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Updated: June 8, 2025
"Still, right or not, I'm for pushing on." Then Charly, who held the wheel, broke in. "I guess it's north," he assented. "They'd have no use for fetching up among the Russians, and there's nobody else until you get to Japan. No white men, anyway. Besides, from the Behring Sea to the Kuriles is quite a long way." "If you were dumped down ashore there, which way would you go?" Dampier asked.
But closer examination of the Yezo and Itorop pits showed that there was complete absence of any mark of antiquity such as the presence of large trees or even deep-rooted brushwood; that they were arranged in regular order, suggesting a military encampment rather than the abode of savages; that they were of uniform size, with few exceptions; that on excavation they yielded fragments of hard wood, unglazed pottery, and a Japanese dirk, and, finally, that their site corresponded with that of military encampments established in Yezo and the Kuriles by the Japanese Government in the early part of the nineteenth century as a defence against Russian aggression.
Anyway, they couldn't do anything with her on the wind, and as it kept heading them from the east she sidled away down south through the Kuriles into the Yellow Sea. They got ice-bound somewhere, which explains why Dunton fetched Vancouver only a week ago." "But the message?"
That gray monotony of sea is not at all homelike, being as yet new and not used to the procession of keels. It holds a very few pictures and the best of its stories those relating to seal-poaching among the Kuriles and the Russian rookeries are not exactly fit for publication. There is a man in Yokohama who in a previous life burned galleons with Drake.
In the peninsula of Kamchatka there are twelve active volcanoes, in the Aleutian Islands thirty-one, and in the peninsula of Alaska three. The chain of the Kuriles contains at least ten active volcanoes; the Japanese Islands and the islands to the south of Japan twenty-five.
A similar statement in all probability applies to the systems of volcanic mountains of the Aleutian Isles, Kamtschatka, the Kuriles, the Philippines, and Sunda Isles.
This point of land, which is a low flat cape, formed a marked object in the geography of the eastern coast of Asia, and by an accurate observation and several good angles, they determined its precise situation to be in latitude 51 0', and longitude 156 45'. At the same time they saw too the first of the Kurile islands, called Shoomsha, and on the next day they saw the second, Paramousir; the latter is the largest of the Kuriles subject to Russia; but the gale increasing from the west, they were never able to approach it nearer than to observe its general aspect, which was very high land, almost entirely covered with snow; and to ascertain its situation; which was found to be 10' west longitude from Lopatka, and its latitude 50 46' at the north, and 49 58' at the south end.
Nevertheless, Russian subjects, their shores being contiguous with those of Japan, occasionally found their way as sailors or colonists into the waters of Saghalien, the Kuriles, and Yezo. The Japanese did not then exercise effective control over Yezo, although the island was nominally under their jurisdiction.
"If I'd a wallet full of papers certifying me as a harmless traveler, it would be south just as hard as I could hit the trail. Guess I'd strike somebody out prospecting, or surveying, and they'd set me along to the Kuriles. Still, if I'd been sealing, I wouldn't head that way. No, sir. That's dead sure." There was a reason for this certainty, right or wrong, in the minds of the sealers.
"To explore the north-west and south-west coasts of Japan," says Kruzenstern, "to ascertain the situation of the Straits of Sangar, the width of which in the best charts Arrowsmith's 'South Sea Pilot' for instance, and the atlas subjoined to La Pérouse's Voyage is laid down as more than a hundred miles, while the Japanese merely estimated it to be a Dutch mile; to examine the west coast of Yezo; to find out the island of Karafuto, which in some new charts, compiled after a Japanese one, is placed between Yezo and Sachalin, and the existence of which appeared to me very probable; to explore this new strait and take an accurate plan of the island of Sachalin, from Cape Crillon to the north-west coast, from whence, if a good harbour were to be found there, I could send out my long boat to examine the supposed passage which divides Tartary from Sachalin; and, finally, to attempt a return through a new passage between the Kuriles, north of the Canal de la Boussole; all this came into my plan, and I have had the good fortune to execute part of it."
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