The twenty-one-year-old Tolstoy was already known in St Petersburg society as a ‘dangerous madcap . . . whatever anyone else did, he did ten times over.’5 But professionally and socially he was in a squeeze. He had already been demoted to an inferior battalion of the Guards for unrecorded misdemeanours. Gambling debts loomed, and by his own (highly unreliable and contradictory) later accounts, a complicated love affair with a married woman made his continued presence in the capital inadvisable. So the two Tolstoy cousins agreed to swap. Rezanov approved the last-minute substitution, evidently unaware of the replacement Tolstoy’s psychopathic tendencies. Of all the arrogant drunks in this most mismatched of ship’s companies, Tolstoy was to be the most dangerous and disruptive. Even before they set sail Tolstoy began as he meant to continue. He and two other junior officers ‘did not deny themselves the opportunity of staging a drinking bout into the night . . . they are a lively bunch, jumping around, laughing, climbing, making noise. Count T. is primus.’6
The first day’s sailing was not a success. The Nadezhda was top-heavy because of the luggage stowed on deck: she rolled dangerously and eventually developed a list to starboard. Rezanov and half the officers were struck down with seasickness. It was also discovered that in the confusion of departure Ratmanov’s gold watch, Tolstoy’s gold snuffbox and Shmelin’s pipe had been stolen, prompting a general if fruitless search of everybody’s effects. The Japanese, whom Rezanov had exempted from the search lest these live diplomatic gifts take offence, were universally suspected. At dusk the gentlemen retired to their tiny sleeping cabins to commence their journals, letters and diaries.
Almost every one of the literate men on board wrote a diary, recording the querulous table talk in more or less detail. Several – notably Krusenstern, Lisiansky, Tilesius and Langsdorff – published their journals, lavishly illustrated, to great international acclaim at the expedition’s end. But it is the diary of Hermann Ludwig von Löwenstern, the Nadezhda’s fourth lieutenant and map-maker, which is by far the frankest and funniest. Written mostly in German but with an admixture of Russian and English, it was edited by a German-speaking relative in the late nineteenth century, who excised some references to the crew’s womanizing in the South Seas but – hilariously – failed to censor Löwenstern’s frequent use of Russian obscenities.7 It was not published until 2004. ‘Well my dear ones, you who will in future leaf through my diary, have to be kind to the writer,’ wrote Löwenstern wryly. ‘My passionate character has led me to conclusions that I have written as they occur to me.’
By the time the Nadezhda reached Copenhagen on 3 August the ship’s company was in better spirits, despite the loss of Usov, a sailor who fell overboard and became ‘the unhappy victim of ferocious Neptune’, an oddly pagan reference by Hieromonk Gideon.8 Rezanov took the largest suite at an inn on Copenhagen’s main square and set about entertaining himself and his fellow officers in style.
‘Par curiositet R is visiting all of the dance halls and wh[ore] houses,’ wrote the prudish Löwenstern of one exhausting afternoon spent ashore in the company of his chief. ‘I could not decline R’s polite invitation to lunch . . . That afternoon in the Summer Garden R forgot himself so completely that he with Star [of the Order of St Anne] ran after street girls and later climbed to the top floor of several houses. We followed as if pulled by the hair . . .’
Löwenstern’s shock was not too great, however, to prevent him from dining with Rezanov that evening and lunching with him the day after as well. A more decorous expedition, with Hieromonk Gideon in tow, took the Russians to the royal palace, where the monk was deeply impressed by the Hall of Mirrors, ‘so remarkably arranged that the spectators see themselves and their surroundings in infinite distance’.
Rezanov was clearly enjoying himself thoroughly and didn’t care who knew it. ‘From the balcony of his inn he does not let a single girl cross the market square without throwing her a kiss, calling to her, and laughing loudly at his own jokes,’ Löwenstern noted in his diary. ‘At about noon a young girl went by with her handiwork. R called and waved her in. Then R got a girl for Friderici, but since he did not want to she had the honour of being kissed by His Excellency. That takes the cake! R can talk of nothing else but girls and bawdy.’
