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

by Owen Matthews

  Rezanov attempted to regain the initiative by having the ship’s company assembled on deck to hear him reading part of his orders from the Tsar. ‘He probably wants to let us know how important he is,’ remarked Löwenstern testily. ‘Rezanov, the Russian Pinetti [a famous contemporary illusionist], has told several of us confidentially that he had already complained about Krusenstern from Tenerife. He also complains that the further we get from Europe the more the proper respect he deserves is lost . . . he shies from daylight and appears less and less often.’27 Rezanov spent more and more time in his cabin, drafting and redrafting querulous letters to the Tsar and to his many allies in St Petersburg, an activity which in time was to become something of a mania. The polished metropolitan courtier who had successfully maintained himself in the favour of three successive monarchs had given way to someone altogether more pompous, argumentative and, increasingly, unhinged.

  Sixty sea miles off the coast of Brazil the Nadezhda was greeted by a vast number of butterflies which had been blown out to sea by a squall and settled over every inch of the ship. Closer to port a dugout canoe brought Portuguese customs officers and a pilot who guided the Nadezhda to an anchorage opposite the fort of Santa Cruz, twelve miles from the city of Nossa Senhora do Desterro* some five hundred miles south of Rio de Janeiro. Rezanov attempted to forbid Tolstoy from going ashore as punishment for his constant high jinks and lack of respect. Krusenstern, humiliatingly, overruled him. ‘If this is the way you act you won’t say anything if someone hits me in the face,’ Rezanov fumed before disembarking to take up the local governor’s invitation to stay at his residence.

  The Nadezhda was overhauled and the crew busied themselves filling water casks and purchasing provisions. Dozens of barrels of salt pork, pickled beetroot and sauerkraut were thrown overboard to make room for fresh pineapples, lemons and oranges. The cannons were lowered into the hold to add stability during the coming rounding of Cape Horn and the ‘black’ laundry boiled with lye soap in huge pots. The expedition’s rival chiefs spent their time ashore penning letters to St Petersburg. ‘My, the Emperor will be surprised by so many petitions from Brazil!’ quipped Löwenstern. ‘The captain is requesting protection and justice. R is making no secret of his intention to denounce us all . . . May the hangman take him!’28

  The many letters Rezanov sent from Santa Catarina in November of 1803 are a convoluted confection of complaint and unexplained innuendo. They make for bizarre reading. ‘I am ashamed to repeat here what I have had to endure,’ he wrote to Admiral Pavel Chichagov, the assistant minister of the navy, without at any point explaining what exactly it was he was enduring. ‘At least the beneficial consequences of this disorder might result in the future in the realization that without respect for rank nothing can be accomplished.’29 It is not clear quite what Rezanov expected any of his correspondents to do about his predicament as the Nadezhda sailed towards the Pacific like some kind of faulty satellite, shooting off a flurry of garbled distress signals every few months to a puzzled St Petersburg.

  ‘Every day R seeks out something new to anger our captain with,’30 complained Löwenstern, who made a point of cutting off Rezanov halfway through every sentence the councillor addressed to him. ‘R is the object of our general hatred.’31

  Krusenstern, for his part, sent multiple copies of his letters to the Emperor, Chichagov, Rumiantsev and other luminaries, attaching a note to each explaining that the copies were ‘to make it impossible for Rezanov to intercept them’. Tolstoy, collected ‘attests’ to his good character from his fellow officers to defend his reputation against the complaints he imagined Rezanov would be making against him – pointlessly, it seems, for Rezanov barely mentions Tolstoy in any of his surviving letters, though he had evidently threatened Tolstoy that he would.

  For most of the company, though, there were more interesting things about Santa Catarina than the escalating Rezanov–Krusenstern feud. Langsdorff was ‘wholly transported’ by his expeditions to catch insects and butterflies. The human fauna were no less fascinating. ‘They dance, they laugh, they joke, they sing, they play,’ wrote Langsdorff of his expedition to Nossa Senhora do Desterro. ‘The females are not ugly; among the higher classes we saw some who even in Europe might be called handsome . . . they are well-made with dark complexions, coarse dark hair and dark eyes full of fire.’32 To the delight of the Russians, ‘the most insignificant presents of European merchandise – tinsel, ribbands, ear-rings, are always thankfully received’33 by the women. Friderici copied a local practical joke which involved crushing a wax ball full of perfumed water on the breast of a passing young lady – and dabbing the girl dry with a large handkerchief while chatting her up.

