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Once or twice when it tried to lift, we saw a glimpse of the oily sea, the flitting vision of a junk's sail spread in the vain hope of catching the breeze, or the buoys of a line of nets. Somewhere close to us lay the land, but it might have been the Kurile Islands for aught we knew.

On the fifth of July, A. D., 1811, the Russian sloop of war, Diana, approached Kumachir, one of the most southerly of the Kurile islands, belonging to Japan, for the purpose of seeking shelter in one of its bays against an approaching storm. They were received, on their arrival, by a shower of balls from a fort which commanded the bay.

In the year 1811, Captain Golownin, commander of the imperial war-sloop Diana, lying at Kamtschatka, received orders from head-quarters to make a particular survey of the southern Kurile Islands, and the coast of Tartary.

The Kurile Isles, north of Yesso, and in the neighbourhood of Kamschatka, have been incorporated in the Empire since 1875, and the Loo-Choo Islands, some 500 miles south-west of Japan's southern extremity, since 1876.

ONE of the problems which invited the attention of the new Government early in the Meiji era had been handed down from the days of feudalism. In those days, neither Yezo nor Saghalien nor the Kurile Islands were under effective Japanese administration. The feudatory of Matsumae had his castle at the extreme south of Yezo, but the jurisdiction he exercised was only nominal.

'Ho! you fat black barrel, you're eating my food! said Pambe, in the Other Lingua Franca that begins where the Levant tongue stops, and runs from Port Said eastward till east is west, and the sealing-brigs of the Kurile Islands gossip with the strayed Hakodate junks. 'Son of Eblis, monkey-face, dried shark's liver, pigman, I am the Sultan Sayyid Burgash, and the commander of all this ship.

This girdle sends off branches at several points. The great range of burning mountains of the Andes of Chili, Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico, that of the Aleutian Islands, of Kamtschatka and the Kurile Islands, extending southwards into the Philippines, and the branching range of the Sunda Islands are well-known examples. That of the West Indian Islands, ranging from Grenada through St. Vincent, St.

We desired to pass the fourth, or Amphitrite, channel of the Kurile Islands; the weather was so thick that we could not see a ship's length in any direction, and all night men stood with axes ready to cut the Danzig's tow line in case any sudden danger should appear. The fog lifted just as we neared the channel, and we had a clear view on all sides.

From the Jenesei they reached the Lena, partly by water and partly by land; from the Lena they went to the eastward as far as the Judigirka: and from Ochotsk they went by the Kurile Islands to Japan.

This country, now inhabited by the Niphonians, or Japanese, as we have come to call them, was previously the home of the Ainu, a white, hairy under-sized race, possibly, even probably, emigrants from Europe, and now gradually dying out in Yezo and the Kurile Islands.