Was Rezanov capable of such an underhanded trick as swapping the letter he had just read for another, less humilating version? The next year, when the Nadezhda returned to Kamchatka, Governor Koshchelev also claimed that Rezanov had replaced the letter of apology with a different one, full of complaints against his opponents.39 Yet a long letter from Rezanov, with grovelling aplenty, was logged in the Imperial Chancellery and is quoted above; it sounds exactly like the one which Krusenstern and Löwenstern described and approved. Rezanov, in all probability, was traduced by Löwenstern and Koshchelev.
After such a public climbdown, Rezanov’s own injured pride would have to be massaged a little. Koshchelev’s opportunity to stage-manage a public reconciliation came when letters arrived from St Petersburg confirming the promotion of First Lieutenant Makar Ivanovich Ratmanov40 to the rank of captain-lieutenant. Koshchelev asked Rezanov, as the senior official on the island, to read the news of the appointment to the assembled officers. They duly assembled in full uniform outside the Rezanov residence – not, as Rezanov claims in his own diary, to apologize en masse but to hear the imperial letter of promotion read out. Ratmanov was duly congratulated and Krusenstern made a short speech of a conciliatory nature ‘making peace’ with Rezanov. Apology or not, it was enough to convince all parties that honour had been satisfied. ‘Our story has a beautiful theme: the victory of Justice over Vice,’ crowed Löwenstern.
Tolstoy was sent home, a 1,500-ruble loan from Rezanov in his pocket as a thinly disguised bribe to ensure he gave a good account. The artist Kurliantsev, who was suffering from gallstones, was also let go, as was Doctor Fyodor Brinkin, for unknown reasons. Perhaps he had also cracked in the Great Cabin’s febrile atmosphere – in any event, Brinkin poisoned himself soon after his return to St Petersburg.*41 Travellers who met Tolstoy en route in Siberia reported a crazed man in a weather-stained Preobrazhensky Guards uniform. ‘His eyes, probably as a result of heat and dust, appeared bloodshot, his rather melancholy expression appeared troubled and his very quiet manner of speaking frightened my companion.’42 Tolstoy went on to become a hero of the 1812 war against Napoleon and scandalize society by marrying a Gypsy singer with whom he had eleven children, all of whom died in infancy. The count came to believe that this was divine punishment for the eleven men he had killed in duels, though that did not stop him from continuing to provoke them.
The Nadezhda’s ship’s company, meanwhile, prepared to continue their fractious journey. Minor problems remained: the officers’ dirty underwear was sold by the local sub-surgeon, who drank the proceeds before he was discovered. The Nadezhda’s spectacular leaks could not be adequately fixed because of a lack of seasoned wood, nails and copper. But the seismic rift between Krusenstern and Rezanov, which had threatened to destroy the whole expedition, had, for the time being at least, been patched up. Krusenstern ordered his carpenters to take down the partition that had divided the Great Cabin since Brazil.
Footnotes
* One is reminded of Mahatma Gandhi’s quip about being underdressed for tea with King George V at Buckingham Palace: ‘His Majesty was wearing enough clothes for both of us.’
* Of the twenty gentlemen who sailed with the Nadezhda, two – Brinkin and Golovachev – would kill themselves, a suicide rate of 10 per cent.
12
Nangasac
I most humbly entreated His Majesty that I should be conducted in safety to Nangasac. To this I added another petition, to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed on my countrymen, of trampling upon the crucifix . . . The Emperor seemed a little surprised; and said he believed I was the first of my countrymen who ever made any scruple in this point.’
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 3.xi: ‘The Author leaves Luggnagg and sails to Japan’, 1726
The Nadezhda was given a rousing send-off from Kamchatka for her historic voyage to Japan. Company Director Evstrat Delarov, Shelikhov’s old Greek shipmate, was freshly arrived from Okhotsk. He and General Koshchelev played hosts. A feast of goose, wild sheep, ox steaks and roasted reindeer was prepared, followed by a ball in a tent set up by Rezanov. The company consisted of the governor’s wife, the wives of subalterns and soldiers and ‘some Kamchatkadale women in silks, nankeens and satins’.1 Rezanov took a turn playing quadrilles on the violin. Langsdorff was less impressed by the Kamchatkadale dances ‘which consist of imitations of bears, dogs and birds’.
