Löwenstern’s sketch of Langsdorff ’s balloon experiments.
Around the end of January, just as Rezanov was sliding into genuine illness with rheumatic pains and tightness in the chest, the tolk Tamehachiro confided ‘a profound secret’. Two hundred of the ‘highest dignitaries’ had been summoned to Edo by the Shogun to consult upon the expediency of establishing trade relations with Russia. Whatever the existential dangers to the Tokugawa regime posed by Rezanov, contemporary accounts suggest that nonetheless large sections of Japanese society favoured more contact. The Nagasaki tolks and guards repeatedly told Rezanov that the local people wanted to trade with the Russians. Mogami Tokunai, a celebrated explorer of Japan’s northern frontiers, wrote later that ‘people all over the country sympathized’ with the Russians. The artist Shiba Kokan argued that rice was both cheap and abundant in Japan and should be traded. Many members of the samurai class, Japan’s largest landowners, who would become even richer by selling surplus grain, shared his view. The state too stood to gain tax funds to fund a pet shogunal project, the development of Ezo, the wilds of northern Japan.11
News of this ‘great debate among the ruling circles of the country’ thrilled Rezanov – and filled him with agonized anticipation. When he was told that it would be at least thirty more days before the governor of Nagasaki could see him because special ceremonial robes would have to be prepared, he flew into a rage. ‘I shit on the governor and all of his clothes,’ he shouted. ‘I will not be led around on this fool’s rope any more!’ The tolks attempted to pacify Rezanov with gifts of lacquer boxes. ‘Your constant complaints could have dire consequences,’ they warned. ‘Do you want our governor to receive a sword from Edo to cut open his stomach with?’12
Rezanov ill in bed.
Suffering from cold and rheumatism, the ambassador built himself a small tent from rugs, sailcloth and straw mats inside his room and spent much of the day huddled inside with a pan of hot coals. When he emerged his companions were dismayed that ‘none of us wears our shirts so dirty or such torn stockings’. Extreme lethargy and disregard for personal appearance are of course classic signs of depression. So is paranoia. ‘He is so crazy that he has set up a written plan for war,’ reported Löwenstern. Rezanov repeatedly threatened the long-suffering translators, his only Japanese interlocutors, who bore the full brunt of his disintegrating psyche. ‘If I killed ten of you tolks then my business would go faster and better!’ he raged. Japanese doctors were summoned. Their diagnosis, entirely correct, was that their Russian guest was suffering from ‘ill will and ill humour’.13
On 1 March Rezanov was informed that there was no question of his travelling to Edo for a personal interview with the Shogun; an emissary would be sent instead to Nagasaki. Yet even as the Russians scrambled to prepare for their long-awaited audience, Rezanov oscillated from fatalistic anticipation of failure to wildly optimistic fantasies of a Russian Pacific empire. One day he chatted excitedly of a circular trade in Alaskan furs, Chinese manufactures, Japanese grain and rice, all centred on Kamchatka. The next, Löwenstern bitchily reported, he was having whispered discussions with Shmelin on how to steal some of the emperor’s presents. Krusenstern reported that all the repairs to the Nadezhda had been made; Löwenstern drew cartoons of the ambassador doling out money from a box marked Kaznya – ‘state funds’ – to his crony Shmelin.
Rezanov and the Japanese ‘pulling the knot [of misunderstanding] tighter’.
