The Voyage to Unalaska (1823–1824)

The fourteen-month journey that carried Fr. Ioann Veniaminov and his household from Irkutsk to the Aleutian Islands: the departure from Irkutsk in May 1823 with his mother, brother, wife, and infant son; the overland crossing of eastern Siberia to Okhotsk; the Pacific passage to Sitka and the long winter there; and the final voyage aboard the brig Rurik to Unalaska in the summer of 1824, where he served his first Liturgy on the islands that would be his home and his school for the next decade.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

Setting Out (May 1823)

Having volunteered for the Aleutian assignment that no other Irkutsk priest would take (see Irkutsk and the Young Priest), Fr. Ioann Veniaminov left Irkutsk on 7 May 1823 (Old Style) (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 2; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), Canadian Orthodox History Project [orthodoxcanada.ca]). He did not go alone. He took with him his whole household: his aged mother, his brother Stefan (who would serve as his lay assistant on the islands), his wife Ekaterina, and their infant son Innocent (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 2; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca). To carry a nursing infant and an elderly woman across Siberia and the open Pacific was a measure of the seriousness — and the finality — with which he had embraced the assignment.

The decision to bring the whole family was not sentimental but structural. A married priest of the Russian Church could not simply leave his household behind for a posting of indefinite length at the edge of the world; the family went where the priest went, or not at all. And so the choice Veniaminov had made in Irkutsk was a choice made on behalf of all of them — wife, child, mother, and brother bound together into a single venture from which there could be no quick turning back. The early-May departure was itself dictated by the calendar of the road: the overland leg had to begin as the Siberian spring opened the way east, so that the party might reach the Pacific coast in time for the summer sailings (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 2). Behind the bare date, then, lies the whole logic of a journey planned to the season.

The first stage was the immense overland crossing of eastern Siberia: from Irkutsk by the post-roads and river routes toward the Pacific coast and the port of Okhotsk, the embarkation point for Russian America. The distances of this leg alone — well over two thousand miles of taiga, mountain, and river — meant a journey of months, undertaken in stages, before the party ever reached salt water (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 2; Black, Russians in Alaska, on the Okhotsk route).

The Okhotsk track was the great artery of Russia’s Pacific empire, and it was notorious. From Irkutsk the route ran down the Lena and across to Yakutsk, and from Yakutsk the worst of it began: a punishing trail over mountain passes and through trackless forest and bog to the coast at Okhotsk, traveled in summer by packhorse because no wheeled vehicle could pass. Horses and men were lost on it regularly; goods and supplies for the whole American colony had to be dragged over it at ruinous cost, which was among the reasons the Russian-American Company’s settlements were so chronically short of everything (Black, Russians in Alaska, on the Okhotsk route and colonial supply). For a family party that included an elderly woman and a nursing infant, the crossing was an ordeal measured not in comfort but in survival; that they accomplished it at all, and over a single season, is a quiet testimony to the seriousness with which Veniaminov had committed his household to the work.

The pace of such travel was dictated by the seasons. The overland leg had to be timed so as to reach Okhotsk in time to catch a vessel before the autumn closed the North Pacific to shipping — a logistical clock that governed the whole of colonial life and that would govern Veniaminov’s movements for the next decade and a half. Missing a sailing meant a wasted year. The family’s progress across Siberia in the summer of 1823, and their arrival on the coast in time to sail that same season, show how tightly the journey was planned around the rhythm of the ships.

Across the Pacific to Sitka

From Okhotsk the family sailed across the North Pacific to Novo-Arkhangelsk (New Archangel; later Sitka), the capital of Russian America on Baranof Island, which they reached on 20 October 1823 (Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 2). The season was by then too far advanced to risk the further passage west into the Aleutians, and so the party wintered at Sitka — Veniaminov’s first sight of the Russian-American colonial capital and of the Tlingit (Kolosh) people who lived around it, the very place and people to which he would be sent as priest a decade later (see Novo-Arkhangelsk).

The long winter at Sitka was an apprenticeship in the human and physical geography of Russian America: the fortified company town, the mixed population of Russians, creoles (the children of Russian and native unions), Aleut hunters brought from the islands, and the watchful, independent Tlingit beyond the stockade. It was here that Veniaminov first took the measure of the Russian-American Company’s world — the fur-trade economy and the colonial society inside which his entire missionary life would be lived (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 2; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. on the colonial Church).

