He also took a leaf out of Catherine’s book and hired talented foreign adventurers to build his American empire. He tried unsuccessfully to recruit the brilliant young naval engineer Samuel Bentham, brother of the philosopher Jeremy, when Sam was in Irkutsk in the summer of 1788 (see notes for the remarkable Russian careers of the Bentham brothers, two of the great original minds of the age).37 But he had more luck with one of the talented English shipbuilders that Bentham had brought to Siberia with him, James Shields.
The launch of James Shields’s ship, the Phoenix, in Voskresensky Bay, 1794.
Shields was the father of a technological breakthrough crucial to the future of Russian America: locally built modern sea-going ships capable of navigating the open ocean. Hitherto Russian navigators from Bering to Shelikhov had sailed in glorified Cossack riverboats, with shallow draughts and primitive rigging. The first of Shields’ new deep-keeled, ballasted, swift-sailing, three-decked ships was a barque christened the North-Eastern Eagle, built at the Shelikhov-Golikov Company wharves at Okhotsk in 1790.38 The following year the Eagle, under Shields, assaulted and took the island of Unalaska for the North-Eastern Company. The Englishman had a genius for improvisation. At Voskresensky Harbour on the Alaskan mainland in 1794 he created a kind of tar from pine resin and made cordage from vines. ‘Although the Company has a shortage of iron and pitch . . . a solid paste from spruce pitch, flammable brimstone, ochre, and whale fat was made,’ Natalia Shelikhova reported to Platon Zubov – though she attributed this invention to her husband.39 The resulting three-masted, twenty-four-gun frigate Phoenix was the Company’s first serious warship and by far the most powerful naval vessel then on the Pacific.* The Company now had the maritime clout it needed to resupply and protect colonies 11,000 miles from Okhotsk.40
By that time the north Pacific had suddenly become the unlikely focus of the world’s attention and nearly triggered a major European war. The series of events that was to bring the Alaskan coast international fame had been set in train in late 1785 when the Comte de La Perouse, en route to the northern Pacific, made a brief victualling stop in Spanish-ruled Chile. News that France was planning to stake a claim to the regions to the north of New Spain caused alarm in Madrid (just as La Perouse’s visit to Petropavlovsk generated deep consternation in St Petersburg the following year).
One by one, the powers of Europe proceeded to assert their own claims to the remote coastline. As we have seen, news of Perouse’s voyage pushed Catherine the Great into ordering the Mulovsky expedition. News of Russia’s threatening preparations, reported by a worried Spanish Ambassador to his chiefs in Madrid, stung the Spanish into action in their turn. The viceroy of New Spain, Manuel Antonio Flores, was ordered to dispatch an expedition from Spain’s new naval base at San Blas on the Pacific coast of Mexico* to repel the expected Russian invaders. The viceroy instructed Naval Lieutenant Esteban José Martinez to occupy Nootka Sound, at the foot of modern-day Vancouver Island, to build a settlement and fort, and to make it clear to all interlopers that the coast was Spanish territory.
On arriving at Nootka Sound in May 1789 Martinez found no Russians – the Mulovsky expedition having been cancelled the previous winter – but he did find one British and two American merchantmen moored in the natural harbour. Rashly, Martinez boarded the British ship Iphigenia and arrested its captain, William Douglas, at pistol-point before confiscating his vessel and her valuable cargo in the name of His Most Catholic Majesty. Martinez then seized two more English merchantmen, the Princess Royal and the Argonaut, as well as two American ships as they arrived at Nootka. The simmering international crisis was further inflamed when Martinez shot Callicum, a local Indian chief who had come aboard the Argonaut to protest against a settlement named Fort San Miguel which the Spanish were busy erecting on his ancestral land. Martinez ended his summer’s work by taking the Princess Royal and the Argonaut as prizes of war and sailing them, along with their imprisoned captains and crews, to San Blas under armed escort.
