The Mission Party and the Voyage to Kodiak

In late 1793 a party of Valaam monks set out under Archimandrite Joasaph (Bolotov) on a journey of some 7,300 miles to the Russian colonies in America, arriving at Kodiak Island on September 24, 1794. This file traces the composition of the mission, the extraordinary overland-and-sea voyage, and the gap they found on arrival between Grigory Shelikhov’s promises and the reality of the colony.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (glorified by the OCA and ROCOR, 1970)

Origins of the Mission

The mission to America grew out of the petition of the Siberian fur merchant Grigory Ivanovich Shelikhov, who in 1784 had founded the first permanent Russian settlement in America at Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island and who sought clergy to consolidate and legitimize his colonial enterprise. The request reached the imperial court and went forward under the sanction of Empress Catherine II, with Metropolitan Gabriel of St. Petersburg entrusting Abbot Nazarius of Valaam with the task of choosing the men (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America, 1794–1994, ch. 1; 1867 Valaam Life; see the broader history). The men were drawn principally from Valaam, with some from the nearby Konevits Monastery on Lake Ladoga. The full institutional background is treated in the separately verified mission overview; this file keeps to the party and the journey themselves and stays consistent with that account.

The Mission Party

The mission is commonly described in shorthand as “eight monks” — counting the tonsured members — though the full party, including novices and lay servitors, is usually tallied at ten persons. The sources enumerate the ranks slightly differently, which is itself worth flagging.

[Disputed: The party’s exact tally varies by what is counted. Stokoe and Kishkovsky give the standard enumeration “the Archimandrite Joasaph, four hieromonks, a hierodeacon, two monks, and two servitors” (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1). The Russian rosters reproduced by the Canadian Orthodox History Project break the ten down as “4 hieromonks, a hierodeacon, 3 monks and 4 novices” (orthodoxcanada.ca, “Saint Joasaph (Bolotov),” a locator for the Russian-language rosters). The looser “eight monks” counts only the tonsured members. The discrepancies concern how novices and servitors are classed, not the identity of the principals.]

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; OCA, “Bishop Joasaph (Bolotov),” oca.org). Among the company were:

Hieromonk Juvenaly (Govorukhin / Hovorukhin) — the mission’s most energetic evangelist, who would disappear on the mainland and be venerated as the Protomartyr of America (see Early Mission Years).
Hieromonk Makary (Alexandrov) and Hieromonk Athanasius (Afanasy Mikhailov).
Hierodeacon Stephen and Hierodeacon Nektary (Panov).
The monk Herman — the future St. Herman of Alaska — who served, in the words of the rosters, “as an ordinary monk” and who, alone of the principals, was never ordained (orthodoxcanada.ca locator; Wikipedia locator, traced to Korsun).
Several novices, including Mikhail Feodorovich Hovorukhin (Juvenaly’s brother in the world) and Cosma Alekseev Telepnev — the surname later entangled in the confusion over Herman’s own biography (see Early Life).

Herman thus entered the great enterprise of his life not as one of its officers but as its humblest tonsured member — a simple monk among priests and an archimandrite-bishop-to-be.

The Voyage: Some 7,300 Miles

The mission left St. Petersburg in the closing days of 1793. Sources place the departure on December 21 or 25, 1793; the party reached Moscow and set out from there toward Siberia on January 22, 1794 (orthodoxcanada.ca locator; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1; the date range is reported consistently with the mission overview).

[Disputed: The St. Petersburg departure is given as December 21, 1793 in some accounts and December 25, 1793 in others; the difference is small and the records do not resolve it (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1; orthodoxcanada.ca locator).]

From the capital the route ran overland across the whole breadth of Siberia to the Pacific port of Okhotsk, and then by sea across the North Pacific to the Alaskan colonies — a journey of roughly ten months, on the order of 293 days, covering approximately 7,300 miles (orthodoxcanada.ca locator; OCA, “Bishop Joasaph (Bolotov),” oca.org; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1).

