The sultan was better than his word. He convinced the competing pirate organization—the Cantonese Pirate Coalition operated by pirate chieftain Wu Shi’er and the Muslim Badjao [Sea Gypsies] to see the wisdom of following Zheng’s example. The bulk of the Sulu/Celebes pirates had grown tired of being afraid and of fighting for everything. They settled near the former Maranao pirates’ lairs. Slavery died out when the old slaving forts and towns were destroyed by Chinese soldiers. The Balinguingui pirates became farmers. The forts of Marawi and Sepac served the army for a time and then were allowed to deteriorate into ruins.
The base of the Sulu Sea economy changed from wholesale slavery and piracy to become predominantly agricultural with farming and fishing as the main sources of livelihood. The islands’ fertile soils and moderate and humid climate was ideal for growing a variety of crops: abaca–a type of banana from which a tough and useful fiber is produced–coconuts, edible bananas, coffee, oranges, and lanzones—a tree fruit which the islanders learned to change from sour to sweet–as well as exotic fruits, durian and purple mangosteen–the health producing fruit of the evergreen tree of the same name.
The Sulu Sea is one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. Fishing led to the discovery of pearls resulting in the Zamboanga Province developing a highly successful pearl industry on Marungas Island. With the opening of trade with foreign countries, the Sulu people began to make products of value including using the backs of sea turtles being polished and made into a trays and combs. Because they no longer had to depend on the risky life of piracy, the people learned how to build beautiful and useful boats and woven fiber mats. In time, the people became industrious enough and good enough businessmen to succeed at coffee growing and processing and created a large export fruit plantation system. They learned fruit preservation and shipped the preserves all around the world.
Absent piracy and the distasteful and dangerous slavery trafficking business, the gifted craftsmen and women—and even children—delved back into their roots and began to develop businesses making handicrafts with Islamic, Filipino, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Oriental products. These included boats, knives, swords, hatchets, and spears; bronze and brassware, hand woven indigenous cloth; embroidered textiles; beautiful and intricate shell craft including valuable jewelry, the long thought to be lost art of traditional house carvings; and carved wooden grave markers which became popular all around the world during the late nineteenth century.
Six weeks after concluding negotiations with the Sulu sultan, Alexandra and her weary shipmates and employees made their way back to the Golden Horn Bay of Vladivostok. It was the dead of winter and freezing to the point that it would not be long before the bay froze over to the point that only the sturdiest of ice-breakers could penetrate the barrier to the far eastern Russian port city. Communication was inadequate; so, her arrival went unannounced. She and her crew battened the hatches and locked the storage holds containing so much valuable booty and commercial items before they left their ships at the wharf to go to the hotels or their homes until the light snow and sleet turned a blizzard, and the blizzard to heavy drifted snow. Hauling the cargo to the company’s holding sheds could wait until it was calm enough for people to work without freezing to death.
When Alexandra arrived back at the No. 71 Pekinskaya Street Tarasova House, Boris was spending the week in Balagansk taking care of his prison duties. It was an incongruous situation. He worked fairly hard to bring the neglected infrastructure back to an acceptable level of safety and security at an imperial army pay level that was not a hundredth of what he could glean from one voyage as a partner in the Matheson-Tarasova-Yusupov, et. al. enterprises. He knew it would be the height of folly to step away from his position, thereby leaving him open to criticism in the ranks and at the mercy of the Okhrana whenever another crisis swirled around the tzar and his family or the army. He got little satisfaction out of doling out punishment to men and women who were not far different from himself and terms of their tzarist and Okhrana defined crimes. However, he did so by swallowing his pride and his honor because to do otherwise would bring his house of cards existence tumbling down. Already there were tidbits of news indicating unrest throughout the empire and threats against the tzar and his family.
After four days of resting in warm quarters, Alexandra, her ships’ crews, and the small army of Tarasova Fur Company workers–including her parents–cleared a pathway through the heavy deep snow to the Far East Transporter and its burgeoning holds. They brought with them every dray animal, cart, and troika, to move the precious goods to the Tarasova sheds. Abram and Irina were astounded at their daughter’s success—a treasure trove which would net them the equivalent of a king’s ransom, enough for them all to retire to a life of leisure. They offloaded bales of the best decorated silk in all of the Orient, Chinese toys, animal pelts enough to fill one of their fur sheds to its maximum, gold and silver coins in chests that took four men to carry, handmade artifacts of surpassing beauty and value from far-flung ports as diverse as India and the Bay of Bengal to Chŏson and Alaska.
There was a dray wagon sized load of bearer bonds and promissory notes and more: exotic crops like mangosteen from the Sulu Sea, knives and swords of the highest quality taken as booty from Sulu Sea pirates in exchange for their freedom, precious gem jewelry expropriated from Zheng Shi Sao, and Buddhist Nephite Jade statuary by the wagon load obtained through fair trade which was worth double its weight in gold in Europe and the rich cities of the East and those in the rapidly expanding richness of American markets.
