Rezanov may have been suffering from a lack of amusements, but Baranov faced a more pressing existential problem. As Langsdorff delicately put it, ‘however agreeable for the governor von Baranov to receive as his guest a plenipotentiary of the Company of such high distinction as the Chamberlain von Rezanov . . . Yet he was put to no small embarrassment by the wholly unexpected arrival of so large a train of visitors.’ Both parties had evidently been expecting the other to furnish supplies. When the Aleut and Russian hunting parties returned to camp at the end of the season’s hunting, Baranov found himself having to cater for over 200 people when he had supplies for no more than fifty.
Salvation arrived in the form of the Juno, a 250-ton brig from Bristol, Rhode Island. Her New England owners had provisioned her the previous summer specifically with the Russians of Sitka in mind. She carried a cargo of rum and tobacco (of course), molasses, sugar, rice, ship’s biscuit and fine white flour, as well as the usual manufactured trade goods. It was the Americans, with an eye to profit, rather than the chancelleries of St Petersburg, who had responded to the needs of Russian America with impressive speed and efficiency. The Juno’s captain, twenty-six-year-old John D’Wolf, had already sold Baranov a third of his goods on arrival in Sitka that spring. Now, after a tense summer trading with the unpredictable natives up and down the coast with five other Boston boats – and helping the stricken Atahualpa after the Tlingit attack – D’Wolf returned to New Archangel to make urgent repairs to his hull after running into rocks near the modern-day city of Juneau.
Baranov, much as he needed both ships and provisions, had neither the cash nor the authority to buy an entire ship like the Juno, along with all her cargo. But Rezanov could. His signature, as de facto director of the Company, was as good as a cheque. It was D’Wolf who first suggested the deal. His cargo was for sale, and why not the ship too, if the money was right? Rezanov agreed – but before closing the deal he seems to have told the New Englander a few white lies to bring down the price. Rezanov claimed, for instance, that the Russian navy was on its way to patrol the coast and the Bostonians would soon be banned from trading with the natives.
D’Wolf’s main difficulty, however, was not the threatened appearance of the Russian navy but how he and his crew would continue their journey to Canton with their haul of furs.7 The solution presented itself at the beginning of October with the arrival of the Yermak, Baranov’s old sailing galley, from Yakutat. The Russian American Company, in the person of Rezanov, bought the Juno and her remaining cargo for a total of $68,000 – close to what the Company had paid for the unladen Neva and Nadezhda together in London – and threw in the Yermak plus 572 sea-otter skins to the value of $13,000, as well as $300 in silver, representing almost all the cash available in the colony at the time.8 Rezanov drafted a bill of exchange – a promissory note – for $54,638 to be drawn on the main office of the RAC in St Petersburg. In addition the Yermak was to be loaded with a hundred days of supplies, four of the Juno’s six falconets, plus two sets of sails, thirty muskets and ammunition. The Juno’s heavy guns – six full-bore cannon and eight dummy wooden ones – would now be part of the Company’s arsenal.9
On 5 October, after mutual cannon salutes, D’Wolf ceremonially lowered the flag of the United States – the newest version, with fifteen stars and fifteen stripes to mark Vermont and Kentucky’s new status as states of the Union – and raised the tricolour of the Russian American Company in its place.10 To general jubilation, the first instalments of the Juno’s cargo of 1,955 gallons of molasses, 3,000 pounds of sugar and – especially welcome – six hogsheads of rum were carried ashore. The colony’s heavy smokers were also delighted to have six gigantic bales of Virginia tobacco, each weighing 1,800 pounds.
D’Wolf, it is clear from the cheery memoir he penned in deep old age of his youthful travels in Russian America and Siberia, was a man in search of adventure. Having exchanged his ship and her cargo for a piece of paper, he now decided – or allowed himself to be persuaded by Rezanov – to remain in Alaska and return to St Petersburg with the ambassador the following year. D’Wolf was ‘agreeably disappointed to find that various reports that we should find the Russians little advanced from the savage state’ proved untrue. He clearly hit it off with Langsdorff, a fellow questing spirit. D’Wolf gave George Stetson, the Juno’s first mate, command of the Yermak. The fifty-five-foot long craft, with most of the Juno’s Boston crew and their season’s haul of furs aboard, sailed for Canton on 27 October.
