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He then surveyed a small portion of the coast of Yezo, naming the chief irregularities, and cast anchor near the southernmost promontory of the island, at the entrance to the Straits of La Pérouse. Here he learnt from the Japanese that Saghalien and Karafonto were one and the same island. On the 10th May, 1805, Kruzenstern landed at Yezo, and was surprised to find the season but little advanced.
*A monument still stands on the site of the old Taga Castle. It was put up in A.D. 762, and it records that the castle stood fifty miles from the island of Yezo. Again the eight Bando provinces were ordered to send levies, and at the head of the army thus raised a Japanese general penetrated far into Mutsu and destroyed the Yemishi's chief stronghold.
But their two visits had shown them that Yezo was capable of much development, and they gradually began to flock thither as colonists. Officials sent from Japan proper to make an investigation reported that Kamchatka, hitherto a dependency of Japan, had been taken possession of by Russians, who had established themselves in the island of Urup and at other places.
Even Bering himself, hugging the Asiatic coast, had not descried the opposite shores of America, and was uncertain as to the exact position of the strait. This point was not cleared up till Cook's voyage of 1778, and even after that the Sakhalin, Yezo and Kurile waters still remained to be explored.
Within Dewa, Mutsu, and the island of Yezo, the aboriginal Yemishi had been held since Yamato-dake's signal campaign in the second century A.D., and though not so effectually quelled as to preclude all danger of insurrection, their potentialities caused little uneasiness to the Central Government. But there was no paltering with the situation which arose in 724.
Saghalien commands the estuary of the Amur, and Muravieff, the distinguished Russian commander in East Asia, appreciated the necessity of acquiring the island for his country. In 1858, he visited Japan with a squadron and demanded that the Strait of La Pérouse, which separates Saghalien from Yezo, should be regarded as the Russo-Japanese frontier.
The Ainos of Yezo may be called Shamanists or Animists; that is, their minds are cramped and confused by their belief in a multitude of inferior spirits whom they worship and propitiate by rites and incantations through their medicine-man or sorcerer.
This invigoration was followed by the mighty missionary labors of the last half of the thirteenth century, which carried Buddhism out to the northern frontier and into Yezo.
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.
"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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