Langsdorff was profoundly shocked by the casual brutality he found in Russian America. ‘The Russian subject here enjoys no protection of property, lives in no security and if oppressed has no one to apply to for justice. It is revolting to a mind of any feeling to see these poor creatures half-starved and almost naked as if in a house of correction when at the same time the warehouses of the RAC are full of clothing and provisions.’20 The Company ran a credit system whereby it sold food and clothes to his own employees at inflated prices, to be deducted from their salaries. The result was that the employees were ‘debtors rather than creditors’ to their employers. ‘Detained as hostages for the payment of their debts, they strive to drown their cares in brandy . . . they must esteem themselves fortunate if after years spent in hardship and privations they return home at last with empty pockets, ruined constitutions and minds wholly depressed and broken down.’21
Langsdorff was a gentleman of science: he had volunteered to come to Russian America to document its natural wonders, and took his self-imposed mission seriously. Just before Christmas a delegation of Sitka Tlingit came to offer the Russians of New Archangel a feast. Visiting ‘formerly their own abode, they did not venture any external show of enmity, yet it can scarcely be supposed that they are free from it in their hearts’.22 Tents were pitched outside the stockade and a feast prepared with an ‘astonishing variety of things’ from berries preserved in seal fat to smoked geese and fermented salmon, mocking the Russians’ inability to feed themselves from the abundant land they claimed as their own. The chiefs were invited into Baranov’s compound but, wary after the last time, refused brandy, ‘afraid that, deprived of their senses, they should fall into [the] power of [the] Russians’.
Langsdorff lost no time in securing an invitation to the Tlingit camp. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found no Russians who were willing to accompany him. (Rezanov firmly believed that ‘only the terror which had been inspired by the European artillery . . . made [the Tlingit] assume an outward show of friendship’.23) Only the irrepressible D’Wolf was game. Accompanied by a former slave of the Tlingits who spoke both Tlingit and Russian, the little party set off down Sitka Sound in three three-man baidarkas paddled by Aleuts and was treated to three days of feasts and native dancing.
The detailed anthropological observations Langsdorff made on his travels were as important as Cook’s and Vancouver’s. His 1813 Voyages and Travels became an anthropological classic. ‘When their skins are clean and purified from the dirt they consider ornamental [the Tlingit] have complexions as fair as Europeans and by no means unpleasing features,’ Langsdorff observed. Tlingit women have ‘the most extraordinary, the most unnatural idea of increasing their beauty that the fertile imagination of man has yet invented’. They would pierce their lower lip in childhood and insert increasingly larger pieces of polished wood as they grew. ‘The women thus all look as if they had large flat wooden spoons growing in the flesh of their lower lip.’ The highest-ranked ladies wore pieces up to five inches broad. But Langsdorff found this no more absurd that contemporary European fashion. ‘Why, when we would appear in great state, we rub the finest flour into our hair?’ The main disadvantage to the practice, in Langsdorff’s opinion, was that ‘it is wholly impossible for the fair sex to receive a kiss’. The men were no less fastidious about their appearance. For ceremonies they made their hair up with the powdered down of eagle and painted their bodies with cinnabar, chalk and ochre. This process took ‘as much time as a European lady spends at her toilette’, aided with Boston mirrors, which allowed each man to decorate himself twice as fast as in old times, when they could only make each other up.24
Within days of D’Wolf and Langsdorff’s return from their social visit, chilling news came from Kodiak. The settlement of Slava Rossii – Glory of Russia – at Yakutat had been destroyed by a Tlingit war party. Of forty settlers at the fort only eight native men and two women survived. The Tlingit captured four cannon. Even worse, most of the large Aleut hunting party based at Yakutat was also lost. Seeing the burning colony from out at sea, the hunters in 100 out of 130 baidarkas panicked and attempted to make a run for Kodiak, right into the teeth of an advancing gale. Two hundred Aleut hunters and their season’s catch were shredded on the unforgiving rocks of Yakutat Bay’s eastern shore. Only the expedition’s leader, Timofei Demyanenkov, and the thirty baidarkas that had stayed with him survived. The only good news was that nearby Fort Konstantinovsk was saved by the timely intervention of ‘Matvei’, a local Chugach chief loyal to the Russians. An escaped Chugach prisoner warned the chief that a 200-strong war party headed by the Tlingit warlord ‘Fyodor’ was on its way to destroy the fort. When Fyodor entered Chugach territory Matvei invited him and seventy of his Tlingit braves to a feast, where he had them all murdered.
