The Juno’s crew found California every bit as agreeable as their officers. Rather too much so, in fact. Within three days of arrival five of D’Wolf’s men – four Bostonians and a Prussian – who had signed up for Company service the previous autumn in New Archangel, requested permission to remain in San Francisco. Several Russians appeared keen to join them. Clearly, if Rezanov were to let them go he would soon have no crew left with which to return to Sitka.
Don Luis was not keen on Protestant Yankee sailors wandering his colony and offered a picket and mounted patrol to guard the Juno and prevent any desertions. A court martial was held on the Juno’s quarterdeck, which condemned the five for conspiracy to desert and ordered them confined to a small stockade on an uninhabited island in the Bay known to the Spanish as La Isla de los Alcatraces – the Island of the Pelicans. Thus the Juno Five became the first prisoners of Alcatraz. But despite these precautions two of the Company’s ‘most esteemed seamen’ nonetheless managed to abscond while washing their clothes in a creek. They were never found. Rezanov asked Arguello for them to be deported to Russia via Vera Cruz, if ever caught, and followed up by asking Rumiantsev to ensure that if these miscreants ever showed up in their homeland they should be ‘returned to [Russian] America for ever’ – apparently the most horrible punishment he could think of.
On the afternoon of 7 April a salute of nine guns from the shore battery and another from a second, hidden battery – duly noted by the diligent amateur spy Rezanov – announced the arrival of the gubernatorial party from Monterrey. The following morning Father Pedro arrived with an invitation to dine with Don José Joaquin Arrillaga, Alta California’s governor. Rezanov, obsessed as always with form and protocol, bridled at the lowly status of the messenger. ‘Are the Holy padres not as worthy of respect as officers?’ retorted the priest, brushing aside the snub. ‘We live in America and I’ll wager we know nothing but sincerity.’
Rezanov chose to set aside his irritation and mounted up. On the way up the hill Father Pedro confided that a considerable obstacle had arisen to Rezanov’s trade mission. ‘Previous to his leaving Monterrey the Gobernador received information from Mexico to the effect that if we are not now at war with Russia we soon shall be.’ Rezanov laughed off the report as a ‘blunder’. ‘Would I have come here at such a time?’ if war was in the offing, he bluffed.21 Yet he sent a message back to the Juno – on the pretext of sending for a forgotten handkerchief – ordering no-one to leave the ship. Riding into the courtyard of the presidio Rezanov feared that he might be arrested. ‘When crossing the Plaza I noticed the pleasant, smiling faces of the beautiful Spanish señoritas, and at once my suspicions vanished, as, if there had been any ground for suspicions the señoritas would no doubt have been secluded.’
Waiting for Rezanov on the steps of the presidio were Don Arrillaga and Don José Dario Arguello, Conchita’s father. Elaborate compliments were exchanged in French, which Arrillaga spoke well. Rezanov was solicitous of Don Arrillaga’s bandaged foot. ‘Everything in California is subject to my commands, yet my right foot refuses obedience,’ joked the governor, whom Langsdorff found ‘a very polite and respectable elderly gentleman.’22
The Spanish apologized for the informality of the invitation; Rezanov airily claimed that ‘I had not given the matter any serious consideration, I had made all conventionalities subordinate to my desire to secure the benefits which attracted me to Nueva California.’ Strange as Rezanov’s obsession with protocol seems today, in truth he had very little to offer his Spanish hosts except an impressive front. For both Russian and Spanish noblemen of the time the political culture of the court and its elaborate codes were more than simply ritual; they were crucial signifiers of status. Rezanov’s seemingly boorish insistence on being accorded due deference at all times was, to his mind at least, part and parcel of his mission to impress the Spanish with the dignity, wealth and power of Russia, their new neighbour and rival.
