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

by Owen Matthews

Patience and sincerity will change the manners of people. Even bears can be trained to obey.

  Nikolai Rezanov, letter to the directors of the Russian American Company1

  I sailed the seas like a duck, suffered from hunger and thirst and from humiliation. But twice worse than this was my suffering from my heart’s wounds.

  Nikolai Rezanov to Mikhail Buldakov, 18072

  Bolts of fine cotton nankeen and English broadcloth, chests full of Boston-made shoes and round felt hats, caskets of scissors and saws, barrels of iron and brass nails, cases of cutlasses and tomahawks were hauled up from the Juno’s hold. In its place nearly 200 tons of grain – all packed in leather sacks, such was the abundance of cattle and the dearth of sackcloth – was loaded in. Four and a half thousand pounds of tallow, butter and salt followed, as well as dried beans and peas, fresh beef and vegetables. Rezanov had succeeded in provisioning Russian America to the tune of 24,000 Spanish dollars.

  While the ship was being loaded Don José Dario invited his future son-in-law and his companions to an open-air meal at his family’s ranch at El Pinar, some thirty miles south of San Francisco.3 The ladies of the presidio travelled cross-country on highly-sprung carriages; the men rode. The Arguellos’ ranch was a park-like expanse of fruit trees dominated by a large adobe house. Beef was grilled over hot coals on a large suspended metal frame the Spanish called a barbacoa; its use continued to be popular among later generations of Californians. The feast was followed by spectacular displays of horsemanship by the Spanish soldiers and natives. Rezanov was greatly impressed by these ‘Californian Cossacks’. He also pondered how lightly defended the Spanish territories were. ‘If the RAC had a force comparable to its position it would be very easy to seize from 34 degrees [Santa Barbara] North and keep this territory for ever,’ he wrote.4

  Back at the presidio some uncomfortable news awaited the Russian chief. A party of Boston men in the Peacock, under Captain Oliver Kimball, had landed at San Diego to take on fresh food and water. The Spanish, rightly suspecting them of being en route to poach sea otter in Spanish waters, arrested four of the Bostonians and clapped them in irons. Under questioning, the Americans claimed they were on their way to Sitka to trade their cargo of arms and other goods to the Russians. What was the meaning of this? Rezanov was politely asked.

  One imagines Rezanov’s brow furrowing with a look of indignation and concern. Whatever Rezanov’s good points may have been, it’s also clear that he was an accomplished and convincing liar. ‘I am very glad that you reminded me of this proceeding,’ Rezanov replied, according to his own account to Rumiantsev. ‘These Bostonians do more harm to us than they do to you. They land people here [in California] but they steal from us . . . This rascal of whom you speak captured a party of our Americans and stole forty Kadiaks and their families. In the following year Captain Barber, a man of the same stamp, brought to us twenty-six of these stolen people saying he had ransomed them from captivity and would only give them up upon the payment of ten thousand rubles.’5

  Even by the extravagant standards of Rezanov’s untruths, this was outstanding. ‘Our Americans’ had in truth not been kidnapped by Kimball but were put aboard quite willingly by Baranov specifically to loot sea otter off California, and the ‘stolen people’ had in fact been rescued by Barber, at some risk to himself, from Tlingit servitude after the destruction of Fort St Michael. ‘We should take steps to drive off intruders of that character,’ Rezanov gravely told Arguello, who seemed reassured that he had an ally in Rezanov against the depredations of the wicked Bostonians.

  With the hold of the Juno filled, the time had come for Rezanov to leave while he still could. More embarrassing news of Baranov’s Bostonian associates could emerge at any moment, and all his personal friendliness with the Arguellos would not outweigh a direct order from the viceroy to seize his ship. Rezanov announced the necessity of his departure to his hosts. He also promised Conchita that he would return. He probably even meant it.

