ABSTRACT
Ivan Riumin was a clerk in the Bol'sheretsk Chancery who participated in the escape from Kamchatka orchestrated by Benyovszky in 1771. Riumin’s wife was one of the few women present on the voyage with Benyovszky. Along with fifteen other members of the expedition who had decided to return to Russia, the pair left Benyovszky in Port Louis and made their way to Paris, where they arrived in April 1773. In Paris, Riumin, together with the clerk Spiridon Sudeikin and navigator’s apprentice Dmitrii Bocharov, prepared an account of the Benyovszky voyage, which Khotinskii forwarded to the College of Foreign Affairs in St Petersburg. Riumin’s account can be compared with that of another of Benyovszky’s companions, Ippolit Stepanov. On the 11th July the commander left the ship together with Stepanov to go on land.