On 27 March, as the cherry trees around Nagasaki came into full blossom, the Groote Heer – the emissary from Edo – finally arrived in Nagasaki. The tolk Shozaemon’s advice to Rezanov was to be ‘like pure water – one may pour water into whatever vessel one wishes and the liquid takes the form of the vessel’. Sadly, this Zen approach was not the Rezanov way. Predictably, long negotiations on protocol ensued. Would only Rezanov be carried in a litter or his whole party? Would he kneel, sit or stand? Would he wear shoes or be barefoot? Sword or no sword? Honour guard or not? And so on. The tolks were near their wits’ end. ‘If your Embassy is unsuccessful because you did not wish to bow, will you tell your Emperor that too?’ asked one of the Japanese in a rare moment of open frustration.14
On the appointed day the Daimyo of Hizen’s state barge – festooned with the customary flags, hangings, drummers and rowers – again made her stately way to the Russian compound at Umegasaki. Rezanov emerged in his carefully-cleaned chamberlain’s uniform with his Cross of Malta and glittering Order of St Anne prominently displayed. He was swordless and wore light shoes. Four of his cavaliers followed – Friderici and Fosse in their green-and-red army officers’ uniforms, Fyodorov in his blue regimentals and Langsdorff in his plain black academic uniform – accompanied by two soldiers, one bearing a standard and the other brushes to clean the gentlemen’s boots on arrival. A crowd of Japanese and ‘a rooster who had placed himself in front’ quietly watched the ceremony of the Russian marines presenting arms.15
The party disembarked at Nagasaki’s ‘Mussel Stairs’ (probably the Ohato embankment) to find the town transformed. The bustle they had observed through their telescopes had disappeared. Every door and shutter was firmly closed and the side streets shut off by screens of cloth and matting. ‘Here and there only we saw a head, urged on by insatiable curiosity, peeping from behind the hangings,’ wrote Landsdorff. ‘The tolks told us that the common people were not worthy to see so great a man as the Ambassador face to face.’ Preceded by an honour guard of forty-eight Japanese officials and soldiers, Rezanov was carried in a litter through the streets while his cavaliers followed on foot ‘still and slow like a funeral procession’.16 Unlike the muddy and pestilential streets of European cities of the era, Langsdorff found Nagasaki’s highway ‘broad and clean with wide gutters to carry away water’ and lined with finely built one-storey wooden houses.17
Rezanov, in ‘full omata’, presents his credentials to the Japanese.
At the governor’s house the Russians were prevailed upon to remove their shoes and boots and shown into an anteroom with paper walls furnished with a large porcelain spittoon, where they were given pipes of tobacco and tea which ‘in the general judgment of our company was by no means good’. The ambassador was shown into the presence of the emissary from Edo and the governor of Nagasaki. Behind them stood guards with drawn swords. Rezanov, as agreed, did not kneel but sat on the floor with his legs to the side.
The audience did not go well. Slowly and patiently, the Shogun’s man explained that an embassy had been expressly forbidden in the letter given to Laxman and that Rezanov’s presence was ‘absolutely inconsistent with propriety’. Rezanov protested that he was simply an instrument of his emperor’s will, delivering the letter which showed the Russian emperor’s ‘inclination to goodwill and friendship’. The official nodded gravely and observed that their Russian guest ‘must be unused to sitting in such an uncomfortable position’, bringing a polite end to the half-hour audience. A written answer would be delivered to Rezanov in two days.18
Spring rain poured from a low sky on 24 March, the day of the second interview. The tide was low and the boats ferrying the party to Hizen’s barge ran aground; all the Russians were soaked apart from Rezanov, who had the embassy’s only umbrella. Once they had crossed the bay, Rezanov insisted that litters be found for every member of his party, causing a two-hour delay which the Russians passed agreeably drinking tea and smoking on board the barge, warmed by braziers while their escorts waited in the rain. A Japanese artist had been sent to sketch the strangers; he seemed particularly fascinated by ‘Rezanov’s three-cornered feathered hat, his star and ribbon, the officers’ insignia, their buttons, scarves, keys of office, watch-strings and seals’.19
In the governor’s residence Reazanov was presented with a scroll that the tolks held to their foreheads in reverence and opened ‘with a deep awe’. This letter, from the court of Edo, was ‘an extraordinary instance of favour’ from the Shogun, the tolks explained. However, its contents were anything but
favourable to Rezanov’s ambitions. ‘The chain of friendship cannot be but disadvantageous to the weak members included in it,’ wrote the shogunal chancellery. ‘Japan has no great wants and therefore has little occasion for foreign productions. Her few real wants . . . are richly supplied by the Dutch and Chinese, and luxuries are things that she does not want to see introduced,’ the court explained. ‘Also our products are, unfortunately, very limited . . . all of Japan does not possess enough laquerware to fill your great ship.’20
More crushingly still, the Shogun regretted that he could not accept Tsar Alexander’s gifts or even his letter, since to do so would oblige him to reply in kind by sending an embassy to Russia ‘and we have no large vessels for such an undertaking, nor the gifts.’ In short, ‘The basic laws of Japan forbid us from making foreign acquaintances, and the breaking of this law could disturb the peace of Japan.’ To make the point absolutely clear, the tolks presented Rezanov with two further scrolls, one signed by every member of the shogunal council, confirming the ruling, and the other from the governor of Nagasaki, advising him that he was free to leave and that provisions would be sent out to the Nadezhda to ready her for her return to Russia.
