The Russians ‘unloaded every grain of gunpowder and every arm down to the smallest midshipman’s dirk’.27 Thus disarmed and securely attached, like Gulliver in Lilliput, by many ropes to a fleet of fifty small rowing barges, the Nadezhda weighed anchor and was towed inshore to a safer anchorage with rhythmic cries of ‘O! Ossi! O!’ As she anchored, a provision boat arrived piled with duck, rice and fresh vegetables, a gift from the governor.
The visitors now settled down to wait for answers from the banyoshi – when they would be allowed ashore, when they would be able to have an audience with the governor, when Rezanov would travel to Edo to present his compliments to the Shogun. None were immediately forthcoming. During their first negotiations Rezanov had been told that Edo would have to be consulted even on the matter of whether he would be able to bring his sword ashore. This did not bode well for a quick and successful outcome to the embassy.
LÖwenstern’s sketch of Rezanov and the tolks.
Langsdorff, who spent as much time speaking to the various tolks assigned to the Nadezhda as Rezanov, was struck by ‘their excessive closeness and the circumspection with which every step is taken; it seemed as if the least error would cost the life even of the person highest in rank’. He found them obsessed with secrecy: ‘every thought, every question, every word was weighed in the nicest manner’.28 The tolks refused even to tell Rezanov the name of the reigning emperor, which they claimed was hidden even from his own people until his death, though they did tell him the name of the current shogun, Tokugawa Ienari, as a deadly secret.29
Löwenstern was more concerned with observing the local womenfolk through his telescope. He found the Japanese married woman’s practice of blackening her teeth disgusting, but was charmed by ‘her clothing, which is very comfortable, one nightgown upon another, like a book one can open’. The prospect of doing just that was evidently much on his mind. ‘The Dutch awaken hope that according to Japanese law everyone will be given a girl, the officers two and the captain four,’ he wrote, joking that the captain’s famous uxoriousness meant four more for the other officers.30
Doeff, coming aboard a second time, told Rezanov frankly that he was pessimistic about the success of the Russian mission. ‘The laws and customs of this people do not allow them to enter into ties of friendship and trade with other nations,’ Doeff wrote in his memoir after twenty years as the Dutch East India Company representative in Nagasaki. ‘Until the fundamental laws of the state, by which Japan has fared so well for two centuries, are repealed, all such proposals from any nation will receive a negative reply. If we Dutchmen were not settled there already, we would never be allowed in.’31
Both Langsdorff and Krusenstern later became convinced that the Dutch were scheming to sabotage the Russian mission, but the truth is that there was a dire shortage of trading hulls in the Pacific because of the Napoleonic Wars, and the Dutch badly needed ships – even Russian ships – to carry wares from Nagasaki to Batavia, Canton and Europe. Doeff himself says that though he and Rezanov were only allowed to meet twice, they maintained a warm (if secret) correspondence, and claimed that he often spoke in the Russian’s favour.32
The Nadezhda was still moored an uncomfortable distance from the shore, with autumn squalls and swells gathering, and the euphoria of arrival soon turned into irritation. ‘It is a kind of incarceration,’ wrote Löwenstern. ‘All we have learned from the Japanese is through the telescope.’ Rezanov vented his frustration on his messmates, ordering Horner to take off the nightcap he wore against the cold and bawling at Tilesius to sit up straight at table. To the tolks he was scarcely more diplomatic, shouting at their mumbled apologies and excuses. Had Rezanov been ‘an insignificant personage like Laxman he would have been ashore long ago’, they explained. ‘But for so great a man they must wait the commands of the court as to the manner in which he must be received and to make the necessary preparations for his rank and dignity.’33
A rumour circulated that a recent Chinese ambassador had waited eight months on his ship while suitable arrangements were made; Rezanov, with his higher rank, might have to wait even longer. This was probably true, tempting though it is to imagine that the tolks came up with the explanation as an ingenious way to needle the rude Russian. Rezanov’s insistence on his own exalted status had backfired badly. ‘The Japanese were astounded to hear Rezanov making so much noise, since for them patience and calmness are the first qualities of a distinguished man.’34 The tolks, for their part, were so unfailingly courteous that Langsdorff found that ‘we might have supposed ourselves among the most polished Europeans’.35