The often-repeated superlative — that this was “the longest missionary journey by any group in recorded history” — should be attributed rather than asserted: it is the framing of devotional and parish accounts of the mission (e.g., orthodoxcanada.ca; OrthoChristian.com, “225th anniversary,” used as a locator) rather than a claim established by comparative scholarship. What is securely true, and impressive enough, is that the party crossed the full width of the Russian Empire and a stretch of the Pacific to reach a colony at the literal edge of the known world.

The route’s two halves were utterly different in character. The overland leg ran the great post-road across Siberia — through Tobolsk, Irkutsk, and on toward the Pacific — a journey of months by sledge and cart through the Russian winter and spring of 1794, the same artery along which Irkutsk would later govern the new Kodiak vicariate. The maritime leg, from the rough Pacific port of Okhotsk across the storm-prone North Pacific, was the more dangerous: it was on precisely this passage that Bishop Joasaph and his companions would later be lost aboard the Phoenix (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1; Black, Russians in Alaska; see Early Mission Years). That a party of monks unaccustomed to the sea completed the crossing without loss in 1794 was itself no small thing. For Herman, the months of travel were a kind of extended cell: the Life and later tradition remember the monks keeping their rule of prayer and services as far as conditions allowed throughout the journey, carrying the discipline of Valaam with them across two continents.

Arrival at Kodiak: September 24, 1794

The mission arrived at Kodiak on September 24, 1794, landing at Pavlov (St. Paul’s) Harbour (orthodoxcanada.ca locator; OCA, oca.org; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1). This 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 (see the mission overview). Within the same season the monks established the parish that became Holy Resurrection at Kodiak, the oldest Orthodox parish in North America (Wikipedia / parish locators; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1).

The Shelikhov Misrepresentations

The arrival brought immediate disillusionment, for the colony bore little resemblance to what Shelikhov had described. The settlement was “more primitive than described, and the Temple that had been promised did not exist” (orthodoxcanada.ca locator; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1, which records that the monks found conditions far worse than Shelikhov had represented and that the promised church was not there). Shelikhov had painted a picture of an established, supplied, and church-equipped colony ready to receive a mission; the monks found instead a rough fur-trading outpost.

More troubling than the physical austerity was what the monks learned of the colony’s treatment of the native peoples. The Russian-American Company’s manager on the spot, Alexander Andreyevich Baranov, regarded the Alutiiq chiefly as a labor force for the fur hunt, and “an antagonistic environment began to grow” between the clergy and the colonial administration almost from the start (orthodoxcanada.ca locator; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1). The monks had been told they were coming to assist a Christian colonizing venture; they discovered that defending their converts against that venture’s exploitation would become a central part of the mission. That conflict — and the evangelistic labors that nonetheless flourished in the first years — belong to the next chapter of the story.

What the party did not yet know was how quickly its ranks would thin: within five years Juvenaly would vanish on the mainland and Joasaph, Makary, and Stephen would be lost at sea, leaving the unordained monk Herman as the mission’s senior survivor. The men who crossed two continents together in 1793–94 would be scattered by martyrdom and shipwreck before the new century was well begun (see Early Mission Years). Of the ten who set out from St. Petersburg, it was the one chosen last for office and never ordained who would outlive them all and become the abiding face of the mission — the monk Herman, in whom the whole long journey from Valaam finally came to rest.

References

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).”
Oleksa, Michael. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992.
Korsun, Sergei. Herman: A Wilderness Saint — From Sarov, Russia, to Kodiak, Alaska. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications, 2012.
Black, Lydia T. Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004.
Orthodox Church in America. “His Grace, Bishop Joasaph (Bolotov).” Past Primates. oca.org (used to locate Joasaph’s biography and the arrival date).
Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint Joasaph (Bolotov) of Alaska.” orthodoxcanada.ca (used to locate the Russian-language mission roster, departure dates, and the 293-day / 7,300-mile figures; primary claims traced to the Russian sources, Oleksa, and Stokoe & Kishkovsky).