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

by Owen Matthews

  While the Empress and the more frivolous courtiers amused themselves with dangerous liaisons and amateur dramatics in one part of the palace, other corners of the great house buzzed with busy bureaucrats. The Ministers’ Staircase, next to the annexe housing Catherine’s art collection, linked a labyrinth of small offices on the second floor to the apartments of the Empress. This was the Office of Petitions over which Derzhavin – and Rezanov, as his chef de cabinet – ruled. The ministers’ windows, as befitted humble functionaries, overlooked a courtyard. Rooms with a view were reserved for the Empress’s ladies-in-waiting and the official lover, with whom Rezanov and his fellow scribes shared the second floor, the clamorous backdrop to the pageant of ambition and power that was the palace’s life.

  Location within the physical geography of the palace was a mirror of status. By that measure Zubov soon proved that he was a cut above the usual royal gigolo by leaving the modest apartments of the Empress’ cavaliere servante and moving down into grander ones near Catherine’s on the Palace’s piano nobile. He also acquired his own wing of the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial summer residence. Zubov also set about establishing his own private court, a motley confection of ambitious Russian aristocrats, foreign adventurers and court ladies attracted like flakes of glitter to the magnetism of his swelling wealth and power.

  Nikolai Rezanov may not have glittered, but nonetheless the diligent young secretary caught Zubov’s eye. Perhaps it was during one of the Empress’s convivial staff lunches at the Winter Palace, or in the bustling upper floors of the palace, where distinctions between the court’s worker bees and its social butterflies broke down in the rushed corridors. Doubtless Derzhavin, an intimate ally of the rising Zubov, commended his youthful protégé to his even more youthful patron. In any case, within a year of Rezanov’s arrival at the Winter Palace Count Zubov had hired him away from Derzhavin’s Office of Petitions to join his own growing household.

  So what manner of man was Rezanov at this, the moment when he finally moved from the attics of the Winter Palace to take his own place on the court’s crowded carousel of fortune? An energetic young bureaucrat, certainly. ‘A dedicated scribbler’,26 good with numbers and ambitious. A man hard-working to the point of obsession: ‘I have a headache from thinking that all my efforts are in vain; I wish I were not a loafer,’27 Rezanov would write at the end of a life filled with furious activity. He knew how to make himself agreeable – at least to people he needed to conciliate. ‘Rezanoff is a man . . . possessed of many amiable qualities,’ according to the American Captain John D’Wolf, who travelled with him to California.28 ‘He was kind and affable to those around him and always ready to hear complaints and afford every redress in his power of grievances.’ Rezanov’s behaviour towards his subordinates was not always so charming – but that is a story for another chapter. At twenty-nine years old he was also still a bachelor. This, for a man of Rezanov’s class and generation, was a measure of his social ambition rather than romantic failure. He was a man of good name but modest means. Wealthy heiresses often married poor aristocrats – but only successful ones, and Rezanov clearly judged his professional achievements too modest, as yet, to be cashed in on the marriage market.

  Rezanov was loyal too, and eager to please. Certainly he pleased Derzhavin enough to earn a recommendation to Zubov. And beneath the sober exterior he was also a gambler. Leaving a safe job in the Office of Petitions to join Zubov’s louche and corrupt court was a risky strategy, and not an entirely respectable one. Nonetheless, if fortune continued to favour the arrogant young favourite, his followers stood to reap large rewards. Yet in many ways Rezanov was also careful, and conservative. He would have no truck with political radicalism, for instance, and had stayed well away from Radishchev at the Treasury. And he was passionately patriotic – or at least he wrote of his patriotism often and at length. ‘Love of country has made me spend all my energies,’ he wrote later, ‘I wish for nothing but the knowledge that I have been of some service to His Imperial Majesty.’29 Rezanov’s shipmates would report that he reduced the sailors to tears with his patriotic speeches, and wept himself as he drank to the Emperor’s health. In later life Rezanov would come to see himself as an agent of Russia’s greatness, a servant of the empire destined to bring glory and increase to his beloved Emperor. Sincere or not, a burning sense of duty to his sovereign was a central part of him – at least of the man he pretended to be.

