According to a scurrilous account by Sergeant Miron Brityukov, a surgeon’s assistant who later developed a deep hatred of Shelikhov and went to great lengths to blacken his former chief’s name,* the Russians fought back and took several prisoners. Shelikhov personally tortured two of the captives for information (according to Brityukov), ordered a third speared to death and shot a fourth. Two more captives were summarily shot by Gerasim Izmailov, the ship’s helmsman. Escaped Aleutian slaves – or possibly friendly natives from the Koniag village – brought more worrying news. The Koniags were massing on a nearby headland, today known as Refuge Rock, apparently preparing for a major attack at dawn to wipe out the Russians.18 Shelikhov, a modern man, promptly brought the latest technology to bear on the problem. He ordered the ships’ five small cannon dragged into range of the cliffs and opened fire. Shelikhov later claimed that he fired at the rocks, not at the massed natives, and that his 128 men took 1,000 Koniags prisoner. Brityukov said that 500 natives were killed. Both versions seem equally far-fetched. Izmailov, when questioned by a commission of inquiry sent by St Petersburg in 1790, testified that Shelikhov and ‘Russian workmen killed islanders, approximately one hundred and fifty or two hundred people, and that probably many more among them threw themselves off the promontory into the water out of fear’.19
‘Man of Kodiak’, a Koniag chief sketched by John Webber.
Whatever the numbers, the massacre of Refuge Rock had important consequences: it brought an end to organized resistance to Russian rule by Aleut and Koniag natives, and heralded a century of shameless Russian exploitation. It also earned Shelikhov a reputation for bloodthirsty brutality which he was never to shake and which formed the basis for a distaste and distrust of merchants by the government that was to last until the end of Russian rule in America. Shelikhov spent the rest of his life talking up his colony as part of Russia’s civilizing mission to the natives – partly to cover the original sin of its bloody birth, and partly to extract funds from the government.
There was, in Shelikhov’s view, much to civilize. He found the Aleuts even more backward than native Siberians. Incest and polyandry were widely practised, and a special caste of boys was brought up as girls for the sexual amusement of tribal leaders. The Aleuts had no wheeled vehicles or writing. They were amazed by the concept of letters, which they called talking papers, and were convinced they whispered to their readers in a little voice when opened.20
Shelikhov and his wife took pains to baptize as many natives as they could. Shelikhov performed the rite himself on forty Koniags, there being no priest available, and both stood godparent to dozens of new ‘converts’. They also set up a school, of sorts, for the natives – or specifically for the children of native chiefs, whom the Russians held hostage against their parents’ good behaviour in a longhouse at Three Hierarchs Bay. He formally offered the Empress’s protection to native chiefs who would swear loyalty to the crown, glossing over the fact that the threat they most needed protection from was probably Shelikhov himself.
Like Hernando Cortès at the other end of the north American continent two centuries earlier, Shelikhov quickly became adept at exploiting tribal feuds to divide and rule the Aleuts, a slave-owning society which used prisoners of war – known as kalgi – as unpaid labour. Shelikhov encouraged the Russian colonists to poach these with offers of better living conditions, creating a caste of Russian-owned slaves. Later complaints claim that Shelikhov regularly used these slaves as assassins to eliminate impertinent native leaders. The Russians called these captives kaiurs, from the Tatar word gaiour, or infidel,21 tellingly exposing the old Siberian origins of the practice, when it was the Russians themselves who had been enslaved.
The Russians ‘frequently quarrelled and fought with the natives and were on such bad terms with them that they never went to sleep without their arms ready loaded at their side’, wrote English Captain George Dixon22 – a former shipmate of Cook’s – who visited the Aleutian Islands in search of furs in 1787. But the Russian reign of terror was effective. Dixon was unable to find any natives to trade furs with because they were all too afraid of their Russian masters to go behind their backs. Dixon found the Tlingit tribes of the American mainland quite different, trading enthusiastically with all comers and, when the Russian showed up in the 1790s, refusing to pay tribute or give hostages.
Tlingits of Sitka Sound.