On 22 August the Nadezhda set sail with her heavy freight of imperial ambition. She soon ran into heavy seas. The cast-iron fireplace in the Great Cabin broke loose and crashed through a partition, demolishing four smaller cabins and smashing dozens of bottles and pots as it went. Nonetheless on 11 September the gentlemen were in good enough humour to stage a small ‘Round the World’ concert, even though ‘the creaking of the ship outshouted the instruments and the storm played counter-bass’.2
A few days later, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Emperor Alexander’s coronation, Rezanov addressed a rousing speech to the assembled officers and crew. ‘Love of Fatherland, skill, dignity, disdain of danger, subordination, mutual respect and meekness are the main characteristics of the Russian seaman and of Russians in general,’ he declared. He praised the sailors, telling them that ‘you have already acquired a degree of renown which jealousy herself can never deprive you’.3 And to his ‘cavaliers and associates of the Embassy, my worthy companions and assistants, it remains to us to accomplish the brilliant objects on which we are set: the opening to our country of new sources of wealth and knowledge’. This speech reduced ‘all the sailors to tears’.4 Rezanov then distributed medals to all the seamen. The mood of high patriotic fervour was marred only with a by-now-predictable altercation with Krusenstern, who asked Rezanov if the medals weren’t meant for loyal natives and foreigners rather than his own crew. To which Rezanov replied, ‘I say nothing: fuck your mother.’5*
Krusenstern did not take this remark well.
‘I demanded to be arrested and shackled and taken to St Petersburg in irons if Rezanov’s charges were to be accepted,’ Krusenstern wrote in an unpublished portion of his diary. ‘A mutineer – for this is what Rezanov called me – cannot be in charge of a ship of war.’6 By his own account, the captain only abandoned his threat to have himself imprisoned because without his leadership the expedition would be ‘destroyed’ and ‘all of Russia would suffer because Rezanov insulted me’.
The following evening the weather turned even worse. The Nadezhda ran into mountainous seas, whipped up by the tail end of a great Pacific typhoon. One giant wave engulfed the Nadezhda completely from the stern, smashing her boats and filling the Great Cabin with three feet of churning water. ‘The waves rolled in frightful masses, rushing over one another with the swiftness of an arrow . . . every strike seemed to threaten to be the finishing stroke of our existence. Expensive books, chairs, tables maps, mathematical instruments, clothes, all swam together about the Cabin and seemed to give a foretaste of what was to follow.’7 ‘All were preparing for death. They held each other and asked for pardon . . . one sat like a stone, another praying and preparing to give up the ghost.’8 The next morning the lower decks were found to be three hands’ deep in sand and shells, showing how close they had been to an unknown shore and perdition. The soaked damasks for the Japanese Sho- gun were unpacked and draped over the stays in an attempt to dry them.
Undaunted by this near-fatal experience, Rezanov pressed on with preparations for meeting the Japanese. Chief among these were getting the guard of marines he had picked up at Kamchatka to practice drum rolls and presenting arms on the quarterdeck, preparing stocks of vodka, wine and tobacco, and mustering all the officers in full-dress uniform. He also prepared a written question-and-answer pamphlet for the benefit of any Japanese curious about Russia. ‘Russia occupies half the world and is the greatest Empire in the Universe,’ it began, boldly but perhaps not terribly tactfully, 9 Rezanov, unconsciously echoing the Chinese emperor’s grandiloquent letter to the Russians at Nerchins
k a century and a half previously, went on to explain that ‘The Great Russian Emperor, seeing the deficiencies suffered by other lands, out of human compassion permits the use of the State’s ample resources and our borders are open to all merchants.’10
He also pored over his copy of the letter given by the Japanese to Adam Laxman eleven years before, which Rezanov hoped would be his warrant to pursue both trade and diplomacy. In this Rezanov was either deluded or highly optimistic, because the text left little room for misunderstanding. ‘Our Empire offers neither respect nor disrespect for your Empire,’ wrote the chief shogunal councillor at the time, Matsudaira Sadanobu. ‘We expect no further negotiations. As for establishing friendly relations, it is impossible to do so locally and it is forbidden to travel from here to [the shogunal court at] Edo.’ Nonetheless, the Laxman letter – known as the Nagasaki Permit – did provide permission for a single Russian ship to come and trade.
