For all his complaints about the clergy, it was the Fathers, not the Company, to whom Rezanov entrusted the agricultural experiments that were a strategically vital part of Russian America’s future. As long as the colony could not feed itself it was at the mercy of the erratic transports from Okhotsk and therefore inherently insecure. Without vegetables the Russians sickened and died from scurvy. The monks dispatched by Shelikhov in 1794 had attempted to grow potatoes, radishes, poppies, turnips, tobacco, cabbage, cucumbers, watermelons, melons, green peas, sunflowers and beets. Of that ambitious potager, only the potatoes, winter radishes and turnips grew, plus a bit of barley on manured ground.62 Rezanov reported that he ‘gave Father Herman twenty [native] boys to be trained in agriculture. They will be taken to Spruce Island, to the north of Kodiak, to experiment with sowing wheat, planting potatoes and vegetables and learning how to make preserves of mushrooms and berries.’
Herman was to remain on Spruce Island for forty years and achieve sainthood there. His wheat, despite years of trying, did not take root. But Orthodoxy did. Long after the sea otters had been hunted to the edge of extinction and the Company’s lands sold to the United States, the Russian clergy and the native faithful remained. Today the majority of the indigenous population of Alaska is still Russian Orthodox. That, and chronic alcoholism, are the two most visible legacies of Russian America. The most prominent landmark of almost every town in coastal Alaska is still a distinctive Russian onion-domed church topped with an Orthodox cross.
In Kodiak’s Cathedral of the Holy Resurrection, a late-nineteenth-century building just off Rezanov Drive, the congregation still takes communion from the handsome silver chalice brought out by Gideon on the Neva. Its base is inscribed, ‘Minister of Commerce Count N Rumiantsev sent this chalice to America in the Year of Our Lord 1803.’ There is the handsome icon of the Virgin and Child from Valaam, and the set of heavy iron chains and four-pound iron cross worn by Herman under his clothes for his whole life. Today the priest is a Washington-State-born American, the inscriptions on the modern icons and the service are all in English. But the robes, the smell of incense, the low chanting of the choir, the huddle of bowed Aleut congregants, these are all clear echoes of the hut in which Rezanov must have taken communion from those same vessels for the first time in 1805.
It is on Spruce Island, though, that the spirit of those early monks most perceptibly lingers. The island is separated from Kodiak by a mile and a half of choppy sea, which the three modern-day monks navigate in a sturdy steel open boat. They are skinny, bearded and wear robes their eighteenth-century forebears would immediately recognize: long black cassocks and black cloth monk’s caps. Only their rubber boots and bright North Face backpacks might baffle Herman. The beaches of Spruce Island are of black volcanic sand, carpeted with shiny black kelp. Inland the woodland landscape is surreal. To a height of five or six feet every tree, rock and shrub is covered with a thick layer of vibrant green moss, several inches thick. This dense living carpet has the odd effect of dampening all sound, like snow, and one moves through the forest in a strange silence. The constant rainfall and damp of the forest floor also cause huge pale mushrooms to flourish.
For their first year on the island Herman and his twenty orphan charges lived in a large hole in the ground; it must have been damp. Later he built a simple hut next to a small clearing where he conducted his agricultural experiments. He is buried below the hut he built, now replaced by a plank-built church that attracts hundreds of pilgrims on his saint’s day on 9 August. The Orthodox Church in America beatified him as St Herman of Alaska in 1969, and he is considered by the Orthodox to be the patron saint of the Americas. Today Herman is the Russian most widely remembered and revered in Alaska, not Shelikhov, Rezanov or Baranov.
In the crude shack on Kodiak where Archimandrite Iosaf had lived before his demise Rezanov ordered shelves to be put up. On these he carefully arranged the beautifully-bound, if now slightly mildewed, books donated by St Petersburg’s grandees. Onto the walls he tacked prints of the royal family, and on the top shelves he placed the scientific instruments he had brought. In pride of place was the long-suffering galvanic machine, battered by its travels but still functional. Russian America, Rezanov proudly reported apparently without irony, now had its very own branch of the Academy of Sciences.63
Footnotes
* ‘The natives observing our astonishment at their agility and skill paddled in among the breakers which reached their breasts and carried their boats under water. They sported about more like amphibious animals than human beings,’ wrote Martin Sauer, The Billings Expedition, pp. 157–8.
