page_title: Maurice Benyovszky
section_title: Escape from Kamchatka
hierarchical_section_title: Maurice Benyovszky / Biography / Escape from Kamchatka
caption_attribution_description: 日本語: ベンヨスキーの臺灣探撿 English: caption on book
context_page_description: Count Maurice Benyovszky de Benyó et Urbanó was a renowned military officer, adventurer and writer from the Kingdom of Hungary, who described himself as a Hungarian and a Pole. He is considered a national hero in Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.
  Benyovszky was born and raised in Verbó, Kingdom of Hungary. In 1769, while fighting for the Polish armies under the Bar Confederation, he was captured by the Russians and exiled to Kamchatka. He subsequently escaped and returned to Europe via Macau and Mauritius, arriving in France. In 1773, Benyovszky reached agreement with the French government to establish a trading post on Madagascar. Facing significant problems with the climate, the terrain and the native Sakalava people, he abandoned the trading post in 1776.
  Benyovszky then returned to Europe, joined the Austrian Army and fought in the War of the Bavarian Succession. After a failed venture in Fiume, he travelled to America and obtained financial backing for a second voyage to Madagascar. The French governor of Mauritius sent a small armed force to close down his operation, and Benyovszky was killed in May 1786.
context_section_description: Over the next few months,  Benyovszky and Stepanov, along with other exiles and disaffected residents of Kamchatka, organised an escape.  From the list of those  who participated in the escape (70 men, women and children), it is evident that the majority were not prisoners or exiles of any sort, but just ordinary working people of Kamchatka.  At the start of May, an armed uprising by the group overcame the garrison of Bolsheretsk, during which the commander, Grigorii Nilov, was killed.  The supply ship St Peter and St Paul, which had been over-wintering in Kamchatka, was seized and loaded with furs and provisions.  On 23 May (Old Style: 12 May), the ship set sail from the mouth of the Bolsha River, and headed southwards.
  Benyovszky’s Memoirs state that the route taken by the ship, having rounded the southernmost point of Kamchatka, was generally north and eastwards, taking in Bering Island, the Bering Strait, Alaska and the Aleutian Islands.   However, in the time available (four weeks according to Benyovszky’s own account), this 6000-mile itinerary is barely credible for a leaky ship and inexperienced crew.  Such a route is completely absent from three other separate accounts of the voyage (by Ippolit Stepanov,   Ivan Ryumin  and Gerasim Izmailov).  Additionally, some of the events described by Benyovszky are so implausible that the entire voyage in this area must be considered a fiction.
  The ship landed at the island of Simushir in the Kuril Islands chain, and stayed there between 29 May and 9 June to bake bread and take stock of their supplies and cargo.  During this time, the sailor Izmailov was judged to be organising a mutiny; he and two other Kamchatkans were left on the island when the ship finally sailed southwards.  Izmailov subsequently carved out a career as an explorer and trader in the Aleutians and the Alaskan coast, providing information to Captain James Cook in the summer of 1778.
  Their next known port of call was at Sakinohama on the island of Shikoku in Japan, where they rested between 19 and 23 July, and in the following days at Oshima island in Awa Province.  Here the voyagers managed to trade with villagers, despite this being expressly forbidden by the Japanese authorities .  At the end of July, they landed on Amami-Oshima in the Ryükyü islands, where they also traded successfully.  At the end of August they arrived on the island of Formosa (present-day Taiwan), probably at Black Rock Bay, where three of the voyagers were killed during a fight with native islanders.   Then they sailed to the Chinese mainland, at Dongshan Island.  Following the coast down from there, they finally arrived at Macao on 22 September 1771.
  Shortly after their arrival in Macao, 15 of the voyagers died, most likely from the effects of malnutrition.  Benyovszky took responsibility for selling the ship and all the furs they had loaded at Kamchatka, and then negotiated with the various European trading establishments for passage back to Europe.  In late January 1772, two French ships took the survivors away from Macao.   Some of them (13) stopped on the island of Mauritius, others died en route (8), and the remainder (26) landed at the French port of Lorient in July.
caption: An Affair of Retaliation on Formosa - illustration from the Memoirs
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