to find the Russian fleet in the Pacific Ocean during the Crimean War, a French-British naval force reached the port of Hakodate (open to British ships as a result of the Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty of 1854), and sailing further north, landed on Urup, taking official possession of the island as "l'Isle de l'Alliance" and nominating a local Aleut inhabitant as provisional governor.

On the night of 27–28 April 1853, the ship Susan (349 tons), of Nantucket, was stove by ice and sank in Bussol Strait while attempting to enter the Sea of Okhotsk.

[17] In 1855, during the Crimean War (1853-56), both nations took the remarkable step of annexing Urup, one of the largest Kuril islands, as part of their aggressive policy against Russian settlements.

Consequently, an attack on Urup was initiated, aiming to reduce a reported Russian settlement and establish a naval base more firmly under allied control than those accessible in Japan.

A meeting in London led both companies to persuade their respective governments to agree to a neutrality pact concerning their North American settlements, resulting in the British refraining from attacking Alaska during the Crimean War.

[20] Allied naval operations in the Pacific during the Crimean War were characterized by inglorious and often farcical episodes, with the formal annexation of Urup standing out as a particularly curious incident.

The main Russian settlement on the island was Tavano, where an Anglo-French force arrived in late August 1855, led by HMS Pique and the French Sybille.

The decision to assign Captain F. W. E. Nicolson to this mission was potentially unfortunate, considering his role in the previous year's Franco-British assault on Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka.

Details of the proceedings, preserved in Nicolson's dispatch, highlighted the allies' declaration of Russia being deprived of its rights and the solemn possession-taking of Urup, an island ceded by Japan to the Russian Emperor in the last treaty between the two nations.

The Treaty of Paris in 1856 restored all occupied territories to the Russians, ending Urup's brief period as part of the British and French colonial empires.

While the annexation was met with criticism in the Admiralty, Parliament, and the press, detailed reconnaissance and the removal of Russian presence were sensible operations in preparation for possible plans in 1856.

Stirling's instruction to take possession might have been misinterpreted by the headstrong Nicolson, leading to a ceremony that, while Gilbertian and possibly morale-boosting, achieved little beyond providing entertainment for locals (Stephan, cit.

During the Invasion of the Kuril Islands by the Soviet Union after the end of World War II, Japanese forces on Urup surrendered without resistance.