When word of these acts of aggression against British trading vessels reached London there was predictable outrage. The government of William Pitt the Younger, receiving no apology or recompense from Madrid, began preparing a naval assault on Spain. A full-scale fleet was equipped at enormous cost – there was even talk of imposing an income tax to fund the war 41 – but in one of the few examples in history of an arms race with a happy outcome, Spain folded first. In October 1790 Madrid signed the humiliating Nootka Convention, which effectively ceded Spain’s exclusive claims to the American coast north of the Colombia River to Britain. The British Admiralty, relieved to have preserved its fleet from war,* sent Captain George Vancouver (yet another of Cook’s former officers) to the American Pacific coast to establish symbolic control in a very English way – to map it and name it.42
Shelikhov’s reaction to the presence of foreigners in waters he considered to be Russian was belligerent. He urged his new general manager Alexander Baranov – of whom we will hear much more later – to take matters into his own hands. When Baranov reported that an English merchantman – the Phoenix, a namesake of Shields’ new frigate – had called at Kodiak, Shelikhov wrote back to upbraid him for not seizing her and murdering the crew. Local Koniags could be blamed for the attack, he suggested. Baranov was insulted. He had enjoyed getting drunk with Hugh Moore, the Phoenix’s captain, and even accepted a young Indian servant boy called Richard from him as a present. ‘The indoor theories of hot-headed intelligences do not always turn out in practice’ was Baranov’s sarcastic comment to a fellow Company manager. To Shelikhov himself he wrote, ‘Your rebuke astonished me. It shows greed and cupidity without limit. How can you imagine that I would break the rules of hospitality? Instead of being civilized I would be called a barbarian.’43
Shelikhov’s suggestion showed that the Empress’s reservations were well founded – for all his airs he remained part-pirate. But Shelikhov had not given up hope of respectability, and of a royal charter. By 1793 it was clear that the time was ripe to renew his efforts at court. Five years before, when he had first tried to interest Catherine in his idea of a state-backed monopoly, the north Pacific had been a remote backwater, of interest only to the hardiest and most enterprising fur traders. Now, it seemed, the whole world was squabbling over the coastline. It was time, Shelikhov judged, to win the Pacific Great Game once and for all for Russia. He consulted his old backer, Urals iron king Nikita Demidov, on tactics. Demidov knew exactly the man who could persuade the Empress to change her mind: her darling and lover, Prince Platon Zubov.
Footnotes
* Later known as Alta California – roughly corresponding to modern California and parts of Arizona.
* Or rather almost entirely without his chief, for a few of Cook’s bones were returned after his flesh had been eaten.
* The British Royal Navy erected a handsome granite monument to Clerke in 1914 which still stands by the esplanade at Petropavlovsk, overlooking a rusting fishing fleet and the sleek black hulls of Russia’s nuclear missile submarines as they slip out of Avacha Bay.
* He was the second of three Shelikhov sons named Mikhail, all of whom died in infancy.
* Avdotia grew up to be as forceful a character as her mother. Pavel Lebedev-Lastochkin wrote in 1787 that ‘the girl Avdotia Grigoriyevna, “the American”, is a great talker – you can see she began her life on the Islands’.
* Perhaps understandably. After he fired Brityukov during the return voyage from Kodiak in 1786, the notoriously tight-fisted Shelikhov deducted 370 rubles from his share of the profits for supplies consumed on the voyage, leaving him with just 47 rubles for two years’ exertions.
* A strange name – it means in Russian ‘Big Little River’.
* By the time Russia’s claim was reasserted with the foundation of the colony of Fort Ross in Sonoma County, California, in 1812, both Spain and Britain had already established their own rival settlements on that coast. The crucial moment had passed.
* She was
also to be Shields’ grave: she went down, with Shields aboard, during a storm off Afognak bay in 1799.
* Near modern-day Guadalajara.
* Many of the ships built for the would-be Nootka war would eventually fight the Spanish at Trafalgar in 1805.
5
A Nabob in St Petersburg
The Russian Columbus here buried crossed the seas and discovered unknown shores. Seeing everything on earth is corrupt, he set his sail for the Heavenly Ocean.
Gavriil Derzhavin, epitaph on Grigory Shelikhov’s tomb, 1795
Men of ambition wishing to make their way in the world in the summer of 1793 knew that the fastest path to wealth and advancement lay through the favour of the Empress’s most shameless and most powerful lover. Zubov’s court was a theatre of greed and ambition where favours were traded, government appointments were bought and sold and gossip was swapped. Nikolai Rezanov was one of its gatekeepers.
At his newly acquired apartments at Tsarskoye Selo, the twenty-four-year-old Zubov behaved in the manner of a minor monarch. The Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski, who attended Zubov’s audiences in the hope of recovering ancestral property confiscated by Catherine, observed that they resembled nothing so much as ‘the levees of the mistresses of French kings’.1 From the early morning anxious supplicants rolled up to the palace leaving their carriages parked three deep in the drive, as if outside a theatre. At eleven the folding doors of the noble Reichsfürst’s private apartments were flung open, and Zubov emerged from his bedroom in a flowing silk dressing gown.