Novo-Arkhangelsk in 1823 was the capital and chief depot of a colony built on a single commodity: the sea-otter pelt, the most valuable fur in the world, hunted by Aleut and Kodiak baidarka crews whom the Company conscripted, often by coercion, into its service. The wealth of the colony rested on this native labor, and the moral cost of that arrangement — the depopulation, dislocation, and hardship visited on the Aleut people by decades of the fur trade — was the social reality into which Veniaminov was sailing as priest. The town itself was a wooden fortress perched on the edge of Tlingit country; the Tlingit had destroyed an earlier Russian settlement on the site in 1802 and remained a formidable independent power around it, trading with the Russians but never subjugated by them (Black, Russians in Alaska, on Novo-Arkhangelsk and the Tlingit; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska). For a young Irkutsk priest, the winter of 1823–24 was a first, sobering education in the colonial order — its commerce, its violence, its peoples — that he would spend the rest of his life serving and, increasingly, criticizing.

The Rurik to Unalaska (1824)

When the spring shipping season opened, the family sailed west toward their destination. On 1 July 1824 they left Sitka aboard the brig *Rurik*, bound for the Aleutian chain (Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 2). The passage carried them along the great arc of the Aleutians to the island of Unalaska, in the Fox Islands group, the administrative center of the eastern Aleutian district.

The Aleutian archipelago is one of the most forbidding sea-roads on earth: a chain of more than a hundred volcanic islands curving some twelve hundred miles westward from the Alaska Peninsula, dividing the Bering Sea from the North Pacific. The islands are nearly treeless, swept by perpetual wind, and wrapped much of the year in fog and storm; the waters between them, where the two seas meet, are among the foggiest and most dangerous in the world. Unalaska, in the Fox Islands group at the eastern end of the chain, was the largest settlement and the natural hub of the eastern district — but it was still a place of grass and stone and weather, a green volcanic island with no timber to build with and no shelter from the gales (Black, Russians in Alaska, on the geography of the Aleutians and the Fox Islands; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3). To sail the length of this chain in a small brig was itself a feat; to make it the field of a lifetime’s ministry was the work Veniaminov was now undertaking.

They arrived at Unalaska on 29 July 1824, fourteen months after leaving Irkutsk (Repose of St. Innocent, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca). Fr. Ioann served his first Divine Liturgy on the islands on 1 August 1824 (Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca). [Disputed: a few secondary summaries, including some OCA administrative pages, give the year of arrival as 1822; this is an error. The departure from Irkutsk in May 1823, the over-winter at Sitka in 1823–24, and the arrival at Unalaska on 29 July 1824 are firmly and consistently attested in the Garrett-based chronology.]

The Measure of the Journey

Fourteen months separated the departure from Irkutsk and the first Liturgy on Unalaska — fourteen months of river, mountain, ocean, and a Sitka winter, with an infant and an elderly mother in the party the whole way. The scale of it is hard to grasp from a modern map: the family had crossed most of Asia and a great reach of the North Pacific to reach a posting from which a single exchange of letters with the seminary that had formed him might take two years. This was the geography of Russian America, and it conditioned everything about the mission. Supplies, news, instructions, and reinforcements all moved at the speed of the Okhotsk track and the seasonal ships; a priest in the Aleutians was, for most practical purposes, on his own, answerable to a distant bishop and dependent on a Company whose first concern was furs, not souls (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 2; Black, Russians in Alaska, on distance, supply, and the isolation of the colonial clergy).

That isolation cut both ways. It threw the missionary back on his own resources — which, in Veniaminov’s case, were uncommonly deep — and it gave him a freedom of action that a more closely supervised priest would not have had. The man who would learn the Unangan language, give it an alphabet, build a church with his own hands, and study the natural history of the islands was able to do so in part because there was no one near enough to tell him not to. The long voyage that ended at Unalaska on 29 July 1824 had carried him beyond the reach of the ordinary machinery of Church and empire and set him down where his particular genius could have its full scope.

The man who stepped ashore at Unalaska in the summer of 1824 was twenty-six years old, a married parish priest from Irkutsk with no missionary training, set down on a treeless volcanic island at the end of the inhabited world. The Aleutian district to which he had been assigned stretched across dozens of islands and a stormbound sea; his nearest brother priest was hundreds of miles away. What he made of that situation over the next ten years — the church he built with his own hands, the language he learned and gave an alphabet, the people he came to love and defend — is the subject of the chapters that follow (see The Aleut Mission).

References

Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The journey of 1823–24: departure 7 May 1823 with the family; the Okhotsk route; the winter at Sitka; the Rurik passage; arrival at Unalaska 1824.)
Saint Innocent (Veniaminov). Canadian Orthodox History Project (orthodoxcanada.ca). (Old-Style itinerary: departure 7 May 1823; Sitka 20 October 1823; sailed for Unalaska aboard the Rurik 1 July 1824; arrival 29 July 1824; first Liturgy 1 August 1824.)
Repose of Saint Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, March 31. (Arrival at Unalaska 1824.)
Black, Lydia T. Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004. (The Okhotsk route and the structure of Russian-American colonial travel and society.)
Oleksa, Michael J. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992. (The colonial Church and the Russian-American Company world that Veniaminov entered.)