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

by Owen Matthews

  Interior of a native hut at Nukakhiva.

  A dinner was arranged on board for the royal family – of whom Cabri was a member, having married one of the chief’s daughters. Muhaw, the king’s brother, made an impression at table by casually punching a hole in the top of a coconut with his knuckle, drinking the water, then crushing the rest of the nut between his knees. One of the king’s retainers, fastidiously measured by Tilesius as being six feet eight inches tall with ten and a half inches from his navel ‘to the parting of the legs’, further impressed the ship’s company by climbing to the top of the mainmast and diving into the sea cannonball-style, his knees tucked under his chin.

  The community’s leading tattooist, an elderly woman who swam over holding her tools and dyes in her mouth, tattooed all comers from dawn until dusk in exchange for nails and cloth. Her bird’s-quill needle with its blue-black ash-based dye was ‘as much sought after as among us a particularly good tailor – though if the garment be spoiled in the making the mischief is irreparable and must be worn, with all its faults, the whole life through’.20 Even Krusenstern submitted himself, though sadly exactly where and with what he was tattooed has been lost to history.

  Tolstoy naturally went the whole hog and sat for tattoos every day. They eventually covered his whole back, arms and torso. In later life Tolstoy was to make much social hay of his ten days’ stay on Nukakhiva. He enjoyed showing off his tattoos, especially to young ladies. His cousin Maria Kamenskaya recalled a dinner in 1842 at which Tolstoy, after not much persuasion, ‘undid his shirt studs and bared and swelled out his chest. Everyone at the table stood up in their places and stared – it was completely covered in tattoos. In the very middle sat in a ring some sort of big multi-coloured bird rather like a parrot in a blue and red hoop . . . The ladies sighed and gasped without ceasing and asked solicitously “Wasn’t it very painful, Count, when those savages tattooed you?”’

  Langsdorff ’s drawings of Nukakhivan tattoos.

  Among the more extravagant lies Tolstoy told about his South Seas adventures was the claim that he was about to be eaten when another tribe attacked and treated him as an idol instead ‘because of his beautiful white legs’21 – though it is true that the Nukakhivans did occasionally eat enemies slain in battle. He also claimed that Krusenstern marooned him on a remote island, whence he made his way to the land of the Tlingits in Alaska, where he led hunts in his Preobrazhensky Guards uniform. In Alaska, Tolstoy told breathless listeners at St Petersburg dinner tables, he ‘became as adept with a harpoon as he had been with foil or sabre’ and the natives ‘begged him to become their tsar’. He also claimed that Queen Pomare of Tahiti, which he never visited, was his daughter. In truth Tolstoy visited only one South Sea island –Nukakhiva – and thereafter remained on the Nadezhda until she reached Kamchatka, whence Krusenstern sent him home to St Petersburg in disgrace.

  Rezanov was one of the few members of the ship’s company not to join in the fun. He was showing signs of severe strain from the months of confinement in his lonely half of the Great Cabin with only a few sycophants from his embassy for company. He appears to have become more than slightly mentally unbalanced by this ordeal – at least by the account of Löwenstern, his determined enemy. Certainly a crisis broke soon after Lisiansky and the Neva joined the Nadezhda at Nukakhiva on 11 May. The tiff began with a disagreement between Rezanov and Krusenstern about the purchase of coral. Krusenstern had categorically forbidden the purchase of any items from the natives until his quartermasters had finished their negotiations to fill the Nadezhda’s holds with meat and vegetables – his sensible intention was to prevent inflation which might be triggered by private transactions. Rezanov objected: his people had a warrant from the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg to obtain as many natural specimens as possible, and should be exempted from the ban on trading.

  During the shouting match that ensued over this apparently minor disagreement ‘Rezanov allowed himself more freedom than his rank, the emperor’s order and a carte blanche would permit him,’ reported Löwenstern. ‘The open threats, the insults and wrongs towards the Captain will have to be straightened out publicly . . . Who dares to cast insult into a Captain’s face in front of his entire crew?’

