On September 6th (or 5th) of 1758 the Russian sailing vessel Kapiton was wrecked, possibly on what is now Kiska Island in the Aleutians. The ship had itself been built from a wreck, that of the Pekup i Zonat. It was constructed on Bering Island in 1750.

They departed from Okhotsk in September 1757, but suffering from bad weather they had to hug the Kamchatka shore until more favorable conditions arose. Once better weather had arrived they sailed east arriving off an island unknown to them, probably Kiska. They went ashore and were promptly driven off by the natives who did not welcome their presence.

Shortly thereafter a storm drove the ship on to the rocks and she became a total loss, the thirty-nine men made their way on to the island saving what they could, some food and most if not all of the firearms. The latter came in handy almost immediately as the natives attacked them before they could begin to recover from their ordeal.

One of the men spoke the language of the natives and asked for their assistance, but the natives either did not understand or just had no intention of allowing them to remain on the island. They attacked with arrows and spears, but the Russians used their guns and killed two of them after which they withdrew.

Starvation and the elements were now the two biggest enemies of these poor men, and over the course of the next seven months seventeen of them died. The rest lived on what ever they could find, a dead whale provided much needed nourishment, but they ate anything they could find.

At the end of this time they had constructed a boat from some driftwood and the remains of their wreck and set sail from their island hell. They made their way to another island where they found another Russian ship named Petr i Pavel who took them home, they arrived back in Russia sometime in 1761 .