Baranov, not a man to take bad news lying down, prepared to set out on a punitive mission on the Kodiak-built Rostislav with twenty-five men and four cannon. This despite having just had two bone splinters removed from his arm, a legacy of his wound from the battle of Sitka. Rezanov managed to talk him out of this suicidal mission.* Despite the loss of life, money and strategic reach that the Yakutat raid represented, Rezanov managed to remain sanguine about the future of relations between the Company and the Tlingit. ‘Studying the mentality and morality of the savages I find them kind-hearted but revengeful, quick-tempered, lazy, moderate in their desires, capable of learning,’ he wrote to Gideon, ruefully acknowledging that the colonists made poor role models. ‘Their education is overlooked and they have few good moral examples to guide them.’25
As Christmas approached, the naval officers’ behaviour became more drunken and violent. ‘Everywhere they stay windows are broken and clerks powerless to stop them. Some [officers] owe a year’s salary for vodka they drank and charged to their accounts. They drink two to three bottles a day. Mr Sukin to date owes the store more than 300 rubles,’ Rezanov reported. The officers had long made a point of insulting Baranov as a social inferior and ignoring his orders. Ordered to take the Maria on a hunting expedition, Sukin had torn up Baranov’s orders and eaten them. He then threatened to have Baranov tied to the mainmast of the Maria and flogged if the manager dared to step aboard. When relieved of his command by Rezanov for this egregious insolence, Sukin was sullen and disrespectful. ‘Truly in all my life I have never witnessed such drunkenness and debauch,’ wrote Rezanov. ‘Drinking as they do and letting the hunters drink I would not be surprised if one day they would cause the Company more ruin than the Kolosh did.’
But with the sailing season over and the Maria and Rostislav pulled ashore as makeshift barracks for the men, the officers were left with little to do except drink, brood and fight. Mashin, Sukin, Khvostov and Davydov went completely out of control, starting drunken gunfights and openly insulting Rezanov himself. ‘They are losing their minds from too much drinking . . . One day they behave and listen to me, the next day they are drunk, curse without mercy and one day started a fight. I ran to stop them and they almost shot Baranov and me. We were lucky to snatch the loaded pistols from their hands.’
After this incident Rezanov ordered further supplies of alcohol to the Juno – still at anchor in Sitka Sound – stopped. That at least brought Khvostov immediately on shore, cursing from his longboat as he came. Bursting into Baranov’s office, Khvostov managed to insult the Company’s men so seriously that Baranov, his deputy Ivan Kuskov and all the clerks all immediately resigned in protest, even offering to forgo their salaries in exchange for immediate transfer back to Russia. Rezanov refused to accept their resignations and had Khvostov locked in the bathhouse to sober up. The following day, Christmas Eve, a hung-over Khvostov shuffled to Rezanov’s hut to attempt an apology. Rezanov refused to open the door. The long-suffering Baranov was more forgiving.
‘Toward evening Khvostov sincerely begged the Manager’s pardon,’ which Baranov gave. However, their tearful reconciliation triggered a further bout of Christmas revelry. ‘Having drunk too much, [Khvostov]
and Ivan Koriukin started carving each other.’ Khvostov attacked the Maria’s shipwright with a knife. As the stabbed Koriukin was taken to his lodgings, Khvostov staggered in the direction of Baranov’s sleeping quarters. Word went round the Aleuts that their manager was in danger, and sentries later discovered an impromptu bodyguard of four hunters hiding on Baranov’s porch with knives in their hands ready to protect their chief from the rampaging Khvostov.26
Food grew scarce. Severe winter storms prevented the shooting of seals, the colony’s staple meat. ‘We gathered snails and clams during full moon when they are edible; at other times we have shot eagles and crows. We have been eating everything we can get. Occasionally we get a cuttlefish . . . from January on, thank God, seals reappeared and sea lions, which have been our main diet ever since,’ wrote Rezanov. The ground froze hard, and work on a new wharf and a sixteen-gun brig ground to a halt. ‘We did little else but sleep and long for spring,’ remembered D’Wolf.27 Even the busy Langsdorff became depressed. ‘Buried in this remote part of the New World my only consolation has been to sigh and long for the old one,’ he wrote in a rare mournful moment.28 Rezanov missed the two children he had left behind in St Petersburg. The toion Akilkak from Ugatotsk brought his son to meet him, and Rezanov recorded in his diary that ‘I kissed the boy, and while I was holding him close to my breast his hair became so tangled with my coat buttons that I had great difficulty in untangling it. The toion proclaimed that fate had decided I was the boy’s second father.’
