Captain Golownin, an educated and intelligent Russian naval officer, had been commissioned in 1811, as commander of the sloop of war “Diana,” to survey the southern Kurile Islands, in which group the Russians include both Sakhalin and Yezo, which they reckon as the twenty-first and twenty-second Kuriles. At the southern extremity of Etorofu, the nineteenth Kurile, some Japanese were first met with (July 13). Soon after, Golownin, with two officers, four men, and a Kurile interpreter, having landed at a bay on the southern end of Kunashiri, the twentieth Kurile, where the Japanese had a settlement and a garrison, they were invited into the fort, and made prisoners. Thence they were taken, partly by water and partly by land, to Hakodate, already mentioned as a Japanese town at the southern extremity of Yezo. This journey occupied four weeks, in which, by Golownin’s calculation, they travelled between six and seven hundred miles. The Japanese stated it at two hundred and fifty-five of their leagues. The route followed was along the east coast of the island. Every two miles or so there was a populous village, from all of which extensive fisheries were carried on, evidently the great business of the inhabitants. The fish were caught in great nets, hundreds at once. The best were of the salmon species, but every kind of marine animal was eaten. The gathering of sea-weeds for food (of the kind called by the Russians sea-cabbage[91]) also constituted a considerable branch of industry. In the northern villages the inhabitants were principally native Kuriles, with a few Japanese officers. Within a hundred and twenty or thirty miles of Hakodate the villages were inhabited entirely by Japanese, and were much larger and handsomer than those further north, having gardens and orchards, and distinguished by their scrupulous neatness; but even the Kurile inhabitants of Yezo were far superior in civilization and comforts to those of the more northern islands belonging to Russia.