Sketch of the History of the American Orthodox Mission (the Kodiak Mission, 1794–1837)
A history of the first Orthodox mission to Alaska, published by the monastery from which most of its members came for the mission’s centenary. It quotes at length the letters the missionaries sent to their abbot in 1795 and prints later letters and testimonies about Herman.
The monks of Valaam compiled this book for the hundredth anniversary of the mission. They state that they give their information, wherever possible, in the very words of the sources, and the first part is largely made up of the letters written from Kodiak in May 1795 by Archimandrite Ioasaph and the monk Herman to Abbot Nazarius. An appendix prints documents not published before, among them a letter of 1867 from Innocent, archbishop of Kamchatka, about Herman. The narrative also quotes the recollections of S. I. Yanovsky, a Russian official who came to Kodiak in 1818 and knew Herman there.
The letters are first-hand and close to the events; the figures of baptisms in them are the missionaries’ own. The connecting narrative is the work of monks writing a century later to honour their forerunners, and it takes the missionaries’ side in their quarrel with the trading company. It is cited in Orthodox Monks Reach Alaska.
Cited in
- 24 September 1794, firm date