  It was at the glittering, venal court of Zubov that Rezanov met a man of a completely different world from his own who set his life on an utterly unexpected course. His name was Grigory Shelikhov, a millionaire fur trader, adventurer and explorer, known in St Petersburg society – with various overtones of sarcasm and envy – as the King of Siberia.

  Footnotes

  * At least fourteen of Rezanov’s regimental classmates are immortalized in the gallery of portraits of the victorious generals of the war of 1812 in the Winter Palace commissioned after the victory over Napoleon.

  * Nothing, not even the name, remains of the estate today.

  * Now known as Karelia, on the border with Finland.

  * Radishchev’s book A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, published in 1790, was a passionate condemnation of serfdom and feudalism. All copies were confiscated and Radishchev condemned to death, later commuted to exile in Siberia.

  * An early example of what would today be called crowd-sourcing.

  * Today the suite houses the Hermitage Museum’s collection of slightly bilious Poussins.

  4

  The King of Siberia

  Their master has in him the same cruelty that we read of in the ancient Spanish histories when he tries his sword and pistol on the unfortunate Aleuts.1

  Eric Laxman to Foreign Secretary Count Bezborodko

  Had Grigory Ivanovich Shelikhov been of noble stock, or even at a pinch a foreigner, he would doubtless have been recognized in his lifetime as one of the age’s greatest explorers. But since he was the son of a middling merchant from the backwater of Rylsk, near Kursk in central Russia, Shelikhov’s discoveries were tainted by the lowly motive of commercial profit rather than the lofty scientific and imperial ambition of gentlemen-explorers like Alexei Chirikov and Vitus Bering.

  In the course of a tumultuous life Shelikhov became a millionaire, the founder of Russia’s first overseas colony and the most powerful man in Siberia. But he never quite became respectable. He was like those whom Englishmen of the time called nabobs – new men who had enriched themselves in the colonies, men whose fortunes failed to mask their primitive manners and a brutal way with subordinates. Like many merchants Shelikhov arrived in Siberia as a young fortune-seeker. Unlike most of his fellow adventurers, however, he had both a canny way with money, a systematic mind and a burning ambition. ‘His fiery soul coveted not so much riches but glory. To him obstacles did not exist,’ wrote Ekaterina Avdeeva-Polevaya, the daughter of one of Shelikhov’s business partners. ‘He conquered all with his inflexible iron will; those around him labelled him “the Scorching Flame”, for good reason.’2

  Frontispiece of Shelikov’s memoirs of his voyage to Kodiak –with franciful ‘sea dogs’ to the left.

  Over fifteen years, first briefly as a fur trapper and then as a trader, Shelikhov built a powerful business empire that spanned north Asia from Irkutsk to Kamchatka. His first breakthrough came in 1763, when the newly-crowned Empress Catherine II abolished the state’s monopoly on trade with China. Shelikhov would later have cause to regret Catherine’s zeal for free markets, but initially at least the abolition sparked a boom in Chinese demand for Siberian furs that brought immense wealth to Shelikhov and his fellow Irkutsk fur barons.

  Shelikhov’s first recorded commercial partnership was with the trader Pavel Lebedev-Lastochkin,3 a veteran Kurile navigator whom he met on a fur-trading trip to Kamchatka in 1774. By the next year the young Shelikhov had acquired enough cash and social standing – in eighteenth-century Irkutsk these were pretty much
synonymous – to marry Natalia Alexeyevna Kozhevina,4 daughter of a prominent clan of Okhotsk navigators and mapmakers. Shelikhov was twenty-eight, Natalia thirteen and a half.

  It was an inspired match. Natalia was to prove every bit as formidable an explorer and administrator as her husband. That same year Shelikhov dispatched his first overseas fur expedition to the Kurile Islands. The ship he had built, the Sviatitel’ Nikolai, was probably financed by Lebedev-Lastochkin and Natalia’s dowry. It was crewed by shipmates and cronies of his new Okhotsk in-laws. The expedition was a high-risk venture: a decade previously four Russian expeditions had been massacred and their vessels burned by Aleuts angry at Russian inroads into their fur catch. But luckily for Shelikhov’s fledging business career, the ships returned unmolested and filled with pelts after a bumper season.