The Dutch ship Gesnia Antoinetta left harbour in mid-October, firing a thundering 150-gun salute as if in mockery of the Russians’ lack of gunpowder, while the Nadezhda and her unhappy inmates found themselves an involuntary tourist attraction. Every fine day a flotilla of sampans and noble barges would cruise past to observe the Europeans and their ways. Boatloads of children, ‘a whole school brought out to be treated with a sight of the Russians’, women with infants at the breast, young girls with stringed instruments and gawpers with telescopes. The grandest was the yacht of the ‘Prince of Fisen’ – more correctly the Daimyo of Hizen – ‘decorated with a variety of flags, staves, bows, arrows, muskets and other insignia of honour’.36
Meanwhile, Rezanov, in Löwenstern’s phrase, ‘fools away the respect of a nation’ by his habit of appearing on deck in a loose jacket and pissing off the side of the ship – an act commemorated in a sketch in Löwenstern’s diary wryly entitled ‘Rezanov shows himself to the people of Japan’. Rezanov ‘loses a great deal in the eyes of the Japanese who observe etiquette so strictly,’ Löwenstern observed in a low moment. They ‘hold us Europeans in contempt – and rightly so’.37
Footnotes
* The exchange was recorded in Cyrillic in Löwenstern’s diary, hence escaping the editorial hand of his censorious descendants.
* This timepiece made it all the way round the world and was eventually returned to the Winter Palace collection from where it was originally obtained by Rumiantsev. Alas this well-travelled clock is no longer in the Hermitage Museum’s inventory.
13
Humiliation
God grant us patience to bear Japanese ceremony and Russian caprices.
Hermann Ludwig von Löwenstern
While the Russian ambassador was relieving himself into the Bay of Nagasaki, furious debate was unfolding in Edo over the very nature of Japanese civilization and its relationship to the wider world. Unbeknown to Rezanov, his arrival had precipitated a power struggle between the noble supporters of the Tokugawa Shogunate, a hereditary clan who had ruled in the emperors’ names since 1603, and a growing class of magistrates, officials, interpreters and merchants who stood to benefit from trade with the Russians.
But the matter of opening diplomatic relations with Russia was much more than a simple commercial matter – it went to the heart of the regime’s legitimacy. The principle which came to be known as sakoku – literally ‘closed country’– had been proclaimed by Iemitsu, the third Tokugawa shogun, in 1633–9, after he had cemented his power by finally expelling the Jesuits and Portuguese.1 Sakoku was a fundamental plank of Tokugawa power – indeed, when the Shogunate did finally reluctantly agree to fully open Japan to the West in 1858, it would last only ten more years.2
The Dutch were tolerated because of their willingness to integrate themselves into the Japanese social hierarchy. An influential Japanese philosophy of the age was kokugaku – ‘national learning’ – the notion of the innate superiority of Japanese culture relative to all others. When they bowed to the banyoshi the Dutch acknowledged their submission to the Shogun, and, by implication, kokugaku also. Rezanov, by contrast, was clearly unwilling to do so. What he failed to understand was that the rites and rituals that he disdained were more than simply courtesy; they were the outward manifestations of the neo-Confucian vertical hierarchy that formed the ideological underpinnings of the Shogunate. To conservative nob
lemen in Edo, Rezanov embodied not only a reprise of the threat from the Christian West that the ancestors of Shogun Tokugawa Ienari had repulsed in the early seventeenth century but also a challenge to Japanese civilization on an elemental spiritual level.3
Back in Nagasaki, the tolks told the ambassador little of these machinations, replying to his urgent questioning with cascades of apologies. Rezanov therefore tried a different tack to get attention. Taking to his bed, he sent word to the tolks that he was angry at being treated ‘not as a friend but rather detained as a criminal and State prisoner’ and that his deteriorating health made it ‘absolutely necessary to walk on land’.4 This gambit seemed to do the trick. Frightened as the Nagasaki authorities were of acting without orders from Edo, the prospect of their distinguished guest perishing in the harbour worried them even more. Swarms of workmen appeared in an uninhabited corner of the bay on the Cape of Megasaki known as Umegasaki or Plum-Tree Point. A bamboo house was erected and just as quickly concealed from view by a bamboo palisade. The little ambassadorial compound was ready three days later. With the sailors in the rigging saluting him, together with the usual drummers and honour guard, Rezanov descended to the jolly boat to be rowed ashore to enter his new residence on Japanese soil, the first official ambassador of a foreign government ever to do so.
