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Updated: May 8, 2025
After having surveyed Patience Gulf, which had only been partially examined by the Dutchman Vries, and at the bottom of which flows a stream now named the Neva, Kruzenstern broke off his examination of Saghalien to determine the position of the Kurile Islands, never yet accurately laid down; and on the 5th June, 1805 he returned to Petropaulovski, where he put on shore the ambassador and his suite.
Shall I give you the list of those who are tortured to-day at Saghalien because of what you did? It would be vain, for if you have any feeling, even that of a dog, they are remembered by you. You betrayed the man who trusted you; you betrayed your country for what? Shall I say that it was for this asylum in a strange land; for power, for the temptations which all must suffer? No, no.
Here President Roosevelt's intervention should have ceased. The terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth were a bitter disappointment to the Japanese people and the Japanese commissioners undertook to shift the burden from their shoulders by stating that President Roosevelt had urged them to surrender their claim to the Island of Saghalien and to give up all idea of an indemnity.
Three years later Muravieff ordered 6000 Cossacks to migrate from these trans-Baikal settlements to the land newly acquired from China on the borders of Manchuria . In the same year the Russians established a station at the mouth of the Amur, and in 1853 gained control over part of the Island of Saghalien. For the present, then, everything seemed to favour Russia's forward policy.
Japan naturally refused a proposal which would have given the whole of Saghalien to Russia, and Muravieff then resorted to the policy of sending emigrants to settle on the island.
It was not inhabited by Ainos, but by Tartars, of which very decided proof was obtained a few days later. Kruzenstern next entered the channel separating Saghalien from Tartary, but he was hardly six miles from the middle of the passage when his soundings gave six fathoms only. It was useless to hope to penetrate further.
Japan demanded a money indemnity and the cession of the southern half of the island of Saghalien, which Japanese forces had already occupied. These demands the Russians refused. Then Roosevelt took a hand in the proceedings. He urged the Japanese delegates, through the Japanese Ambassador, to give up their demand for an indemnity.
Yet what I have done is only at direct orders from Helsingfors orders that are stern, pitiless and unjust. Men have been torn from their families and sent to the mines, women have been arrested for no offense and shipped off to Saghalien, and mere children have been cast into prison on charges of political conspiracy with their elders in order to Russify the province!
Were it not for you, I should ere this have been on my way to Saghalien, to the tomb to which Oberg had so ingeniously contrived to consign me. Ah! you do not know you never can know all that I have suffered ever since I was a girl." Here the statement broke off, and recommenced as follows: "In order that you should understand the truth, I had better begin at the beginning.
An interesting sequel to this chapter of history is that, thirty years later, Saghalien became the scene of a Japanese invasion and was ultimately divided between the two nations along the fiftieth parallel, which was precisely what the Bakufu statesmen had originally proposed. The expedition of Formosa in 1874 has already been spoken of.
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