by Jane Cook
The invitation seemed as out of place as a waltz at a funeral. They could not taste cake’s sweetness or wine’s fruitiness while making the most crucial decision of their voyage. This was no time to rest or recreate. They must resume.
Finally John could no longer dance around the issue. He had to make a final choice. He capitulated to the captain, agreeing to change course toward Kiel on one condition: if the weather changed—if favorable winds came upon them as they sailed for Kiel—then they would turn around and try one last time to catch a fair wind for St. Petersburg.
Though Yankee ingenuity prevailed, the Adams in him scolded him for giving in. “I cannot but reproach myself for this momentary compliance, as it indicated a flexibility which ought not to belong to me,” he later confessed.
He saw the fatigue, and likely tantrums, of his two-year-old. He watched the tired lines grow wider on his wife’s ashen face. Her brown eyes stopped dancing, and her wavy, light brown hair became limp and lifeless from the sea air. Though he lacked a physician’s ability to diagnose her troubles and treat her symptoms, he had compassion for her. He, too, felt imprisoned by the ship, captive to their constantly changing hardships. They had endured far more dangers than he expected.
“But I had objects on board more precious to me than my own life, and there was some reason for shrinking from a risk of the ship and cargo, which was not mine and which was the special trust of the captain.”
They headed for Kiel on October 14. The wind bore them away at a good clip, enabling John to return to reading books.
Beckford may have longed for Kiel’s shores, but he bore integrity as often as he donned his captain’s cap. Unwilling to deceive the diplomat under his charge, he alerted John the next day that the weather was about to change. They would try one more time to sail to St. Petersburg.
The crew protested. They were “desponding under the long succession and continued prospect of adverse winds” and “alarmed at navigating the Baltic so late in the season,” John described the men.
Standing out in the open away from shore for a whole day, the Horace waited for the wind to change. To no avail! The water was as still as a dead man. Beckford was ready to sail again for Kiel, while John implored him to wait just a little longer. Back and forth they argued. Their battle lacked the violence of pirates standing with swords drawn, but not the passion. Each frankly put forward his reasons.
As an attorney, Adams knew that forensic evidence was on the captain’s side. Freezing rain. Falling temperatures. Rocky reefs. John was armed with principles, namely, that he owed it to his government to reach Russia through the cheapest, most direct way possible.
No matter the succession of miseries that had imprisoned them the past month, what was past was past. He was the only one charged by the president to establish official ties with Russia. He alone represented the mission’s failure or success to Congress. He was the only one who needed a successful mission to bring him out of his so-called exile.
“Yet, in the pursuit of a public trust, I cannot abandon, upon any motive less than that of absolute necessity, the endeavor to reach the place of my destination by the shortest course possible,” John explained.
While the Horace waited, Adams soon made an interesting observation. They were not alone. Like a school of fish, four other ships pulled out from the port.
Forty-eight hours after giving up, they received a second wind. Literally. The Horace caught a swift gust and headed toward the Gulf of Finland. Heaven smiled on them with an angelic gale. Fair breezes carried them for three days.
Then the pilot gave Beckford and John a worrisome verdict. He feared that a recent fog caused him to miss a crucial turning point into the Gulf of Finland, Gotland island, a sizable landmark. Because of the fog, he couldn’t see the end of their bowsprit, much less an island.
Heaven, however, hastened again and sent another angel. When the fog cleared, they saw a ship. They hailed it. She raised her colors. Was it an English flag? No. Whew. Danish? No—thank goodness. The Stars and Stripes topped her sails. Her presence was as helpful as backup troops to a losing general. Called the Ocean, this New York–based ship was also bound for St. Petersburg. The Ocean’s captain gave them good news. Yes, they missed the island, but they were headed in the right direction after all.
The captains of both ships agreed to help each other. Staying within yelling distance, they took advantage of each other’s sailing force, and if necessary, the ability to rescue the other in case of a wreck along a rocky Russian reef.
