The 1794 Valaam Mission to Kodiak

In 1794 a party of monastics drawn chiefly from Valaam Monastery arrived on Kodiak Island, planting the Orthodox Church on the North American continent for the first time. Sent at Empress Catherine II’s direction in response to the merchant Grigory Shelikhov’s petition, the mission baptized thousands of Alutiiq and neighboring peoples within two years, lost its leader Archimandrite Joasaph (Bolotov) in the 1799 wreck of the Phoenix, saw the disappearance of Hieromonk Juvenaly, and endured prolonged conflict with the Russian-American Company — leaving St. Herman as its last survivor and enduring witness.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (North American context)

Background: Shelikhov, Baranov, and the Petition for Clergy

By the 1780s the Siberian fur merchant Grigory Ivanovich Shelikhov had established the first permanent Russian settlement in America, founding a colony at Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island in 1784. Shelikhov argued for permanent settlement of Russian America and installed Alexander Andreyevich Baranov as his colonial manager (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, ch. 1, “The Alaskan Mission”). To consolidate and legitimize the enterprise — and, by his own account, to bring the Christian faith to the native peoples he had begun baptizing in a lay capacity — Shelikhov petitioned the Holy Synod for a mission of clergy.

The request reached the imperial court, and the mission went forward under the authorization of Empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great). Hagiographic and historical accounts alike describe the mission as undertaken “at the direction” or with the sanction of Catherine II; the monks were recruited principally from Valaam Monastery, with some drawn from the nearby Konevits (Konevitsa) Monastery on Lake Ladoga (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1). The departing missionaries received the blessing of Abbot Nazarius (Nazary) of Valaam, the spiritual father under whom several of them, including the future St. Herman, had been formed.

The Mission Party

The party is most commonly described as ten persons: an archimandrite as superior, several hieromonks (priest-monks), a hierodeacon, monks not in orders, and lay servitors. Sources tally the ranks slightly differently — the standard enumeration is “the Archimandrite Joasaph, four hieromonks, a hierodeacon, two monks, and two servitors” — and the looser shorthand “eight monks” reflects counting only the tonsured members (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1; Joasaph (Bolotov), OCA Past Primates). The leader was Archimandrite Joasaph (Bolotov), in the world Ivan Ilyich Bolotov, born January 22, 1761, in Tver province and tonsured at the Tolga Monastery in 1786 (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. on the first mission; OCA biography). Among the company were the Hieromonk Juvenaly (Govorukhin/Hovorukhin) and the monk Herman — the future St. Herman of Alaska — together with hieromonks Makary and Athanasius and the hierodeacon Stephen (Nektary).

The Voyage

The mission left St. Petersburg in the closing days of 1793 — sources place the departure on December 21 or 25, 1793 — and traveled overland across Siberia and by sea across the North Pacific. They arrived at Kodiak on September 24, 1794, after a journey of roughly ten months covering on the order of 7,300 miles (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1; OCA, Joasaph (Bolotov)). It was the first body of Orthodox clergy to set foot on what is now United States territory, and September 24 is reckoned the foundational date of the Orthodox Church in America.

Early Mass Baptisms

The missionaries set immediately to evangelizing the Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) people of Kodiak and the surrounding coast and islands, and the rate of conversion in the first two years was extraordinary. Within roughly two years the mission reported baptizing on the order of more than 12,000 native Alaskans and blessing more than a thousand marriages (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska). Hieromonk Juvenaly was the most active evangelist: contemporary accounts credit him with baptizing 746 Chugach (Chugatchi) people at Nuchek (Hinchinbrook) Island and many hundreds more among the Sugpiaq and Athabascan peoples of the mainland coast before his death (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska; Black, Russians in Alaska 1732–1867).

These numbers reflect a missionary method that, at its best, met the native peoples within their own communities and languages. Oleksa has argued that the rapidity of the conversions cannot be reduced to coercion or to superficial baptism: the Alutiiq received Orthodoxy in part because its sacramental and cosmological vision resonated with elements of their own worldview, and because the monks — unlike the Company’s traders — came as advocates rather than exploiters (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, chs. on the Kodiak mission). The depth of the implantation is borne out by the survival of Orthodox practice among native communities long after the Russian departure in 1867.

The Death of Hieromonk Juvenaly (c. 1796)

Hieromonk Juvenaly disappeared in 1796 while on a missionary journey on the Alaskan mainland, and he is venerated as the Protomartyr of America (glorified 1980; commemorated July 2). What is securely attested is narrow: he set out to evangelize the mainland and did not return, and no material evidence of his death survives (St. Juvenaly of Alaska, Canadian Orthodox History Project; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska).

Beyond that bare fact, the sources diverge sharply, and the difference is a textbook case of competing transmissions. A nineteenth-century “diary” of Juvenaly — supposedly translated by Ivan Petrof for the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft and summarized in Bancroft’s History of Alaska (1886) — was accepted for roughly a century as a primary source. It portrayed Juvenaly as seduced by a chief’s daughter and then murdered for refusing marriage. Lydia Black and other scholars have shown this document to be a forgery, very probably composed by one of Bancroft’s own assistants: it cites nonexistent ships, misdates liturgical feasts, and contradicts both Church and native tradition (Black, Russians in Alaska; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska). The discredited “diary” should not be treated as evidence.

The more credible account comes from Yup’ik oral tradition, recorded and corroborated by Archpriest Michael Oleksa. By this telling, Juvenaly approached a hunting party near Quinhagak, at the mouth of the Kuskokwim, and, ignoring signals to keep away, continued toward shore, whereupon the shaman-led group killed him; his unnamed native helper, attempting to flee by water, also died (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska). Oleksa notes that contemporary mission records name Quinhagak as the place of an incident, and that the Moravian missionary John Kilbuck recorded a local memory (c. 1886–1900) of “the first white man killed in the region” consistent with the oral account (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska).