Doctor Georg Heinrich Baron von Langsdorff, newly arrived post-haste from Göttingen, would have had no trouble locating the high-profile Russian party at the Hotel of Sieur Rau. There he presented himself on the morning of 24 August, neatly dressed in the black frock coat of a man of science. The twenty-nine-year-old doctor of medicine was also a keen amateur naturalist. In 1797 he had travelled to Portugal in the suite of a German prince, and had stayed on as surgeon major to the British Regiment of Castries. Fascinated by botany, Langsdorff corresponded with some of the greatest natural scientists of France. He was also a correspondent member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg.*
For many hungry young men of science Russian service represented a fast track to advancement, an opportunity to leapfrog the academic hierarchies at home. Langsdorff was no exception, and he had written repeatedly to the Russian Academy of Sciences in an attempt to attach himself to the great round-the-world expedition, only to be politely rebuffed. Undaunted, Langsdorff rushed to Copenhagen to press his suit in person and begged Rezanov ‘to be received as a sharer in the voyage’. He promised to pay his share of mess bills and offered to act as Rezanov’s personal physician. A portrait engraving in Langsdorff’s memoirs, published in London in 1811, shows a slight, angular young man with a likeably intelligent expression. Both Rezanov and Krusenstern seem to have been charmed (even though Langsdorff, though German, was surprisingly not related to the captain) and, despite the lack of space, assigned him a small cabin near Shmelin’s in the hold.
By 1 September the ship’s water casks had been refilled and the holds repacked for the journey across the Atlantic, round Cape Horn and thence across the Pacific. Rather than lose any of the Emperor of Japan’s precious presents 300 puds – nearly half a ton – of flour was unloaded in order to trim the ship for the open sea.
The crossing of the North Sea proved a traumatic experience for the newly formed ship’s company. Shmelin almost blew the vessel up by using candles near the powder magazine, and a violent storm saw all the inmates of the great cabin ‘elbowing, jostling, crying out . . . a scene entirely new to most of our company’,9 wrote Langsdorff. ‘The moaning and throwing up is endless,’ observed Löwenstern, less delicately.10 After the storm had abated, Langsdorff gazed at a spectacular aurora borealis: ‘streams of light rose like pillars of fire’.11
In the English Channel the Nadezhda and Neva were stopped repeatedly by British men-of-war hoping to take a lightly armed French prize. Krusenstern, Löwenstern, Lisiansky and several other Russian officers were reunited with old acquaintances on the British ships. Captain Berrisforth of the frigate Virginia, an old shipmate of Krusenstern’s from his days in Canton, offered to run Rezanov and his suite to Sheerness. They would rejoin the Nadezhda and Neva in Falmouth by post-chaise after a brief look around London.
Rezanov also needed to visit London on a fact-finding mission. As the future head of a major colony to be peopled primarily by convict labour, Rezanov was anxious to glean as much as he could from the British about their fifteen years of experience transporting prisoners to Botany Bay in Australia. He was cordially received by the governor of Newgate Prison and shown a shipment of convicts ready to be transported. Rezanov was impressed at how humanely the English treated their prisoners – a far cry, he wrote, from the brutalities inflicted on the Russian convicts he had seen en route to Irkutsk, who regularly had freezing water poured onto their shaven heads as a punishment.
But the talk in Newgate in 1803 was not of Botany Bay but of an exciting scientific experiment that had been performed in the jail earlier in the year by an Italian physician named Professor Giovanni Aldini, nephew of the biological electricity guru Dr Luigi Galvani. Following his uncle’s pioneering work with b
eheaded criminals in Bologna, Aldini had wowed London by apparently animating a body using an electrical generator. The victim, or subject, was one George Foster, hanged for drowning his wife and youngest child in the Paddington Canal.
‘The jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened,’ observed the Newgate Calendar. Mr Pass, the beadle of the Surgeons’ Company, ‘who was officially present during this experiment, was so alarmed that he died of fright soon after his return home’. So fashionable were Dr Galvani’s amazing machines in the courts of Europe – it was with an early model that Catherine the Great had electrocuted her staff – that Rezanov bought one and had it stowed in the hold of the Nadezhda as an additional present for the Shogun. Thus would Rezanov bring the wonders of science to the savage shores of Japan.
While Rezanov was investigating modern penal and Galvanic practices in London, Langsdorff explored the ‘dry, desert and unfruitful aspect’ of Cornwall, his interest excited only by the deep tin mines, which to his amazement extended under the seabed. The officers amused themselves as best they could with the social whirl, or perhaps slow rotation, of the Falmouth gentry. Rezanov, Tilesius and Horner returned from London in a carriage groaning with sextants, snuffboxes and other kit requested by their fellow officers from the fashionable shops of the metropolis.