There was little Rezanov could say or do. He attempted to get the Japanese to agree to accept payment for the food, firewood, copper, timber and cordage that had been so generously supplied. The answer was an absolute refusal. ‘If we accept one thaler or five hundred, it is still trade.’ The Japanese also rejected Rezanov’s suggestion that Russian ships could return shipwrecked Japanese sailors; in future, they stipulated, such survivors should be handed over to the Dutch for repatriation.
The Japanese, with their experience of Rezanov’s moods, were desperate to placate their guest’s volcanic temper. The Shogun’s representative offered twenty-four coats as a parting gift for Rezanov. As they left the audience, Shozaemon ‘asked very urgently whether the Russian emperor would declare war on Japan’. Rezanov assured him that he would not. The party set off back to the barge in the pouring rain, this time with no escort, their path back to the quay lit with waxed paper lanterns on poles. In the event it would not be the Russian emperor who declared a war of revenge on Japan but Rezanov himself.
‘Just as a body cannot be reunited with its sweat, just as little can the ancient laws of Japan be rescinded,’ Rezanov was told by Shozaemon , who had been – or at least told Rezanov he was – a keen advocate of opening trade.21 ‘All Japan is talking of you and saying that you are different from the Dutch, prouder, more heated and that you look down on the Japanese,’ lamented the translator, who had seen more than his fair share of just how proud and heated the ambassador could be.
It remained only to take on provisions and pay a farewell call on the Nagasaki authorities. At Rezanov’s third and final audience the Shogun’s emissary assured him that the long delay in considering his embassy has been ‘a proof of great friendship because other nations would have been refused much more quickly’. Rezanov, though he had promised not to, answered in Japanese. ‘I need and would like to buy a lot of things,’ he told them. ‘But since you are so hard as to refuse to give me permission to do so I am leaving here in great need.’ By Löwenstern’s account, ‘these unsuitable remarks were silently ignored’. Rezanov attempted to refuse the governor’s gift of twenty-five cases of silk wadding, but was told that Edo would have to be again consulted on what was to be done with the presents. ‘To obtain our liberty, therefore, our Excellency was obliged to accept.’22
A party of sailors painstakingly repacked the elephant clock, rugs, portrait, galvanic machine and all the rest, and hauled them back once again into the Nadezhda’s hold. The mirrors, judged too fragile to transport further, were left as a present for the Dutch, along with several candelabra and, oddly, a collection of steel coat buttons. To the long-suffering Japanese sailors, who were finally to be allowed to part company with their Russian companions, Rezanov (‘the personification of greed’, according to Löwenstern) gave three kisses and twenty ducats in addition to their navy pay of 300 Spanish thalers (pronounced ‘dollars’ by English sailors). The tolks accepted, after much persuasion, some tiny gifts – the Adams globe, a world map from Arrowsmith of London, a spyglass.
‘The Japanese seem to fear us now because Rezanov has talked of war and animosities,’ wrote Löwenstern. ‘They hope to get rid of us soon with goodwill . . . since Rezanov is not in his right senses.’23 A flotilla of thirty sampans carrying armed men appeared to guard the Nadezhda while a ‘superabundance of provisions’ was delivered, courtesy of the nervous Nagasaki authorities. The inventory complied by the careful Shmelin is indeed impressive reading: 1,627 eggs, 88 chickens, 85 ducks, 20 oysters, 1,982 pounds of white bread – plus ‘12 balls of twine, 8 giant snails, two pieces of seaweed and one bunch of parsley’. Three banyoshi who had accompanied the Shogun’s emissary from Edo came aboard to have what they believed was the last glimpse in their lifetimes of live Europeans and their craft; ‘unlike our local banyoshi these are free and bright with their looks, fresh and flexible in their bodies and have a thirst for knowledge’.24
These were not the only Japanese sorry to see the Russians go. ‘Mademoiselle Apsha’, a thirteen-year-old girl who lived in a house near the Russians’ compound, sent a small portrait of herself to Moritz Kotzebue, along with a bouquet of white, green and red roses. Sadly, apart from a couple of lines in Löwenstern’s diary, we have no other description of this would-be Madame Butterfly and her crush on the young Kotzebue. In a fit of righteousness, or perhaps simple malice, Rezanov confiscated the picture of the infatuated girl. The barge of the ‘Prince of Tschingodsi’ – probably the Daimyo of the fief of Chikugo, who shared the duty of defending Nagasaki Bay – a far inferior craft to Hizen’s, ferried the embassy and its effects back to the Nadezhda. This time there was no ceremonial escort.