As the full pageant of the prince’s morning toilet was enacted by a team of hairdressers and powder-puff-wielding valets, the supplicants were shown in one by one. The most important of the petitioners were conducted in by the prince’s principal secretary Andrea Altesti, a Sicilian-Greek scandalmonger and blackmailer. Rezanov, Altesti’s deputy, was assigned to deal with lesser favour-seekers. Zubov heard them out while brushing his long hair in front of a mirror, his back to the visitor, and dismissed or approved their petitions with a casual nod or a grunt. Occasionally Zubov would address remarks to his buffoon or to a pet monkey, which sprang from head to head in the dressing room, dislodging minor avalanches of powder. Specially favoured guests were allowed to make him coffee. In this manner Zubov received princes, marshals, generals and the highest state officials, all seeking his favour and, through him, the ear of the Empress.*
‘This Zeubov has the character of being an active little man,’ wrote John Parkinson, a visiting Oxford don who met the prince at Tsarskoye Selo. ‘Who however behaves with no small degree of hauteur, which in a person from the dust is no small offence.’2
Potemkin was dead. The new young favourite was ‘flying high despite his years; he is minister of all parts of the administration’, wrote the veteran courtier and former royal lover Pyotr Zavadovsky despairingly in July 1793.3 Zubov surpassed Potemkin, Zavadovsky and indeed all the Empress’s other lovers in the scale of his greed and corruption. Like Grigory Orlov before him, he shamelessly promoted his brothers to positions of power in the army – but unlike the talented Orlovs, the Zubovs were mediocrities. The ageing Empress loaded him with over 10,000 serfs, lands in Russia and Poland and marvellous jewels. Zubov shamelessly further added to his fortune by charging his petitioners heavily for his favours. Only the oldest and most venerable of Russia’s grandees dared to challenge the new favourite. ‘I do not like the tone of your orders, your addresses, your letters or your flunkeys,’ was General Alexander Suvorov’s acid comment to the young upstart. But Suvorov was Russia’s most decorated soldier and one of the few men who could get away with snubbing the Empress’s beloved.4
Zubov’s court became a magnet for adventurers, rogues and opportunists. Then, as now, Russia attracted foreigners fleeing failure or seeking adventure, advancement, quick fortunes in a land of infinite opportunity where they could be free of their background, disgrace or both. The enormous wealth of Russia’s aristocracy was concentrated in St Petersburg, where the demands of the court and society forced them to flaunt and fritter it away in constant display. The Russian capital was a stage for a vastly expensive architectural and social spectacle, the Dubai of its age. Soldiers and builders as well as practitioners of softer arts from dancing masters and tailors to fly-by-night financiers and theatrical impresarios flocked to the land of open-handed patronage, where wealth exceeded taste by a considerable margin.
The Empress Catherine led the way, with her international essay competitions and her correspondence with the great public intellectuals of Europe, effectively declaring her country a vast laboratory for those who wished to experiment with their own versions of mankind’s future. She recruited Saxon farmers en masse to revolutionize the farming of the Volga.* She hired French sculptors and painters and Italian architects to build her palaces and the cities of Potemkin’s New Russia. Potemkin had hired bright young idealists like the Benthams. But Zubov’s circle attracted a more dubious kind of adventurer. Zubov’s secretary Altesti, for instance, obtained his entrée into Russian society by striking up a friendship – later cemented, the gossip went, by homosexual blackmail – with the Russian ambassador to Constantinople.5 Altesti was a skilful spymaster and collector of what Russians today call kompromat – compromising information – on powerful courtiers. Catherine herself had tried to dismiss Altesti for embezzlement, only to be talked into reinstating him by Zubov.*
Another Zubov crony was the half-Spanish half-Irish adventurer Don Giuseppe de Ribas-y-Boyons. De Ribas had attached himself to Alexei Orlov, commander of Catherine’s Mediterranean fleet, in Livorno in 1770. He fought against the Turks at the battle of Cesme and became Orlov’s trusted envoy, ferrying messages to his brother Grigory, Catherine’s first favourite, in St Petersburg. By the time of Zubov’s ascent in 1789 de Ribas was a brigadier general married to one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting and the Empress was godmother to his daughters. He was as much in imperial favour as any foreigner could hope to be. Formally, it was Zubov who became de Ribas’s patron, but it was the wily old adventurer de Ribas who doubtless gave the younger man a masterclass on ways to take advantage of his position. In 1794, with Zubov’s backing, de Ribas was sent south to found a great new city on the recently conquered Black Sea coast. Catherine named it Odessa, and it became known as the St Petersburg of the south; its main street was named Deribaska, the Russified version of its founder’s name.6
Somehow Rezanov did not seem to quite fit in among this dubious crew. For one, unlike his flamboyant colleagues at the court of Zubov, Rezanov did not get rich in the prince’s service. In 1795, after four years in the household, Rezanov was still writing to his relatives asking for money. Was he too honest, too cautious? He does not come across as a priggish type, and his shipmates would later report Rezanov joking about how well he knew the art of lining his own pockets. More likely, Rezanov was just calculating. He was not a flash foreign fortune-hunter; he was a Russian-born nobleman of good family, a former officer and judge, a sober man good with figures whom great men like Derzhavin and Zubov trusted to organize their affairs. Rezanov’s was a longer game. He was using his years in the service of Zubov to study the mechanisms of power up close: how advancement could be wheedled, lobbied and bought.