The ships’ companies reassembled, the two vessels set sail across the Bay of Biscay, bound for the Canaries. Giant sacks of fresh cabbages were hung from the stern rails. In one of them a wagtail had unwisely nested, ‘but whistled, unafraid, its innocent song’12 until one of the Japanese caught it and squeezed it to death, upsetting the sentimental Löwenstern. Tilesius and Friderici set up a convivial-sounding private bivouac in the ship’s longboat, where they would read, sketch and smoke undisturbed. By Langsdorff’s rose-tinted account, the voyage began to resemble a kind of floating Platonic symposium. ‘In an expedition such as ours among a numerous society of learned and scientific men in search of knowledge, it is impossible to experience ennui.’ Krusenstern’s well-stocked library was available to all who asked. ‘The mornings passed in reading, writing, drawing, taking the height of the sun and calculating the distance to the moon . . . all these things furnished abundant matter for pleasant and instructive conversation, even sallies of wit and mirth.’ The men of science also busied themselves with observing the dolphins, flying fish, sharks, birds and whales. In the evenings, after ‘a table spread with very excellent provisions’ there were ‘cheerful conversations over a bowl of punch’13 and concerts ‘with Romberg violono primo, Rezanov secundo, Tilesius basso, Langsdorff viola, Friderici flute primo, Horner flute secondo’.14
With the ships sailing in tandem, visits were exchanged. Hieromonk Gideon, dining on board the Nadezhda, got so drunk with Tolstoy that the priest fell sound asleep on deck. Tolstoy then proceeded to stick the prelate’s beard to the boards with a large blob of wax impressed with the captain’s seal, which he purloined from Krusenstern’s cabin.15 When Gideon came to, Tolstoy told him not to move because breaking the imperial seal would be treason. The clerical beard had to be cut off and left, sealed to the deck.
This agreeable idyll was disturbed only by the nascent but increasingly difficult-to-ignore rift between Rezanov and Krusenstern. Like many Lutheran German Balts, Krusenstern had a conflicted attitude to Russian rule and to the courtiers of St Petersburg who ran the naval ministry. The idea of putting together an expedition to circumnavigate the earth had been Krusenstern’s and he clearly resented Rezanov’s last-minute inclusion, even though it was thanks to Rezanov’s great Russian American scheme that the expedition had received imperial patronage and Company funding. But the fundamental problem was that both men had effectively been given mutually contradictory instructions on who was to lead the expedition. ‘We left Russia with the firm conviction that R was a passenger aboard,’ wrote Löwenstern, a firm backer of Krusenstern. When ‘Rezanov produced his Orders with the Imperial signature, [he] thereby suddenly robbed the captain of the incentives on whose account he had left the Fatherland.’16 Rezanov, in the view of the officers, was attempting to hijack the expedition of which Krusenstern ‘was the originator, recognized throughout Europe’ – and moreover waited till the ships were three months out of port before revealing the full extent of his imperial authority.
This conflict, which was to resurface endlessly and with increasing rancour throughout the voyage, got its first full-blown airing as the Nadezhda approached the Spanish Canary Islands. Krusenstern wanted to dock at Tenerife; Rezanov attempted to insist that they put in at the Portuguese island of Madeira. It is not clear why. Löwenstern gives his version of their conversation verbatim.
rezanov: What reason can you give me for not going to Madeira? I have to know in order to report to the Emperor.
krusenstern: No other than ones I considered good. And by the way, the Emperor will not care to know why we have sailed to Tenerife and not Madeira.
Rezanov fell silent.
Krusenstern’s decisive response seems to have stung Rezanov into increasing bumptiousness. ‘R behaves coarsely and harshly towards his fellow countrymen and is polite, well behaved and obliging towards foreigners,’ complained Löwenstern. ‘It is impossible to imagine being on board ship a long time with him. He has often enough been thoughtless, mean, partial and roaring.’17
Tenerife provided some respite from the claustrophobia of the Great Cabin, with the added piquancy that this was the last outpost of Europe that they would see. They found the town neat and clean. Langsdorff was sent to gather geraniums for transport to Kamchatka while Rezanov and Friderici went in search of ‘bold women and rabble’.18 The Russians found the Spanish ‘exceedingly un-neighbourly’. A group of local rowdies stole the Nadezhda’s jolly boat after drunken Russian sailors left it unguarded, and Löwenstern was charged a shocking four dollars for twenty-five pieces of laundry. ‘Tenerife is said to be for Spain what Siberia is for Russia,’ complained Löwenstern. ‘One finds more rascally faces here than anywhere else.’
