This was too much for Rezanov’s battered pride to bear. The previous year he had sent a series of bitterly critical reports of Krusenstern and his officers, finally accusing them of mutiny.4 Now news came from the court – his very own stamping ground and spiritual home – that these officers were to be rewarded while he, Rezanov, would suffer the humiliation of reporting the absolute failure of his diplomatic mission to Japan. In his own eyes, he had stood up single-handedly for the honour and authority of the Tsar in the face of the arrogant German officers who had tried to defy it. Now the Tsar was ignoring the word of the man he had appointed to head the expedition and instead rewarding the mutineers.
In this angry frame of mind, still in bed with fever, Rezanov composed a long letter to the Emperor which bristled with indignation, spleen and barely-concealed accusations of betrayal. Penned between 9 and 12 June 1805, the twenty-page report blasts Koshchelev’s administration of Kamchatka and complains about Krusenstern’s insubordination. In a frenzy of self-pity, Rezanov even threatened to leave government service altogether: ‘I will stay in America for a century. Rank and decorations are not necessary in America and I will send them back with pleasure on the first available transport.’ Rejecting the tokens of the Tsar’s favour was just about the most insulting thing a courtier could do. Rezanov’s petulant letter surely deserves a place alongside the rashest political suicide notes in history.
Nor did Rezanov keep his anger to himself. ‘Using very bitter expressions,’ recorded Lowenstern, ‘Rezanov said he intended to move totally to Kodiak’ and even claimed that he had asked Rumiantsev ‘to send his children there when they turn thirteen’, though there is no trace of this request in any of Rezanov’s surviving letters.5 He also bawled at Tilesius, who reported that Rezanov ‘tried openly to kill me with the most dishonourable of swear words, so that I sought the protection of the governor of Kamchatka’.6 The fateful dispatches to the Emperor were sealed and handed to Councillor Fosse, who was returning to Okhotsk and St Petersburg on the Theodosia.
At some point in eastern Siberia Rezanov’s blistering letters must have found themselves under the same post-house roof as the emperor’s missive to Rezanov, heading the other way. It was the warmest, friendliest and most supportive letter the emperor had ever sent to him; it would also be the last. ‘As a sign of Our particular good wishes towards you I send you a diamond tobacco case with Our monogram,’ wrote Alexander in his own hand. ‘I have also taken your son as a Page at court.’ One can only imagine Rezanov’s anguish at the knowledge that his apparent reply to this honour and kindness would be his own angry outburst, now heading inexorably towards the imperial Chancellery in Fosse’s waterproof document case.
There was some comfort amid the bad news. Rezanov was alone at last in a relatively spacious room for the first time in a year and a half, and finally free of the company of the officers of the Nadezhda. Despite his physical and emotional exhaustion, the old gambler’s belief that the next play could make everything right – silence his critics at a stroke with a single, glorious stroke of genius – still ran strong. He knew he had to somehow save his reputation and career, or he would never be able to show his face at court again. A crossroads, then. There was no way to explain away the disaster of Nagasaki in which the Tsar and the RAC had invested so much treasure and hope, he decided, except by holding out the promise of a greater victory. ‘Not through petty enterprise but by great undertakings have mighty bodies achieved rank and power,’ he would write the next year to Rumiantsev.7 The time had come for a bold stroke.
Rezanov informed St Petersburg that the Nadezhda would continue her voyage without him. He would instead sail on the Maria back east to Russian America, take the new territories in hand after the disaster of Sitka and lay the foundations of the Pacific empire about which he had spoken so passionately at court. The consolidation and conquest of America would be Rezanov’s redemption.
Rezanov’s long-suffering valet Alexander was dispatched to clear out his cabin on the Nadezhda and remove a selection of the Japanese present fund from the hold. The Maria, in a terrible state after a winter being buffeted by Pacific gales, was to be readied for sea again, her foul berths sluiced out and all available cordage, supplies, sailcloth and tools scrounged from Petropavlovsk and loaded aboard.
Rezanov, ‘not judging it expedient to wander among the rugged, uncultivated and inhospitable coasts of America without the attendance of a physician, made very advantageous proposals to me to accompany him’, wrote Langsdorff.8 The doctor, excited by the prospect of natural-historical discoveries in America and perhaps less than keen on returning to the pox-ridden Nadezhda, agreed. His letters written and orders issued, and with Langsdorff at his side with his bleeding bowl and scalpel, Rezanov retired exhausted to his bed to let his illness run its course.
