Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

by Owen Matthews

  Lisiansky was either duped or – in the widely-held opinion of his shipmates – accepted a handsome kickback in exchange for overpaying. ‘On his return he was impressed with himself, because he had filled his pockets with the money of others,’ wrote Lieutenant Hermann Ludwig von Löwenstern. Both ships were built in 1789, though Lisiansky reported to St Petersburg that they were considerably newer.10 The Leander’s foremast had been badly cracked by the impact of two French cartouche balls and had to be replaced. The ships needed a further £6,000 worth of repairs and fitting out before they were seaworthy for their voyage to St Petersburg and a new life. Lisiansky returned with them with hired British crews in the spring of 1803. The larger vessel was rechristened the Nadezhda – Hope – and the smaller one Neva after St Petersburg’s principal river.11

  While Lisiansky was negotiating his deals in the shipyards of London, tragedy struck the Rezanov household. Anna Rezanova had given birth to the couple’s first child, a boy named Pyotr, in 1801. On 7 October 1802, after a traumatic two-day labour, a second child was born, a girl named Olga. Infection set in and after eleven days Anna died. She was buried under a simple classical column among the greatest soldiers and courtiers of her age in the fashionable Lazarus Cemetery of St Petersburg’s Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Curiously, there are almost no traditional Christian crosses to be seen in the graveyard. The Russian nobility of the period preferred to commemorate their dead with broken Roman pillars, weeping muses, empty classical armour, pyramids and steles.

  Even in death Anna was defined in relation to the men in her life – husband, father and son: ‘Here lies the governing Senate’s Ober-Procurator and Knight Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov’s wife, Anna Grigoriyevna Rezanova, born Shelikhova, mother to Peter aged one year and three months,’ reads her epitaph. Rezanov was devastated – so much so that even six months after Anna’s death the Tsar and Rumiantsev remarked that the widower still appeared crushed. ‘I have lost all my life’s happiness with Anna’s death, and though my two little children are pleasing to me they only open my wounds,’ he wrote to his friend Ivan Dmitriev.12 ‘My true love is still with you, at the churchyard of Alexander Nevsky under a piece of marble,’ Rezanov wrote later to his brother-in-law Buldakov, even though he was by that time engaged to Conchita Arguello.13

  While Rezanov grieved, the round-the-world expedition that he had underwritten was catching the imagination not just of the Tsar but also of the navy, the recently founded Russian Academy of Sciences, the Foreign Ministry and St Petersburg’s beau monde. The expedition’s goals quickly multiplied. This was not to be just a naval sortie to support the Russian American Company’s American settlements, but something much grander. The voyage of the Nadezhda and the Neva would be a great scientific expedition of conquest and exploration as well as the first Russian circumnavigation of the world. Rumiantsev decided that it would also, crucially, make an attempt to open the closed markets of Japan to Russian trade. The voyage would therefore carry the first ever embassy from the Tsar to the Japanese Sho- gun* at Edo.

  The emperor’s emissary for such an important mission would obviously have to be a nobleman, a native Russian, a courtier, preferably a man with a stake in the success of the mission. To Rumianstev and the Emperor, if not yet to Rezanov himself, it was clear there was only one man for the job. In April 1803 Alexander summoned the unsuspecting Rezanov to Tsarskoye Selo for a private audience.

  ‘The Emperor kindly sympathized with my grief and at first advised me to do something to distract myself?,?’ Rezanov wrote to Dmitriev. ‘At last His Majesty offered me a voyage and then, gently leading me to agreement, announced to me His will that I should take upon myself the Embassy to Japan.’ The offer, judging from Rezanov’s letter, came as an unpleasant shock. The expedition would be at sea for at least three years, and Rezanov would be forced to leave his two motherless infant children behind. Nonetheless, one did not refuse the Tsar. Alexander made the offer more attractive by promoting Rezanov to the court rank of kamerheer, or royal chamberlain, equivalent to a major-general and fourth in the table of ranks, and upgrading his Order of St Anne to first class. Whether he liked it or not, Rezanov was now launched on a new career as a diplomat and inspector of the Russian American colonies. He would be exchanging the world of the court for one of the remotest wildernesses on earth.