The compound built for the Russians was ‘small beyond all idea’,5 just twice the length of the ship and with every blade of grass torn away and replaced by perfectly levelled packed sand. By strict order of the governor, no more than nine Russians were allowed to stay ashore overnight. Nonetheless, shore duty was eagerly looking forward to, even in these spartan conditions. Ratmanov asked the tolks when they would be getting their rumoured quota of Japanese girls. Rezanov, settled in a large armchair decorated with a double-headed eagle crest, which he had had brought from the Nadezhda, found this request very funny. The Japanese ‘drew breath and remained silent’.6
This mean bamboo hut, Rezanov decided, was no place for an ambassador of His Imperial Majesty to reside. With Krusenstern planning to run the Nadezhda aground and tip her over to repair her fouled and damaged bottom, grander accommodation had to be found quickly. An old Chinese junk was rejected out of hand as too being cramped and low-ceilinged (not to mention her poor sailing qualities: ‘no ship so illogical, fat and big can exist anywhere’, thought Löwenstern). Therefore work began to convert a larger storehouse on Umegasaki into in a compound in which Rezanov and his suite could winter in greater comfort. As the Nadezhda was stripped of her rigging, masts and spars in preparation for her overhaul, the tantalizing sound of the Japanese carpenters’ hammers again drifted across the water.
December was punctuated by excuses that couriers from Edo had been delayed by floods – as well as grovelling and apparently pointless enquiries from the tolks as to the appointments of the new residence. ‘How many casseroles, pans and kettles does he need? . . . They will probably come again in five days to enquire if the ambassador drinks tea or coffee, if he wants to sit on chairs or benches, if he will be wearing boots or shoes, how many girls should be held in readiness for him,’ wrote Löwenstern in frustration. ‘God grant us patience to bear Japanese ceremony and Russian caprices.’
The gentlemen of the Nadezhda amused themselves by sketching, writing, reading and translating. On the quarterdeck above the great cabin Espenberg taught the Kotzebue brothers fencing. Rats, it was discovered, had got at the last of the wine barrels, leaving the Cabin nothing to drink but bad Kamchatka rum. ‘Our ill humour was increased by very cold, stormy weather,’ wrote the usually cheerful Langsdorff. ‘There is scarcely a soul on board who does not feel great impatience and indignation at being trifled with.’7
The Japanese, when finally ready, certainly put on an impressive show. After the usual elaborate negotiations over protocol, the Daimyo of Hizen’s barge was sent to collect Rezanov and his embassy to view their new accommodation. The ambassador was installed in the barge’s state apartment, whose laquered walls were draped in lilac silk and decorated with the prince’s arms in gold, his marines carrying the Russian flag standing behind. Though the barge had places for sixty rowers it was towed by smaller boats as a sign of further respect. The new residence itself was an improvement, at least, on the first, though by no means impressive: a single-storey house with walls of varnished paper and with fine woven mats on the floor in a compound forty paces by fifty, surrounded on three sides by sea and on the fourth by a high bamboo screen. Rezanov and his ‘cavaliers’ found a fine dinner of venison, ducks, rice and fowl prepared. As dusk fell their Japanese hosts took their leave and the ‘doors of our new habitation were close shut and locked and we were surrounded by a guard on all sides’.8
The Ambassador’s compound on Megasaki, by Löwenstern.
On board the Nadezhda the officers celebrated. ‘The plague of the Embassy is now raging on land.’9
Rezanov decorated his new quarters with the Nadezhda’s cargo of official presents – the six-foot mirrors, the galvanic machine, the elephant clock, the woven picture of Alexander I and all the rest. He busied himself with learning Japanese from the tolks and compiling a
dictionary of the language. On 24 December Rezanov declared that he was dissatisfied with the work of Motoki Shozaemon and asked for a different interpreter, Sukezaemon, with whom he got along better. This could suggest that Rezanov by this point understood Japanese well enough to be able to judge the accuracy with which his words were being conveyed – or that his peevishness and frustration was expressing itself in aggression towards the only Japanese he saw on a regular basis.