  Langsdorff, free of the status anxiety which so gravely afflicted his superiors, went to special efforts to observe the black slaves dance ‘despite the not very agreeable smell of so many Negroes shut up together in a confined space, heated up with the exertions of jumping and leaping . . . Their leader stood like a hero in the midst of his followers, his head ornamented with gold paper and feathers and his body with glass, gold, bangles and stars and suns in silver paper.’ The conditions in the slave market, where Langsdorff saw ‘wretched helpless beings lying almost naked about the streets for sale’ for a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars – fifty times more than the cost of a young steer – depressed him. But he soon discovered fellow gentleman-naturalist, Señor Matteos Cardoso Calideiro, and together they caught ‘butterflies as big as birds’ with a giant two-man net.34 So taken with Brazil was Langsdorff that he returned in 1813 as Russia’s consul general in Rio de Janeiro. He later acquired a farm, hosted and entertained foreign naturalists and scientists and led expeditions into the interior.*

  Catholic Christmas and New Year were celebrated with feasts of mangoes and pineapples, their Orthodox equivalents in the Julian calendar following thirteen days behind. The Neva required extensive refitting, including a new foremast. Löwenstern was convinced that Lisiansky had deliberately put off these repairs to avoid awkward questions at Kronstadt about the extravagant cost of the two British frigates, supposedly in tip-top condition. ‘Lisiansky certainly played under the same hat as the seller,’ Löwenstern wrote.35

  On board the Nadezhda Krusenstern was doing a little refitting of his own. The latest row had been sparked when Rezanov, getting his own back for being overruled on the matter of Tolstoy’s punishment, refused to allow Krusenstern to ban the painter Kurliantsev – a member of the embassy and not a military officer, unlike Tolstoy – from the Great Cabin for insubordination. Krusenstern’s ingenious solution was to order the ship’s carpenters to erect a panelled partition down the middle of the cabin, one side for himself, the ship’s officers and most of the gentlemen, and the other side for Rezanov. ‘He will be wide-eyed when he arrives,’ crowed Löwenstern.36

  Rezanov’s reaction on returning from his two months ashore, opening the familiar door to the cabin and finding it divided in half is, surprisingly, unrecorded. But we can safely speculate that it was not positive. Meanwhile below decks confusion reigned. Dozens of boxes of Langsdorff’s specimens, including bullfrogs, lizards, crabs, snakes and butterflies, jostled for space with sacks of watermelons and vegetables as well as other crew members’ live pets, including two raccoons, Löwenstern’s green parrot, which could say ‘Durak!’ – Russian for ‘fool’ – and a monkey purchased by Tolstoy.

  In such disarray, and with the rival chiefs of the Nadezhda ensconced in their separate halves of the Great Cabin separated by an inch of good English oak, the two ships set off southwards into the most dangerous waters in the world.

  Footnotes

  * In the sense that they had been full-fledged British officers, as opposed to Krusenstern, who had also served in the British Royal Navy but as a Russian officer on secondment.

  * Though since Rezanov’s uneducated brother-in-law Mikhail Buldakov was also a correspondent member, one wonders how high the fledgling institution set the bar for membership abov
e the ability to write a civil letter.

  * Modern-day Florianopolis in the state of Santa Catarina.

  * A recent study found that Langsdorff has 1,500 descendants in Brazil, among them Luma de Oliveira, a carnival queen who holds the world record for appearances on the cover of Playboy magazine.

  11

  Cape Horn to the Court of the Hawaiian King

  L’enfer, c’est les autres.

  Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos

  Rezanov has caused me very sad days through his personal hate, his countless deceptions as well as his offensive insults, his unjust, despotic and tyrannical control over me. He misused the authority and confidence of the Monarch.