By spring 1786 Shelikhov had successfully subdued the natives of Kodiak, planted a permanent settlement on the island and founded several small redoubts – the maritime equivalent of Cossack ostrogs – on the north shore of Kodiak and on the nearby island of Afogniak. Shelikhov’s men, led by the Cossack Konstantin Samoilov, liberally plied native settlements and canoes with their artillery. Satisfied with his work, Shelikhov set off for home on 23 May 1786 in the Three Hierarchs, leaving Evstrat Delarov, a Greek veteran of several Cossack fur-hunting voyages, in charge as his general manager.23 Aboard were Shelikhov’s wife and two children, a dozen mostly sick Russian colonists, including the already disgruntled Sergeant Brityukov, and almost 300,000 rubles’ worth of sea-otter and other furs. A number of Alaska natives keen to see the wonders of Okhotsk formed the bulk of the crew, as well as at least twelve Aleut children, whose parents, according to Shelikhov, ‘wanted them to learn the new Russian knowledge’.24
In early August they sighted the eastern shore of Kamchatka and made landfall near Bolshaya Rechka.* However, while Shelikhov and a small shore party were searching for supplies of fresh water and fish, a gale blew up. The Three Hierarchs dragged her anchor and was born helplessly southwards, with Natalia and the children on board. Shelikhov and his men made their way overland to Petropavlovsk and waited for the ship’s return, but as winter set in he realized that the storm must have pushed the Three Hierarchs further south still, into the Sea of Okhotsk. Undaunted, he decided to strike out on foot across Kamchatka and through the lands of the Chukchi to rejoin his family at Okhotsk, arriving two and a half months later after a cross-country trek of over 1,200 miles.25 Reunited with Natalia and his children, he rested only eight days in Okhotsk before setting out for the next gruelling leg of the journey to Yakutsk, where they spent only a day before pressing on to Irkutsk. Miraculously both the Shelikhov family and the native children appear to have survived this punishing journey.26
In Irkutsk Shelikhov found himself a celebrity – not least among his worried investors, who were beginning to fear that he would not return. From the proceeds of the Kodiak expedition the Shelikhovs bought themselves one of the largest timber houses in Irkutsk, complete with a separate ‘barrack house’ so that they could comply without inconvenience with the onerous duty of billeting soldiers, which was imposed on all members of the merchant class.27 More importantly, Shelikhov presented his notes and maps to the governor, Ivan Yakobi (the same Yakobi who had once courted Maria Rezanova), and the two discussed how Shelikhov’s new colony could become the foundation for a Russian Pacific empire.
Yakobi, a sixty-year-old widower and veteran of an embassy to China, as well as a hero of Potemkin’s Crimean campaigns, was enthusiastic. Shelikhov’s dream was to equip ships to trade furs and manufactures between Russia and Canton, Korea, India, the Philippines and United States, and to send thousands of colonists to occupy the wildernesses of north-western America. However such a scheme was possible, in Russia, only with the backing of the state. The reasons for this were primarily financial. The merchants of Irkutsk, or even the wealthy Demidovs, were good for financing single voyages, but, unlike in Britain or Holland, Russia’s merchant class was neither wealthy nor bold enough to finance larger-scale longer-term ventures. Equally importantly, unlike Britain, Holland and even the fledgling United States, Russia had no system of maritime insurance. This made large ventures ruinous for their backers if they failed. Neither were there any state or private banks willing to lend significant capital to merchant adventurers. The aristocracy, with its vast collateral of land and serfs, had no problems running up vast
debts with private bankers like Zubov’s Scottish financier Baron Richard Sutherland. But lending-houses such as Sutherland’s were not investment banks as much as glorified private high-interest mortgage lenders to the rich and spendthrift.