‘After taking a long, parting look at the little vessel fading on the horizon I returned to the village. I would take things as they came and make the best of them,’ D’Wolf vowed. He kept on one man as a valet: ‘Edward Parker, one of my ordinary sailors but a very useful man of work. A barber by trade, he was also a tolerably good tailor and performer on the violin and clarinet. This latter accomplishment might be useful in dispelling the Blues if we should at any time be troubled with that complaint.’11 Thus equipped, D’Wolf settled in ‘for a long siege’.
The Juno’s first mission for the Company was to go on a provisioning run to Kodiak, skippered by Lieutenant Khvostov. Johann von Banner (also known as Ivan Banner), the Company’s manager at Kodiak, loaded 70,000 dried fish on board – yet she arrived with only half that amount. Rezanov accused Khvostov of selling the missing fish en route, or allowing his men to do so. A stand-up row ensued which ended in Khvostov retreating angrily to the captain’s quarters of the Juno, where he would stay for much of the winter. But this tiff was soon forgotten in the excitement generated by Juno’s passengers, a number of Koniag women sent on Banner’s orders for the amusement of the lonely colonists at New Archangel.
Langsdorff was indignant. ‘It is obvious that the Aleuts are the complete slaves of the Company; no Aleutian of Kodiak would ever remove to Sitka’ without coercion. But Banner knew his business. The arrival of a party of tarts did wonders for flagging morale. Baranov ordered a barrack cleared for dancing to celebrate the new arrivals. ‘They made out bravely in cotillons and contradances’ with the Kodiak women, who wore Russian-style clothes. Rezanov and Langsdorff played their violins, with George Parker – a Yankee deserter who had settled at Sitka and survived the massacre of 1802 and no relation to D’Wolf’s man Edward – playing the clarinet. ‘With plenty of good resin for the stomach as well as the bow we made a gay season of it.’
Winter closed on the settlement, bringing with it constant rain and strange atmospheric effects. ‘For many hours together in the darkest nights a bluish green electrical light called St Helens or St Elm’s fire may be seen on bayonets fixed to muskets or on the metal heads of the flagstaffs on the fortified hill,’ reported Langsdorff, who kept himself busy with ornithology.12 Like all accomplished naturalists of his day he was a superb shot with his English rifle. He obtained a baidarka by ‘assuming an authoritative tone’ – politeness, he noted dryly in his memoir, didn’t seem to work on Russians – and used it to ‘carry on hunting and water parties’. The meat of the birds he shot was for the table; the skins he stuffed ‘for benefit of science’.13
Most of New Archangel’s officer class was not so energetic. Naval Lieutenant Alexander Sukin,* who had skippered the Yermak down from Kodiak, appeared to be slipping into depression. ‘His recreation is drink and sleep,’ Langsdorff noted. ‘He has done no work or exercise of any kind, visits nobody and nobody visits him. He lives so quietly it is almost as if he did not exist at all.’ He shared a room with Lieutenant Mashin of the Maria, but the two men never seemed to speak. ‘They are both so preoccupied with either the present or the future that they do not find matter for conversation with each other.’14
But it was Lieutenant Khvostov, brooding and drinking out in the foggy Sound aboard the Juno, who was becoming dangerous. He already had a reputation as an angry drunk. Soon after his first arrival in Kodiak two years previously, Khvostov had smashed windows in a murderous rage and fired a pistol at von Banner, who had had to lock himself in his office to avoid be
ing murdered. Now, Rezanov reported to the Company, Khvostov ‘began a drinking bout which lasted three months steadily. He drank, as you will see from his store account, 9 ½ buckets of French brandy and 2 ½ buckets of strong alcohol.’ A ‘bucket’ was four gallons, meaning that the lieutenant apparently got through the equivalent of 272 bottles of strong drink in a hundred days. This combination of Khvostov’s heavy drinking and his command of the Juno’s artillery was unsettling for the men ashore. ‘All the time the drinking went on, swearing and threats to all. At nighttime there was shooting from cannons.’
