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

by Owen Matthews

  The fame that he had so long sought and enjoyed so much in Yakutsk pursued him, in death, to Krasnoyarsk. According to a local diarist, Rezanov’s body lay in a chilly room for two weeks while artists ‘were busy taking his likeness to send to St Petersburg’.19 He was finally buried in the cemetery of the Cathedral of the Resurrection. In 1807 Gavriil Derzhavin wrote an ode to the fallen chamberlain, his former protégé. It feels heartfelt and is one of the old courtier-poet’s finest works, all the more moving for being so sadly far from the truth.

  Rezanov! Who does not wish to be part of his immortal fame?

  And who can ever hope to rival his energy, his bravery, his fearless soul?

  Let the great icy cliffs advance, and the stony mountains smoke,

  And fierce Aeolus blow,

  But the Russia which you founded

  Will bestride the wide Ocean,

  And ornament the Throne of Alexander.20

  Epilogues

  Russian America

  On a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean just off California Highway 1 stands a wooden stockade roughly two hundred yards square. At the corners are timber bastions with cannon pointing out of the gun-ports. A stumpy Russian church tower overlooks a large graveyard filled with nearly three hundred wooden Orthodox crosses. Inside the compound is a collection of buildings of distinctly north Russian design, a Russian-style well with a long pivoted pole to dip the bucket and a row of cannon. On summer days the smell of cooking borscht and woodsmoke drifts across the area; small figures carrying muskets and wearing mismatched tsarist uniforms troop up and down in the distance.

  Fort Ross, seventy miles north of San Francisco, was the southernmost outpost of Russia’s American empire from 1812 until 1842. In 1974 California’s Parks Service rebuilt the fort as a State museum. The only remaining original building is the house of General Manager Alexander Rotchev, built circa 1836, but the armoury, chapel, storehouse and artisans’ quarters have been meticulously rebuilt and stocked with muskets and trade goods, furs and traps, authentic tools and furniture. Thousands of Californian schoolchildren come to summer camps at Fort Ross every year. They dress up as Russian colonists, the boys in fur hats and rabbit-skin waistcoats and the girls in aprons and headscarves. The boys march around the compound with muskets to the command of ‘Levo! Levo! ’ – ‘Left! Left!’ – and fire real half-pound gunpowder charges from the cannons. The girls cook Russian soups on open fires and sweep the floors with twig brooms. A Russian priest comes up from San Francisco to hold services in the chapel and summons the faithful by ringing a large bell cast in St Petersburg.

  Rezanov’s death had come at the worst possible moment for the execution of his grand design. Within a year of his demise at Krasnoyarsk the Spanish empire was decapitated as Napoleon occupied Madrid and deposed the Spanish King Charles IV. The convulsions of 1808 would have been Russia’s moment to advance on the leaderless Spanish colonies. But by that time the Tsar’s attention was too absorbed with brokering another peace with Napoleon to worry about the fate of Spain’s suddenly orphaned overseas territories, and there was no Rezanov on hand to talk him into mounting a bold grab for the floundering empire’s Californian colonies.

  But Rezanov’s vision of a Russian American empire did not entirely die with him. The Company did, as Rezanov had urged, eventually colonize not only California but Hawaii too. In 1812 Baranov’s deputy Ivan Kuskov founded the Fort Ross settlement near Port Rumiantsev – now Bodega Bay – in Sonoma County, California. It was the ultimate – in every sense – Cossack ostrog, with its stockade and barracks for the Aleut hunters and Russian settlers. Kuskov and his successor, Naval Captain Leonty Hagemeister, were energetic general managers and successfully negotiated purchases of land from the local Indians along what is now the Russian River. But Fort Ross was not a well-chosen site. The nearest deep-water harbour was several miles to the south; sea-otter numbers along the whole coast were dwindling steadily, and attempts at growing grain to supply Alaska were foiled by plagues of gophers.

  Fort Ross never became the thriving colony that Rezanov envisaged and was eventually sold to John Sutter, a Mexican citizen of Swiss origin, in 1842. The sale was poorly timed: seven years later the richest vein of gold ever recorded was found at another Sutter property, Sutter’s Mill, inland of the Russian River, sparking the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the surge of wealth, immigration and development which followed.