One shed was filled with coconuts, sugar, hemp, coffee, tea, and spices from the islands. There were one hundred drums of Okolehao, the Hawai’ian alcoholic beverage. They filled half a shed with finely broken up best-quality hard anthracite coal.
“Well done, my brilliant daughter,” Abram Timurovich told her. “More important than all of that is the family, My Dear. When do you see Boris Nikolaiovich, and your little sons, Nikita and Oral Borisovich?”
Alexandra blushed scarlet. She had almost forgotten her twins’ names.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
MILITARY TRANSFERS
I left my home in NanTze, Taiwan, to serve as a full-time missionary in northern California in 2005… The missionary work was difficult, and people often yelled at us. We had few investigators. It seemed to me that the work was not going anywhere… I was convinced I would be transferred… I also knew that my Heavenly Father knew my thoughts and frustration. He understood my weakness, and He sent His servant to reassure me… Throughout the next five weeks, my companion and I witnessed many miracles as we exercised enough faith to work hard.
—Lena Hsin-Yao Cho, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, On-Line, June 2015
Storms don’t last forever.
—Pastor T.D. Jakes, Everything Love, the Good Vibe
National Archives of Australia, Victorian Archives Centre, 99 Shiel Street, North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, February 28, 2014
Elder and Sister Smith finished their mission and flew home in early February with mixed emotions—thrill in anticipation of seeing their nine grandchildren again, nostalgic sadness at leaving their mission friends, and a hint of frustration at not having succeeded in unraveling the mystery of Alexandra Tarasova-Yusupov to their satisfaction. The day they left was one of the exchange days which took place every eight weeks. Their replacements–Elder Cecil and Sister MaryAnne Cheevers from Heber City, Utah–arrived the same day turning it into something of a chaos with no significant time for emotional upsets. Most of the afternoon was spent in getting the Cheevers settled into the apartment which would be their home away from home for the next eighteen months. As they helped the Cheevers unpack, the other missionaries explained their private little quest to learn all that could be learn about the woman they now referred to fondly as, “The Mysterious Alexandra Tarasova-Yusupov, or sometimes they added the patronymic making it Alexandra Abramovena Tarasova-Yusupov.
The Cheeve
rs were glad that they would have some kind of a project outside their archival work, which frankly, to Elder Cheevers, sounded deadly dull—one of his worst nightmares, that of being bored for long periods of time. His doctor had diagnosed him with adult attention deficit disorder, but he sloughed that idea off by saying he had “ants in his pants” and had always craved activity over sitting around.
The Taylors had only two months to go, and watching Nephi and Marianne Smith leave and the Cheevers arrive made them feel a little uneasy about their mission work; should they feel guilty about considering themselves short-timers, or should they lose themselves in the work of the Lord…and the work of ferreting out tidbits of information about Alexandra. They decided on the latter.
Thus reoriented to the work by the following morning, Lisa Taylor followed up on what they had been learning about Boris Yusupov. There was no real history—at least, no narrative; but Lisa was determined to find out more about his apparent transfers. She and Neal took turns delving into the records of Balagansk Prison and of the town. Lisa hit on the idea of checking postal records and had her first success in the afternoon.
“Look, Elder Taylor…”
He said, “Lisa, you can use my Christian name when we are alone; it is not a sin, you know. I don’t even think it breaks the mission rules.”
“All right, Neal, where was I…Oh, yes, I found something that may be useful about our young husband, Boris. The Balagansk postal service kept mail drop-offs separated by sections of town and by institutions. There were dozens and dozens of posts to the prison over the years. So many that I just narrowed my search down to the years from 1879 when we know for sure that Boris was receiving documents of his work at the prison to 1895, which was the last record we have found of him in Balagansk, or in Vladivostok, or the Irkutsk oblast for that matter. He seems to have disappeared about then.
“So, I went into the Balagansk Prison Archives which were surprisingly complete. I looked through them real carefully to find anything mentioning Boris, no matter how trivial. Twice in 1880 and again twice in 1881 it was recorded that…and I quote ‘Maj. Gen. Yusupov, Commandant of Balagansk Penitentiary personally applied the punishments ordered by the general staff.’ Usually, the documents did not specify what the punishment was; but in one of the 1881 documents the prisoners for whom the punishment was ordered was a group of one hundred new arrivals. They came to Balagansk in July of that year, and each one of them was to have twenty-five lashes by the knout. The orders separated common criminals—the minority—from the political prisoners—anyone who had offended the tzar or the royal family in any way. None of them were to have a simple leather strap or cane applied. The common criminals were to have their backs lashed by a cat-o’nine-tails. I looked that up. It was a whip made with nine knotted cords or thongs of rawhide attached to a handle.
