First edition. Part 1 only. Large Octavo (ca. 24,5x15,5 cm). [2 – half title], [2 – t.p.], ix – preface, 364, [3 – table of contents] pp. Later grey paper wrappers. Pp. 53, 145, 233 and 289 with the ink stamps of the private library of N.N. Beklemishev. Several leaves at the front very mildlysoiled on extremities, several leaves at the rear with mild water stains in the lower outer corners, but overall a very good uncut copy.

The first part of the fundamental work on natural history and ethnography of the Unalaska Division of Russian America (the Fox Islands and several adjacent groups in the Aleutian archipelago), written by a renowned Russian American missionary and linguist, the “Enlightener of Alaska and Siberia,” Ivan (Ioann) Popov-Veniaminov. Volumes of this exceedingly rare work are usually found separately, likely as the volumes perhaps were published separately with a slight delay between them. In 1840, he became Innocent, Archbishop of Kamchatka, Kurile and Aleut Islands (1840-1868), in 1868 - Metropolitan of Moscow (1868-1879). In 1977, he was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as St. Innocent of Alaska.

Deeply interested in the life and culture of the people he preached to during his service on Unalaska (1824-1834), Veniaminov started to compile a thorough description of the islands and their inhabitants, which was finished during his tenure as the dean of St. Michael’s Cathedral in New Archangelsk (Sitka) in 1834-37 (Barsukov, Ivan. Innokentii, Mitropolit Moskovsky i Kolomensky po yego sochineniyam, pismam i rasskazam sovremennikov. Moscow, 1883, pp. 46, 98). The book was first published in 1840, during Veniaminov’s travel to Saint Petersburg and Moscow, together with his four other famous publications – translations of the Gospel of St. Matthew and Orthodox Christian Catechism into the Aleut Language, Veniaminov’s original Instruction in Christian Faith (published in the Aleut and Russian languages), as well as his pioneer work on the history of Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska. “Zapiski” are very rare and were not republished in Russian until the 2010s.; the first complete English translation was issued only in 1984 (Notes on the islands of the Unalashka District/ Veniaminov, I., Pierce, R.A. Kingston, Ont.: Limestone Press, 1984).

The first volume is mostly dedicated to the nature of the islands of the Unalaska District, which, by Veniaminov, covers Fox Islands and nearby Krenitzin, Shumagin and Sanak Islands, as well as Islands of Four Mountains. The chapter consists of three parts. Part 1 includes chapters on the islands’ geographical position, relief and mountains, coastline, prominent capes, bays and straits, tides and currents, floods and sea ice (including descriptions of a tsunami in 1790), earthquakes and volcano eruptions, rivers and lakes, ores and minerals, flora and fauna (including introduced domestic animals and cattle herding), products suitable for trade (furs, walrus tusks, baleen, blubber), climate, atmospheric pressure, winds, geological origin of the archipelago, and human settlement by the indigenous people of Eastern Siberia. An extensive chapter talks about the discovery of the islands by the Great Northern Expedition of Vitus Bering in 1741 and subsequent voyages of Russian fur hunters in the 18th century, including a detailed description of the massacre on Unalaska of the crew of Russian ships under the command of merchant Alexey Drushinin in 1762.

Part 2 contains detailed notes on the mains islands and groups of the Unalaska District (in the order from west to east): Islands of Four Mountains, Umnak, Unalaska, Krenitzin Islands, Unimak, Alaska Peninsula, Sanak and Shumagin Islands; talking about their nature, history of volcanic eruptions, main indigenous and Russian settlements, posts of the Russian American Company, churches and chapels, facts from the history of relations between Russians and Aleuts, &c.