As they entered the Gulf of Finland, the water felt smooth. They glided with ease as if going over ice, though the water was not yet frozen. Fair winds blew strong. They quickly passed lighthouse after lighthouse, each keeping them on course with the precision of following the stars. More incredible was the brilliance of an October moon, which enabled them to travel continuously at night. On the morning of October 22, 1809, the Horace and Ocean arrived in Kronstadt’s shallow waters.
“At last we reached our destination though some distance from the land,” Louisa wrote with relief.
Before them was Kronstadt, an island fortress twenty miles from St. Petersburg by water and at the head of the gulf. When Peter the Great began building St. Petersburg in 1703, he ordered stone fortifications, or moles, to dissect Kronstadt’s low waters. No boat could get to St. Petersburg without going through Kronstadt’s stone canals or the Russian navy’s Baltic fleet.
After surveying the area, Beckford ordered the Horace to anchor near one of the guard ships, about two miles away from the mole. A Russian officer rowed out to them and inspected their paperwork. At 1:00 p.m. they signaled for a pilot to take them into the mole. They waited. And they waited. An hour passed. Then two. Three. Finally a Russian pilot came out to them, but it was so late in the day that Beckford and John came to the same conclusion. Both rightfully feared they would damage the Horace by taking it into the mole in the dark.
“My objective was merely to land and get a lodging for the night at an inn,” John determined practically.
A guard boat officer offered a solution. The Horace could stay where she was until daylight, when a pilot could better guide her through Kronstadt’s channels to St. Petersburg. In the meantime, the lieutenant would take the passengers to Kronstadt island in a Russian government boat. Because the imperial government required all foreigners to pass an examination by the admiral, he would escort them to the admiral’s house. John agreed. His primary goal was to get his wife and child onto land.
The government boat, however, was barely big enough for their large party: John, Louisa, Kitty, Charles, their two domestic servants, and three attachés. Seeing the dilemma, Mr. Smith offered to stay with the Horace. Everyone, however, would have to leave clothing and trunks behind. Because it was for one night only, the plan seemed plausible.
“We dressed ourselves and accompanying him [the officer] left everything in the vessel,” Louisa wrote, explaining that they took what she thought would be appropriate attire for a Russian admiral’s house. “[We] landed perfect beggars though supposing that our trunks would follow us immediately.”
The small boat took them to the mole. From there they walked a mile to the main mansion. They were “ushered into an immense saloon at the admiral’s house full of elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen staring aghast at the figures just introduced.”
Appalled. Horrified. These Russians stared at them as if they were wearing buckskin fig leaves.
“My sister and myself wore hats which had been chosen at Copenhagen that we might appear fashionable—and we could scarcely look at one another for laughing: immense brown beaver of the most vulgar imaginable as much too large as our American bonnets were too small.”
Shakespeare could not have written a better farce. Not even new beaver hats could conceal the fact that they had just disembarked after a long journey. Their American simplicity shocked this society of sophistication. The Russian women’s dresses were most likely silk, t
rimmed around the edges with intricate, expensive embroidery. Louisa’s plain white linen wrapper and her equally plain skirt could not have contrasted more with the Russian ladies’ embroidered dresses. The Adamses’ attire stood out as plain brown boulders against a coral reef ’s pretty delicate lace of red, pink, and orange hues.
“It [the admiral’s house] was exquisite beyond all description and too ridiculous in the first moments to be mortifying as we naturally supposed it would only be momentary,” a highly embarrassed Louisa noted.
When the Russian admiral realized that the dirty, plainly dressed, wigless man standing before him was the designated US minister to Russia, he was shocked. He quickly arranged for Mr. Sparrow, an English gentleman, to escort these stragglers to an inn, which turned out to be full.
“Not a place could be found to put our heads in (bonnets not excepted),” Louisa wrote, finding some humor in their Mary and Joseph–like dilemma.
Although the admiral offered his home, John and Louisa could not accept. These American aborigines were much too embarrassed of their plight. Mr. Sparrow took them to his house for the night.