They had a more friendly reception at the salon of Mrs Armstrong, ‘a coquette of the highest degree’. Captain Lisiansky was much taken by the British hostess: ‘he is like a cat prancing around a bowl of hot porridge with her’, reported Löwenstern. A ball was thrown in the Russians’ honour, with Lieutenant Fyodor Romberg taking over from the terrible local musicians and playing a Scottish reel on a Spanish guitar. The ladies of Tenerife, ‘infected with their hostess’ coquettishness’, danced wantonly. Poor young Moritz Kotzebue was so smitten by one Delphine Kuwe that he considered deserting ship to be with her until talked out of it by Löwenstern. Instead Kotzebue climbed to the top of the mainmast in tears as the ship sailed for Brazil so that he could see his beloved one more time.19
But despite the fresh tropical produce bought at Tenerife, tempers began to fray when back in the close confinement of shipboard life. Dr Espenberg found the tea too strong and the coffee too weak, and irritated the officers by shaving at breakfast and appearing on the quarterdeck in his dressing gown. The wind failed and the Nadezhda drifted in the late-summer equatorial heat. The sun and humidity made the sleeping cabins too hot, so the gentlemen spent all day around the table. Rezanov loudly recited Japanese verbs; Friderici drew a map of Santa Cruz; Brinkin read Latin out loud; Dr Espenberg drilled the two young Kotzebues in arithmetic; Bellinghausen sketched ships; Romberg leaned against his cabin door playing his violin with a damper while the painter Kurliantsev ‘leaned against the cabin wall staring vacantly at these goings on’.20 Löwenstern, absenting himself from the crowd and sweating over his diary in his airless and lightless cabin, wrote, ‘There is no place else where men can become so estranged from each other as on a ship. Little annoyances build up, vexation grows bigger and bigger . . . if mistrust has crept in, the step to discord is not much further.’21
A small lapdog Romberg had bought in Copenhagen had made friends with a sailor’
s cat and provided much amusement to the Nadezhda’s crew. ‘They play together so hilariously that we often form a circle around them and simply enjoy it.’22 Now, becalmed in mid-Atlantic, the little dog came into heat and began to whine and yap incessantly. Krusenstern ordered the animal thrown overboard, much to the distress of Romberg – and its friend the cat, ‘which cannot stop looking for the little dog in all the cabins and crannies of the ship . . . meowing pitifully to call her playmate’.23 One of the ship’s pigs, driven mad by the heat on the becalmed ship, broke from its pen and jumped overboard. Unlike the dog, however, it proved such an excellent swimmer that Krusenstern ordered all the pigs thrown overboard for a good wash. The terrified squealing and shitting provoked by getting the pigs in and out of the water were distressing to the more highly strung passengers. The ship’s hens were less fortunate: Langsdorff observed that the terrible heat and salt dust off the decks had blinded them all.
The captain insisted that full uniform be worn at table and reprimanded Tolstoy for appearing in a shirt. ‘Perhaps the Russian custom of using the vapour-bath so much allowed [Krusenstern] to support the heat,’ observed Langsdorff dryly.24 Nonetheless, the crossing of the equator was celebrated in traditional style. The sailor Kurganov, dressed in sheepskins and carrying a harpoon in place of a trident, appeared as a sweaty Neptune and doused the ship’s company in warm seawater. Rezanov made a patriotic speech on the occasion of the Russian flag flying in the southern hemisphere for the first time and presented every member of the company with a Spanish dollar. Krusenstern was tossed in the air, then Rezanov, and multiple salutes fired. ‘Rezanov got completely drunk . . . everyone was joyous and only the Nadezhda was sober.’25
In early November, after nearly four months at sea, the Nadezhda approached the coast of Brazil. Violent rain showers made ‘the whole ship smoke . . . the dampness makes everything rot, moulder and spoil. Whenever the sun comes out everyone carts their belongings out to let them dry and our ship is festooned with clothes and bedding,’ complained Löwenstern, ever the fastidious officer. Rezanov’s simmering feud with the captain was stepped up a notch when he casually ‘let drop a word at table that he was the leader of the expedition. Without a word, everyone left the table.’26 ‘Everyone’ presumably meant Löwenstern and the ship’s officers; Rezanov’s own entourage would have stayed firmly put.
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 17