Part 3 contains a description of the Pribilof Islands (Aleut folk stories about the islands, history of discovery by Gavrila Pribilov in 1786, nature, climate, sea otter and fur seal hunting industry). The next chapter, titled “Opinions and proofs of the existence of the islands in the Unalaska Department, yet unknown to the world,” retells Aleut stories about the several unknown islands in the archipelago (south of Samalga Island, west of St. Paul Island, south of Unalaska Island, east of St. George Island, &c.). The last chapter contains the results of meteorological observations kept by Veniaminov in the Iliukliuk village, Unalaska, in 1825-33 (atmospheric pressure, air temperature, direction and strength of winds, monthly weather).

Overall a very good copy of this important early work on the nature and history of the discovery of the Fox Islands, written by St. Innocent of Alaska. Several pages in the book bear the ink stamp of the private library of Nikolay Beklemishev (1857-1934) – Russian naval officer, hydrographer and writer, publisher of “Morie i iego zhizn” [“Sea and its life”] magazine (1905-1917), a member of the Russian Imperial Technical Society. To commemorate Beklemishev’s hydrographic survey, a mountain in the Provideniya Bay (Bering Sea) was named after him in 1881 by the crew of Russian naval clipper “Strelok.”

The second and third volumes of the “Zapiski” (not present here) contain detailed ethnographical descriptions of the Aleuts of the Fox Islands, as well as of the Aleuts from the Andreanof Islands and Tlingits (Koloshes) from the Alaskan mainland.

“This is an outstanding work on this part of Alaska. It is difficult to emphasize sufficiently its wealth of authoritative information and its importance in the study of the Unalaska, the Atkan Aleuts, and the Koloshes. There is also much information on the sea and land animals, as well as the fish of the district” (Lada-Mocarski 111).

«The author’s full name was Ivan Evseevich Popov-Veniaminov. The son of a sexton in a Siberian village, after the usual theological studies and intermediate churchly positions, he was ordained a priest in 1821 and two years later decided to become a missionary and spread the Gospel among the Aleutian natives. His first post was at Unalaska, where he built a church. In the course of some 30 years of devout and enlightened missionary work throughout the Aleutian and Kuril Islands, as well as in Kamchatka, he started schools, vaccinated the natives against smallpox, translated Russian liturgical books into native languages, etc. In 1857 (by then Archbishop of Kamchatka, the Kuriles and the Aleutian Islands), Veniaminov was called to St. Petersburg and in 1868 was made Metropolitan of Moscow under the name of Innokentii. For a more complete biography of this remarkable man, see the 24-page The Life and Work of Innocent, the Archbishop of Kamchatka (San Francisco, 1897), which is based on a voluminous work (in Russian) by I.P. Barsukov entitled Innokentii, Mitropolit Moskovskii (Moscow, 1883)» (Lada-Mocarski, 107).

Ivan Veniaminov went to Unalaska as a missionary priest in 1824 and spent ten years there. He «transliterated Unangan, the Fox Island dialect, into Cyrillic characters and, with the help of Ivan Pankov, translated the St. Matthew’s Gospel, as well as many prayers and hymns. The work was continued at a later date by Father Ilya Tyzhnov, who produced the first and only printed part of the Holy Scripture in the variant of Aleut spoken on Kodiak Island». He served in Sitka in 1834-38, where he built a school for Tlingit children and composed textbooks for it. In 1840, he went to St. Petersburg and Moscow, where he took monastic vows and was subsequently nominated bishop of Kamchatka, the Kuril and Aleutian Islands. In May 1842, «he set off on a tour of his diocese, visiting Unalaska, Atka, Unga, Pribilof, Bering and the Spruce Islands, <…> Kamchatka and Okhotsk». In the 1840-1850s, he made another three voyages around his diocese, in 1853 he took up permanent residence in Yakutsk; later he travelled across Eastern Siberia and the Far East to Blagoveshchensk, the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, and Kamchatka. <…> On 6 October 1977, by a decision of the patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, acting on the official request from the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America, Veniaminov, Bishop Innocent, was numbered among the saints» (Howgego, 1800 to 1850, V4).

Lada-Mocarski 111, Sabin 98885, Wickersham 5828, Pilling p. 99.