  The Russian colony on Hawaii proved even shorter-lived. It was the creation of one of the Company’s most remarkable employees, Dr Georg Anton Schäffer, a native of Franconia in modern Bavaria. Schäffer joined the Russian navy as a surgeon in 1811. The following year, during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, he attempted to interest the Russian army in designs for military balloons.1 When the scheme failed, Schäffer went back to the navy and sailed as ship’s doctor on the Suvorov on Russia’s third round-the-world voyage. He argued with the captain and was put ashore – or by his own account, resigned his post – at New Archangel.2 Baranov, always short of officers, immediately hired the adventure-seeking German.

  Baranov had been eyeing Hawaii as a potential victualling base for the company as early as 1808, but never had enough money, ships or men to make it a reality. His opportunity came in 1815, when a Company ship, the Bering, ran aground on the Hawaiian island of Kauai and was plundered by the island’s chief, Kaumualii. Baranov dispatched Schäffer to Kauai with orders to demand compensation in the form of trade concessions. Schäffer, however, had grander ideas. He ordered the two Company ships sent out to support him in 1816 to the Big Island to force King Kamehameha, the high king of all Hawaii, into conceding land for a Russian settlement.

  Kamehameha resisted Schäffer’s bluster, but King Kaumualii of Kauai did not. On 21 May 1816 the flag of the Russian American Company was hoisted over the chief’s longhouse on Kauai by Kaumualii himself, dressed in a Russian naval uniform lent to him by Lieutenant Yakov Podushkin of the Company ship Otkritye. Kaumualii also seconded a 300-strong workforce to Schäffer to construct Fort Elizabeth, a star-shaped fortress built of stone and adobe to a scientific European design sketched by the multi-talented doctor.

  Schäffer was convinced that he had gained a Svengali-like hold over the chief and his wife, for the king also authorized a 500-strong native army to invade the neighbouring islands of Oahu, Lanai, Maui and Molokai for the Russian crown. ‘The King provides Doctor Schäffer carte blanche for this expedition and all assistance in constructing the fortresses on all islands,’ read one of the treaties that Schäffer talked Kaumualii into signing. Believing himself to be the author of a great imperial coup, Schäffer sent victorious messages to Baranov and St Petersburg requesting a full-blown naval expedition to protect his ‘fantastic achievements’. He began work on two more Russian settlements, Fort Alexander and Fort Barclay-de-Tolly, and toured Kauai giving German names to various landmarks. He named the Hanalei River valley the Schäfferthal, or Schäffer’s Valley.

  In truth it was Schäffer who had been bamboozled by the wily Kaumualii, who needed Russian ships and guns to back his own rebellion against Kamehameha. Schäffer’s short-lived Russian colony came to an abrupt end the following summer when American merchants allied to Kamehameha attacked Kauai and tore down the Russian flag. Schäffer escaped to Macau on an American brig, leaving his colleagues at the Russian American Company to pick up the pieces of his disastrous experiment. Otto von Kotzebue, once midshipman on the Nadezhda and now a captain, had to apologize to Kamehameha and explain that Schäffer had exceeded his orders, just as Russian officers had had to grovel to the Japanese after Rezanov’s personal war on Hokkaido. The Company, belatedly hearing of Schäffer’s adventures late in 1817, fired him. The Tsar also forbade the Company from any further attempt to settle Hawaii.3

  Dr Schäffer quickly recovered from his disgrace and ended up in Brazil, where he pursued a successful career as a courtier and administrator and certainly met the new Russian ambassador there, Dr Georg Langsdorff, of who
se career we shall hear more below.4

  St Petersburg might have looked with more indulgence on such misadventures had the Russian American Company been bringing in more money. But Rezanov had been entirely right when he warned Rumiantsev in 1806 that the fur trade was unsustainable and that the Company would only survive if it succeeded in diversifying into general trade. In real terms the Company’s most profitable year was 1802; thereafter the fur catch steadily declined while the costs of the Company’s growing navy and increasingly numerous settlements rose. The government took more and more control. By 1818 almost all the officers were navy men, and the Company’s old freewheeling identity as a merchant-run operation was subsumed as the RAC became effectively an arm of the Russian state.