Grigory Shelikhov arrived at Zubov’s court in the autumn of 1793 through a convoluted chain of acquaintance. Nikita Demidov introduced him to his friend Alexander Zherebtsov, Zubov’s brother-in-law, who brought him to the prince’s notice. Shelikhov was already well known in the capital as a wealthy lobbyist reputed to pay top ruble for any political capital going. The Siberian nabob, with his dreams of fortune and empire and most importantly his ready cash, was most welcome in the infamous antechamber of Zubov’s wing at Tsarskoye Selo.
Shelikhov had hit on a brand new angle to persuade the crown to support his colony. Leaving the idea of a monopoly aside for the time being, he instead planned to petition the government to send a fresh group of skilled colonists to Kodiak – and also a pries
t. The clergyman would be maintained in the colony at Company expense to educate and baptize the natives. Brityukov’s old complaints of brutality – despite a positive report from Captain Billings – still tainted the Company. What better insurance against future calumny, Shelikhov calculated, than a priest to look after the education of the natives and hopefully knock a bit of the fear of God into the rowdy colonists? A party of settlers, family men and craftsmen would also help transform Kodiak from a community of plunderers into a permanent outpost of empire.
Perhaps it was the Nootka Sound incident that finally convinced the Empress that her American colonies were worth fighting for. Certainly Zubov’s support played a key role.7 But whatever the reasons, Catherine’s attitude had changed completely since Shelikhov’s unsuccessful lobbying of 1788. In a letter to the new governor-general of Siberia in late 1793 the Empress confirmed that Shelikhov’s plans were ‘wholly useful to the State’ and wished him well in his endeavours. The recently-formed Holy Synod quickly fell into line, falling over itself to echo the sovereign’s new-found enthusiasm for Shelikhov’s American Company. Metropolitan Gavriil decreed that not one but eight monks would be sent, selected from the monastery of Valaam, renowned for its strictness and probity. The priestly party was to be headed by thirty-two-year-old Archimandrite Iosaf, a biblical scholar and missionary.8 By January 1794 Shelikhov’s petition had been formally granted, the Empress’s letters of support drafted, and the group of monks was ready to depart on its long journey to the New World.9
Then, as now, political favours in Russia were a tradable currency: power was turned into money and vice versa. Zubov had expended political capital to further the interests of Shelikhov at court; now it was time for Zubov to collect the debt, probably in the form of an interest in the booming and highly profitable fur trade. But who would the prince send to supervise his new interests in Siberia? Who better than Rezanov, his trusted man of affairs, who must have played a key role in the winter’s political manoeuvrings. Rezanov was duly appointed Zubov’s personal representative, charged with taking royal letters from the Empress as well as ‘personal dispatches’ from Zubov to Ivan Pil, successor to the disgraced Governor Yakobi. Zubov also instructed Rezanov to report on how his orders had been fulfilled and, crucially, to ensure that they were, which made him more than a mere messenger.10 Rezanov was to be dispatched to the Siberian town where his father had spent the last thirty years as emissary and plenipotentiary of Russia’s most powerful man.
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 9