Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
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Langsdorff also found the outposts filthy and disorderly with no medicine and little food.41 ‘The natives are so completely slaves of the Russian American Company that even their clothes and the bone tips of their spears belong to the Company,’ he wrote. The ‘oppression under which they live at home, the total want of care and the change in modes of living’42 plus the Company’s practice of sending away the best hunters from their home villages for months at a time had diminished the population severely since Shelikhov’s day.
Langsdorff described the Aleuts as ‘a kind of middle race between Mongol Tatars and North Americans . . . they have a pleasingly benevolent expression of countenance, their character is generally kind hearted, obliging, submissive and careful, but if roused to anger become rash and unthinking, even malevolent . . . The colour of their skin is a dirty brown to which perhaps their habits of life and a great want of cleanliness may well contribute.’43, 44 The Aleut habit of washing their hair and clothes in human urine, kept in large open buckets at the entrances to their underground abodes, did not help sweeten their smell. They were both polygamous and polyandrous: ‘boys if they happen to be handsome, are often brought up entirely as girls and instructed in all the arts women use to please men. Their beards are plucked, chins tattooed like those of women, they wear ornaments of glass beads and bind and cut their hair as women and supply their places with the men as concubines.’ Langsdorff found it a ‘shocking, immoral and unnatural practice.’45 Incest was also widely practised, ‘the nation in this respect following the example of sea-dogs [seals] and otters’.46, 47
Their villages of half-buried houses ‘resemble a European churchyard full of graves’. Their dwellings – barabaras – ‘consist of a large room with a door three foot square and an opening in the roof to let out smoke. The middle a large hole is dug for a fire . . . it answers the purpose of courtyard, kitchen and, when required, a theatre,’ wrote Lieutenant Davydov. ‘All household chores are done here, cleaning fish repairing baidarkas. Around the main hall are individual dwellings reached by separate holes in roof hatches covered in translucent fish skin.’48
Left to their own devices, the Aleuts were perfectly adapted to their environment. Every part of the seals they hunted was put to good use – the oesopahgus for leggings and boots, the fat for light, the entrails for waterproof parkas and ‘carters smocks ornamented with glass beads, exquisitely made, taking up to a year to make and decorated with little red feathers’.49 Seal intestine was also used instead of glass on windows, the bones for household utensils. Local bilberries, raspberries, cloudberries, cranberries and whortleberries were eaten by children and the sick, the Aleuts never having made the connection between the fact that ‘a vegetable diet was not much esteemed’ in their culture and their chronic seasonal scurvy.50 They had become addicted under Russian influence to snuff, and would work as much as a day for a pinch of it. Alcohol, the other great Russian vice, was to decimate Aleut communities in the twentieth century, but in this period was so scarce that Baranov seldom saw a barrel of brandy from year to year, and with barley or other grains almost unknown on the islands even producing decent home-brew was nearly impossible.
In early July the Company transport, the Svyatoi Alexander, sailed into Unalaska harbour, bringing Rezanov good news from the south: Baranov had recaptured Fort St Michael the previous summer. The Neva, under Lisiansky, had participated in the battle. In celebration of the victory the Unalaska natives amused Rezanov – or perhaps didn’t – with their dances, accompanied by the rhythmic rattle of small stones in sea-dog bladders. ‘The only motion consists of a kind of hop.’51
The Maria sailed for Kodiak on 10 July 1805, leaving ‘some of the most unruly and diseased . . . of our half-starved, miserable crew’52 to the care of Larionov, while taking in their place some of the healthiest and best Aleut hunters, as well as Mrs Larionov’s last cured ham, several salted and smoked geese and a large supply of fish pastries. One imagines there were mixed feelings in the Larionov household concerning Rezanov’s flying visit.