  A farewell ball was arranged at the presidio. All the colony’s persons of quality – the gente de razon – arrived in their finery, trundling in carriages across the dusty countryside from Monterrey, Santa Barbara and even from Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles, the tiny pueblo founded by Arguello a decade before. Musical instruments were lent by the garrison of Santa Barbara and dutifully chronicled by Langsdorff: ‘4 flutes, 3 clarinets, 2 trumpets, 2 bass viols, one bass drum, 2 kettle drums, 6 old fiddles, 4 new fiddles, one triangle and one Chinesco [xylophone]’. At the dance itself, held in the afternoon, the Spanish dignitaries wore sombreros and heavy spurs, while the women wore mantillas and lace. Rezanov was of course by far the most splendid man in his uniform and decorations. He danced with Conchita for the last time.

  The following day, 10 May, a service of blessing for the Russians’ safe passage was held at the mission; the officers of the Juno all attended in full uniform. There was a final dinner at the presidio. Later novelists and poets have written much on the last meeting between Rezanov and Conchita – the most famous piece is by the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, who speculated that the doomed couple believed that they would never see each other again. ‘I will never see you – I will never forget you,’ says Conchita in his poem ‘Avos!’ But in truth the only eyewitness account of the parting is Langsdorff’s rather prosaic one: ‘The Governor, with the whole family of Arguello, and several other friends and acquaintance, had collected themselves at the fort and wafted us an adieu with their hats and pocket-handerchiefs.’ The Juno gave a six-gun salute (indeed she only had six guns; the rest were wooden dummies) and was answered by a nine-gun salute from the waterside fort.

  Nearly half a century later Conchita confided to her young protégée Sister Vincentia that she had been filled with deep foreboding even as the ship sailed out of sight. ‘Although Concha . . . never doubted as to [Nikolai’s] deep loyalty and intense sincerity in her regard, she told me that from the evening he sailed away out through the Golden Gate she had somehow a deep, hidden, eerie feeling that stayed with her night and day.’6

  The Juno’s return journey was no more than usually onerous. They spent ten days becalmed; there was an outbreak of ‘rheumatic fever’ on board and the ship’s rigging rotted through and collapsed. But they were plentifully provisioned and the crew had ‘healthy countenances . . . their colour and strength was so perfectly restored that nobody could have supposed them the same people who had left the settlement such miserable, pale, lean, emaciated figures’.

  The Juno nosed into Sitka Sound on 7 June after twenty-seven days at sea. In rude good health after their California rest-cure, her company eagerly looked out for their mates ashore. But no one came to meet them, despite a signal gun. Finally, as they approached the dock a bedraggled pair of baidarkas emerged, ‘their rowers looked like living skeletons they were so starved and thin’.7 Baranov was moved to tears by the sight of the provisions. He had been preparing for the final annihilation of the colony at the hands of a thousand-strong Tlingit war party which had moved onto the northern shores of Baranov Island ostensibly in search of a vast shoal of herring but also drawn by rumours of Russian vulnerability. They had even sent their women into the Sitka stockade as whores in order to spy on the colonists’ deteriorating strength. Rezanov had returned just in time.8

  Not that the denizens of New Archangel had been living the quiet life while the Juno had been away. Jonathan Winship, the new captain of the Boston boat O’Cain, had called in early May and unwisely invited Baranov and his officers aboard for lunch and drinks. By dusk, he recorded in his diary, ‘our visitors, the governor [Baranov] and other dignitaries, being mostly in a state of intoxication and creating such confusion and disorder that I concluded would be imprudent to put to sea. At five bells [of the third watch – 9 p.m.] our visitors had the goodness to depart, doubtless not a sober man among them, I saluted with five guns and three cheers and heartily rejoiced at their departure.’9 Winship took a hunting party of one hundred borrowed Al
eut hunters and twelve native women with him, further cheering Baranov, who was pleased to be rid of the burden of feeding them. Winship’s 1806 hunting season would bring 4,820 pelts, a record catch never surpassed in the history of Russian America.

  The O’Cain had in fact also brought something more important than free alcohol: a message from King Kamehameha of Hawaii to Baranov, offering friendship and proposing to trade taro (a vegetable), breadfruit, pigs and rope for lumber for shipbuilding, linen cloth and iron. The powerful king also proposed a royal visit to New Archangel to see the settlement for himself and open trade between Russian America and Hawaii. Rezanov had dreamed and written of the cross-Pacific trade that was vital to the future of Russian America, and here it was echoed in a concrete business proposition by an important neighbouring monarch.