Meanwhile the brawling, ill-disciplined daily life of Petropavlovsk raged unchecked. A brief mutiny on board the Maria was quelled by navy officers Khvostov and Davydov: one smacked the rebels’ leader over the head with a hefty stick while the other slapped each mutineer in the face in turn.9 A fight also broke out among the commanders of the garrison of Kamchatka. Major Krupskoi, nominally the governor’s chargé d’affaires and Rezanov’s host, had lost all authority over his unruly subordinates. Army Lieutenant Falkin attacked Krupskoi with a knife in a local alehouse, shouting, ‘Get out of here if you love life.’ Krupskoi succeeded in having Falkin arrested, but when he was called away on government business Falkin’s allies dismantled the major’s house and attacked his children.10 ‘In the summer the soldiers are lazy and catch no fish for winter supplies; in the winter they starve with their dogs,’ complained Löwenstern. ‘They would rather chop up fences that do not belong to them than cut down wood which is growing in front of their noses.’11
On the morning of 14 July 1805, with Rezanov’s fever past and the mutinous sailors subdued, the Maria raised anchor and turned towards the rising sun. The Nadezhda’s officers celebrated Rezanov’s departure with a drunken party, amusing themselves by taking turns to impersonate ‘Petrovik’s’ humiliation at the hands of the insolently polite Japanese tolks.12
Rezanov was grateful to be, finally, in undisputed charge of a vessel – albeit one that began to disintegrate almost as soon as she left harbour. The 150-ton, two-masted Maria was, complained Rezanov, ‘the newest and supposedly best Company ship’, but her bowsprit fell off and her topmasts had to be lowered because they threatened to split in the freshening wind. ‘Such is the shipbuilding at Okhotsk. The ignorance of the shipbuilders there and the shameless robbery by Company representatives produces worthless ships that cost more than ships built anywhere else.’13 The ship’s company also left much to be desired. The Nadezhda, for all its jealous officers, hard-drinking priests and pranksome counts, was at least a Chatham-built Tsar’s ship crewed and commanded by professional sailors. The Okhotsk-built Maria contained the scum of the earth. ‘From the moral point of view they may be called the refuse of mankind,’ sniffed Langsdorff.14 This band of desperadoes, adventurers, cut-throats and Siberian half-breeds were in various stages of scurvy from a diet of ‘dry and frozen fish, the fat of whales and sea dogs [seals] as their principal nutrient’.15 They also sported an impressive variety of venereal diseases. ‘Our crew consisted of adventurers, drunkards, bankrupt traders and mechanics or branded convicts in search of a fortune.’16 However, as Löwenstern wryly noted after the Maria’s departure, discipline could only improve as they sailed east. ‘Even though the RAC hires the worst scoundrels [in Kodiak], they are forced to behave. He cannot escape – except into the hands of the [native] Americans, who would seldom let a Russian live.’
The ship was so overloaded – in part by Rezanov’s four jolly boatloads of luggage – that ‘the greater part of the crew were obliged by turns to remain on deck’.17 This overcrowding and the ‘great want of linen’ meant that the fastidious Langsdorff rarely ventured out to ‘the place where fresh air might be inhaled’ because ‘these
dirty disgusting men were sitting about it everywhere, disencumbering themselves of their unwanted guests’. The carpet of dead lice, ticks and fleas kept Langsdorff ‘in a constant fever of disgust and horror at the sight of them’.18
The officers were little better. ‘In Captain Krusenstern and other companions on the Nadezhda I had been accustomed to the society of upright and enlightened friends,’19 wrote Langsdorff. The officers of the Maria were, apparently, neither. The Company had always had trouble recruiting good officers, and the few graduates of the Naval Academy that the Company was able to hire were to be retained at all costs, whatever their drunken and slovenly behavior. Khvostov and Davydov told Langsdorff – almost certainly pulling the prim German’s leg – that one of the Company’s officers had been ‘exiled to Siberia for incest with his own mother’.20 It’s a measure of the low esteem in which their fellow officers were held that the German doctor believed them.
Nikolai Khvostov had been passed over for promotion after a dispute with the Admiralty and had recruited his younger protégé Midshipman Gavriil Davydov for service in America with the promise of fortune and adventure. Both were on their second tour to Russian America. ‘I do not know if it is good or bad fate which let us come together with N. P. Rezanov in this the remote point of the Russian state,’ wrote Khvostov in June 1805.