  Shelikhov was joining a rush for the fur wealth of the north Pacific in which the world’s maritime empires would soon take an intense interest. In 1763 the trapper Stepan Glotov ventured further than any of his predecessors and discovered Kodiak Island, just off the coast of the Alaskan peninsula. It was a key discovery because it was the first island found in the north Pacific with large stands of tall spruce trees suitable for planks, making Kodiak a vital staging post for shipbuilding and repairs. The following year the Empress Catherine sent her British-trained Admiral Vasiliy Chichagov to map the entire northern coast of Siberia as far as Kamchatka, an endeavour that was to take five years.

  The British Royal Navy, always keenly interested in any maritime intelligence picked up by His Majesty’s ambassador in St Petersburg, got wind of the supposedly secret expedition, possibly through Chichagov’s English wife. London thought the matter important enough to send Lieutenant John Blankett to St Petersburg specifically to gather information on Russian Pacific navigation. The appearance of an English officer in her capital asking questions about Alaska spurred Catherine to take a keener interest in her Pacific backyard. In 1768 she dispatched another navy expedition,5 this time to explore the coast of America with express instructions to scout out sites for future colonies.

  Security evidently being none too tight at the Russian Admiralty, news of this second supposedly secret expedition soon reached Madrid. The Spanish government was understandably nervous at the Russians’ probing at the fringes of their empire. Madrid therefore decided to reinforce its claim to the province of Nueva California* by founding a new settlement at the northernmost extremity of its New World possessions.6 Thus it was in direct response to Russian ambitions that in 1776 the Spanish founded a new mission on the shores of a great natural harbour. They called it San Francisco, after the founder of the colony’s dominant monastic order.

  Russian attempts at keeping their discoveries secret, including publishing a deliberately inaccurate map of the north Pacific to throw their rivals off the scent, unfortunately succeeded in concealing vital information only from the Russians themselves. The industrious William Coxe, an Anglican priest who visited in St Petersburg in the 1770s as tutor to Lord Herbert, son of the Earl of Pembroke, collected various manuscripts of Russian travelogues as he travelled across Europe. The resulting Account of the Russian Discoveries between Asia and America included the Cossack Semyon Dezhnev’s account of his passage through the Bering Strait in 1643 and was, to the Empress’s extreme indignation, a far fuller record than anything the Russian Admiralty itself possessed.7 It was published in London in 1780 and was keenly read by students, both amateur and professional, of Britain’s expanding naval power.

  Captain James Cook was already a celebrity in England as a result of his two voyages of discovery in the south Pacific. He had been the first European to make landfall in Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand. In 1778 he set out on a third expedition, his most ambitious yet, to explore the coast of Alaska and the Bering Strait. Cook’s personal interest was a measure of how excited London’s scientific, commercial and military circles were about the north Pacific, the last unexplored corner of the world’s oceans.

  ‘A man of Oonalashka’ as drawn by Cook’s artist, John Webber.

  Cook sailed up the craggy west coast of North America, mapping and naming geographical features as he went, and attempted unsuccessfully to pass through the Bering Strait to investigate the possibility of a passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific along the northern coast of Siberia. Prevented from sailing north by contrary winds and fog, Cook instead turned south to Hawaii and his rendezvous with death at the hands of an enraged native mob on the beach at Kealakekua Bay on St Valentine’s Day, 1779. Cook’s deputy Charles Clerke continued with the expedition without his chief,* sailing into the harbour of Petropavlovsk on Kamchatka in August 1779. The Russian authorities were deeply alarmed by his unexpected arrival – even more so when Clerke showed local officials the expedition’s draft maps of the American coast, with English names attached to features long claimed as Russian.8 Ingenuously, Clerke also allowed the Russian governor-general’s cartographers to copy his charts, which found their way to the Admiralty in St Petersburg and caused predictable consternation. Clerke himself was already gravely ill with tuberculosis picked up during a youthful spell in debtors’ prison in London on his brother’s behalf.9 He died two weeks later, on his thirty-eighth birthday, and was buried in Petropavlovsk.*

  Cook’s third voyage of discovery had one wholly unexpected but revolutionary consequence. Officers and men from the HMS Resolution and Discovery had traded beads, copper trinkets and tobacco with natives in Cook Inlet in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands for the pelts of sea otters. These animals, five feet long and weighing up to seventy pounds, have the densest fur of any animal in the world. It is a deep rich brown, two inches thick and quite miraculously soft.10 When Cook’s ships docked at Canton, China’s great trading entrepôt, the English were amazed to find that local merchants offered them one hundred Spanish dollars per pelt, nearly two years’ salary for an ordinary seaman.11 Lieutenant John Gore, the expedition’s third commander, almost had a mutiny on his hands as the crews clamoured to return to the source of these pelts which the mandarins of Peking valued so highly. Conceived with high-minded scientific goals and partly funded by the millionaire naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, the main result of Cook’s expedition was to spark a rush for the north Pacific’s soft gold.