‘Rezanov, quiet and still, speaks neither of the past, present or future,’ observed Löwenstern. ‘He was always niggardly [with his drink] the whole trip; now every morning at breakfast a double bottle of schnapps gets emptied . . . at noon one or two bottles of Madeira or Cheres, and at tea he offers the finest Jamaica [rum].’ This sudden impetuous generosity was taken by his shipmates as a disturbing sign of Rezanov’s deep despair.
At four o’clock in the morning of 5 April 1805 a flotilla of boats manned by soldiers in the livery of the ‘Prince of Tschikusa’ took the Russian ship under tow and rowed her out into the sea-roads four miles off Nagasaki. Only there, safely out of cannon shot, was the Nadezhda’s powder returned, along with the swords and muskets. With the powder was a final parting gift for the ambassador: a beautifully-wrapped packet of seeds for the Empress of Russia so that she might have Japanese flowers in her northern gardens.
14
The Voyage of the Maria
Authority is a solvent of humanity.
Patrick O’Brian, HMS Surprise
Most of the men who come here are depraved, drunk, violent and corrupted to such an extent that any society would consider it a great relief to get rid of them.
Nikolai Rezanov to the directors of the Russian American Company, 18051
The Nadezhda stopped briefly at Sakhalin Island before returning to Petropavlovsk on 24 May 1805. Two other ships rode at anchor in Kamchatka’s Avacha Bay, the Company brig Maria Magdalena and the imperial transport Theodosia. An unidentified disease had broken out among the crew of the Nadezhda and Rezanov himself was running a high fever. Sick and humiliated, he installed himself in the log cabin of Major Krupskoi, the senior officer of the settlement. General Koshchelev was once again absent from Petropavlovsk. Rezanov fired off a quick letter to him announcing the Nadezhda’s return and expressing his anger at his treatment by the Japanese. Their refusal to accept the Russian embassy ‘will cost them dear’, Rezanov blustered.2
All was not well ashore. Lieutenant Andrean Mashin, captain of the Maria, presented himself to Rezanov without his uniform, drunk. Rezanov, not in the best of moods, ordered
his valet to throw Mashin out of the house and not admit him again until he was properly dressed. When Mashin reappeared it was to admit that he had failed to deliver supplies to Alaska the previous autumn. Furthermore, a boatload of would-be colonists the Maria had brought from Okhotsk had revolted: twenty-four of the eighty-strong party had already deserted, preferring to take their chances in Kamchatka’s wilderness to risking the privations of Russian America. ‘They are rebelling, they want to attack me,’ a tearful Mashin, again drunk, confided to a fellow naval officer in Company service, Lieutenant Nikolai Khvostov. Löwenstern formed no good opinion of the few colonists who remained. ‘The subjects of the Russian American Company are known scoundrels and rascals, because who wants to go to Kamchatka as a prospector if he can find bread in St Petersburg or Moscow?’3
There was more bad news from America. The previous autumn Mashin had got as far as the Aleutian Islands, where he picked up mail from Baranov, who confirmed that Fort St Michael on Sitka Sound had indeed been raided and destroyed by natives.
The letters from St Petersburg Rezanov found waiting for him did little to improve his mood. The Tsar himself had written with advance congratulations on the embassy’s success in Japan. A worried Rumiantsev asked about the situation at Fort St Michael. Buldakov reported falling Company profits. There was also five-month-old news from Europe: Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor of France, and the continent was once again preparing for war. Worst of all, friends in St Petersburg wrote to inform Rezanov that the Tsar was delighted by news of his reconciliation with Krusenstern and was planning to award the Order of St Anne First Class to the captain, to match Rezanov’s own. The other officers were also to be handsomely decorated on their return.
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 22