  That same year Alexander Baranov finally succeeded in retiring. He had built himself a handsome dacha near Sitka in which to pass his old age, but he changed his mind and instead decided to return to St Petersburg, perhaps to be close to his creole son, who was studying at the Naval Academy. Chief Katlian came to say farewell to the old foe whose arrival in Tlingit country nineteen years before had transformed his tribe’s fortunes so radically.5 But Baranov never saw his homeland again. At Batavia, modern Java, he fell sick, and he died in the Straits of Sunda. His body was consigned to the waters of the Pacific, which he had tried so hard to make a Russian sea.

  The end for the Company as an independent, adventurous entity came when a group of idealistic but indecisive young officers attempted a coup d’état against the new tsar, Nicholas I, on Senate Square on 26 December 1825. Most of the conspirators were young aristocrats who had been active in various secret political societies which had arisen in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars under the influence of Freemasonry. They hoped to install Nicholas’s more liberal brother Constantine on the throne. Nearly a dozen of the Decembrists’ leaders had been closely associated with the Russian American Company, especially the romantic poet Kondraty Ryleyev, the driving force behind the radical Northern Society and one of the Decembrists’ ringleaders.6 At the time of their arrest Ryleyev and two other conspirators lived and worked at the Company’s St Petersburg headquarters on the Moika Canal. Ryleyev was the RAC’s office manager and had arranged secret meetings of the plotters at the Company’s office after hours – perhaps even under the stern gaze of Rezanov’s portrait in the boardroom. During the inquisition following the abortive uprising the Tsar asked a suspect where he worked, and when the latter replied, ‘At the Russian American Company,’ Nicholas I snorted, ‘And that’s a fine company you have assembled there.’

  The Decembrists’ connection to the RAC was more than just coincidental. Many Russian reformers of the era had had their eyes opened to their country’s shortcomings by travelling abroad.7 A generation of Russian officers had criss-crossed Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, and when they occupied Paris in 1814 had seen the contrast between post-republican France and feudal Russia at first hand.* In the same way, a generation of young naval officers had travelled around the world on RAC business. The Company headquarters also attracted bright and questing young men keen to travel and learn foreign languages. Many young officers returned from the colonies with heads full of radical ideas – like Rezanov, who had urged the Company to transform its colonies into communities of property-owning entrepreneurs in his 1806 manifesto. In thinking how the affairs of Russian America might be improved, men like Ryleyev also turned their thoughts to reform of their homeland.

  The Decembrist rebellion not only tainted the RAC with treason by association but was also the cause of an epochal reverse for the Company and for Russia. In 1821, after years of civil war, Mexico finally gained its independence from Spain. In 1827 the new nation began making diplomatic overtures to Russia, offering to allow the RAC’s claim to parts of Alta California in exchange for the Tsar’s recognition of the Mexican Republic. RAC General Manager Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel strongly supported the idea. But the Company had fallen out of royal favour, and Nicholas I, who styled himself Europe’s arch-reactionary, refused to countenance recognizing the Mexican anti-monarchist rebels. Russia’s chance to gain a slice of California – probably including the area where gold was struck in 1849 – from the disintegrating Spanish empire was lost for ever. One wonders if Rezanov, had he lived, might have talked the Tsar into a different decision.

  From Rezanov’s death onward, it seemed, Russia never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity in the New World. Company revenues declined, and corruption and the dead hand of state control took their toll. By the time of the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 it was clear that the Russian navy was not powerful enough to defend Russia’s own Pacific coast, let alone its further-flung possessions in Alaska. A British squadron bombarded Petropavlovsk on Kamchatka, though the force failed to take the fortress, and Britain established two crown Colonies on Alaska’s doorstep – Vancouver Island (1849) and British Colombia (1858). Royal Navy ships cruised the Inside Passage to New Archangel and beyond with impunity. Tsar Alexander II decided that Russian America would inevitably be lost in the event of a future war with Britain and in 1859 instructed his ambassador in London to offer to sell the territory to the British. Lord Palmerston, newly-elected for a second term of office, decided that the fledgling provinces of Canada already had plenty of uncharted wilderness to deal with and declined the offer.