Shelikhov’s original settlement at Three Hierarchs Bay on Kodiak Island had been badly damaged by a tsunami in 1792, and its harbour rendered useless by a sandbank swept inshore by the giant wave. Baranov relocated to a promontory on the north-eastern shore of Kodiak he called St Paul’s Harbour. Even today, it seems an odd place for a town. The settlement stood clustered on a small plain overlooking a narrow channel, with sea inlets on two sides. But unlike the aptly named Anchorage, a day’s sail to the north, Kodiak’s twin harbours are shallow, prone to currents and barely sheltered from the massive storms which barrel in from the Pacific. Even on relatively calm days the swells breaking on Armoury Point to the north of the town throw spray forty feet in the air. The modern Kodiak, like most of small-town America, is widely spaced and huddles low to the ground. In winter, when the sport fishermen and cruise ships have gone and only a handful of bear hunters are in town, it has an abandoned air. Sea winds howl across the wide empty spaces between the giant downtown Wal-Mart and the locked fishing-boat sheds on the shore. The heights that loom over the town beyond the modern-day Rezanov Drive are bleak and covered in gorse and brush, like the Scottish Highlands, and beyond are tall stands of spruce and pine.
It was these forests that had attracted Baranov to this desolate place. No timber grew on the windswept Aleutians, and the woods at Kodiak were the first supply of straight pinewood between Kamchatka and the Alaskan mainland. The giant spruces, towering up to 120 feet into the air, were perfect for shipbuilding, while the less springy and denser redwoods were good for houses. The colonists mostly hailed from north Russia and Siberia, so naturally enough they built Siberian-style houses in their new colonies – one-storey, two-roomed log cabins made of whole timbers and caulked with moss. In the centre, dividing the structure in half, stood a large brick or stone stove at least two yards square reaching from the foundations to the roof. The design was perfect for extreme, dry, Siberian cold, less so for the mild, rainy winters of Russian America.
Nonetheless, the old Company storehouse, built in 1808 and incorporated into a later plank-built house, survives. The massive timbers are three feet wide, hand sawn down two sides and morticed together at each corner. In its heyday literally millions of rubles’ worth of sea-otter pelts were stored in the house, enough to buy several ships-of-the-line or run the imperial court for months. Now the Baranov Museum, it contains a few tangible remains of Rezanov’s period: a bronze bust of Alexander I brought by Lisiansky as a present from the Company; various corroded small-bore cannon; the Company’s locally-issued money printed on squares of sealskin because of the shortage of metal.
By the time Rezanov made landfall, on 31 July 1805, Kodiak already boasted thirty houses, including a brick manufactory, a forge, barracks and storehouses, docks, vegetable gardens and even an iron smelter. But it was hardly the ‘regular and well-ordered town’ envisaged by Shelikhov. The main ‘magazine’ held the Company’s collected wealth, the thousands of cured pelts stored for transport to Okhotsk. On their first voyage for the RAC two years before, Khvostov and Davydov had collected 18,000 sea-otter pelts from Kodiak, as well as fox, marten, black bear and ‘sea bear’ valued at two million rubles.
Kodiak was at least better appointed – in terms of accommodation and manufactures if not food – than many Siberian ostrogs. Moreover, despairing of seeing any ships from St Petersburg or Okhotsk and in spite of a desperate shortage of tar, cordage, nails and tools, Baranov had succeeded in building his own. The Engish shipwright John Shields’ three-masted brig Phoenix, had been built on an uninhabited bay on Prince William Sound in 1793. But Shields’ smaller, single-masted ships Olga and Delfin were built on Baranov’s new slipway in Kodiak in the two subsequent summers. It was a remarkable achievement – in nearly two centuries on the Pacific coast of the Americas the Spanish had not yet succeeded in building a single ship there.
This progress had come at a high cost, largely to the local population. Acc
ording to a census of Kodiak and the Aleutian Islands taken by Joseph Billings during his tour of inspection in 1791–2, the native population stood between 4,797 and 5,995 souls.53 In the first seven years of Baranov’s rule in Russian America one in ten of the Aleut population was killed, most of them during dangerous hunting expeditions far from home into which they had been press-ganged by Russians.