Through this loophole, as well as the humanitarian pretext of returning the five shipwrecked Japanese, Rezanov hoped to climb, aided by his hold-full of gifts. He was also armed with an elaborately illuminated letter in Russian and Japanese from Alexander I assuring the ‘Emperor’ of Japan of his ‘sincere respect’ and ‘reaffirming Our unshakeable friendly disposition’. Alexander also mentioned the ‘clock in the shape of a mechanical elephant, mirrors, fox furs, ivory vases, guns, pistols, steel and glass artefacts . . . produced in Our manufacturing plants’. This was less than the full truth, as evidenced (as Löwenstern acidly observed) by the word ‘London’, which featured prominently on the clock’s face.* Never mind. Alexander hoped that ‘though these gifts are of no great value I wish that Your Majesty will find something from within my borders to your liking’.11
On 26 September they sighted a fishing boat crewed by ‘men like savages, naked but for their belts’,12 who attempted to shoo the Nadezhda away, but seeing the foreign ship with Japanese aboard retreated in confusion. The Russians, with marines beating to quarters, sailors hauling the cannon out of the hold and officers scrambling into their dress uniforms, continued into the mouth of Nagasaki Bay. The Nadezhda thus became the first – but by no means the last – Russian man-of-war to enter a Japanese harbour.13
Ahead, the Russians saw a town of low wooden houses dominated by hills covered in terraces to their very summits. An official war barge, manned by forty rowers and flying a black-and-white pennant, intercepted them. Two officials on board, after reading an edict from a scroll which no one on the Nadezhda heard, indicated that the Russians should anchor four miles offshore. It was a bad anchorage, exposed to the open ocean swells and in forty fathoms of water, but Rezanov was nonetheless delighted. ‘He hugged us for joy and kissed me and Bellinghausen,’ reported Löwenstern.14
Two large barges carrying local notables and a small party of Europeans – evidently the local Dutch representatives – approached to inspect the Russians but did not hail them or acknowledge their signals. As night fell twenty small sampans bearing curious picnicking sightseers edged out into the bay, illuminated by paper lanterns ‘of great size and beauty bearing two very bright and clear lights and highly ornamented with transparencies of coats of arms’.15 The Nadezhda settled down to her first night in Japanese waters moored in a sea of bobbing paper lanterns and wreathed in the smell of frying fish.
The next morning an official Japanese delegation of thirty elaborately dressed officials, armed with swords, and their attendants came aboard. The head official was shown into the Great Cabin to the accompaniment of well-drilled drum rolls. The Russians, following the Dutch-speaking Japanese interpreters, called him a banyoshi – apparently a corruption of the Japanese title bugyo, best translated as ‘civil servant.’16 The senior banyoshi and his two subordinates immediately seated themselves, cross-legged, on the cabin’s divan. Attendants with symbolic lanterns arranged themselves on one side; on the other more servants bearing ‘an apparatus for smoking, a vessel with hot embers, another for tobacco and a small one for spitting’ knelt at the banyoshi’s side.
Rezanov, after bowing to his distinguished visitor in the European manner, settled himself opposite in a carefully-placed armchair. He attempted to use his hard-won Japanese but was politely cut off by one of the officials’ team of interpreters, who apologized that it was not permitted to address the banyoshi except through an official translator.17 The senior Japanese translator, oppertolk in Dutch, was Motoki Shozaemon. He was to become the Russians’ principal liaison with the Japanese authorities for the first three months of their stay. Since Rezanov spoke no Dutch he needed a tolk of his own, but there being no Dutchmen aboard the Nadezhda this service was performed by Dr Langsdorff, who knew some Low German. Revealingly, Shozaemon knelt as he addressed Rezanov, but when he turned to the banyoshi he fell forward on his hands and knees and humbly addressed his translation to the cabin floor.
After a period of chit-chat during which the Japanese enquired about the visitors’ journey, three European visitors were announced by the cabin sentry. Hendrik Doeff was the twenty-seven-year-old head of the Dutch trading mission in Nagasaki. He was accompanied by Captain Mousquetier of the Dutch trading vessel Gesnia Antoinetta, out of Batavia, and Baron von Pabst, a Dutch traveller.18
Löwenstern’s sketch of the Dutch bowing.