  Lisiansky was summoned, and once again Rezanov’s tact appears to have deserted him. Lisiansky then gathered all the officers of both ships in the Nadezhda’s Great Cabin and announced that ‘His Excellency the Chamberlain has said to me publicly that “You are acting childishly and will be demoted to common sailor.” In light of this I cannot continue to command.’22 Ratmanov suggested that Rezanov ‘be considered crazy and locked in his cabin’. The ambassador was fetched from his quarters, from which he emerged ‘looking pale and white with his [imperial] Instructions’. Without entering the cabin Rezanov reread his precious ukaz aloud from the safety of the companionway stairs. As is clear from the many complaints he would later address to the great and the good of St Petersburg, Ratmanov’s threat to imprison him deeply shook Rezanov’s already-bruised pride.

  With neither side willing to back down or apologize, the row continued to fester unresolved. The officers acknowledged that the Tsar’s signature on Rezanov’s mandate was genuine, but all of them, except the Nadezhda’s Second Lieutenant Golovachev and First Mate Kamenshikov, declared that they would never have joined the expedition if they had known that Rezanov would be in charge. The two dissenters supported Rezanov for reasons of self-interest. The previous year Rezanov had hatched a plan to give one of the ships – probably the Neva, which was after all Company property – to the RAC’s general manager, Alexander Baranov, for use as a private Company warship permanently stationed in Kodiak. It is not clear quite how Rezanov planned to transfer authority over the vessel to the Company, since regardless of who had paid for them both the Neva and Nadezhda were travelling under naval command and flew the St Andrew’s Cross, the navy standard. In any case, Rezanov had privately offered command of the Neva to Golovachev and promotion to Kamenshikov, and as a result both men chose to publicly stand by the ambassador against their fellow officers. The result of breaking ranks was to be devastating for both men.

  The two Russian ships set sail in the teeth of a growing gale on 18 May. Jean Cabri had come on board to say his farewells, but soon found that they had been blown too far for him to return to shore, where his native wife and children awaited him. ‘He seemed however soon to reconcile himself to his fate and was an extremely useful sailor. As for the rest, he was but a mauvais sujet, very ready for laying plans for stealing, lying and cheating and no less adroit in executing them.’23 Or as Löwenstern put it, ‘only his nasty character and the few vulgar ballads he knows show him to be a Frenchman’.24 Cabri’s failure to disembark from the Nadezhda in time was the beginning of a disastrous decline. He made his way overland from Kamchatka to St Petersburg with Tolstoy, and by 1806 he was scraping a living teaching naval cadets at Kronstadt to swim. He ended up in a travelling freak show in Brittany showing off his tattoos. On his death in 1818 there was talk of raising money to preserve his skin for the anthropological museum in Paris, but too few people came forward and Cabri’s tattoos were buried with him in a pauper’s grave.

  On 7 June the expedition sighted ‘Owyhee’, the largest of the Sandwich Islands. Discovered by Captain James Cook in 1778 and the scene of his murder the following year, Hawaii had become something of a Pacific metropolis by the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1795 King Kamehameha the Great of Hawaii had led a force of 960 war canoes and 10,000 warriors to bring most of the neighbouring islands in the archipelago under his rule, and by the time of the Russians’ arrival had further built up his wealth and power by supplying the European and American ships which were frequenting the north Pacific in ever-greater numbers in search of whales and fur. He had also bought a fleet of fifteen Western-built brigs and frequently exchanged cordialities and gifts with Baranov in Sitka, 2,700 miles to the north-east. ‘Baranov’s fame stretches across the whole Pacific,’ Re
zanov noted with satisfaction.

  When the Russians anchored off Hawaii the wily and obese monarch was away campaigning against the rebellious northern island of Kau’ai – where the Russians would later establish a short-lived colony. But a motley pair of English deserters known as Mister Davie and Mister Young who served as Kamehameha’s advisers passed on some disturbing news. The Russian Fort St Michael, on Norfolk Sound just north of modern Sitka, had been sacked in November 1802 by Tlingit natives. Its Russian garrison had been massacred or taken into slavery, according to American ships that had picked up a few survivors and delivered them to Kodiak. The loss of the RAC’s newest and most southerly possession posed a serious strategic threat to the Company’s position. Rezanov immediately penned instructions to Baranov to retake the fort and avenge the loss of face the massacre represented to Russian power in the region.