[Disputed: The forged Bancroft “diary” places Juvenaly’s death on the Iliamna/Lake region as the result of a marriage dispute (Bancroft, History of Alaska, 1886) and is rejected as a forgery; Oleksa, drawing on Yup’ik oral tradition, locates the killing near Quinhagak on the Kuskokwim and attributes it to a shaman-led hunting party (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska). The Valaam/hagiographic tradition holds Juvenaly a martyr; the precise circumstances remain unestablished by documentary evidence.]

Joasaph’s Episcopate and the Wreck of the Phoenix (1799)

Recognizing the scale of the new mission, the Holy Synod resolved in 1796 to erect an auxiliary see in America and to elect Archimandrite Joasaph Bishop of Kodiak, a vicariate of the Diocese of Irkutsk. Notification of his election reached Joasaph only in 1798, and his episcopal consecration took place on April 10, 1799, in Irkutsk at the hands of Bishop Benjamin (Veniamin) of Irkutsk — remembered as a rare instance of consecration by a single bishop (OCA, Joasaph (Bolotov); Joasaph Bolotov, locating the OCA and synodal data).

[Disputed: Some popular accounts compress the chronology and state that Joasaph was “consecrated bishop in 1796”; the Holy Synod’s election was in 1796, but the consecration itself is dated April 10, 1799 (OCA, Joasaph (Bolotov)).]

Returning to his see, the newly consecrated bishop sailed from Okhotsk aboard the company ship Phoenix. In a storm off the Alaskan coast on May 21–24, 1799, the Phoenix was lost with all aboard, including Bishop Joasaph, Hieromonk Makary, and Hierodeacon Stephen (OCA, Joasaph (Bolotov); Black, Russians in Alaska). The first Orthodox episcopate in America thus ended before its bishop could reach his cathedral, and the see lapsed; no resident bishop would govern in Alaska again until St. Innocent in 1840.

Conflict with the Russian-American Company

From the outset the monks found conditions on Kodiak far worse than Shelikhov had represented: the settlement was more primitive than promised, and the church he had pledged was not there (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1). More gravely, the missionaries repeatedly clashed with the commercial administration over the treatment of the native peoples, whom the Company conscripted and exploited as fur-hunters. The monks regarded protection of their converts as inseparable from the mission, and they protested the abuses to St. Petersburg.

After Joasaph’s death the conflict sharpened under Alexander Baranov, by then chief manager of the chartered Russian-American Company (formed 1799). Baranov resented clerical interference; by 1800 the remaining monks were effectively confined and forbidden to travel freely, and the mission’s evangelistic momentum was broken (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1; Black, Russians in Alaska). The episode set an enduring pattern in Russian America: the Church as the conscience and advocate of native Alaskans over against the commercial colony — a stance most fully embodied in the survivor of the mission, the monk Herman.

St. Herman, the Last Survivor

Of the original party, the monk Herman outlived all the rest. He withdrew to Spruce Island (between roughly 1811 and 1817), naming his hermitage New Valaam, and there continued as a simple, unordained monk for some forty years, catechizing, caring for orphans, and defending the Alutiiq against the excessive demands of the Russian-American Company; during one epidemic he is remembered as the only Russian to visit and tend the sick (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1; OCA, St. Herman of Alaska). He reposed on Spruce Island in 1837 and was glorified by the Orthodox Church in America on August 9, 1970, at Kodiak — the same date on which the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia canonized him in San Francisco (OCA, St. Herman of Alaska).

[Disputed: St. Herman’s repose is traditionally commemorated on December 13 (December 25 N.S.), 1837; some modern scholarship, working from the Company manager Kupreyanov’s dispatch to the bishop of Irkutsk, dates the death to November 15, 1837 (Korsun, Herman: A Wilderness Saint, 2012).]

The fuller life and veneration of St. Herman belong to a dedicated treatment; here it suffices that the foundation laid by eight or ten monks in 1794, though broken by shipwreck, disappearance, and conflict, did not fail. The Church they planted endured in the Alutiiq villages and would be carried forward a generation later by St. Innocent and the first native clergy.

See Also

• St. Herman of Alaska — full compendium — the mission’s last survivor, treated in depth

• St. Innocent and the Native Church — the second-generation mission that carried the work forward

• The Immigrant Era — Orthodoxy in America beyond the Alaskan mission

• The Orthodox Church in America — the jurisdiction that traces its origin to the 1794 mission

• American Saints — Joasaph, Juvenaly, Herman, and the other saints of Alaska

• The Synodal Period — the Russian ecclesiastical context that sent and governed the mission

References

• Oleksa, Michael. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992.
• Stokoe, Mark, and Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America, 1794–1994. Syosset, NY: Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995. Chapter 1, “The Alaskan Mission (1794–1870).”
• Black, Lydia T. Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004.
• Korsun, Sergei. Herman: A Wilderness Saint — From Sarov, Russia, to Kodiak, Alaska. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications, 2012.
• Orthodox Church in America. “His Grace, Bishop Joasaph (Bolotov).” Past Primates. oca.org (used to locate the 1796 election and April 10, 1799 consecration dates).
• Orthodox Church in America. “St. Herman of Alaska.” oca.org (used to locate the 1970 glorification and biographical data).
• Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint Juvenaly (Hovorukhin) of Alaska.” orthodoxcanada.ca (used to locate the attestation problem and the Bancroft-forgery discussion; primary claims traced to Oleksa and Black).
• Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of Alaska, 1730–1885. San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1886 (cited only as the vehicle of the discredited Juvenaly “diary”).