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8 REACTIONS "It is very necessary to find a way of transporting provisions and all kinds of supplies to Okhotsk without such labor as formerly. " Vitus Bering, 1733, in A. Pokrovsky, ed., Ekspeditsiya Beringa, p. 135. Difficulties such as we have glimpsed prompted officials and merchants to seek various remedies, primarily alternate routes between Yakutsk and the Okhotsk Seaboard and alternate sites for Okhotsk Port. The sea route could be little altered; only the ships and the sailors could be improved, and there improvement was slow in coming. Thus, attention was focused on the Yakutsk-Okhotsk Track and its eastern terminus of Okhotsk, both of which became the subjects of periodic remodeling and eventual relocation. As early as 1719, less than three years after the opening of the sea route to Kamchatka from Okhotsk, the Russian Government, dissatisfied with the Yakutsk-Okhotsk river route, ordered the Kamchatka commissar (tax collector) Kharitonov to find a shorter route by land to Okhotsk-but he failed to find one.1 The next two decades saw the development of both the land and the river routes between Yakutsk and Okhotsk by Bering's two expeditions. As a result of Bering's resolve to make unnecessary "such labor as formerly," i.e., during the First Kamchatka Expedition, one of the tasks of the Second Kamchatka Expedition was to explore the coast of the Okhotsk Sea "for the finding of a shorter route to the Kamchatka [Okhotsk] Sea, not going through Yakutsk ..." but via the Uda River;2 the Uda was considered navigable and as having "sufficient timber and rich land."g Accordingly, two surveyors, Skobeltsyn and Shatilov, tried three times (1735, 1736, and 1737) to find such a route but failed.4 They concluded that the Zeya River-Uda River route was unsuitable, being uninhabited and beset with "impassable places, rocky mountains, and swampy bogs."5 Moreover, it was on the Chinese frontier, which the Russian Government was reluc141 142 OVERLAND-OVERSEA PROVISIONMENT tant to disturb lest China retaliate by halting the lucrative Kyakhta trade. In 1738 another member of the Second Kamchatka Expedition, Captain Spanberg, suggested that Okhotsk itself be moved fifteen miles southward to the mouth of the Luktur River on the middle Urak;6 and in 1741 Commandant Devier suggested moving it to the mouth of the Malchikan River twenty miles up the Okhota.1 Neither of these proposals was approved. By the middle of the century the land passage was the main route between Yakutsk and Okhotsk. But since it was far from satisfactory , periodic attempts were made to rebuild or reroute the YakutskOkhotsk Track. In the middle 1750's the track was reconstructed by convicts, but by 1758 the Yakuts were petitioning the Governor of Siberia about its atrocious condition. Governor Soimonov then ordered Lieutenant Sindt to inspect the route between Yakutsk and Udsk, which he found to be worse than the Yakutsk-Okhotsk Track. In 1762 the Yakuts refused to transport supplies to Okhotsk because of the state of the track, but on May 21/June 1, 1763, the Senate ordered the Yakuts to take turns transporting supplies to Okhotsk regardless, for which, however, they were to receive travel allowances.s In 1764 Plenisner (Plenstner) , the new Commandant of Okhotsk, was ordered by a Senate decree "to find another more suitable track" between Yakutsk and Okhotsk negotiable by carts in summer and by sledges in winter, and "to find another more suitable and less dangerous place" for Okhotsk Port, while a reward of up to 1,000 rubles was offered for finding a better route from Yakutsk to Okhotsk.9 The next year a Yakutsk Cossack, Ivan Baishev, reported finding "a shorter track to Okhotsk for transporting provisions and goods more conveniently ... ,1110 evidently via the Notora River and the Allakh-Yun. Plenisner sent the pilot Dolzhantovykh over this route, and Dolzhantovykh compiled a description of it and founded stations on it. Irkutsk received Plenisner's report on Baishev's route in early 1767, and in early 1768, in accordance with a Senate decree, Governor-General Bril sent the surveyors Voinov of Irkutsk and Chemyasov and Danilov of Yakutsk to examine the new route. They found that it was shorter than the old track and had fewer quagmires and more grass. In early 1770 Bril ordered the sending of provisions and goods to Okhotsk via Baishev's route and the founding of magazines and barracks on it, including a Yakut town on the Aldan River. However, the Yakut transporters...

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