Orthodox Monks Reach Alaska

A history of the mission published by the monastery of Valaam in 1894 quotes the missionaries’ own letters at length. It says that the mission was formed in 1793 of eight monastics and two church servers, most of them monks of Valaam, that it travelled through Siberia at the expense of the trading company of Shelikhov and Golikov, and that it reached Kodiak in the autumn of 1794 (Valaam Monastery, History of the Kodiak Mission (1894), p. 66). The monk Herman of Alaska wrote to his abbot that all ten had arrived safely after almost a year on the road (Valaam Monastery, History of the Kodiak Mission (1894), pp. 66–67 (letter of Herman, May 1795)). The head of the mission, Archimandrite Ioasaph, wrote that he left Moscow on 22 January 1794 and travelled by river, on horseback and by sea, and that on Unalaska they baptized more than a hundred people who, he says, had long been ready for it because they lived among Russian traders (Valaam Monastery, History of the Kodiak Mission (1894), pp. 67–68 (letter of Ioasaph, May 1795)).

Both men wrote to Abbot Nazarius of Valaam in May 1795 (Valaam Monastery, History of the Kodiak Mission (1894), p. 66). Ioasaph reported that he had baptized more than seven thousand “Americans” and married more than two thousand couples, and that a church had been built; the people, he wrote, were kind but poor, they and the monks loved one another, and they had broken and burned their shamans’ gear (Valaam Monastery, History of the Kodiak Mission (1894), p. 68 (letter of Ioasaph, May 1795)). Herman put the baptized at nearly seven thousand and described with delight how the priest-monks Macarius and Juvenal argued over which of them should have Alaska to preach in (Valaam Monastery, History of the Kodiak Mission (1894), pp. 70–71 (letter of Herman, May 1795)).

The same history records losses and quarrels. An account it quotes says that Juvenal baptized more than seven hundred Chugach in 1795 and was killed the next year near Lake Iliamna (Valaam Monastery, History of the Kodiak Mission (1894), p. 72). Ioasaph wrote to the company’s partners about “various disorders” (Valaam Monastery, History of the Kodiak Mission (1894), pp. 68–69 (letter of Ioasaph, May 1795)).

Herman stayed. By 1818 he was living on Spruce Island, near Kodiak, in a cell with a garden; a Russian official who knew him there says that Aleuts came to him for counsel and with complaints of ill-treatment, and that he visited the sick in an epidemic; the history adds that he kept a small school on the island (Valaam Monastery, History of the Kodiak Mission (1894), pp. 107–110). He died there on 13 December 1837 (Valaam Monastery, History of the Kodiak Mission (1894), p. 115).

A married priest from Irkutsk, John Veniaminov, reached Unalaska in 1824, learned the Aleut dialects, devised an alphabet and translated the Gospel of Matthew (Russian Orthodox Church, Act on the canonization of Innocent (1977), paras. beginning ‘On May 7, 1823’, ‘His travels over the islands’ and ‘Father John Veniaminov’s first translations’). He also wrote in Aleut an Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven (Russian Orthodox Church, Act on the canonization of Innocent (1977), paras. beginning ‘On May 7, 1823’, ‘His travels over the islands’ and ‘Father John Veniaminov’s first translations’). It tells its readers that there is one way, the way Jesus Christ walked (Veniaminov, Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven, introduction), and that Christ compels no one to follow him (Veniaminov, Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven, part 3). As the monk and bishop Innocent of Alaska he was given the new see of Kamchatka, the Kuriles and the Aleutians in 1840 (Russian Orthodox Church, Act on the canonization of Innocent (1977), para. beginning ‘At the same time, the Holy Synod’). He wrote in 1867 that in 1842, kept from Kodiak harbour for three days by a contrary wind, he had looked toward Spruce Island and said inwardly that if Father Herman had found favour with the Lord the wind should change; within a quarter of an hour, he says, it turned, and he later went to Herman’s grave and served a memorial service there (Valaam Monastery, History of the Kodiak Mission (1894), pp. 169–170 (letter of Archbishop Innocent, 1 March 1867)).