Nonetheless, Rezanov was hopeful. Piled above the stinking bilges of the Maria’s hold were the accoutrements of civilization – books, charts, navigational instruments donated by the flower of the St Petersburg scientific world and the Tsar’s ministers for the betterment of the empire’s future subjects, and even Dr Galvani’s (evidently rather sturdy) electric machine. He was finally to see the wild coasts of which he had spoken so enthusiastically and for so many years but never visited.
Rezanov’s first sight of Russia’s offshore empire was magnificent, but appalling. Through the mists off the Pribilov Islands the Maria’s crew saw a land teeming with brown slippery bodies, the largest seal rookeries in the world. But as they approached the bleak black-sanded harbour of St Paul Island, Rezanov was almost felled by the wave of putrefaction from piles of rotting seal carcasses. ‘The number of seals on this island is unbelievable. The shores are covered with them. It is very easy to kill them,’ wrote Rezanov. ‘Before I arrived 30,000 male seals had been killed in a single day. Their pelts had been discarded.’21 Only the animals’ penises had been removed for the Canton market, where they were much prized as aphrodisiacs. The Russian colonists had been encouraged in this practice by visiting Boston boats. Twenty had called over the previous season alone, buying up thousands of air-dried seal penises and slaughtering more seals themselves.22
‘More than a million fur seals had been killed by the time I arrived,’ a shocked Rezanov reported to Company headquarters. ‘Even at that I was told that there are only a tenth as many as there used to be. These islands could be an inexhaustible source of wealth if only the Bostonians did not compete with us on the Chinese market.’23 Already the sea otter, once so plentiful on the Pribylov Islands that 3,000 pelts were taken in a single recent season, had disappeared from those waters. Steller’s sea cow, once a favourite food for sailors and colonists, had also been hunted to extinction within twenty-five years of its discovery; the last known specimen was caught in 1768. It was the old paradox which had driven Russia’s imperial expansion in the first place, restlessly probing east in search of the retreating fur-bearing animals. ‘The Russians for momentary advantage kill all they meet with – old and young,’ wrote Langsdorff. ‘Nor do they see that by such a procedure they must soon be deprived of their trade entirely.’24
Langsdorff led a scientific expedition into the seal rookeries, noting that the animals seemed to have no fear of man, an evolutionary lapse that had proved disastrous to their species. The noise and smell were overpowering. ‘From many came a tone not unlike a person vomiting, and others cried like little children.’25 Rezanov allowed the Maria’s men to kill eighty seals for meat and then ‘ordered the killing be stopped lest they be exterminated and set the men to obtaining walrus tusks instead’.26 The meat was ‘very like veal’ as long as the seals had fed only on their mothers’ milk; otherwise Langsdorff found it disagreeably fishy.
The fifteen Russian colonists on the Pribilovs lived in dugouts and earth huts with their roofs held up with whale ribs, there being no timber on these windswept islands. ‘The climate is cold and ungenial and it appears scarcely comprehensible how any persons not natives of the country can have resolved to fix their abode in so confined a spot, separated almost entirely from the rest of the world.’27 Despite this, the Russian settlers ‘fell at the Chamberlain’s feet’,28 pleading not to be sent home and to be allowed to remain with their Aleut wives. Rezanov was unmoved, ruling that all employees of the Company must observe the regulations set down by Shelikhov and leave for the mainland after fifteen years’ service.
