What was heard about the Northern Raft: Japanese castaways in Russia
A Japanese scholar's 1794 record of a castaway captain's years in Siberia and Russia, 1783 to 1792.
Full title Brief Account of What Was Heard about the Northern Raft (Russia and Siberia as experienced by Japanese castaways 1783-1792), 11 maki with appendix of maps and drawings (1794)
北槎聞略
Katsuragawa Hoshū (1751-1809), from the testimony of the castaway captain Daikokuya Kōdayū
Daikokuya Kōdayū, a Japanese sea captain cast away far from home, lived among Aleuts, Kamchadals and Russians and crossed Siberia between 1783 and 1792. The shogunal physician and scholar Katsuragawa Hoshū questioned him and wrote up the answers in 11 volumes in 1794, adding maps and drawings and checking them against Dutch geography books. It describes the Aleutians, Kamchatka, Okhotsk, Yakutsk, Irkutsk, Moscow and St Petersburg. The atlas does not hold the text: the corpus knows this work only from its catalogue card, which points to page images of a manuscript in the National Archives of Japan Digital Archive.
- How they knew
- Part eyewitness
- Who “Tartar” means here
- The card lists Tatars among the peoples described, next to Yakuts, Buryats and Tungus, which points to Tatars of Siberia and the Russian empire. How the text itself uses the word is not recorded here.
- Why read it
- A view of Siberia and Russia in the 1780s from a Japanese eyewitness, independent of both Chinese and European writers, with a map of the Russian empire drawn in Japan.
- Watch out
- The words are Kōdayū's, but the book is Katsuragawa's edit and was shaped by Dutch-derived geography. The atlas has no page text, so no passages are quoted.
What it says
No quotes from this one yet. Its text is out of reach for now, or the scan could not be read.
The fine print
How we know
informant testimony Written down from what informants reported.
informant testimony: Kōdayū's firsthand experience of the Aleutians, Kamchatka, Okhotsk, Yakutsk, Irkutsk, Siberia and St Petersburg (1783-1792), recorded and systematised by a shogunal physician-scholar with reference to Dutch geographies
Research notes
- Kōdayū's oral testimony filtered through Katsuragawa's editing and through Dutch-derived geography (his Roshiya shi); modern edition Kamei Takataka (Iwanami 1990). Waseda holds the appendix of drawings (bunko08 b08_j0021).
Why it matters
Firsthand Japanese description of Siberia and Russia in the 1780s, with a Japanese-drawn map of the Russian empire and descriptions of Siberian peoples: an East Asian eyewitness independent of both Chinese and European traditions.
Places named
Aleutian Islands; Kamchatka; Okhotsk; Yakutsk; Irkutsk; Siberian route; Moscow; St Petersburg
Peoples named
Russians; Kamchadals; Aleuts; Yakuts; Buryats; Tungus; Tatars; Japanese castaways