The foundations of the presidio that Rezanov knew lie under the floorboards of a US Army officers’ club built on the site a century later. It was a small room, perhaps fifteen feet by thirty, with adobe walls nearly six feet thick. It had no glass in the windows and was roofed with thatch. Yet with its rough-hewn furniture and impressive silver plate and lit by home-made candles, Rezanov found the place had ‘a subdued, barbaric beauty’. At dinner Rezanov talked a big game, as might be expected from a man who was, by his own account, posing as head of a neighbouring state. Brushing aside rumours of war – ‘Men like us who are inured to all kinds of dangers must not take notice of such rumours,’ he told the Spanish – Rezanov’s message was clear and wholly disingenuous. He assured his hosts that Russia had no designs on California. ‘Dismiss from your minds this erroneous idea,’ Rezanov told Arrillaga. ‘The Southern parts of America are not necessary to us . . . Even if it were otherwise, you must acknowledge that so strong a power [as Russia] would not need to disguise its intentions and you could never prevent us from carrying it out.’ At the same time he warned Arrillaga that once Napoleon was defeated the Spanish were doomed to lose California to the Americans unless they strengthened their empire by opening to trade – with the Russians, for instance.
Rezanov apparently believed that Arrillaga was reassured by these arguments. ‘The gobernador listened with much pleasure,’23 he reported, though the old man maintained that decisions about ‘intercourse that might be established between Russian settlements and this Spanish province’24 were above his station. Not even the viceroy in Mexico City could decide such weighty matters of state, mumbled Arrillaga, even ‘though he perfectly concurred in considering it advantageous to both parties’.25 This was surely a matter for the cabinet in Madrid to decide.
Yet, as he returned to the Juno that evening accompanied by an honour guard of Spanish dragoons, Rezanov was in high spirits. As anyone who has ever tried to get anything done in Russia knows, invoking ever higher and more distant authority is in reality a sign that purely local problems are about to be resolved, here and now, man to man. ‘God is high and the Tsar is far,’ the Russians say, and the further away and higher the obstacles to Rezanov’s problems, the better the chance he would be able to persuade the old governor to bend the rules a little here in his own backyard.
Footnotes
* So named by a British fur trader, John Meares, who failed to find the entrance to the Colombia river just to the south of the Cape in 1788.
* Similar objections would be made in 1867 to William Seward’s proposal to purchase Alaska from the Russians for just two cents an acre.
* Upper and Lower California, today the US and Mexican states of California and Baja California.
* This silver was looted during a British raid on the Mexican port of Loreto in February 1822, where Don Arguello finally settled after a lifetime’s service. The raid’s commander, Sir Thomas Cochrane, went on to become admiral of the fleet and retired to Ipswich. Perhaps a family in East Anglia is still eating dinner off heavy provincial Spanish plate.
18
Love and Ambition
He, from grave provincial magnates oft had turned to talk apart,
With the Comandante’s daughter on questions of the heart,
Until points of gravest import yielded one by one,
And by love was consummated what diplomacy begun.
Francis Bret Harte, ‘Conception de Arguello’, 1872
A ball was arranged at the presidio for the distinguished visitors. The garrison’s barrack – the largest roofed space in the compound – was cleared of furniture and bedding, and the women of the Arguello household busied themselves preparing the hall. They decorated it with a Spanish flag and a Russian standard borrowed from the Juno. A small orchestra was assembled from among the garrison’s soldiers: drummers, guitar players and fiddlers. Indian servants were sent out on the hazardous mission of gathering wild honey and, less perilously, spring salad leaves.
Rezanov and the officers wore full-dress uniform. Langsdorff wore hi
s black academic suit and waistcoat of cream lawn. The Arguello girls taught the Russians a dance called the barrego, in which two couples stood opposite each other, stamped their feet, clapped hands and turned around each other in a chain. Langsdorff, Khvostov and Davydov ‘took pains to teach the ladies English country dances and they liked them so much that afterwards we often danced them’.1 Rezanov and the doctor took turns at the violin, accompanied by the soldiers’ guitars. At ten the company broke off dancing to eat dulces – small honey cakes – and drink sweet yellow wine.
Rezanov danced with Conchita. It seems he was immediately attracted to her; it is even likely that the feeling was mutual. Conchita was, at fifteen years and two months, already considered a famous beauty. Rezanov, though forty-two and gaunt from a hungry winter, was the most impressive man she or indeed anyone in California had ever seen. The doomed romance of Conchita and Rezanov has inspired epic poems, plays and novels in English and Russian, as well as the Soviet Union’s first rock opera. But we have only two contemporary accounts of what happened in the five weeks the Juno was at San Francisco: Langsdorff’s travelogue – which is coloured by unconcealed resentment of his chief – and Rezanov’s own letters to the Company, which are necessarily dry and put the relationship in purely political terms.