The men, naturally much worse off than the officers, were ‘tormented by hunger [and] ready to give their last shirt or garment of any kind for fresh food’. By February ‘many walked around in only stinking dirty sheepskins full of vermin’.29 On weekdays the colonists were fed the rancid fat of a beached whale, on Sundays a thin soup of salt meat and rice, a glass of brandy and molasses. The officers kept luxuries such as flour, biscuit and sugar to themselves. ‘While so large a portion of the people lay in a state of wretchedness the directors and other overseers, clerks and friendly officers and their hangers-on fed sumptuously on wild ducks, fresh fish and pastries . . . in short whatever was afforded by nature or storehouses.’30
Rezanov told the Company that he had ‘ordered [the sick] given wheat molasses and beer made from fir cones. We all drank this as an antidote to scurvy.’ A Tlingit fisherman set traps in the Sound, landing several ‘excellent holybutts’. He went home ‘a very rich man in his way, canoe loaded with shirts and breeches’.31 But it barely helped. In the spring of 1805 Baranov had chosen 150 of the youngest and healthiest men in Russian America to retake the Sitka colony. Now, as winter of that year drew to a close, eight were dead of scurvy and sixty lay exhausted and covered in scorbutic sores in a barrack with no windows ‘warmed only by their own pestilential breath’.32 The Russians considered being carried to the sick house ‘an infallible indication of being the end, as if a sick person yet living was carried to the churchyard’.33 Aleut dead were given no funeral at all; the Russians were ‘thrown carelessly into the earth . . . with scarcely a friend or comrade following his deceased fellow countryman to his grave’.
Boston ships would not arrive before early summer; Kodiak had been twice tapped for supplies, and Yakutat was destroyed. New Archangel faced starvation unless resupply could be arranged. The nearest prospect was the Spanish colonies of California. Despite the risk of storms at the winter equinox, Rezanov ordered the Juno made ready for sea. Eighteen of the healthiest and fifteen of the sickest men went on board. Khvostov was finally forgiven after tearfully begging Rezanov not to report his behaviour (on the grounds that ‘the disgrace would kill his elderly parents’34) and put in command. ‘All quitted with joyful hearts the miserable winter abode to which they had been doomed,’ wrote Langsdorff.35 On 25 February 1806, provisioned with the last of the colony’s carefully hoarded salt meat and biscuit, the Juno nosed between the odd little islands of Sitka Sound and turned south towards the warm waters of California.
Footnotes
* This must have been a hard surname to live with. Suka in Russian means ‘bitch’, and sukin means ‘of a bitch’. The insult sukin syn – ‘son of a bitch’ – has been in colloquial use in Russian for centuries.
* The crisis of Spain’s empire was much closer that Rezanov imagined. Within two years of writing those words the empire would be effectively decapitated by Napoleon. Indeed the events that would lead to its collapse were already underway. Napoleon had been allied to an unwilling Spain since 1796, but it was Napoleon’s ‘continental system’, an attempted blockade of English trade, which led to a British invasion of Spain. By 1807 British and French armies were fighting on Spanish territory, and Napoleon occupied Madrid and deposed the Spanish King Charles IV.
* The Company eventually ransomed the ten Aleut survivors from Tlingit slavery the following year.
17
Conchita
With the advantages which so great a line of coast presents, it would be in the power of Russia not only to open new sources of commerce in that region of the world [California], but to command a complete monopoly of commerce of those seas.