  The original plan had always been for Lisiansky and the RAC-owned Neva to break away from the Nadezhda in the north Pacific and head to Kodiak to drop off supplies and collect furs. But Lisiansky and Rezanov, though now barely on speaking terms, both realized that the Neva’s fourteen guns would be needed to retake Sitka. Lisiansky made ready and set off north on 31 May, with orders to rendezvous with Rezanov and the Nadezhda back in Kamchatka at the end of summer.

  The Nadezhda, meanwhile, took on pigs, fruit and sugar. Langsdorff’s ever-more-experienced eye for native breeding found the Hawaiian inhabitants ‘naked, dirty, or middling stature, not well made . . . covered with bruises and sores, and many had lost front teeth’. Nonetheless the crew was disappointed when Krusenstern ordered his first mate to shoo away the crowds of curious half-naked native girls who approached the ship on outrigger canoes and clamoured to be allowed on board.

  Rezanov’s brief stay on Hawaii was not entirely ruined by the news of the sack of Fort St Michael. The temperate beauty of the island overwhelmed him. ‘The fine woods of birch and grassy hills resemble a European landscape so much that we might believe ourselves in our native country,’ wrote Langsdorff of a long walk he and Rezanov took into the interior.25 It also occurred to Rezanov, as it had to Baranov shivering in Alaska, that the plenteous agriculture of Hawaii could be the key to solving Russian America’s chronic food supply problems. ‘All Siberia might be supplied with sugar from Owyhee,’ Rezanov noted.26

  The final leg of the Nadezhda’s journey across the north Pacific quickly became nightmarish. The fresh Hawaiian food quickly ran out, as did the ship’s supplies of mustard and, more seriously still, brandy. Krusenstern had already threatened to leave Tolstoy on Hawaii for continued drunkenness and insubordination, but the unstable young count now descended into psychotic outbursts. ‘Now he is saying he is going to kill Rezanov and then set fire to the Nadezhda and some other crazy stories.’ The young man was by now so clearly insane that the captain ordered him to take sick leave on Kamchatka rather than punish him. Rezanov’s psychological health appears to have been not much better. He stayed in his cabin, brooding and drinking, barely appearing on the quarterdeck between the Nadezhda’s departure from Nukakhiva in May and their arrival in Kamchatka on 3 July, when he emerged unsteadily from his cabin ‘in full ornata’ to take a seven-gun salute from the garrison of Petropavlovsk.27

  View of Petropavlovsk on Kamchatka, 1811.

  The gentlemen of the Nadezhda found this remote outpost of the empire miserable in the extreme. The Kamchatka peninsula may be physically joined to continental Russia, but in practice it was (and remains) an island, with no roads linking it to the rest of the country. Even today locals speak of Russia proper as ‘the mainland’. Kamchatka is a land of volcanoes, forests, black sand and heavy sea fogs. In 1805 Petropavlovsk comprised no more than thirty log houses clinging to the steep sides of Avacha Bay, where the Mulovsky volcano plunges into the sea. It boasted a half-built church, barracks, fish-drying sheds, a stinking convict corral and guardhouse, and a small commander’s house, where Rezanov installed himself. Packs of huskies roamed wild after being turned loose for the summer to fend for themselves.

  The tiny settlement was home to a garrison of 150 soldiers, a company of artillerymen, some Cossacks and a handful of officers of the Russian American Company. It was surrounded by ‘impenetrable grass almost as tall as ourselves, bogs and forests’.28 In 1799 the Emperor Paul had sent a contingent of 800 troops to Kamchatka on a whim, and in the process nearly destroyed the fragile human ecosystem of the peninsula. The soldiers, ‘dirty, stultified, negligent and entirely ignorant of husbandry . . . drained the Kamchatkans in every way and laid the foundation of both physical and moral depravity’, complained a shocked Langsdorff.29 Even the usually indifferent Löwenstern was moved. ‘Pox and fever have decimated the [native] people; where one hundred once lived there are now barely five.’30

  Interior of a native hut on Kamchatka, from Langsdorff’s sketch.

