Here the matter rested for several years, but into a school for teaching navigation, which Catherine II established at Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia, she introduced a professorship of the Japanese language, the professors being taken from among the Japanese shipwrecked from time to time on the coast of Siberia. Meanwhile, even the Dutch commerce to Japan had undergone some new restrictions. Whether from the prevalence of the “frog-in-a-well” policy, or from apprehensions, as it was said, of the exhaustion of the copper mines, the Dutch in 1790 were limited to a single ship annually, while to accommodate their expenditures to this diminished trade, the hitherto yearly embassy to Yedo was to be sent only once in four years, though annual presents to the emperor and his officers were still required as before. The occupation of Holland by the French armies not only exposed Dutch vessels to capture by the English, it cost Holland several of her eastern colonies, and thus placed new obstacles in the way of the Japanese trade. It was no doubt to diminish the danger of capture by the British, that, in the year 1797, the ship despatched from Batavia sailed under the American flag, and carried American papers, while the commander, one Captain Stewart, though in reality an Englishman from Madras or Bengal, passed for an American, and his ship as the “Eliza,” of New York. That the crew of this vessel spoke English, and not Dutch, was immediately noticed by the interpreters at Nagasaki, and produced a great sensation among the Japanese officials; but at last, after vast difficulty, they were made to understand that though the crew spoke English, they were not “the English,” but of another nation, and, what was a still more essential point, that they had nothing to do with the trade, but were merely hired to bring the goods in order to save them from capture; as a result of which explanation it was finally agreed that the “Eliza” should be considered as a Dutch ship.