  Alexander simultaneously approached the Americans, but the United States was sliding into its own civil war and had no interest in acquiring even more land. Only in March 1867 did Alexander’s energetic emissary to the United States, Eduard de Stoeckl,* manage to reopen negotiations with Secretary of State William Seward. The two men haggled all night over cigars – a contemporary painting depicts Stoeckl standing in front of a giant globe, gesticulating – and an agreement was finally signed at 4 a.m. on 30 March 1867, with the purchase price set at $7.2 million, or about two cents per acre.8 It took Congress more than a year to approve the funds – it was busy attempting to impeach President Andrew Jackson – but Stoeckl, assisted by hefty bribes to recalcitrant representatives, eventually got his way. The cheque for the full sum, drawn on Riggs Bank of Washington, DC, was finally issued on 1 August 1868.

  The handover ceremony took place on the hill of Sitka, site of the original Tlingit village, on 18 October 1867. The last moments of Russian rule proceeded in much the same spirit of incompetence and misadventure as the previous eighty years of Russian administration. ‘Now they started to pull the [Russian double-headed] eagle down, but – whatever had gone into its head – it only came down a little bit, and then entangled its claws around the spar so that it could not be pulled down any further,’ wrote Toomas Ahllund, a Finnish blacksmith who witnessed the ceremony.

  A Russian soldier was therefore ordered to climb up the spar and disentangle it, but it seems that the eagle cast a spell on his hands, too – for he was not able to arrive at where the flag was, but instead slipped down without it. The next one to try was not able to do any better; only the third soldier was able to bring the unwilling eagle down to the ground. While the flag was brought down, music was played and cannons were fired off from the shore; and then while the other flag was hoisted the Americans fired off their cannons from the ships equally many times.9

  The ceremony is repeated every year on the anniversary of the handover, which is now Alaska Day. It’s a touching event, part small-town American pageant and part slightly confused tribute to the territory’s Russian past. Sikta’s fire trucks, Forest Ranger jeeps and National Guard Humvees trundle past St Michael’s Orthodox cathedral, followed by high school and military bands playing patriotic American music. The crowd files up to the top of the Castle Hill, site of Baranov’s leaky hut and later fortified with ramparts and cannon bearing the Russian double-headed eagle, which are still there. Local historical re-enactors in the dark blue uniforms of the Union army represent the new American authorities. A more motley group in striped naval shirts and rabbit-fur hats stands in for the Russians, led by a huge bear
ded fellow in a scarlet frock coat who plays the Russian commissioner, Captain Aleksei Peshchurov. Drums roll. The flag of the Russian American Company is lowered and the American one raised. The National Guard fires salutes from rifles. The dean of St Michael’s, an Orthodox priest born of Russian émigré parents in Venezuela, says some prayers in English. Alaska’s former governor, Sarah Palin, dressed in a bright North Face anorak against the driving rain, grins and waves. The National Guard band strikes up the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and almost everyone in the crowd stands to attention, hands on hearts.

  Again, it turned out, Russia sold up at the wrong moment. In 1897 a record gold strike was made on the Yukon River, which runs from modern Canada into Alaska. But it was Alaska’s new Yankee masters, not Russia, which profited from the Klondike gold rush. Rezanov had been proved right – both about the fantastic promise of the lands of California and the Pacific north-west, and about Russia’s failure to rise to the challenge of the New World.

  Friends and Enemies

  For most of the gentlemen of the Nadezhda and the Neva, the round-the-world voyage marked the beginning of a glittering career. ‘We already have a horror of the smeared vapour smoke that, after our return, will appear in print,’ wrote Löwenstern, referring to the number of scribblers on board.10 He was right: Langsdorff, Lisiansky, Krusenstern and Tilesius all wrote bestselling accounts of the voyage, published in London and St Petersburg, which established their fame as naturalists and ethnographers across Europe.11

  Langsdorff returned to Brazil as Russian ambassador in 1813 and spent the rest of his life there leading expeditions and cataloguing the country’s flora and fauna. Löwenstern had predicted that ‘Rezanov will not be deficient, through written lies, of confusing everything even more than he spoiled irreparably by his behavior and certainly will not refrain from decorating himself with others’ words and others’ achievements. There will be so much written, smeared, invented, and lied in this way that Krusenstern’s description of the voyage will be doubted if he tells the truth.’12 But in this he was mistaken: Rezanov’s lengthy diary of the voyage and his detailed account of the Japanese debacle – both in fact rather sober and free of invective against his shipmates – remained unpublished until the 1980s.13