‘The Company rounded up the Aleut hunters for the Sitka hunting party in the following manner,’ reported Hieromonk Gideon, who had arrived in Russian America with Lisiansky on the Neva in 1804.
The Russians equipped themselves with leg irons, manacles, wooden neck-yokes and whips (for the young ones) and sticks (to beat the older ones), a boat was sent with a light cannon and muskets to the western edge of Kodiak. The armed Russians formed a line and said to the Koniags, ‘Well, anyone who does not wish to go may speak up now and be shot.’ Who under such threat could express his objections? On arrival at Sitka the Russians discharged a cannon, then put out all the manacles and yokes on the deck and stood with loaded guns. ‘Whoever does not wish to go may choose one of these irons for himself.’ The first man to try to talk himself out of going was immediately seized, clapped in irons and whipped until he could barely say the words, ‘I will go.’54
Gideon estimated in his subsequent report to the Holy Synod in St Petersburg that between 1792 and 1805 ‘One hundred and ninety-five Aleuts have been captured or killed by Tlingit,’ the natives of mainland Alaska, ethnically and culturally distinct from the Aleuts. A further 290 had drowned accidentally and 135 died as a result of shellfish poisoning. Langsdorff believed that depopulation had been more radical still. Evstrat Delarov estimated the population of Kodiak and its neighbouring islands at 3,000 souls in 1790. By 1805 Langsdorff found that no more than 450 able-bodied men were at the Kodiak manager Ivan Banner’s disposal. ‘The spreading of unusual diseases, oppression and ill usage – especially compulsory fatiguing hunting parties – cares and sorrows and insurrections have, like a pestilence, depopulated the countries to an almost incredible degree.’55 The Company’s activities were proving almost as devastating to the region’s human inhabitants as to its wildlife.
The monks of Kodiak became the Aleuts’ most vocal – and indeed only – defenders. As early as 1796 reports by Archimandrite Iosaf of abuses by Russian colonists had hindered Shelikhov’s attempts to get Catherine II to grant a monopoly and a state loan. Even after Iosaf’s death in the wreck of the Phoenix in 1799 his monks continued the dead prelate’s complaints. This attitude did little to endear the clergy to the RAC and its officers, who concluded that the snitching monks were bad for business. Gideon, for his part, reported that the Company’s Russian employees also ‘use the monks as their tools against the Manager’.
Rezanov’s attitude was more nuanced. On the one hand he found the rank-and-file monks venal and brutal, and he complained about them at length to both Company and emperor. When news came in late summer 1805 that the newly founded outpost on Lake Ilamna had been overrun by Yakutat Tlingits and all the Russians massacred, Rezanov placed the blame squarely on the Church rather than on the Company’s manager Stepan Larionov, brother of the Larionov of Unalaska, who was massacred along with his family.56
‘The monk Juvenaly . . . baptized the natives forcibly, married them, took girls away from some and gave them to others,’ Rezanov wrote to the directors of the RAC with news of the massacre.