  Rumiantsev rushed to back up the Tsar’s offer with assurances of the embassy’s success. The two men probably met in the study on the first floor of Rumiantsev’s mansion; its windows overlook the Neva and Peter the Great’s Kunstkammer Museum on the far side. Rezanov would be in overall command of the expedition, Rumiantsev promised, and indeed the Instruction the Emperor issued to Rezanov in July clearly stated in its first paragraph that the chamberlain was ‘in command of all the officers’ – including, by implication, the captain himself. We will hear much about this controversial document in coming chapters. In Russian America Rezanov would, according to these written orders, also be the Tsar’s viceroy, with full authority ‘to administer courts and punishments . . . as much as possible remove all burdens from the inhabitants . . . [and] lay firm foundations of good order’.

  As for the embassy to Japan, the ships would be sailing under the authority of the document the Japanese authorities had granted to Adam Laxman in 1792 – though perhaps the minister omitted to mention that the Laxman document allowed only a single Russian ship to trade at Nagasaki and was ambiguous about the possibility of political contact. Rumiantsev also announced that a parallel embassy to Rezanov’s was to be dispatched overland to China, with a brief to overturn the restrictions on Russo-Chinese trade imposed by the Treaty of Nerchinsk and open trade at Canton to Russian shipping. Furthermore, Rumiantsev promised, the Treasury would provide ample diplomatic gifts for the Japanese Sho- gun and even relieve the Russian American Company of the cost of buying the Nadezhda.14 For good measure, and since this was now to be a government mission as much as a Company one, Rumiantsev attached a priest nominated by the Holy Synod to report on the state of spiritual affairs in Russian America. Rezanov, for his part, launched an appeal for books for the enlightenment of the Tsar’s newest subjects. Fashionable St Petersburg flocked to become patrons of the expedition. ‘Many vied with each other to serve their country and sent many things and books,’ wrote Rezanov. ‘When I reach Kodiak I will put in the American museum in eternal memory for generations to come of those who patronized the enlightenment of the region.’15*

  If Krusenstern was annoyed by all these additions to his expedition, he was careful to conceal his resentment from the navy and from Rumiantsev. Crucially, Krusenstern still believed that he, not Rezanov, was the expedition’s commander. He busied himself selecting his officers and crew, which as captain was his time-honoured personal prerogative. In the early summer of 1803 both Krusenstern and Rezanov were inundated with petitions and requests from society hostesses and powerful bureaucrats to find places on board for their children and protégés. By the time Hieromonk Gideon of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, the Synod’s representative on the voyage, reported for duty at the naval base of Kronstadt there were no cabins left on either ship. Only when Admiral Chichagov, deputy minister of the navy, and Rumiantsev himself came to inspect the preparations were various hangers-on – including seven members of Rezanov’s suite, one of them a nephew on the Okunev side – dismissed. ‘Some of the staff and senior officers not needed for the voyage were taken off?,?’ reported Gideon. ‘There was plenty of altercation.’16 The priest was eventually assigned a cabin on board the Neva with the painter Prichetnikov, despite the ship’s captain, Lisiansky, himself the son of a priest and a man of deep anti-clerical convictions, ‘fighting hand and foot’ against it.

  Rezanov himself first visited the Nadezdha on 2 June, in the company of Rumiantsev and RAC directors Buldakov and Evstrat Delarov, the veteran Greek manager of Kodiak. Rumiantsev, introducing Rezanov as ‘Ambassador’ to Krusenstern and his officers on the quarterdeck of the Nadezhda, did not mention to
Krusenstern that Rezanov was also to be the head of the expedition. This duplicity was motivated by realpolitik. Rumiantsev needed both captain and ambassador to make the expedition work, yet he knew that neither would consent to be subordinate to the other, so he made them both believe they were in charge, a surely deliberate omission that was to have disastrous results during the voyage.

  It is unlikely that even as powerful a courtier as Rumiantsev would have played such a double game without the knowledge of the Tsar; it may well have been Alexander’s idea. Many who had dealt with Alexander certainly would not put such deviousness past him. ‘Alexander was clever, pleasant and educated but one cannot trust him. He is a true Byzantine . . . subtle, treacherous and cunning,’ Napoleon was to write of the Tsar from his exile in Elba. ‘Alexander is acute as a pin, sharp as a razor, and false as the foam on the sea,’ wrote the Swedish ambassador to Paris, Count Gustaf Lagerbielke.17

  Guilty or not of hoodwinking Rezanov, in mid-June the Tsar came in his personal yacht from Oranienbaum to inspect preparations, ‘found the tubs to his liking’18 and complimented Krusenstern on the Nadezhda’s sturdy new Russian masts. Again, there was no mention of Rezanov as the voyage’s new chief.