Fortunately Khvostov’s young protégé Davydov was on hand to rein in his superior’s attempts to actually open fire on the colony, and also to thwart his frequent drunken attempts to abscond with the Juno. ‘Davydov, who was always of sober behaviour, [confides] the ceaseless drinking was affecting Khvostov’s mind so much that every night he wanted to raise the anchor,’ complained Rezanov. ‘Luckily the sailors were always too drunk’ to carry out the order.15
When he wasn’t under fire from the Company’s own artillery, Rezanov was pondering the future of Russian America. Clearly, there was much room for improvement. The colony was at the mercy of American boats for supplies and, increasingly, for its core business of otter hunting too. The Company’s shipping was in the hands of alcoholic naval officers, some manic-depressive and others murderous. ‘I am trying to write to you in a polished style,’ he wrote to his old patron Rumiantsev, ‘but am obstructed by many obstacles of a physical and moral nature. Sometimes the bark roof over my quarters begins to leak, sometimes illness, alarm over the Kolosh, or our privileged class gets drunk and starts a disturbance… after two years of travels with immoral men I have become used to abominations of all kinds. I am disturbed almost every hour by abuse and turbulence.’16
Nonetheless Rezanov was able to present the Company’s directors with a strategic vision of striking boldness. As the success, flexibility and ubiquity of the Boston merchants showed, the future of the colony depended on having a reliable fleet, both to trade across the Pacific and to keep the Bostonians away from the coast. Rezanov envisoned Company ships travelling not only to Canton but ‘Cochin China, Tonkin [modern Vietnam], the Burmese Empire and India’. But though his letter was borne by the Elizaveta, with half a million rubles’ worth of furs in her hold, Rezanov saw that ‘notwithstanding this rich cargo . . . the Company as it is organized now will fail’. The current system of sending sporadic cargoes ‘is only a palliative, nothing more – it cannot be the backbone of your business’.
Kamchatka should be made the major entrepôt for Boston traders. There they would avoid the dangers of trading direct with the natives and exchange their West Indian and American goods for the furs of Russian America, which they would sell in Canton, neatly bypassing the Chinese restrictions on Russian ships. In addition, Rezanov planned personally to pioneer a Russian version of the Bostonians’ triangle trade by taking a ship from California to Batavia and Bengal and back to Russia. It would be, he boasted, the ‘first experiment in trade between India and Okhotsk’. The Spanish shipyards of Chile, currently supplied by the English and Americans, could be furnished with Siberian and Alaskan timber instead. Most striking of all, Rezanov also anticipated the vastly profitable whaling business by half a century. ‘Whale oil is used everywhere in India and we can count on Japan to buy all of it,’ he enthused, proposing that the Russian bases at Aniva Bay on Sakhalin be turned into the centre of a Pacific whale fishery.
Rezanov believed that Russian control should be extended south at all costs, into lands where the natives were less hostile, the climate gentler and the soil more fertile. As a first step, he envisaged a settlement at the mouth of the Columbia River, near modern-day Portland, Oregon, ‘from which we can spread little by little further south to the port of San Francisco . . . in ten years’ time our strength will increase so much that we will be able to keep an eye on the California coast in order, the moment that political events in Europe are favourable, to make it a Russian possession’.
Since the Seven Years’ War half a century before, every major European conflict had been fought in the New World as well as the Old. The Napoleonic Wars would surely be no different. And if the maps of Europe could be so dramatically redrawn, why not the maps of America?
