ABSTRACT
The chief instigator of the project was the Finnish scholar Erik Laxman, who had been resident in Siberia for many years, and had taken Kodayu from Irkutsk to St Petersburg. He chose as the leader of the expedition his twenty-six-year-old second son Adam. Adam Laxman had been born in the Siberian town of Barnaul in 1766, attended a military academy and was promoted officer in around 1793. At the time of his appointment to the Japan expedition he was working in a local government role with the rank of army lieutenant in the town of Gizhichinsk on the sea of Okhotsk. Laxman insisted that the Governor-General of Irkutsk could not know either the names of the Japanese chief government officials or the precise difference in their ranks, and that if they did not accept the letter then they would not have detailed information or documentation of the intentions of the embassy with which their shipwrecked compatriots were returned to them.