Rezanov pacing his new compound at Megasaki.
A brief attempt to break out of the compound and mingle with ordinary Japanese was less successful. By Löwenstern’s hearsay account (he was on board the Nadezhda at the time ‘enjoying peace and quiet’), Rezanov ‘stormed out of the house, got in with a crowd of rough Japanese porters who had more to do than to make way for our fool . . . Rezanov was bent, pummelled shoved and thumped, then went back to his house.’
Relations within the compound were also less than perfectly harmonious. ‘You rogue, fuck your mother, I will order the soldiers to shove your head down the shitter,’ Rezanov told Fyodor Shmelin, the Russian American Company’s supervisor, after the disappearance of a narwhal horn which Shemelin had been using as a walking stick. (This gem of authentic Rezanov was again recorded in Russian by Löwenstern, who was present.) Rezanov ordered the soldiers to get dressed and guard the drunk Shmelin ‘lest he damage the valuable presents’. Later that night the ambassador was heard pacing his room, swearing to himself. Löwenstern’s sketch of the scene shows Rezanov in a padded Japanese robe thoughtfully sent by Doeff, clutching his head as Shmelin is dragged away.10
Löwenstern’s sketch of Rezanov falling in the mud at Megasaki.
Rezanov’s mental state seems to have once again deteriorated rapidly during the freezing, drizzly days in Umegasaki. Cannon fire from a saluting Chinese junk had him screaming that the Nadezhda was under attack. Friderici joked that ‘shooting is nothing – it’s when they start building a gallows next to our house that we have to worry’. Löwenstern passed the time by bringing over captured rats from the Nadezhda’s hold and electrocuting them to death with the galvanic machine. Ratmanov and Friderici fell out and even asked to borrow Löwenstern’s dueling pistols before realizing there was no powder with which to shoot each other.
No doubt influenced by the pervasive dark mood, Madsuira, one of the five Japanese who had accompanied the Russians from Kronstadt, attempted to cut his throat with one of the soldiers’ razors. The Japanese guards would not allow Langsdorff to treat Madsuira, and the bleeding man had to wait until the afternoon before a Japanese doctor arrived with an impressive laquered medicine chest and made an antiseptic gargle for the would-be suicide. The Nagasaki authorities would not accept the Japanese sailors back without authorization from Edo, so the unfortunate men lived on with their Russian companions, separa
ted only by a bamboo wall from their homeland and families.
‘After encountering many storms and inconveniences, we had at least reached an interesting land where we hoped to be received if not as friends then at least as strangers of distinction, entitled to all possible deference and respect,’ lamented Langsdorff, who peered at the natural and human wonders of Japan through the compound’s slatted fence. Japanese peered back ‘in the manner that in Europe we look at wild beasts carried about for a show’, enjoying the spectacle of Rezanov moping around the compound ‘in a long dressing gown and nightcap, without trousers’.
Löwenstern’s view of the Embassy on Megasaki, observed by wild dogs.
Deprived of specimens to examine, Langsdorff and Tilesius took to dissecting and sketching the fish they were brought for supper before they disappeared into the kitchens. Using the ‘very thin, light and strong paper of this country’, Langsdorff also passed the days in pasting together hot-air balloons. His early trial balloons, fuelled by straw soaked in spirits, proved such a success that the Japanese guards and interpreters asked him to repeat the trick. Rising to the challenge, Langsdorff created a monster balloon ten feet in diameter and fifteen feet high, with a sketch of Russia’s two-headed eagle on one side and the monogram and crown of the Russian emperor on the other. The balloon rose up impressively high and flew over the rooftops of Nagasaki before crash-landing on the thatched roof of a merchant’s house, causing panic. The city magistrates sent polite word to Rezanov that future ballooning experiments were to be conducted only when the wind was blowing out to sea.
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 21
