174 THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. [chap. 
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 vfith only to a limited extent, which gave 
occasion to repeated complaints ^ and revolts among the already 
unbridled 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, Anziphoeoy 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, Doroeej 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 with him, to be melted down. When the Cossacks first 
came to Kamchatka and were, almost without 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 {Muller^ iii. p. 82). . 