The Maria lumbered on eastwards along the Aleutian chain. ‘In winter the seas are covered with vast rocks of ice, in summer subject to perpetual fogs.’29 At St George’s Island the cannon fired to announce their arrival set such a large number of seabirds into flight that ‘literally a thick living cloud spread itself around us; the sea as far as our horizon reached was blackened by birds’.30
It was on Unalaska that Rezanov had his first sight of sea otters, the lifeblood of the Company’s business. Fur seals and walruses could be clubbed on land where they lay, and the resulting market glut meant their fur was cheap. The sea otter, on the other hand, was a far more elusive beast. Sea otters hunted fish in small groups up to half a mile offshore. They were also, unlike their seal cousins, deeply wary of humans.31 The Aleut had hunted them for centuries from light two- or three-man canoes made of a light driftwood frame covered with sealskin. The Russians called these craft baidarkas, a Siberian term for a bark boat; the Aleuts called them iqyax. They are now better known by their Inuit name, kayak. Langsdorff called them ‘the best means yet discovered by man to go from place to place in the quickest, easiest and safest manner possible’.*32
Women sewed the skins but only men were allowed to handle the finished baidarkas, which were considered living things and members of the family. Paddling into range of the otters wearing special peaked wooden caps to keep the sun out of their eyes, the hunters could cast javelins extraordinary distances with the help of notched eighteen-inch-long throwing planks to give their arms more leverage. The Aleuts’ hunting skills quickly proved their undoing. After local onshore communities of sea otters were exhausted, the Russian managers began to press-gang male Aleuts into months-long long-range hunting expeditions, leaving no one at home in the villages to catch and dry fish. This staple of the islanders’ diet, known as iukola, now had to be bought at inflated prices from the Company, trapping whole families in cycles of debt from which it was impossible to escape.33
As the Maria progressed along the stations of the Aleutian archipelago, Rezanov found himself, in the Russian phrase, ‘both Tsar and God’ – or at least the closest to either the locals were ever likely to see. At each stop the natives prostrated themselves before him and the colonists met him bareheaded, not daring to raise their eyes before this great eminence. At Unalaska, the largest settlement on the archipelago before Kodiak, Rezanov set himself to dispensing justice. He ordered the Aleut hunters to give an account of their Russian masters. The local toions – Aleut elders – dutifully (and improbably) reported that Unalaska’s manager Emilian Larionov was ‘as a father to them . . . they had only one request to make and that was that the manager to be as good to them in the future as he was in the past’.34 Later reports by Company officers depict Larionov as vicious and almost deranged, making the toions’ praise all the more curious – or perhaps all the more understandable, given that the great chamberlain was passing through wheras Larionov was there to stay. Deserved or not, Rezanov duly presented a gold medal to Larionov and a silver one to his interpreter.
An Aleut carrying a brass
double-headed Russian eagle on a pole. Sketch by Martin Sauer, 1792.
Demid Kuliakov, the RAC’s foreman of the Pribilov Islands, was less fortunate.35 Kuliakov lived on the island of Akhta, where he had a native wife and half-breed son, but was visiting Unalaska on Company business when he seems to have got into a bit of drunken bother. The exact circumstances of his crimes in Unalaska are unclear because only Rezanov kept a brief record of the justice he summarily dispensed. But Kuliakov was clapped in irons on Rezanov’s orders ‘for the inhuman beating of an American woman and her baby son’36 and sent to Russia for trial.
Although Rumiantsev had breezily entrusted Rezanov with administering justice in Russian America, in truth neither Rezanov nor any other officer of the RAC had any formal judicial authority over the natives or colonists. Indeed for this reason there was still not a single prison or courthouse in Russian America when the colony was sold in 1867. In theory all felons and witnesses in capital cases had to be shipped to the nearest crown courts, six months’ travel away in Irkutsk. But in practice local managers freely doled out corporal punishment. Most common was public flogging with baleen staves taken from the mouths of beached whales. RAC managers also forcibly impressed natives into working on distant islands as a matter of course. Men like Kuliakov were used to exercising casual brutality and absolute, feudal authority over their native charges.
Whether Kuliakov’s behaviour in Unalaska was truly out of the ordinary or Rezanov was simply using his case as a way to display his power in front of the assembled toions is unclear. Löwenstern, who later saw Kuliakov in chains in Kamchatka, noted that ‘his head for business and usefulness has caused the Company managers to wink at his many cruelties’.37 In any case, for Kuliakov being sent away from the colony for trial was punishment enough. He never returned to Russian America or saw his native wife or son again. Langsdorff was ‘very much overcome by the manner in which I saw the colonists’ lives sported with’38 and felt ‘such repugnance to the scenes of horror which seemed to be in store for me that I almost resolved to shut myself in my chamber lest by communication I should come to be like those with whom I was principally surrounded . . . The distant islands are commonly under the supervision of a Russian colonist, in other words, a rascal, by whom they are oppressed, tormented and plundered in every way.’39 Rezanov also formed no good opinion of the colonists. ‘Those of depraved minds go nowadays to America solely with the aim of growing rich and then upon their return journey fritter it away in a few days, scattering like dust the riches obtained by many years of other people’s tears. Can such desperate people respect their fellow beings? They have given up family life altogether and have no good example to follow. Therefore the poor Americans are (to Russia’s shame) sacrificed to their debauchery.’40
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 23