  The navy officers watched the luggage of Rezanov’s embassy and the presents for the ‘Emperor’ of Japan arrive at the dockside with growing trepidation. On 29 June Löwenstern reported that ‘thirty large crates and chests with the gifts for the Emperor of J arrived today . . . immediately another boat arrived with more crates, presents for Japan. And three apothecary chests, and thus it continues endlessly to a point where you cannot move on shipboard.’ An inventory of the presents lists

  4 pairs of vases from the Imperial porcelain factory; 71 glass mirrors from the Imperial glass factory; 15 glass place mats from ditto; one portrait of Alexander I in tapestry from the Imperial tapestry factory; three other carpets and tapestries from ditto; furs – one black fox, one ermine; 300 yards of watered silk; 356 yards velvet; 11 lengths of English felt; Spanish felt; bronze mechanical clock in shape of elephant taken from the Imperial Hermitage; 5 ivory boxes; 100 ivory cups; pistols; muskets; dagger and sword; folding steel table; 4 chandeliers, 8 cut glass vessels w gold mountings; 12 glass jugs; 2 lamps with multiplying mirrors for lighthouses; 25 gold coronation medals; 200 silver ditto; 39 yards of blue medal ribbons; 142 yards of St Vladimir ribbons; 2 sets of steel buttons.

  One wonders who compiled this strange collection of gifts, or who imagined it would be a good idea to send so much glassware and crockery across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Rumiantsev was particularly proud of having wheedled the elephant clock out of the Winter Palace’s high chamberlain, Count Pyotr Tolstoy; it was probably Tolstoy who made the selection of surplus palace lumber and sold it to the expedition for high prices.19

  Rumiantsev also judged that five Japanese sailors who had been shipwrecked on Kamchatka three years before would help the success of the expedition. Returning the men to their homeland would make a favourable impression on the authorities, it was decided, as well as strengthening the Russians’ excuse for exceeding the terms of the Laxman letter. The sailors were duly outfitted with new suits, presented with silver watches by the Tsar as proof of Russia’s goodwill, and added to the Nadezhda’s crew. ‘Five Japanese to whom the Emperor has given watches came aboard,’ sniffed Fourth Lieutenant Hermann Ludwig von Löwenstern. ‘They are ugly people who guzzle like hedgehogs and have a lot of pretentions.’

  The Emperor paid a final visit in mid-July, conferring his blessing on the crew. A dinner party hosted by Krusenstern’s wife Juliane Charlotte was held for the officers and their wives on board the Nadezhda. Rezanov had arranged for his children to be looked after by their aunt, the late Anna’s younger sister Avdotia Buldakova. Rezanov took his last leave of his son and daughter on 21 July and boarded the Nadezhda, which had moved out into the sea-roads off Kronstadt in preparation for sailing.

  Footnotes

  * Victor Kochubey, Nikolai Novosiltsev, Pavel Stroganov and Adam Jerzy Czartoryski.

  * Advice the government eventually took in 1858 when it founded the port of Vladivostok.

  * A project only finally completed under President Vladimir Putin in 2002.

  * A decision which, by 1805, came close to ruining the Company and necessitated the directors to make personal loans to keep the RAC from bankruptcy.

  * The de-facto ruler of Japan, though technically subordinate to the demi-god Emperor at Kyoto.

  * Part of the library Rezanov took to Kodiak surfaced in San Francisco in the early 1930s, when a Russian émigré offered twenty-four books on economics, navigation and husbandry to Father Andrew Kashevarov, a historian of Alaska. He was unable to buy them and they have been never heard of since. Another volume ended up in the Library of Congress – a tome by Nikolai Ilyinsky on the history of Pskov, which one imagines was of limited usefulness to readers in Kodiak.

  10

  From Newgate to Brazil

  And the Oceans parted for him, opening the path before his feet.