  Wilhem Gottfried Tilesius, 6 October 18051

  As the Nadezhda ploughed towards the earth’s roughest seas, strong following winds drove Rezanov ever further into a cold and unfamiliar world. He was trapped in a wooden tub shorter than three London buses with sixty men, most of whom made no secret of their hatred for him. Rezanov was poorly equipped to deal with this strange and frightening predicament. He was a creature of the court and the capital. Intrigues, gossip, the vicious betrayals men were ready to contemplate in order to win fortune and power: these were things Rezanov knew well. He was a master of the game of politics. His skills were diplomacy, flattery, the ability to appeal to men’s greed or ambition, to paint a grand and seductive picture for his royal masters, to bully, bribe and cajole subordinates into line. But these arts were for a world governed by a powerful and unrelenting gravitational force that centred on the monarch. Out here the rules were different; appeals to the Tsar in St Petersburg were useless. Alliances and allegiances were fixed: on board the Nadezhda there was only one monarch, and it was not Rezanov.

  The ambassador was cold-shouldered by the ship’s company. The naval officers would not speak to him and moved away when he came onto the quarterdeck. ‘The cold at Cape Horn cannot be colder than the cold which R meets from us.’2 Löwenstern drew a sketch of Rezanov in ‘optima forma’ as the ship headed towards the Cape wearing a fur hat, baggy breeches, tall boots and an unbuttoned jacket, huddled in his lonely corner of the deck. The company in the cabin had no doubt been vexing, but it was ostracism that proved harder to bear. ‘R goes round the ship like a water-shy dog, with lowered head.’3 Already Krusenstern had resolved not to stop in Chile but press on to the Sandwich Islands – modern Hawaii – in order to deny Rezanov the chance to send more poisonous letters home. The officers also eagerly discussed Rezanov’s tendency to seasickness. ‘Irresponsible of me, I know, but I am hoping for a storm at Cape Horn,’ Löwenstern observed.4

  Löwenstern’s sketch of Rezanov ‘optima forma’ on the Nadezhda’s quarterdeck.

  On 4 February, in heavy seas, the Neva struck a whale. The blow was so powerful that her captain thought they had hit a rock. The whale also came out of the encounter badly. Langsdorff, on the nearby Nadezhda, observed whale fat spreading for hundreds of yards across the surface of the ocean and reflected on ‘Dr [Benjamin] Franklin’s idea that the waves of the sea, violently agitated, might be stilled’ by the application of oil.5

  The Cape proved a disappointment, at least to those officers who had been hoping to shake up the ambassador. The Nadezhda cleared it in under a week at a spanking nine knots in favourable winds. The only casualty was Löwenstern’s parrot, who was found, squawking in distress, with its feet frozen to the ship’s rail. The three-month slog north towards Hawaii was made tougher than it would otherwise have been by a lack of fresh food and water. Rezanov was blamed – though it is not clear if he was aware that the captain had decided on this course expressly in order to keep him from posting letters in Chile. ‘The unpleasantness we have had, the cold weather and the permanent stress have converted our voyage to an eternity,’ complained Löwenstern. ‘I shudder, as does everyone else, at the thought that one has to spend three more years together with these people.’6

  Even the usually affable Langsdorff managed to get into a screaming row with his fellow scientist Tilesius. Langsdorff refused to share some drawings of unusual jellyfish he’d spent all night catching in a net made of silk stockings. Rezanov came down with an unspecified malady and did not emerge from his cabin for days on end. ‘Conversation, the spice of life, is completely gone of course . . . Our behaviour towards each other is less than upright.’7 Only Tolstoy – ‘that depraved fellow’8 – had the spirit to continue his pranks. A Brazilian monkey he had bought in Santa Catarina broke its harness and ran amok in the Great Cabin, amusing itself by spilling ink over Krusenstern’s maps and papers. Tolstoy, sent in to retrieve his unruly pet, was badly bitten on the hand and hit the creature so hard its injuries were deemed untreatable and it was thrown overboard.

