He was born in Russia around the year seventeen fifty six, of a merchant family, and entered monastic life young. He was at the Trinity-St. Sergius hermitage near Petersburg, and then at Valaam on Lake Ladoga, where he was tonsured with the name Herman and where he spent about fifteen years, most of them in a forest cell at some distance from the monastery. He was not ordained. He remained a simple monk his whole life, which in the Russian tradition is a station and not a lack.

In seventeen ninety three the Holy Synod, at the request of the Russian-American Company, assembled a mission for the new colonies in America. Herman was chosen with nine others under the archimandrite Joasaph. They crossed Siberia by land and the Pacific by sea and reached Kodiak Island on the twenty fourth of September, seventeen ninety four, having traveled something close to eight thousand miles.

The mission baptized in large numbers in its first years. Then it began to break. Archimandrite Joasaph, consecrated bishop, went down with his ship on the return voyage in seventeen ninety nine, and most of the rest were lost, recalled, or worn out. By the early eighteen hundreds the mission was, in practice, Herman.

The Russian-American Company held the trading monopoly and, in practice, the colony. Its treatment of the Aleut and Alutiiq people ran from exploitation to atrocity: forced hunting parties, hostages taken from villages to guarantee the men's return, women and children left without provision, and a mortality that the Company's own records do not hide.

Herman took the side of the native people against the Company and never stopped, in writing, to the Company's managers, and over their heads to the imperial authorities. The chief manager Alexander Baranov, who ran the colony for almost thirty years, regarded him as an intolerable nuisance. The monk had no rank, no office, no protection and no property, and he kept filing complaints for four decades, and some of them worked.

This is the part of the Life that the Orthodox Church in America has emphasized most strongly since the glorification, and it is well documented, because the quarrel generated paperwork on both sides. He is honored not as a mystic who happened to live among the Aleuts but as the man who stood between them and the fur trade.

Some time after eighteen eleven he moved across the strait from Kodiak to Spruce Island, which he called New Valaam, and lived there in a cell in the forest for the rest of his life. He kept a garden, taught, and gathered around him the orphans of the epidemics that swept the islands, running what amounted to a school and an orphanage out of a hermitage.

The Life records the epidemic in which he went from house to house through the settlements for weeks without rest, and the tidal wave he is said to have stopped at the shoreline with an icon of the Theotokos, and the fire he turned back from the island. The people of Kodiak and Spruce Island held him for a saint while he was alive, and they did not particularly need Russia's permission for it.

He reposed on Spruce Island in the winter of eighteen thirty six or eighteen thirty seven. The Aleuts who were with him say he had told them the day, asked for candles to be lit and the Acts of the Apostles to be read, and died as they read. The traditional date kept in the Church is the thirteenth of December.

He was glorified on the ninth of August, nineteen seventy, by the Orthodox Church in America and by the Russian Church Abroad in the same year, the first canonization of a saint in North America. His memory is kept on the ninth of August, the day of the glorification, and on the thirteenth of December, the day of his repose. The reliquary is at Kodiak; the cell and the spring are on Spruce Island, and people still walk there.