Shelikhov calculated that he needed a twenty-year loan of half a million rubles to expand his colony. Only the crown had the capital and the patience to offer that kind of credit. In November 1787 Yakobi forwarded Shelikhov’s proposals to St Petersburg, with his enthusiastic personal recommendation.28
In theory the timing of Shelikhov’s plan was perfect. Even before the publication of the account of Cook’s Third Voyage in London in 1784, word was out that vast profits were to be made from sea-otter pelts in the northern Pacific. First to act was James Hanna, a British merchant based in Canton, who set out in spring 1785. Evidently not a believer in concealing his intentions, Hanna christened his brig the Sea Otter. Two more ships with robustly self-explanatory names – the Experiment and the Captain Cook – were being fitted out in the East India Company’s port of Bombay to experiment with Captain Cook’s newly-discovered fur grounds. By the next sailing season there were no fewer than six British ships from India and London – including two captained by Cook’s former officers Nathaniel Porlock and George Dixon – trading with natives for furs up and down the American coast. Their modus operandi was simple – travelling in pairs, the English would make a show of force by loosing off a few broadsides. Then, having impressed the natives with their firepower, they proceeded to barter manufactured goods for skins.
Europe’s great powers had also begun probing the north Pacific with their navies. Clerke’s unheralded arrival had been shock enough, but the last straw for St Petersburg was news in the summer of 1786 that a French navy squadron commanded by Jean François de Galaup, Comte de La Perouse, was also cruising the coast of Alaska. After offloading his furs at Canton at vast profit, La Perouse docked at Petropavlovsk in September 1787 and airily told his Russian hosts that he had claimed Lituya Bay in Alaska for France the previous August. By this time the Russian Empire was finally stirring. Catherine was sufficiently alarmed by Cook and La Perouse to authorize a major Russian naval expedition, the biggest and most ambitious yet, with the explicitly imperial objective of ‘claiming that coast from [the] harbour of Nootka to the point where Chirikov’s discovery [of 1742] begins as Possessions of the Russian State’.
The expedition, signed into existence by Catherine in December 1786, was to comprise no fewer than four ships-of-the-line, one transport, 639 crew and 34 officers. The Empress took a close personal interest in the provisioning and equipment of the squadron, checking details of the waterproof native-style parkas and woollen socks issued to the crew and insisting that a supply of lemons to fight scurvy be carried on board, as prescribed by Captain Cook. The commander, Captain of the First Rank Grigory Mulovsky, was ordered to destroy all shore installations built by foreigners but to treat the natives with ‘kindness and forbearance’. The Russian Empire was now, in theory at least, finally in the business of asserting its empire in America by right of occupancy.
But it was not to be. War broke out with Sweden and Turkey in October 1787 as both powers sought – unsuccessfully – to reverse their losses in Catherine’s earlier wars. Reluctantly, the Empress was forced to call off the Mulovsky expedition and redirect the ships to the Swedish campaign. So disappeared Russia’s best chance of staking a claim to the Pacific coast of America from Alaska to California.*
In the wake of the cancellation of the Mulovsky armada, as a gesture towards her fledgling American empire the Empress ordered a series of numbered iron-and-brass ‘possession plates’ produced, each inscribed with a cross, a serial number and the legend Zemlya Rossiskago Vladeniye – ‘Land Belonging to Russia’. These plates were distributed to Russian privateers to be buried in any new lands they discovered.29 Their exact location was a state secret, and the intention was that they could be unearthed in the event of a later claim by a foreign power to prove the Russians had got there first. A single possession plate survives, dug up at St Michael’s Redoubt just north of modern Sitka in 1934. The iron has almost rusted away, but the soldered brass words and cross still shine with the Empress’s words.
Despite the abandonment of Mulovsky’s expedition, the educated Russian public’s imagination continued to be fired by the promise of Pacific conquests. In 1787 St Petersburg’s Academy of Sciences produced a handsome map, more decorative than informative, of the north Pacific complete with pictures of a Russian, a native, a Chinaman and the god Hermes, with Bering’s and Chirikov’s voyages marked prominently on a rather vague rendition of the American coastline.30 The time was ripe, Shelikhov calculated, for a public–private partnership to take over where the crown alone had failed.
The Shelikhovs set off for St Petersburg armed with their business plan in the new year of 1788, when the winter was coldest and the travelling fastest. Governor Yakobi, their self-appointed chief lobbyist, accompanied them. Arriving, they rented rooms in a fashionable quarter of town, complaining of the expense to their relatives back in Irkutsk. Shelikhov, after a visit to the capital’s top tailors, began energetically ingratiating himself with Demidov and Yakobi’s friends and relations.