The Spaniards are very weak in this country and if in 1798, when war was declared, our Company had forces adequate to the size of our possessions it would have been easy to occupy California down to the Santa Barbara Mission . . . Nature itself prevents them from sending reinforcements by land from Mexico. The Spanish do not use this fertile soil themselves and moved north only to protect their boundaries. Leaving now the future hidden by Fate, however, I will continue to write about the present.17
Crucially, Rezanov argued, if Russia did not act to secure and expand her Pacific empire then others would soon come to fill the gap the collapse of Spain would leave.* ‘If we do not make haste we can be sure that we have the Batavians [Dutch] as close neighbours in Kamchatka,’ he wrote. And a victorious France – the ‘New Empire,’ as Rezanov called it – could soon return to follow up on La Perouse’s discoveries. ‘It would be a pity for Russia to lose out at a time so advantageous to her and let some other power get a hold in these parts and by that cut off a vast and profitable trade.’18 At the same time, to the personal friends among his correspondents Rezanov admitted the overwhelming gap between his vast plans and the drunken, miserable reality of Russia’s southernmost American possession. ‘Sometimes the spirit of enterprise and ambition make me very resolute in my actions. At other times they seem to me an inexcusable folly,’ he confided to his brother-in-law Buldakov, growing sentimental as he exercised his talent for self-dramatization and self-pity. ‘Leaving behind me everything, sacrificing all, I do not expect nor want to receive praise or reward. Perhaps I will die here but I will die contented because . . . my Sovereign has bestowed on me the honour of being one of the first Russians to rove along the edge of a knife.’
Rezanov was very aware that none of his grand schemes had any chance of working without putting the chaotic affairs of Russian America itself in order. ‘All the Company’s actions are disorganized,’ he stormed – the colony is ‘an orphan left to the will of Fate’. Even the basic fabric of the settlements was, in Rezanov’s view, wrong. Houses made of solid logs heated with large brick stoves were perfect for Siberia’s dry cold, but in the warm drizzle of coastal Alaska ‘the damp quarters with wet walls and the exhalation of many people create a putrefied atmosphere’. Rezanov recommended frame-and-plank houses built on raised cobble foundations, insulated and roofed with clay and chopped grass and heated with open fireplaces to provide ventilation in every room and dry clothes quickly – exactly the kind of houses that later American colonists were to build in coastal Alaska.
Rezanov found it ‘very seldom cold here’ – something only a Russian could write of Alaska, but relative to Siberia it was perfectly true. He worried also that thanks to the Yankees the natives were now better armed than the Russians. The guns sent from the Okhotsk stores proved ‘defective and worthless’, a constant and deadly reminder of the shoddiness and endemic corruption at the Company’s base camp. ‘It is hard to forget the rascals in Okhotsk. It is not enough to make them pay for the damage but it would be right and just for the Company to exile them to America for ever so that they can see all the harm from their swindling for which many here have paid with their lives.’
But it was the human factor that worried Rezanov more than humid buildings, scarce ships and bad guns. Recruiting good officers and men for colonial service had always been a problem for the Company. If Rezanov had ever believed that free, skilled Russians could be persuaded to come voluntarily to Russian America, observing the miserable conditions in the colony persuaded him it was impossible. Seeing 400 convicts being readied for transportation to Australia at Newgate prison had clearly given Rezanov food for thought. Having spent a year in the company of the kind of f
ree-born riff-raff the Company had been able to attract– ‘here, for a cup of vodka they are ready to cut anybody’s throat’19 – he decided that convicts would be preferable.
An English-style law in Russia implementing penal transportation to the colonies would do wonders for the fortunes of Russian America, Rezanov believed. ‘All traders convicted of fraudulent bankruptcy should be shipped to America. In this way the State is getting rid of its unwelcome citizens and at the same time is building towns in the colonies . . . in brief, all criminals and men of bad morals will of necessity improve here and become useful.’ It was only the dregs of society who ended up in Russian America anyway. Troublesome serfs – legally regarded as the chattels of their owners – would also do. Rezanov suggested that the directors ‘ship over here skilled workers who are drunkards but otherwise fit for work, persuading the landowners who own them to cede them to the Company on favourable terms . . . Here hardship and work makes them behave more quietly and there are few opportunities to get drunk.’ He suggested that the RAC advertise in the newspapers, offering a bounty of twenty-five to fifty rubles yearly for each man, with their owners ceding the right to demand their serfs’ return. ‘Moscow alone could supply enough men for this country and still have half the idlers who are now there.’ Womenfolk, he added as an afterthought, could be shipped in from Unalaska. For all his enlightened principles Rezanov was a slave owner – just like many of the liberty-loving gentlemen who had recently framed the Constitution of the United States – and he remained an aristocrat and a landowner in whom the feudal instinct ran strong.
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 27