What is clear is that their affair was at least partly political. ‘Our constant friendly intercourse with the family of Arguello – the music, the singing, the sports and the dancing – awakened in the mind of Chamberlain von Rezanov some new and important speculations which gave rise to his forming a plan of a very different nature from the first for establishing a commercial intercourse between the Russian and Spanish settlements,’ wrote Langsdorff. ‘The bright eyes of Dona Concepción had made a deep impression on his heart and he conceived that a nuptial union with the daughter of the comandante at San Francisco would be a vast step gained towards the political objects he had so much at heart.’2
Rezanov undoubtedly went out of his way to be charming; it seems also that he was charmed in turn by the Arguello’s harmonious family life and the chatter of the womenfolk. The Russian party became daily visitors to the presidio to take chocolate with Conchita and her mother. Rezanov worked hard at transforming his fluent French into basic Spanish. When Don José Dario and the governor arrived from Monterrey Rezanov was already on such good terms with the family that ‘I was told the next day word for word all that had been said there after I left thanks to my close intimacy with the house of Arguello.’3
Conchita was clearly intelligent – Rezanov, who did not suffer fools, spent hours chatting to her. ‘Associating daily and paying my addresses to the beautiful Spanish señorita I could not fail to perceive her active venturesome disposition and character,’ he wrote to Rumiantsev. Moreover, Conchita was ambitious and hungry for a world beyond the confines of the presidio. Rezanov speaks of her ‘unlimited and overweening desire for rank and honours which, with her age of fifteen years, made her, alone of her family, dissatisfied with the land of her birth. She always referred to it jokingly; thus “a beautiful country, a warm climate, an abundance of grain and cattle – and nothing else”.’4 These are Conchita’s only words recorded by Rezanov or Langsdorff.
But there is also a third source. María Manuela Francesca Salgado, born in 1838, joined the Dominican Convent of Monterrey in 1852 and was close to Conchita in the last years of her life. Salgado, known as Sister Vincentia or Old Vinnie, recounted her memories of Conchita to an Irish-American priest in the years before her death in 1940. A third-hand account, then, and one which is riddled with improbabilities – but Old Vinnie helps us to imagine the flesh-and-blood Conchita. She found Conchita
beautiful of face and figure, a little below medium height. Her face was small – oval rather than round – and even then, when past sixty, her face was not wrinkled . . . Her eyes were rather large and through the years did not lose any of their luster. They were deep pools of dark blue, just like the Heavens, and looking into them one could sense the deep dark blue of the ocean. Her voice had a most soothing cadence. It was low and had its own special charm. Her Spanish was faultless. When in conversation with anyone – man or woman regardless – she looked at them straight in the eyes, not searchingly but with a perfect trust and the innocence of a little child.5
At fifteen Conchita seems to have been a mix of her father’s peasant pragmatism and ambition and her mother’s refinement. Don José Dario had risen from private in the Mexican dragoons to an ensign’s commission in the newly founded presidio of Santa Barbara in 1781, and was given command of the San Francisco garrison in 1798.* Hubert Bancroft, an early historian of California, interviewed men who had known Arguello. They reported that he was tall and stout with a commanding bearing and very dark skin. Despite the handicap of a dark complexion, Arguello married into the highest nobility in the colony. Dona María Ignacia Moraga was of pure Spanish blood, the niece of the founder of the San Francisco presidio and kinswoman by blood or marriage of most of the colony’s leading families. Dona María bore him fifteen children – single-handedly accounting for almost a quarter of white children born in the twenty years of San Francisco’s existence.6
Dona María de Concepción was educated by the Franciscan priests of the Misión Dolores. The furthest she would have ever been from home would have been to the provincial capital of Monterrey, a two-day ride away. The white population of San Francisco numbered just seventy. The journey to Mexico City was unimaginably difficult and dangerous for a lady of her status. To travel to Spain was even more inconceivable. Conchita grew up in one of the remotest outposts of the civilized world. Small wonder her desire to be free of it was, as Rezanov says, ‘unlimited’. Rezanov may have seen in Conchita a way to realize his political ambitions, and for Conchita, Rezanov represented the only chance she was ever likely to get to escape into a wider world.