The [native] Americans endured his rough ways and beatings for a long time and finally held council decided to get rid of the Reverend and killed him. He does not deserve pity. But the natives in exasperation killed the whole crew of Russians and Kodiak people . . . I told the Holy Fathers that if any of them took another step without first getting the managers’ approval or if they meddled in civil affairs I would order such criminals deported to Russia, where for disrupting the peace of the community they would be defrocked and severely punished to make an example of them. They cried and rolled at my feet and told me it was the government employees who had told them what to do. . . . I admonished them thus privately in the presence of Father Gideon but in public I have always showed respect for their dignity.57
At the same time Rezanov thought highly of Gideon. He wrote to the Hieromonk with great civility, asking him ‘what is required annually for the upkeep of the clergy and beautification of the temple of God . . . I deem it one of my first duties to understand the present situation of the spiritual mission.’ Rezanov evidently found Gideon both an intelligent companion and ally in his mission to bring enlightenment to the new colonies. The thirty-five-year-old Gideon, born Gavriil Fedotov in Orel, was, with Langsdorff and Rezanov and the three naval officers, one of only a handful of educated men in the colony. Gideon had studied rhetoric, logic, geography, physics and geometry at the Belograd seminary and taught French and mathematics in St Petersburg; his mission from the Synod was ‘to inspect the new converts in the Christian settlements in America’.58
In Rezanov’s view the Orthodox Church in America should be an arm of the Company, to be used by the authorities as an instrument of social control, just as the Church had for centuries been an arm of the state in continental Russia. The Company was founded on the exploitation of natural resources – which meant not just the local fauna but the natives and Russians too. The RAC was, in this respect, feudal in its organization and philosophy. The priests’ role was to pacify the locals and persuade them to resign themselves to their fate. The monks should, in Rezanov’s opinion, refrain from joining the RAC’s managers in abusing the natives – but neither should they take the natives’ side against the Company. ‘I ask you to ensure that obedience to the management is preserved among the Americans,’ he urged Gideon. ‘Or else in this region all may unravel and be lost . . . and the knives under which we live will again be used to annihilate Russians.’59
But the Company was more than just a glorified Cossack raiding cartel. Its officers, and especially Rezanov, also believed, or claimed to believe, in Shelikhov’s ideas of a civilizing mission. Efforts to educate native peoples were unknown, for instance, among the Cossack fur traders of Siberia. The Company also employed some of Russia’s finest ethnographers and geographers. The mission of the Neva and Nadezhda was in part a voyage of discovery on the lines of Cook’s and Vancouver’s. Several naval officers employed by the Company – notably Lisiansky, Davydov and later Vasily Golovnin – took considerable interest in native customs and welfare. Lisiansky’s magnificent collections of native artefacts formed the basis of the Kunstkammer Museum in St Petersburg’s unrivalled native American collections. Langsdorff’s detailed ethnographic accounts of the native traditions became a bestseller when republished in London in 1813. Even Hieromonk Gideon was a man of science as much as of the cloth and sent detailed descriptions of the culture of the Kodiak peoples back to Russia. He described the natives’ shamanic rites – igrushki, ‘little games’, as he called them – with curiosity rather than censure. He also took a keen interest in native herbal cures and Aleut cosmology and myth.
Importantly, Gideon shared many of Rezanov’s criticisms of the slapdash practices of the local clergy. ‘Our monks have never followed the path of the Jesuits of Paraguay by trying to develop the mentality of the savages,’ wrote Gideon. ‘They have just been “bathing” the Americans, and when, due to their ability to copy, the latter learn in half an hour how to make the sign of the cross our missionaries return, proud of their success, thinking their job is done.’60 Gideon moved quickly to remedy the situation. A school of sorts for fifteen native children had been founded by Shelikhov himself in 1784–5 and continued by Archimandrite Iosaf. But it was Gideon who created the first semblance of systematic education, opening a two-class school for up to a hundred part-time native pupils, who learned writing, reading and catechism in the junior classes and arithmetic, grammar, Church and state history in the senior.
One of Rezanov’s less attractive habits was taking credit for the achievements of others. He t
old the Company that it was he who had ordered this school opened; he hadn’t. Gideon mentioned it in a letter to his superior Metropolitan Amvrosii five months before Rezanov’s arrival. Nonetheless it is clear that Rezanov took a lively interest in the place, handing out ‘personal awards’ to the best students after examining fifty pupils in their grammar and prayers. Rezanov also claimed that he had, in the course of a three-week stay in Kodiak, knocked out a seven-language dictionary of several hundred entries detailing the various dialects of the Aleut language, which he enclosed for the directors’ perusal.
‘I commissioned [the monks] to make a dictionary so as not to be at the mercy of interpreters [but] because a work of this kind looked as big and forbidding as a bear I began to make one myself?,?’ wrote Rezanov breezily. ‘The dictionary took quite a bit of work and enclosing it here I beg you to publish it and send bound copies here [for the] American schools.’61 This dictionary was also in reality largely the work of Gideon, who was the first to translate the Lord’s Prayer into the Alutiiq language.