ABSTRACT
Mikhail Tatarinov was a surveyor and navigator who was first attached to the school of mathematics and surveying in the Siberian town of Tobol'sk and in 1755 transferred to the Navigation School in Irkutsk which had recently been founded to ensure the training of the specialists required for the expanding exploration of eastern Siberia and the north Pacific. Tatarinov served as head of the Irkutsk school from 1756 to 1765 and again from 1770 until his death in 1784, and oversaw a period of expansion and reform, including the absorption of the Japanese school in the late 1750s. His account of the Kuril Islands is based on the reports of Ivan Antipin and Ivan Ocheredin, who were both Tatarinov’s students at the Irkutsk Navigation School. Antipin, with navigator’s assistant Putintsov and the interpreter Shabalin, visited the Japanese office to pay their respects and explain the reason they had come there.