  Despite the peninsula’s extraordinary natural abundance – ‘three casts of the net and the [Nadezhda’s fish] barrels were full of turbot, cod, herring, salmon and a dozen crabs’ – everything other than fish was in desperately short supply. So expensive was powder and shot that the native hunters were permanently in debt to their Russian masters. ‘No soldier goes out of his house without taking a Kamschatkadal as his companion to carry all burdens without pay.’ Rezanov attempted to ease the locals’ lot by fixing a new list of prices, but they were still outrageously high – five rubles for an iron teapot, pig iron fifteen rubles a pound, soap two rubles a pound, when the average wage for a Russian labourer in Russian America was just 150 rubles a year.

  On 30 July, with the Nadezhda on her side in the harbour being scraped down and re-rigged, Kamchatka’s governor-general, Pavel Koshchelev, returned from an expedition to the other side of the peninsula. His arrival was the signal for the final showdown between Rezanov and Krusenstern as both rushed to complain to this, the first Russian of comparable rank to their own they had seen in nearly a year. Rezanov was overheard in the bathhouse, or banya, complaining to the general that he had been ‘held prisoner on board for seven months’31 and that ‘all the officers except Golovachev and Kamenshikov should be treated as rebels’.

  Rezanov also gloatingly told Tolstoy and – oddly – Tilesius that they would be sent to the salt mines for the rest of their lives for their various misdemeanours on the voyage.32 Krusenstern, for his part, was prepared to resign his commission and return overland to St Petersburg rather than continue to Japan in the company of Rezanov. After delivering this threat Krusenstern broke down in tears. ‘I curse the moment I had anything to do with the American Company,’ he stormed in a rare moment of anger.33 Rezanov responded by threatening also to resign and abandon the expedition – a bizarre Mexican standoff that would, logically, have resulted in the Nadezhda continuing on her voyage minus both captain and ambassador.

  After three days of shuttle diplomacy by the alarmed General Koshchelev between Krusenstern’s quarters in the banya and Rezanov’s in the superintendent’s house a compromise of sorts was brokered. Mostly it involved a humiliating public apology by Rezanov. Krusenstern demanded that the ambassador ‘leave the discipline of the ship absolutely to me’34 and write ‘a letter to the Emperor stating that he is at fault and report our having made peace with one another’.35 Since the Nadezhda had no chance of reaching Japan without her captain or officers, Rezanov had little choice but to acquiesce. ‘He confessed he had acted rashly, and he asked that everything be forgotten,’ reported Krusenstern in an unpublished portion of his diary. ‘He intended to let me read anything he wrote the Emperor and I could seal his letter myself and give it to the governor. All of the officers witnessed the negotiations. A general reconciliation occurred.’36

  The result was a jaunty and upbeat dispatch from Rezanov that glossed over the hardships of the voyage and instead concentrated on the shortcomings of Kamchatka, including ‘lack of bread, salt, vegetables, powder . . . and a shortage of women, which makes the young men desperate and tempts the women to corrupt
ion’. Referring to his last doom-filled message from Santa Catarina, Rezanov apologized for referring to any ‘discord between me and the naval officers. We felt sorry and upset during this whole journey thinking that this disagreeable news would make Your Majesty sad and that you would think that we put our petty personal ambitions above the interests of the State. I have to confess that the only reason for this was our great ambitions, which blinded the minds of all of us to such an extent we became jealous of one another . . . I feel guilty in sending a report that was premature and humbly beg your pardon for myself and all our navy officers.’37 This grovelling draft was agreed upon by Krusenstern – ‘this most experienced and prudent officer,’ according to the letter.

  Rezanov read his letter out to the assembled officers. ‘The whole thing was very well written,’ thought Löwenstern. ‘After having read the letter to the Emperor, Rezanov’s satisfaction with himself shined out of eyes with a volubility of his own. Rezanov asked us if we had any criticism of the letter and asked us to state our opinion freely. We all were silent, and our silence was interrupted by the appearance of schnapps and breakfast.’38

  Rezanov certainly wrote a groveling letter. But did he actually send it? Löwenstern had his doubts.

  Rezanov put his letter away again and went on land in order to seal it (as he claimed?) together with his other dispatches. Krusenstern excused him by saying that Rezanov’s friendliness, his flattering personality, sealed through his frequent kisses, were proof of respect and friendship that give his appearance the varnish of sincerity. Does Rezanov understand and know how to be sincere? Doesn’t he have new tricks and traps lurking in the background? . . . May we not regret believing this two-faced man can be honest.