Two powerful women had dominated Rezanov’s career: Catherine the Great and Natalia Shelikhova. He knew the power women could wield, even in a man’s world, and set about making the women of the presidio his friends, allies and spies. His target was Don Arrillaga, and his object was to persuade the dutiful old bureaucrat to bend the rules of his government to fill the Juno’s hold with breadstuffs. The gifts to the womenfolk had been nicely chosen: the linen and calico and mirrors and scissors were daily reminders in the Arguello household of the wealth and generosity of their Russian guest.
Women, then, were one pincer of Rezanov’s diplomatic offensive. The priests would form the other. Langsdorff, wittingly or not, had become his key liaison with the padres. Rezanov had forbidden the doctor from leaving the vicinity of the presidio until Arrillaga’s arrival to avoid the impression that the Russians were sending out spies. But now that Rezanov’s personal diplomacy was in full swing, Langsdorff was allowed to head off to spend most of his time inspecting the flora and fauna surrounding the mission.
The German doctor, though a Rhineland Protestant and man of science, quickly made firm friends with the Franciscan monks, the only educated men in this distant outpost. He found them simple and intelligent, refreshingly free of the ambition and single-mindedness that Langsdorff found so irritating in Rezanov. At the same time Langsdorff pumped his new ecclesiastical friends for every detail of the colony’s politics and husbandry. In exchange he told them (in Latin) all the gossip he could think of that would interest them: the fate of the Church in Napoleonic France and the intrigues of the Jesuit Father Grueber at the court of Tsar Paul. They, in turn, made it clear that they were not only frustrated by Madrid’s interdiction of trade with all foreigners but had flouted it in the past and were willing to do so again.
The order that Langsdorff found at the Misión Dolores ranch made an impressive contrast to the starving chaos of New Archangel. ‘The monks conduct themselves in general with so much prudence, kindness and paternal care towards their converts that peace, happiness and obedience universally prevail . . . Two or three monks, in voluntary exile, [succeed in] civilizing
a wild and uncultivated race of men, teach them husbandry and various useful arts, instruct and cherish them as if they were their own children.’7 The native workers were essentially slaves and their womenfolk were prudently kept under lock and key – but their barracks were clean and well built. Beyond were rows of tanneries, grain stores and workshops producing tallow candles, soap and furniture. There may have been room for improvement for the missions’s cabinet makers – every visitor from Vancouver to young Otto Kotzebue, who visited in command of his own round-the-world mission in 1816, commented on the poor quality of the presidio’s furniture – but overall Langsdorff found the colony a model of order and industry.
One reason for this happy harmony was, in Langsdorff’s view, that the local Indians were simple-minded to the point of imbecility. They were ‘wholly incapable of forming among themselves any plan for their emancipation’ because of ‘the extreme simplicity of these poor creatures – who of stature no less of mind are certainly of a very inferior race of human beings’. Langsdorff, as an enthusiastic amateur anthropologist, could claim to be something of a connoisseur of native peoples. He contrasted the Californians, ‘small, ugly, ill proportioned in their persons and heavy and dull in their minds’, with the Tlingit of New Archangel, who were ‘strong, well-made, handsome and possessing such acuteness of mind that by their address they have often foiled both English and Russians’.8
Unlike the state of near-siege in Russian America, just four or five Spanish soldiers at each mission were sufficient to keep the Indians ‘under proper restraint . . . without spirit of mutiny or insurrection’. On the rare occasions they ran away, they were always caught because they returned straight to their own villages, ‘a circumstance which perhaps [the fugitive] scarcely thought of beforehand’. The escapees were beaten on the soles of the feet. But again unlike Russian America, labour was plentiful. Indeed the monks told Langsdorff that there were no windmills in this hilly and windy grain-producing country because they were ‘afraid of making the natives idle’.9
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 30