“The Russian knout—reserved for the political prisoners–consisted of several dried and hardened thongs made of rawhide interwoven with wire—the wires at Balagansk were specified as being hooked and sharpened so that they tore the victims’ flesh—was even more painful and deadly. A particularly painful, though not so deadly, type of flogging was the bastinado which was reserved for women, children, and the elderly which involved blows delivered to the soles of the feet with a light rod, knotted cord, or lash. With the exception of the bastinado, flogging was formerly executed with great brutality. Failure to exert enough vigor would result in the man doing the whipping—in this instance, Gen. Yusupov—to receive half the same whipping. The backs of the condemned were frequently torn into strips, and salt was poured into the wounds to increase the pain. In each of the four instances, it was tersely described that ‘the commandant carried out the sentences with efficiency’.”
“Did you say that punishment was in July of 1881, Sister Taylor?” asked Elder Cheevers.
“Yes.”
“I think I know why. I just googled it on my Blackberry. The tzar was assassinated in March of that year by some crazies, and the imperial army and the secret police—whatever they were called back then—went on a rampage. They sent all sorts of poor souls to places all over Siberia, many to the far north where they were expected to die of exposure. It makes sense that Boris Yusupov was ordered to make examples out of the ones sent to his prison.”
“I’m sure you’re right. Makes one glad to be and American,” his wife said, “and the idea that we’re living in the most evil of times just means that people who say that kind of thing don’t know or don’t remember history.”
“I wonder what he felt about all of that,” Sister Durrell said.
“Gives one the chills,” Sister Clyde said.
“I did find a couple of other documents naming Gen. Yusupov.” Sister Taylor said when she was able to regain the floor. “They were similar. The first one came from the general staff of the imperial army ordering the general to travel to Port Arthur to participate in putting down the rebellion there. The second just ordered him to go to Novonikolaevsk. It was unclear who gave that order or why.”
“That one was in 1895, isn’t that right?” Elder Cheevers asked.
“Any idea what was going on in the capital of Siberia at that time, Elder Cheevers?” asked Elder Durrell.
“No clue. I’ll have to google it tonight after work.”
“Speaking of work, maybe we ought to give a little thought to getting some done; so, this day doesn’t seem to have been a complete waste by the Brethren or the Victoria Provincial Council,” said Sister Durrell, as if either the church or the provincial entity would ever really know or care if they had a little diversion one day out of eighteen months.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHRISTMAS, 1881
I truly believe that if we keep telling the Christmas story, singing the Christmas songs, and living the Christmas spirit, we can bring joy and happiness and peace to this world.
—Norman Vincent Peale, Gooseberry Patch,
Christmas Classics Cookbook
Tarasova House, No. 71 Pekinskaya Street, Vladivostok, Far Eastern Russia, December 24, 1881
Christmas festivities were moving along at a fever pitch. The decorations were nearly finished, and the kitchen staff had the food preparations well in hand. Irina wanted this year to be something very special because—for the first time in four years—the entire family was there to enjoy the best day of the year. Alexandra’s brothers brothers, Veniamin and Valéry, had timed their return from commercial voyages to be able to have the rare pleasure of joining the whole family—which included the servants.
Alexandra had not seen Boris since they each left on their commercial voyages nor the two toddlers, Nikita and Oral, who were now over three-years-old. Since her return to Vladivostok, she had spent as much time as possible re-bonding with the children, who were now mischievous rascals who loved nothing more than to hide from her or to run away from her when it was most inconvenient. She became deeply attached once more and was as happy as she had ever been in her life.
Boris was due home from leave the day before European Christmas—by the Gregorian calendar. She was excited enough having the whole family back together that she asked Abram and Irina to allow them all to have two celebrations—European Christmas on December 25, and on January 7, by the old Julien calendar. Traditional old Russians loved having the Russian holidays on the old calendar; so, her parents acquiesced with alacrity—anything for a party this year. Because four-fifths of the country’s population were Orthodox believers, and because Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, holidays were very close together on the calendar, New Year’s and Christmas–the second most important Orthodox holiday after Easter–were celebrated by almost all of the populace.
Abram had a beautiful Ded Moroz [Grandfather Frost] costume made to surprise his family and the children of their close friends on the twenty-fourth when Irina had planned her usual overly exuberant party. To fetch Boris home from the docks in Vladivostok, he rode the troika in costume with the family’s three handsome w
hite horses abreast pulling the sled. A three-year-old daughter of the family cook rode with him, dressed as Ded Moroz’s granddaughter, Snegurochka, holding an evergreen tree on the seat beside her. They had been sent word that the Diana–one of three Pallada class cruisers of the Imperial Russian Navy–would arrive two days late because she had to wait for an ice breaker to clear the way through Golden Horn Bay. She was accompanied by one of the other Pallada class cruisers, the Aurora. The little girl was beside herself with anticipation when the Diana finally made port on the twenty-fourth.
General mayor Prince Boris Nikolaiovich Yusupov emerged from the quarter deck and walked down the gangplank.
“That’s him,” whispered Abram to the little girl.
She screamed for joy with all of the enthusiasm a precocious three-year-old girl could muster, “Dyadya [Uncle] Boris!, Uncle Boris!, Uncle Boris!, over here. See Ded Moroz. I’m Snegukrochka. Look over here!”
The Mysterious Alexandra Tarasova-Yusupov Page 31