  Rezanov settled down to compose dispatches to Rumiantsev, the directors of the Company and the Tsar. During his forty-two-day stay in California he had composed just one report to Rumiantsev, a short and formal dispatch reporting his presence in Spanish America, sent by the Spanish royal post from San Francisco to St Petersburg via Mexico. Afraid of compromising himself, he saved all the details of his affair with Conchita, negotiations with the friars and his designs on Spanish California until he was safely back on home turf.

  The letter that reached Rumiantsev is a hundred and twenty closely-written pages long and is now in the Archive of the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow.10 We know that Rezanov made an exact copy of this report, which he sent on different ships.11 It is this version that is quoted in the standard histories of the Russian American Company. But there is also another, earlier version of the letter that has never been published. A close read of the text shows that it is almost certainly an earlier draft which Rezanov never sent and was found among his papers when he died in Krasnoyarsk. This version was lost for over 150 years and only included in the Rezanov papers in the State Historical Archive in St Petersburg in the 1940s. There are over a hundred differences between the draft and the final version, differences that give us important clues to Rezanov’s true feelings for Conchita.

  Almost all the changes Rezanov made were to distance himself from Conchita and make the relationship appear more political and calculated. In the draft version, for instance, Rezanov writes, ‘Let me tell you our American habits – when we love someone sincerely, then the whole family makes a holiday of baking biscuits which the beloved guest is invited to prove that the whole house is occupied in favouring his tastes and so they will lead you to where you are awaited. I went into the very clean kitchen where Dona Ignacia sat by her children and female relations. Each of the Spaniards brought up the biscuits she had baked and so I had to dine one more time.’ This charming episode was omitted from the formal report, presumably because Rezanov believed that this warm recollection of a Californian bake-off was evidence that he was too intimate with the Arguellos.

  Of his relationship with Conchita, he originally wrote, ‘The lovely Concepciön multiplied her courtesies to me daily, as well as many other small services and sincerities. For a long time I was indifferent to them, but they began, unnoticed, to fill a void in my heart. We became closer every day in our conversation, which ended in my offering her my hand.’ This he changed to the much more callous ‘Associating daily with and paying my addresses to the beautiful Spanish señorita I could not fail to perceive her active, venturesome disposition and character, 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.’ Of their betrothal itself Rezanov first wrote that ‘the decisiveness of both parties at last calmed everyone’. This he changed to ‘her decisiveness at last convinced everyone’.

  Rezanov clearly feared that his engagement to Conchita could become a liability and open him to suspicion of treason. He was therefore at pains to demonstrate to Rumiantsev that he had not ‘gone native’. ‘My romance [was] not begun in hot passion, which is not becoming at my age, but arising under the pressure of conditions – remoteness, duties, responsibilities – perhaps also under the influence of remnants of feelings that in the past were a source of happiness in my life,’ he assured his patron in his final report. Rezanov was at pains to cast himself as a calculating diplomat, not a besotted middle-aged lover.

  With the directors of the Company Rezanov had a different problem. Buldakov was married to the sister of Rezanov’s late wife; his two children were the Buldakovs’ wards. Coming less than four years after Anna’s death, Rezanov was concerned that his shenanigans with a second teenage heiress might be mal vu by his Shelikhov in-laws – who also controlled the Company’s board. He therefore hastened to assure Buldakov that the Conchita business was just that – business. ‘Don’t think me a weathervane because of my California report my friend,’ he wrote to Buldakov. ‘My true love is still with you [in St Petersburg], at the churchyard of Alexander Nevsky under a piece of marble. And here – all is the consequences of enthusiasm and ever-newer sacrifices for the Fatherland . . . Concepción is fair as an angel, wonderful, kind of heart, loves me and I love her and weep for the fact that there is no room for her in my heart. Here my friend, as a sinner in confession, I repent. But you are my pastor; keep my secret.’12

  Yet for all the distancing from Conchita, Rezanov nonetheless insisted even in the official report that he would go back for her. Already in his letter to Rumiantsev he suggested how useful to Russia his return voyage, via Spain and Mexico, could be. ‘I shall be in a position to serve my country once again, as by a personal examination of the harbour of Vera Cruz, Mexico, and by a trip through the interior parts of America. This could not be accomplished by anyone else, the suspicious Spanish temperament forbidding such investigations . . . Upon becoming acquainted with the viceroy of Nueva España I could make an attempt to secure an entrance for Russian vessels to the Eastern ports.’

