y the mid-18th century, Qing officials had registered 56 surname groups; of these, Qing sources note that six clans and 148 households were those of Ainu and Nivkh who came under the Qing administrative umbrella on Sakhalin. However, as the Chinese governments did not have a military presence on the island, people from Japan attempted to colonise the island.
The first European known to visit Sakhalin was Martin Gerritz de Vries, who mapped Cape Patience and Cape Aniva on the island's east coast in 1643. The Dutch captain, however, was not aware of their being on an island, and 17th century maps usually showed these points�and often Hokkaido, too�as parts of the mainland.
As part of a nationwide Sino-French cartographic program, the Jesuits Jean-Baptiste R�gis,Pierre Jartoux, and Xavier Ehrenbert Fridelli joined a Chinese team visiting the lower Amur(known to them under its Manchu name, Saghalien Ula, i.e. the "Black River"), in 1709, and learned from the "Ke tcheng" natives of the lower Amur about the existence of the offshore island nearby. The Jesuits learned that the islanders were said to have been good at reindeer husbandry. They reported that the main landers used a variety of names to refer to the island, but Saghalien anga bata, i.e. "the Island [at] the mouth of the Black River" was the most common one, meanwhile the name "Huye" (presumably, "Kuye", ??) they had heard in Beijing was completely unknown to the locals.
La Perouse charted most of the southwestern coast of Sakhalin (or "Tchoka", as he heard natives call it) in 1787
The Jesuits, however, did not have a chance to visit the island personally, and the inadequate information about its geography provided by the Ke tcheng people and the Manchus who had been to the island would not allow them to identify it with the land visited by de Vries in 1643. As a result, many 17th century maps showed a rather strangely shaped Sakhalin, which included only the northern half of the