Worse than being underdressed was having no clothes at all. Louisa took comfort in knowing the rest of their belongings would soon arrive. She fully expected the Horace to “warp into the mole” the next morning. However, there would be no warping for the Horace at Kronstadt. The reason was simple. By morning there was no Horace. The ship was gone.
Eighty days after saying good-bye to the birches of Boston, the Adams party arrived in St. Petersburg on October 23, 1809, with only the clothes on their backs. Facing a new challenge, they were trading a Shakespearean farce for a Danish fable. This diplomat and his wife needed new clothes. After all, they couldn’t very well meet the emperor wearing nothing at all.
12
Fig Leaves
ADAMS AND HIS EVE WERE NOT NAKED WHEN THEY LANDED IN Russia, but they were ashamed nonetheless—of their fig leaves.
“[We] did appear quite in the garb of the aboriginals of our land,” Louisa wrote with embarrassment. She didn’t expect to arrive like a queen, but she never dreamed of showing up like the wife of the very first Adam, either.
Suddenly they regretted leaving their clothing on the Horace. So starved were they to sleep on land and reach their destination after nearly three months at sea that they were willing to go without their trunks for a day.
“At breakfast Mr. Sparrow informed us that a heavy [gale] had sprung up; the vessel been blown many miles down . . . and she probably would not get back for ten days.”
Had they realized that their choice would keep them from their clothing for so long, they might have stayed aboard, enduring Beckford’s crankiness a little longer. With all they had faced, they never imagined arriving without their belongings. They felt like beggars from Boston.
“Here was a position agreeably defined—myself [wearing] a white cambric wrapper [a thin white linen shawl]; my sister the same; [a] child of little more than two-years old with only the suit on his back, and the minister with the shirt he had on; solus!!”
Solus is a stage direction indicating that a character is alone onstage. Louisa clearly saw her husband playing the leading role in this farce. What to do? Should they wait for the Horace? Or go to St. Petersburg? Yes. That was the best option. The admiral offered them a government boat for the remaining twenty miles.
Their voyage along the ship channel was unmercifully slow, a staccato stint. Louisa paid the price of the stop-start motion of the smaller boat while it continuously changed its tack to get through the winding channel. She felt so much nausea, she could not enjoy some of St. Petersburg’s most magnificent sights, such as the fountains at Peterhof Palace facing the water not far from Kronstadt.
As they landed, a golden spire did inspire. Topped with a gilded angel, the Peter and Paul Fortress pointed, needlelike, toward heaven, a reminder of guardian angels.
“A beneficent Providence, whether operating by general laws or by the subordinate energy and care of a guardian angel, did conduct us safely through all these perils,” Adams later wrote his mother.
Perhaps no one noticed their aboriginal American fig leaves as they stepped from the rocking Russian boat onto St. Petersburg’s sturdy wharf. They docked about four o’clock in the afternoon under a bridge on the Neva River’s south bank not far from Peter the Great’s grand equestrian statue, the symbol of St. Petersburg.
Weak with nausea and dysentery, Louisa couldn’t use her normally appreciative artistic eye to admire the statue’s grandeur. In addition to this, if two boys were playing chase around the statue’s base or on the wharf, such a tear-inducing sight would have reminded her of leaving George and John behind in Boston.
Adams needed to find lodging. After what seemed like a hundred days to his suffering wife, he finally chose a hotel on the broad Nevsky Prospective. He arranged for a carriage to escort Charles and the ladies, while his aides and servants walked to the Hôtel de Londres.
Extending before them as they entered the Nevsky Prospective were dozens of three- and four-story baroque-style buildings. Just as gold embroidery brilliantly stood out against the rich-colored fabrics of Russian women’s dresses at Kronstadt, so the bright white columns and trim sharply contrasted with the buildings’ deep painted colors of green, turquoise, blue, and yellow.
Adams rented five chambers at the Hôtel de Londres. No one would trouble them for a while. At last they could remove their perspiration-soaked clothes and go fig leafless in private. They could live in seclusion for ten days or so until the Horace delivered their belongings. Then Adams could get down to the business of diplomacy.