Morning Chronicle, London, 18171
The Juno reached the mouth of the Columbia River, the boundary between modern-day Washington State and Oregon, after twenty days in heavy seas. The fifteen men lying sick in the forecastle ‘infected the air of the ship with their unwholesome breath’2 and the ship’s provisions were running out. Vancouver’s chart proved impressively accurate: Mount St Helen’s was spotted through driving rain, and also Cape Disappointment.* A sandbar made the approach to the Columbia notoriously difficult and dangerous. As the Juno tacked to and fro waiting for favourable winds, Rezanov was ‘already sketching plans for removing settlement from Sitka to the Columbia river and was busied with building ships there in the air’.3 They saw smoke from campfires rising in the thick forests south of the river, but there was no response to the Juno’s signals.
Though neither party had any way of knowing about the other, Rezanov on the Juno was less than five miles away from Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the leaders of the United States’ first transcontinental expedition.4 Two years previously Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, had bought 828,000 square miles of territory from France for $15 million. Part of this vast piece of real estate had been originally colonized by the French, but more of it had been wrested from the Spanish after their defeat by Napoleon. In any case the French emperor had little use for this wilderness. A bloody slave revolt in the French Caribbean had consumed precious French armies and resources that Napoleon needed to consolidate his conquests in Europe. And thanks to the sale of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 Napoleon had been able to keep the United States, with its large merchant navy, out of an alliance with England.
Many American merchants and industrialists opposed the Louisiana Purchase as a reckless extravagance – even at three cents an acre.* Nonetheless Jefferson managed to scrape the deal through Congress. The acquisition comprised not only the modern state of Louisiana but all or part of fifteen other present-day US states and two Canadian provinces, stretching from the Gulf Coast through the Midwest and westwards to the Rockies. The deal almost doubled the size of the United States.
In 1804 Jefferson commissioned Captain Lewis and Lieutenant Clark, both Virginian gentlemen and veterans of Indian wars in the Ohio valley, to explore the newly bought lands and beyond. They were not the first men to cross the continent by foot – a Scotsman, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, had managed it in 1793 – but Lewis and Clark were the first Americans to do so. They were given a large number of medals to distribute to native chiefs as tokens of subjection, just as Shelikhov and Baranov had handed out their copper double-headed eagles. More importantly, Jefferson charged Lewis and Clark with pushing beyond the Louisiana Territory – which extended as far as modern Montana – and continuing through unclaimed land to the Pacific in order to find a ‘direct & practicable water communication across this
continent, for the purposes of commerce with Asia’.5
After two exhausting years pushing up the Missouri River and down the Columbia, Lewis and Clark finally reached the Pacific in November 1805. They made their winter camp on the Netul River, a couple of miles to the south of the Columbia on the edge of Chinook tribal territory. They built a stockade and called it Fort Clatsop, and there they spent a hard winter subsisting on berries and smoked elk. Clark led a mission south down the coast to find salt just before Langsdorff ventured ashore near Havre de Grey, north of the Columbia, in a baidarka to try to make contact with the natives. He found none and spent a terrifying night looking for the Juno as a heavy fog descended. In the final days of March 1806, as Rezanov was tacking to and fro in an attempt to enter the Columbia, Lewis and Clarke’s expedition was preparing to turn back eastwards and head home. Lewis sent a last scouting party to the bluffs overlooking the shore to see if they could spot any merchant ships; they saw none. The Juno must have been just out of sight. The pioneers of Russia’s and the United States’ fragile new empires would never meet.
On 22 March, the day before Lewis and Clark left Fort Clatsop, one of the Juno’s sick sailors died of scurvy. Eight more were, in the opinion of Dr Langsdorff, just days away from death. ‘The sick grew more diseased from want of anti-scorbutic remedies . . . no hope seemed to remain unless by the wholesome animal and vegetable productions that might be obtained on the shore.’6 The Juno was then very nearly wrecked as strong winds pushed her towards the lee shore. Khvostov – evidently a decent enough sailor when sober – saved her by dropping both anchors, which caught in just eighteen feet of water a pistol shot from the shore. It was time to stop sailing up and down trying to cross the Colombia’s sandbar and follow the wind south. To cheer everyone up Rezanov ordered the last cask of brandy on board opened. ‘He gave [the] whole crew a good bowl of punch made with brandy of the Russo-Americans which I endeavoured to make more palatable by the assistance of acid of vitriol and sugar,’ recorded Langsdorff. ‘This beverage was universally admired.’ Vitriol being the contemporary name for sulphuric acid, one wonders how the Company’s brandy originally tasted if vitriol improved it.
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 28
