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Updated: June 5, 2025
The reader may find all the facts in any reputable history of Russia, or of the houses of Rurik and Romanoff. In his jealousy of the absolute power he wielded, Ivan the Terrible had made constant war upon his nobility killing them, or driving them away, and in every way possible destroying whatever share of influence they possessed in the state.
Of my earlier acquaintances, I now met only the estimable Don Louis de Torres, the friend of the Carolinas, who communicated to M. De Chamisso many interesting particulars respecting these amiable islanders. After our departure in the Rurik, he had again made a voyage to the Carolinas, and had persuaded several families to come and settle at Guaham.
After the death of Rurik, these pirates of the Baltic, under the regent Oleg, launching their galleys on the Borysthenes, forced the descent of the river against hostile tribes, defeated the armies of Byzantium, exercised their ancient craft on the Black sea and on the Bosphorus, and, entering Constantinople in triumph, extorted tribute and a treaty from the Keisar in his palace.
True, the defeat, like that of the Port Arthur fleet, was not as decisive as could have been wished; for of the three cruisers the Gromovoi, Rossia, and Runk which sallied forth from Vladivostock, under the command of Admiral Jessen, in response to Admiral Vitgeft's call for support in his last desperate sortie from Port Arthur, two of them, the Gromovoi and the Rossia, succeeded in regaining the shelter of Vladivostock harbour, while only the Rurik, the least formidable of the trio, was sunk.
He received me with unfeigned cordiality, and related to me many things which had taken place since my visit in the Rurik eight years ago. Don Louis, he said, had become a great man, and he himself a lieutenant, which here imports a considerable rank. Nevertheless, he disapproved of all the proceedings, and felt assured that no good could accrue from them.
From that time dates the rapid expansion of the Russo-Slavonians a movement that is still going on at the present day. To the north, the east, and the south new principalities were formed and governed by men who all claimed to be descendants of Rurik, and down to the end of the sixteenth century no Russian outside of this great family ever attempted to establish independent sovereignty.
On the other hand, there were those who regarded him as the genuine son of Ivan and thus entitled to the throne which he conquered from the usurper, Boris Gudunoff, in the year 1605. Fraudulent pretender, or genuine Czar of the blood of Rurik, this was the great question.
An inhabitant named Kadu of the group Kawan, no native, but thrown there by a storm from the island of Ulle, made the voyage from Otdia to Unalaschka and back with us in the ship Rurik, and gained the good-will of the whole crew.
We now steered due West, in order to learn whether the island which, on my voyage in the Rurik, I had named after Admiral Spiridow, was really a new discovery, or, as has been said, only the most southerly of the King George's Islands.
But not alone was this reverence for the autocracy so great as to protect the autocrat from violent reprisals on the part of his subjects; but the national veneration for the descendant of St. Vladimir and the stock of Rurik was sufficient to absorb all the indignation which the weakness or the wickedness of the Prince might have aroused.
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