Word of their arrival spread quickly. Levett Harris, the American consul, scurried to their hotel the next day. John’s presence gave him something he did not have in St. Petersburg—a boss. As the US minister, Adams outranked Harris—if the czar accepted his credentials, that is.
John was well aware of Harris. US Secretary of state, Robert Smith, had instructed him to expect Harris’s assistance. He also carried a letter from Smith to Harris with identical instructions. Adams was anxious to meet Levett and learn the ins and outs of Russian diplomatic life.
Harris quickly sized up their situation. John and Louisa had no time to rest and wait for their clothing. They must get down to business. Had Adams been a merchant in a similar fig-leaf situation, he could have easily taken a few days to hide until his clothing arrived. No such luck. As the top American diplomat responsible for the entire US relationship with Russia, he couldn’t risk offending the emperor by concealing his presence. Kronstadt’s admiral had alerted his superiors of their arrival.
Count Nicolas Romanzoff, Harris explained, was the man. John must be introduced to him without delay. Similar to the role of the US secretary of state, Chancellor Romanzoff oversaw foreign affairs for Emperor Alexander. Before Adams could officially be accepted by the emperor, he must first meet Romanzoff. No matter that his clothing was afloat; Adams must dress to impress the chancellor.
Although he had not been able to indulge in his love for long walks while voyaging, John was naturally robust and muscular. In contrast Harris was petite and athletically deficient. What he lacked in a sturdy physique, Harris made up in neatness and know-how, as he quickly revealed.
Harris had greeted many a merchantman fresh from the sea. He saw the soiled shirts of sailors, smelled their sweat, and chewed with delight on the exotic cigars they brought him. Nonetheless, the scruffy appearance of this new American diplomat made this neatnik panic. Harris knew the expectations for a gentleman in the czar’s court—from polished gold buttons lining the center of a gold-embroidered waistcoat to spotless silk stockings tied tightly under the knees.
One glance at John’s sagging, stained stockings, pathetically plain waistcoat, and wigless head led Harris to a quick conclusion. This new diplomat needed new clothes. If Adams’s fig leaves were similar to the suits he'd left behind on the boat, then he needed significant he
lp to fit into Russia’s lavish diplomatic circles. From Harris’s perspective, the Horace’s delay provided a golden apple of opportunity. In this way he could help Adams find better suits without insulting his old ones.
Harris did not know that for years Abigail and John had fretted over their son’s slovenliness. When John Quincy became a senator, she begged him to purchase a new coat. She didn’t want him to become a dandy but feared his sloppiness would stand out on the Senate floor. When President Washington appointed Adams to be minister in residence to the Netherlands in May 1794, Vice President Adams gave his son many instructions on how to prepare for the role, including what to study and how to dress. “[N]o man alive is more attentive to these things than the President [Washington]—neat at least and handsome.” Harris also realized he needed to turn his boss into a beau—quickly.
“Immediately after dinner Mr. Harris the consul came and all the shopkeepers were set in motion to procure the requisites for ready use,” Louisa chronicled.
Thus John Quincy and Harris stepped out of the hotel and onto the Nevsky Prospective, St. Petersburg’s signature street. Because it is broad even by modern standards, this was probably one of the widest boulevards that John ever walked. Today’s streets generally range from twenty-foot alleys to sixty-four-foot or wider main avenues. The nearly three-mile-long Nevsky reaches two hundred feet in width, two-thirds the length of a modern football field. As the widest of the three avenues radiating from the navy shipyard, the Nevsky was the main vein of the leaflike layout, dividing the city in one direction lengthwise, with canals bisecting it crossways.
John and Harris crossed two canals before reaching a long line of clothing shops called the silver row arcade. John probably bought a new suit there. Although he didn’t record what he purchased, he most likely bought a velvet or silk suit, appropriate fabrics for a full court suit, as it was called. What distinguished European court clothes from American suits were fabric, details, and embroidery.