  In Irkutsk news of the fantastic prices sea-otter pelts could command on the Canton market electrified Shelikhov. The time had come, he believed, for Russia – or at least a Russian – to claim America and the vast numbers of sea otters on her shores for the Tsar. And no Russian was better placed to do so, Shelikhov believed, than himself. In 1781 he embarked on what was to be the first of many trips to St Petersburg in search of money and patronage for a voyage of conquest and colonization in America.

  Shelikhov’s first investor was a Rylsk merchant and convicted embezzler named Mikhail Golikov. Golikov had recently been fined for attempting to smuggle cognac past Russian excise men in Riga and urgently needed to raise money. Shelikhov, evidently a formidable salesman, persuaded Golikov to gamble his last capital on the success of his American expedition.12 The two men duly founded the North-East American Company, a slightly modernized version of the old Cossack joint-stock partnerships formed for a single voyage.13 The new company was incorporated for ten years on the St Petersburg Stock Exchange. Another backer was Nikita Demidov, an aristocrat whose family had grown fantastically wealthy from the profits of iron smelting in the Urals. He was intrigued enough by Shelikhov’s plan to contribute 50,000 rubles to the venture to plant a permanent Russian colony in America.14

  Armed with Demidov and Golikov’s gold,15 Shelikhov again demonstrated his considerable powers of persuasion by assembling over 150 colonists willing to volunteer for his new colony on Kodiak. True, many of them were exiles and criminals with little to lose, but there were at least forty families among them, most with young children. One of the families was Shelikhov’s own. Natalia Shelikhova, thought pregnant, nevertheless insisted on accompanying her husband on his voyage
along with their two-year-old son Mikhail.* ‘She wished to follow me everywhere and share all my trials,’ wrote Shelikhov.16 Two slightly older daughters were left behind in Irkutsk. Despite the fact that Shelikhov was now a man of property – on the eve of his voyage to Kodiak he owned shares in nine companies and fourteen ships and had sponsored twenty-one voyages – he was determined to found his new colony in person.

  In the summer of 1783 the party made its way across 5,000 miles of Siberia from Irkutsk to the port of Okhotsk, where Shelikhov had commissioned three ships, the Arkhangel Mikhail (named for his infant son), the Tri Svyatitelya (Three Hierarchs) and the Svyatitel’ Simeon. The colonists set sail on 16 August 1783 from the Urak River, near Okhotsk. The Three Hierarchs, with the Shelikhovs aboard, soon became separated from the other ships in fog and got as far as Medniy Island, 500 miles to the north-east of Petropavlovsk on Kamchatka, before the end of the sailing season

  Unlike the party of Vitus Bering, who mostly died of scurvy over the winter of 1741–2 on nearby Bering Island, Shelikhov’s party survived the winter safely in bivouacs dug into the ground. Natalia gave birth to a baby girl named Avdotia.* In spring the now slightly enlarged party continued eastwards and rejoined the Sv.Simeon (the Arkhangel Mikhail was never heard from again). In a month they landed at Unalaska, site of an old Lebedev-Lastochkin Company settlement, and two months later they reached Kodiak Island itself.17

  There are several, wildly differing, accounts of the two years Shelikhov spent on Kodiak. But they agree on one thing – the natives were none too pleased to see him and his colonists. The first group of Koniag leaders to come aboard the Three Hierarchs on 5 August 1794 was shocked and awed by an eclipse of the sun that serendipitously occurred while the chiefs were on the Russian ship. The omen was not, however, interpreted by the local shamans as a positive one. Within a week a native skirmishing party attacked Shelikhov’s shore camp at the inlet he had named Three Hierarchs Bay.