In late February 1788, after much lobbying and expensive palm-greasing, Shelikhov was finally received by the Empress at the Winter Palace to present and explain his petition. Shelikhov asked for a loan of 200,000 rubles (he had been talked down by Yakobi from his startling original request for half a million), together with a hundred soldiers, the right to buy native slaves and bring conquered natives under the Russian crown, as well as the right to hire and indenture Russians. Most crucially, he asked for a state-guaranteed monopoly on trade with Russian America.
Shelikhov was undoubtedly brave, energetic and charismatic – yet the audience did not go well. The Empress, for one, did not trust these would-be American entrepreneurs. Shelikhov’s partner Mikhail Golikov was a convicted smuggler and excise evader, and his brother Ivan Golikov also owed the exchequer large sums in taxes. Thanks to the denunciation written by Brityukov the previous year, Shelikhov himself had already acquired his reputation as a butcher of natives. With so many foreigners sniffing around the north Pacific, Russia’s fragile dominion depended on its ability to command the loyalty of the local population, which was being alienated and abused, Catherine suspected, by the barbarities of bucaneers like Shelikhov.
‘In the North-East Ocean all commercial enterprises – one might better call them larcenous enterprises – are in the hands of Shelikhov, whose men are drawn from the ranks of the most depraved thieves and bandits of Irkutsk,’ the distinguished explorer Eric Laxman wrote to Foreign Secretary Count Bezborodko. ‘Their master has in him the same cruelty that we read of in the ancient Spanish histories when he tries his sword and pistol on the unfortunate Aleuts.’31
On the question of trading exclusivity, Shelikhov and Golikov had the backing of Yakobi and the Ministry of Commerce. But rival Irkutsk merchants who stood to lose their livelihoods in the event of a North-Eastern Company monopoly were, understandably enough, adamantly opposed. These merchants wielded plenty of influence of their own in the capital, thanks to their deep pockets. They now mobilized their friends at court to oppose Shelikhov’s plans to seize the whole American trade for himself. The Empress also had ideological objections. A close reader of the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, she disliked monopolies in principle. Furthermore she was deeply alarmed by the revolutionary republicanism of the newborn United States of America. The Empress wanted no troublesome American colonists of her own.
A copy of Shelikhov’s petition with the Empress’s annotations survives in the papers of her private secretary Alexander Khrapovitsky. ‘Exclusive concession is not at all compatible with the principle of the Empress for the elimination of every kind of monopoly,’ was one of thirteen points Catherine wrote in the margin.32 She found the idea of ownership of swathes of the Pacific ‘ludicrous’33 a
nd pointed out that ‘it is one thing to trade, quite a different thing to take possession’. As for the money, ‘The proposed loan resembles the proposal of a man who wants to train an elephant to speak in thirty years,’ wrote the Empress, a noted wit. ‘When asked why such a long term he replies “the elephant may die, I may die, the person who lent me the money may die”.’34
As a rather underwhelming consolation prize, Catherine gave Shelikhov a gold medal and silver sword. But even as she refused the merchant petitioner his monopoly, Catherine had nonetheless decided to keep a closer eye on Russia’s interests in the north Pacific. That summer she sent a small expedition at government expense – nothing on the scale of the Mulovsky fleet, but rather a more modest mapping and surveying effort led by Joseph Billings, a British captain in Russian service who had also sailed under Cook, with another Englishman, Martin Sauer, as his cartographer.35 It was Governor Yakobi who suffered the worst fallout from the failed bid. He was accused of bribe-taking – probably by allies of Lebedev-Lastochkin and other Irkutsk merchants opposed to the Shelikhov–Golikov monopoly – and was dismissed from his post.
The indefatigable Shelikhov did not allow these setbacks to throw him off his stride. If a monopoly was out of the question, Shelikhov would make sure several different companies were involved in the Pacific trade – all of them, however, would be controlled by himself or his associates.36 Shelikhov founded and registered a slew of companies on the St Petersburg Stock Exchange – a renewed North-Eastern Company, nominally headquartered in Kodiak, the Predtechensky Company based in the Pribilov Islands and, later, the Unalaska and Kurile Companies.
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 8
