The others in order, are at present made tributary down to Ooshesheer inclusive, as I am informed by the worthy pastor of Paratounca, who is their missionary, and visits them once in three years, and speaks of the islanders in terms of the highest commendation, representing them as a friendly, hospitable, generous, humane race of people, and excelling their Kamtschadale neighbours, not less in the formation of their bodies, than in docility and quickness of understanding. Though Ooshesheer is the southernmost island that the Russians have yet brought under their dominion, yet I understand that they trade to Ooroop, which is the eighteenth; and, according to their accounts, the only one where there is a good harbour for ships of burthen. Beyond this, to the south, lies Nadeegsda, which was represented to us by the Russians as inhabited by a race of men remarkably hairy, and who, like those of Ooroop, live in a state of entire independence.[63] In the same direction, but inclining somewhat more to the westward, lie a group of islands, which the Japanese call Jeso; a name which they also give to the whole chain of islands between Kamtschatka and Japan. The southernmost, called Matmai, hath been long subject to the Japanese, and is fortified and garrisoned on the side toward the continent. The two islands to the north-east of Matmai, Kunashir, and Zellany, and likewise the three still farther to the north-east, called the Three Sisters, are perfectly independent. A trade of barter is carried on between Matmai and the islands last-mentioned; and between those again and the Kuriles, to the northward; in which, for furs, dried fish, and oil, the latter get silk, cotton, iron, and Japanese articles of furniture.[64] The inhabitants of as many of the islands as are brought under the Russian dominion, are at present converted to Christianity. And probably the time is not very distant, when a friendly and profitable intercourse will be brought about between Kamtschatka and the whole of this chain of islands; and which will draw after it a communication with Japan itself. This may eventually be greatly facilitated by a circumstance related to me by Major Behm, that several Russians, who had been taught the Japanese language by two men belonging to a vessel of that nation, which had been[65] shipwrecked on the coast of Kamtschatka, had been sent among those islands. The advantages that would accrue to the Russians by an immediate trade to Japan, have been already adverted to, and are too many, and too obvious, to need insisting upon. The Koreki country includes two distinct nations, called the Wandering and Fixed Koriacs. The former inhabit the northern part of the isthmus of Kamtschatka, and the whole coast of the Eastern Ocean, from thence to the Anadir. The country of the Wandering Koriacs stretches along the north-east of the sea of Okotsk to the river Penskina, and westward toward the river Kovyma.