‘They had only just begun to greet me, when the chief interpreter abruptly shouted for [Doeff] to make a compliment’ to the banyoshi, wrote Rezanov. ‘The interpreter fell onto his knees and bowed, and the Dutch had to do the same, bending at the waist before the banyoshi, placing their hands on their knees, while glancing to the side to see if the interpreter had finished his lengthy speech.’19 Eventually Doeff enquired, ‘Kan ik wederom upstaan???’ – ‘May I stand up?’ – and was given permission to unbend. The performance made a deep impression on Rezanov, sensitive as he was to questions of status, who devoted many pages of his beautifully penned diary to the incident. ‘It was extremely distressing to the Dutchmen to have us all as witnesses to their unprecedented degradation,’ he wrote. ‘The Japanese did not dare to subject us to such demeaning acts.’ Rezanov himself did ‘not even bow to God, except in my own mind’.
Rezanov, in his own estimation, had saved face while the hapless Dutch had lost theirs. He was quite wrong. For one, Doeff did not consider bowing degradation at all. ‘I myself cannot understand in what this self-abasement consists,’ he wrote after Krusenstern’s account of the Dutch ‘humiliating demonstration of submission’ before the Japanese was published in London in 1813. ‘The courtesies that we use in our relations to Japanese are the same that they use among themselves . . . in whatever part of the world one finds oneself one has to adapt or agree to the reigning customs and ceremonies. Otherwise, one need not go there at all.’20
Doeff’s attitude was not a species of early multiculturalism but rather, came from a hard-headed desire to do business. Unlike the Russians, the Dutch traders in Nagasaki were integrated into the neo-Confucian social structure and hierarchy of Japan’s feudal system, known as bakuhan. The head of the Dutch trade mission, the opperhoofd, was recognized as a vassal, or kashin, of the Shogun, with the right to an audience at the palace in the capital of Edo. The fact that the Dutch were foreigners excused them from having to make the full prostrations that Japanese lower officials – such as translators – had to perform to their superiors.21
Two centuries earlier many Spanish and the Portuguese traders and military officers had also taken Rezanov’s attitude that prostration was undignified – and had been summarily expelled by Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu between 1624 and 1639. The humbler Dutch, on the other hand, traded successfully and without interruption from 1609.22 The issue revealed a deep gulf of understanding between Rezanov and his Japanese counterparts, a gulf that was only to grow over the coming six months.
Another wrangle over protocol followed the next day. A shipload of Japanese notables hove into view, kettledrums banging and standards fluttering. A small boat was dispatched to inform Rezanov tha
t the rank of the visitors dictated that he personally approach their craft in Nadezhda’s jolly boat and invite them on board. This, the ambassador considered ‘beneath his dignity’,23 sparking the first of many tedious back-and-forth negotiations over the minutiae of precedence which were to cause the Japanese much confusion and the Russians much frustration. Eventually a compromise was hit upon: Rezanov’s senior officers would go in the boat to invite the Japanese dignitaries, while Rezanov himself stood on the Nadezhda’s forecastle – in a commanding position above the ship’s latrines – and greeted his distinguished visitors from there.
After more tea-drinking, pipe-smoking and decorous spitting, Rezanov presented his credentials in the form of his emperor’s letter written in Russian, Manchurian and Japanese. The banyoshi regretted they were unable to read the Japanese because ‘the handwriting is very bad and the language only that of the vulgar use’24 – hardly surprising, since the translation was penned by a former Japanese fisherman living in Irkutsk. The five shipwrecked sailors from Sendai – who to Rezanov’s frustration were illiterate – were duly produced for the banyoshi, dressed in silk clothes and each brandishing the silver watch given to him by Alexander I as a sign of the Russians’ generosity. However, the banyoshi were less interested in their own countrymen than in the Nadezhda’s charts and a small globe made by Adams of London, on which the Russians traced the line of their two-year-long voyage. More impressive still was the spark-producing galvanic machine, which ‘excited the attention of the Japanese more than any other’. Indeed during the Russians’ entire stay ‘very rarely did a banyoshi come to visit without desiring to feel the effect of the electricity’.25
Rezanov had little choice but to agree to the banyoshi’s chief demand that the ship be fully disarmed before being allowed to approach within cannon range of the city. The only exceptions Rezanov and Krusenstern were able to wring from the Japanese were that the officers were allowed to keep their swords as ‘a necessary part of their uniform’,26 Rezanov’s personal honour guard their muskets and the Nadezhda her cannon – as long as they were stowed in the hold and all powder unloaded into Japanese safekeeping. Rezanov considered these concessions a great diplomatic victory. As it turned out, he was instead in his stubbornness sowing the seeds of disaster for his mission.
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 20