530 THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. [cHAr. 



a Japanese, who had been taken prisoner after being ship- 

 wrecked on the coast of Kamchatka, and the collected tribute 

 which consisted of the skins of 3,200 sables, 10 sea-otters, 

 7 beavers, 4 otters, 10 grey foxes and 191 red foxes. He was 

 received graciously, and sent back as commander of the Cossacks 

 in Yakutsk with orders to complete the conquest of Kamchatka. 

 An interruption however happened for some time in the path 

 of Atlassov as a warrior and discoverer, in consequence of his 

 having during his return journey to Yakutsk plundered a 

 Russian vessel laden with Chinese goods, an accessory circum- 

 stance which deserves to be mentioned for the light which it 

 throws on the character of this Pizarro of Kamchatka. He 

 was not set free until the year 1706, and then recovered his 

 command in Kamchatka, with strict orders to desist from all 

 arbitrary proceedings and acts of violence, and to do his best 

 for the discovery of new lands. The first part of this order he 

 however complied with only to a limited extent, which gave 

 occasion to repeated complaints ^ and revolts among the already 

 imbridled Cossacks. Finally, in 1711, Atlassov and several 

 other officers were murdered by their own countrymen. In 

 order to atone for this crime, and perhaps to get a little farther 

 from the arm of justice, their murderers, Anziphorov and Ivan 

 KosiREVSKOJ,^ undertook to subdue the not yet conquered part 

 of Kamchatka, and the two northernmost of the Kurile 

 Islands. Further information about the countries lying farther 

 south was obtained from some Japanese who were shipwrecked 

 in 1710 on Kamchatka. 



At first in order to get to Kamchatka the difficult detour by 

 Anadyrsk was taken. But in the year 1711 the commander at 

 Okotsk, Sin Bojarski Peter Guturov, was ordered, by the 

 energetic promoter of exploratory expeditions in Eastern Siberia, 

 the Yakutsk voivode, Dorofej Trauernicht, to proceed by sea 

 from Okotsk to Kamchatka. But this voyage could not come 



1 Complaints were made, among other things, that in order to obtain 

 metal for making a still, he ordered all the copper belonging to the crown 

 which he carried witli him, to be melted down. When the Cossacks first 

 came to Kamchatka and were, almost witliout a contest, acknowledged as 

 masters of the country, they found life there singularly agreeable, with one 

 drawback — -there were no means of getting drunk. Finally, necessity 

 compelled the wild adventurers to betake themselves to what we should 

 now call chemico-technical experiments, which are described in con- 

 siderable detail by Krascheninnikov {loc. cit. ii. p. 369). After many 

 failures they finally succeeded in distilling spirits from a sugar-bearing 

 plant growing in the country, and from that time this drink, or raka, 

 as they themselves call it, has been found in great abundance in that 

 country. 



2 He afterwards became a monk under the name of Ignatiev, came to 

 St. Petersburg in 1730, and himself wrote a narrative of his adventures, 

 discoveries, and services, which was printed first in the St. Petersburg 

 journals of the 26th March, 1730, and likewise abroad {Miiller, iii. p. 82). 