  Was this Rezanov’s overactive imperial vision once again running away with him or the musings of a man seeking an official excuse to return to his young Californian bride? We have two contradictory versions of the relationship, both written by Rezanov himself. He was clearly an intensely sentimental man: he writes constantly of love – for his country, for his emperor, for Conchita. Yet in both versions of the affair his sincerity towards his fiancée is nonetheless calculated – or perhaps coloured would be a kinder word – by the giant political implications of founding a new Russo-Spanish dynasty.

  Behind the politics, did Rezanov truly feel something for the ‘fair angel’ who waited for him so faithfully in San Francisco? After two years in the company of the man’s diaries, reports and letters, following his travels in the wilder corners of Asia and America, I would venture that he did. ‘I sailed the seas like a duck, suffered from hunger and thirst and from humiliation,’ he wrote to Buldakov. ‘But twice worse than this was my suffering from my heart’s wounds.’ Wounds of love – or wounds of guilt that he had ‘no space in his heart’ for Conchita? We will never know. But behind Rezanov’s monumental ambition, his bullying and his dissembling, his obsession with appearance, and later with his posterity, was a passionate and lonely man, as intemperate in his affections as he was in his dreams.

  Rezanov’s time in California also seems to have changed his thinking about the nature of Russia’s colonies in America. Rather than seeing the place as a convict colony, a kind of Russian Australia, Rezanov became a disciple of Adam Smith and the power of capitalism’s invisible hand to transform the settlement’s fortunes. During the summer he spent at New Archangel Rezanov penned extensive instructions on root-and-branch reform of the colony to the long-suffering Baranov, who had of course been on the receiving end of such orders since Shelikhov’s day. However unlike Shelikhov’s breezy and unrealistic ukazes, Rezanov’s ideas are not only economically sound but remarkably modern. Recognizing that an economy of confiscation and obligation did nothing to incentivize its employees and encouraged theft, sloth and drunkenness, Rezanov a
rgued that money in the form of cash must urgently be introduced to replace the current practice of paying colonists a lump sum on their return to Okhotsk after years in America.

  ‘Money,’ Rezanov wrote, ‘will define the value of each person’s labour; it will encourage arts and crafts. Gardening will become more attractive when the products raised bring returns . . . marketplaces will spring up. Fish, vegetables, berries, everything will be found in the market and each one will provide for his needs according to his wealth.’ He even proposed that Aleuts be paid cash for their services to foreign ships. ‘In a word, everything is dead now, but with the introduction of monetary circulation the whole region will be alive,’ he enthused. Sending Russians home after five or ten years in the colonies was also wrong, Rezanov decided. ‘All artisans and port workers should remain permanently in their places.’ If colonists were allowed to earn and amass money,

  each one will become more determined to raise a family and establish a household and this will lead to a permanency of the population . . . They will form a citizenry, especially if they are granted lands for their permanent and hereditary ownership. After a certain number of tax-exempt years they will pay a land tax. First they will cultivate gardens of vegetables. In time they will build houses, they should be encouraged to do so by assistance from the Company. Having their own property and amassing it they will find so much pleasure in settled life that they will lose the desire to leave it.

  This prescription for a free, property-owning, taxpaying society, where ‘even the domestic servants will have an opportunity to improve their circumstances’13 was of course exactly the formula by which the English colonies on the other side of America had thrived so prodigiously. In the end Rezanov’s ideas were never implemented. If they had been, the history of Russian America – and perhaps Russia itself – would have turned out very differently.