  On 24 April land was sighted. ‘It was rocky not lush, with burnt peaks as though scorched.’9 The Nadezhda’s English charts called the island chain Nukakhiva; it is now known as the Marquesas, part of French Polynesia. Krusenstern ordered crates of trade goods and trinkets hauled out of the hold, along with the cannon, which were mounted and loaded with grapeshot. Gunners filled cartridges and mounted racks of muskets and pistols on the gun deck. But instead of the expected fleet of canoes a single dugout paddled out to meet the Russian ship.

  ‘How much we were surprised when instead of a South Sea Islander we saw a European,’ wrote Langsdorff. ‘He was entirely in the costume of the country with only a piece of cloth around his waist,’ and greeted the ship’s company in English. The mysterious sailor introduced himself only as Roberts and announced the imminent arrival of the island’s King Katenua. (Edward Roberts’ memoirs, published in 1974, revealed that he had deserted from an English whaler in 1798 and lived among the natives of Nukakhiva until 1806 before working a passage to India, where he died in poverty in 1832.10) Reassured by Roberts via a signal that the visitors were friendly, the royal canoe duly appeared bearing Katenua and his brothers. The king was ‘a large, robust man with his body tattooed all over. He was entirely naked, as were his attendants, and had no badge or characteristic by which he could be distinguished from them.’11 The Nukakhivan men shaved their heads except for two patches above the ears, giving them the appearance of having horns. Löwenstern thought them ‘a handsome people: each savage could serve as a model for the Apollo in Belvedere’.12

  A native of Nukakhiva from Langsdorff ’s Voyages and Travels.

  The king and his retinue shinned athletically up the side of the Nadezhda. Krusenstern, Rezanov and the embassy and officers, all in full ceremonial dress, formally greeted them.* Accompanying Katenua was another European renegade, Jean-Joseph Cabri (or Cadiche), a Frenchman who had almost entirely forgotten his native language and who was covered in native tattoos. The king was presented with presents of nails, knives and a piece of red cloth. In return, with Roberts translating, he promised pigs, crabs and fish. Apparently well pleased with the new arrivals, His Majesty took his leave by diving into the sea and swimming home, his presents in his teeth.13

  Katenua’s subjects on the shore took this as a general signal that the foreign ship was no longer taboo and could be safely approached. ‘An extraordinary spectacle: a shoal of black-haired heads just above the water . . . some hundred men, women, girls and boys all swimming towards the ship, having in their hands coconuts, breadfruit and bananas to sell. The cries, laughter and romping of these mirthful people is indescribable . . . it exceeded any I have heard at our most numerously attended fairs.’ To the delight of Löwenstern, and doubtless every other crew member, ‘the female savages, naked, came onboard wearing only a few leaves to cover their privy parts. The goats on board smelled this greenery and hurried over to rob the naked girls of their last bit of cover.’14 This may have been an in-joke among South Sea sailors – a very similar story also involving goats, girls and grass skirts is repeated by the missionary Captain Wilson of the Duff as well as in other accounts.

  Goats or no, Langsdorff recounts that the girls, ‘their oratory illustrated with pantomime ges
tures, gave us to understand that they were making the most liberal and unreserved offers of their charms . . . Their menfolk did not show the slightest symptoms of jealousy but rather seemed pleased and flattered when a wife, daughter or sister attracted our particular attention.’ Note the ‘our’. Did the gentlemen take advantage of these ‘topsy-turvy, wild girls’15 some as young as eleven, ‘such is the precocity of nature here’?16 Langsdorff, in his published account, demurely notes that ‘the Goddess of night with her dark veil covered everything which may have happened’, and the puritan hand of one of Löwenstern’s descendants has neatly excised the relevant passages in his diary with scissors.17

  In the morning ‘our new Venuses’ slipped over the side of the ship carrying presents of ‘bottles, pieces of broken china, coloured rags . . . one [sailor] tore the lining from his breeches and wrapped it around the neck of his beloved – she was no less delighted and no less proud than a knight with the ribbon of a new Order and hastened home, no doubt thinking honi soit qui mal y pense . . .’18 Having no pockets, the natives’ habit was to carry articles of value in their mouths. Some experimentally minded sailors followed their paramours overboard ‘in order to try it [intercourse] in the water, to see if it can be done’.19 (Apparently it could, especially with the support of the anchor cables.)