  Gavriil Derzhavin, ‘Ode on the Taking of Ismail’, 17911

  At midsummer in the northern Baltic there is no night. Sleep comes fitfully, and the sun never takes its pale eye off the earth. Early on the morning of 26 July 1803 Hieromonk Gideon sang a Te Deum on the quarterdeck of the Nadezhda before returning to his quarters on the Neva. ‘At 8 o’clock after midnight,’ under fresh wind at twelve versts an hour,2 the two ships nosed out of the shelter of the fortified island of Kronstadt at the mouth of the Neva and into the open Baltic. Behind them the golden spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress caught in the sun like a bright splinter even after the rest of the city had disappeared in the haze. It was the last Nikolai Rezanov would ever see of his birthplace.

  ‘As I glanced with heartfelt emotion at the waves playing around the ship their momentary elevation and immediate descent I imagined the uncertainties and even mysteries of human fate,’ wrote Gideon. He recalled the Book of Proverbs, which compares man’s fleeting existence on earth to ‘the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the wake of a ship in the midst of the sea’.3

  At 3 p.m. – the end of the first afternoon watch – the Nadezhda’s officers, the expedition’s scientific and artistic attachés, officials of the Russian American Company and members of Rezanov’s embassy sat down to their first dinner together in the ship’s Great Cabin, which doubled as Captain Krusenstern’s private quarters. Of the twenty-two gentlemen who dined at the captain’s table, only nine were Russian. Almost all the ship’s officers were Lutheran Germans from the Baltic. Both Lisiansky, captain of the Neva, and Löwenstern, fourth lieutenant of the Nadezhda, were former British Royal Navy men;* indeed the Estonian-born Löwenstern ‘spoke not a word of Russian’ when he quit George III’s navy for the Tsar’s in 1797. Lieutenants Romberg, Löwenstern and Bellinghausen, Midshipmen Otto and Moritz Kotzebue and Marine Lieutenant Otto von Bistam were all either Krusenstern’s relatives, friends or friends’ children. August von Kotzebue, father of the two midshipmen and the popular playwright who had composed Tsar Paul’s challenge to Napoleon, achieved the impressive feat of marrying three of Krusenstern’s cousins in succession before being stabbed to death by a religious maniac in front of his family in 1818. First Lieutenant Makar Ratmanov and Second Lieutenant Pyotr Golovachev were the only Russian officers aboard.

  The men of science were Dr Karl Espenberg, of Hobeda, Estonia, the Krusenstern family doctor and the illegitimate son of a friend of the captain’s. The natural scientist Fyodor Brinkin of Moscow had also joined the expedition on the recommendation of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Two more Germans, astronomer and physics professor Dr Johann Caspar Horner of Göttingen University and Dr Wilhelm Gottfried Tilesius of the medical faculty of Leipzig University, were due to join the expedition at Copenhagen. From the Russian American Company were manager and cargo supervisor Fyodor Shmelin, an older man with a weakness for drink, and Filipp Kamenshikov, chief quar
termaster and First Mate, who was a navigator of the twelfth rank, equivalent to a naval lieutenant.

  Rezanov’s ambassadorial suite, in its trimmed-down version, numbered five. Major Hermann Karl von Friderici was a cartographer and astronomer and member of St Petersburg’s Academy of Sciences. Court Councillor Fyodor Fosse – equivalent of a lieutenant-colonel – was a former police officer. Stepan Kurliantsev, a silver-medal-winning graduate of the Imperial Academy of Arts, was the expedition’s official artist. Last but not least was Lieutenant Count Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy of the Preobrazhensky Guards.

  Tolstoy was not meant to be on board. When Rezanov’s embassy was being assembled, the Tolstoy family’s considerable social traction was applied to secure a place for Fyodor Petrovich, the young sailor of the clan, a graduate of St Petersburg Naval Academy. However Fyodor Petrovich himself had not been consulted and was in fact keen to remain in the capital since he was discovering artistic gifts that were in later life to place him in the forefront of Russia’s painters.4 His first cousin Fyodor Ivanovich, on the other hand, had a long and growing list of urgent reasons to leave town. His military career had started badly when, soon after being commissioned into the Preobrazhensky Guards at the age of sixteen, he challenged the regiment’s commanding officer to a duel. Colonel Baron Fyodor Vasiliyevich von Drizen declined the meeting – wisely, it turned out, because even as a teenager Tolstoy was a superb swordsman and pistol-shot who went on to kill eleven men in a lifetime of duelling.