THE KURILSKY AINU 15 
stormy weather, having to be reckoned with in the 
crossing. 
In 1654 a Russian merchant named Taras Stadukin 
sailed from the Kolyma River, down through Bering 
Strait, and along the coast of Kamchatka to its 
southernmost point, and so discovered the northern 
islands of the chain. In 1711 the Russians first 
invaded the islands, and by 1736 all those to the 
northward of Yetorup became subject to Russia. 
In 1766-67 a voyage was made amongst them to 
collect a fur tax, so it may be presumed that by that 
time they had been fairly well settled. In 1795 the 
Russian-American Company established a “ factory 55 
on Urup. 
The northern and central islands were probably 
not permanently inhabited until years after their 
discovery by Stadukin, and it was only the quest of 
the sea-otter that then caused them to be settled. 
There was nothing else on or about them to induce 
anyone to settle in such cold, dreary, barren, and 
inhospitable places, more particularly when there 
was the choice of much better locations in Kam¬ 
chatka to the north and Yezo to the south, in which 
places game, fish, fur-bearing animals, timber, and 
vegetation, abounded. The people placed by the 
Russians on these islands in those early days were 
chiefly Aleuts, as well as some natives of Southern 
Kamchatka, they being expert otter-hunters. As 
to when the Kurilsky Ainu first took to residing 
permanently on them there is no account. They 
appear to have kept apart to a great extent from 
the northern people ; probably the Russians looked 
upon them as inferior beings. 
It was not until towards the end of the eighteenth 