15
Baranov
The wilderness found him out early, and had taken vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude – and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
If somebody could count what these sea otters cost in human lives perhaps they would push their caps made of these same sea otters lower on their brows to hide their faces in shame.
Nikolai Rezanov, Diary1
Kodiak and the Aleutian Islands are scraps of land in a hostile ocean, remote and windswept chunks of Siberian taiga scattered across the Pacific. But as you approach Sitka by sea it is the land, not the water, which dominates. Granite cliffs rise straight up from the water topped with tall pines, unbowed by sea winds. Out on the Aleutians you are seldom out of earshot of the Pacific, but Sitka is protected by a thousand-mile stretch of sea-islands sheltering a convoluted inshore channel which Vancouver called the Inside Passage. Here the water is still, and it is the forests rather than the sea that pitch and hiss. After months out on the roaring ocean, the silence must have been deafening. Sitka Sound itself is dotted with strange little wooded islands and dominated by the vast, snow-topped triangular bulk of Mount Edgecumbe.* This was, unmistakably, the edge of a great continent: finally a place worthy of Rezanov’s grandiose imperial visions.
The Maria lumbered into Sitka Sound on 26 August 1805. Alexander Baranov hurried to meet the highest eminence yet (or indeed ever) to set foot in Russian America. Baranov was fifty-nine years old, ‘of thickset build . . . upright, strong and agile. He walked with a quiet tread. His eyes shone with a lively and penetrating gaze.’2 He wore the uniform of a collegiate councillor, equivalent of a provincial governor, and at his throat was the Order of St Vladimir third class (with his name misspelled as ‘Boranov’ on the back). Both honours had been awarded to him in the summer of 1802 for ‘extraordinary services to the Tsar and Empire’ – in fact both promotion and decoration had been lobbied for by the Company to forestall Baranov’s regular attempts to resign from his post. On his high bald head was a wig of antique design, ‘held in place by a black band under his chin’.3
Alexander Baranov had been a central figure in Rezanov’s life ever since his first involvement with the Company back in 1794. Like Shelikhov, Baranov had been born into a modest merchant family in a town with a long commercial tradition. Cossacks and merchants from Kargopol, in north Russia, had traded along the Arctic coast of Siberia for centuries. Baranov had shown early initiative by inventing a mechanical tractor but had found no backers among the conservative town fathers. In his early twenties he left Kargopol behind to seek his fortune in Irkutsk, setting up a factory producing glass beads and bottles for the colonial market. By the late 1780s he was, like Shelikhov, a man of standing in the Irkutsk merchants’ guild, and was able to borrow capital from his fellow traders to finance a fur-gathering venture in the far-flung territories north of the Sea of Okhotsk, which remained unexplored. In 1789, driven by an insatiable wanderlust, Baranov abruptly left his Irkutsk home, his wife, two daughters and a foundling boy who had been left on the family’s doorstep and headed further east. He would never see them again. Wit
h borrowed gold he trapped and bought furs in the then barely explored north of Kamchatka and the Chukchi peninsula beyond.
Winter transportation on Kamchatka, sketched by Langsdorff.
The Chukchi tribesmen were the only native Siberian tribe violent and warlike enough ever to fight the Russian invaders to a negotiated peace, concluded in 1778. Even after the Russian withdrawal from the ostrog of Anadyrsk under the terms of the treaty, the Chukchi remained notorious raiders of Russian settlements and caravans – including Baranov’s. In 1789 a Chukchi attack robbed Baranov of an entire season’s caravan-load of furs and left the once-prosperous merchant deeply in debt to the backers of his Kamchatkan venture.
Shelikhov had been trying to entice the enterprising frontiersman Baranov into his service since 1787.4 Now he stepped in to pay Baranov’s debts, and offered him employment as general manager of the North-East American Company territories in the New World. Whatever misgivings Baranov may have had about embarking on a life of risk and hardship on the islands were assuaged by Shelikhov’s generous offer of four full shares in the Company and a percentage of the profits, to be paid in furs.5
Baranov turned out to be an inspired choice. He was to remain in Russian America for twenty-nine years, and his doggedness and bravery were to transform the Company’s settlements from a series of precarious temporary trading posts into permanent and thriving settlements. Under his leadership the colony was brought, kicking and screaming, from the world of medieval privateering into the bureaucratic age of high empire.6
Before he even arrived at Kodiak Baranov showed his mettle in the wake of a disastrous shipwreck off Unalaska in the autumn of 1790. Shelikhov’s old barque the Three Hierarchs ran aground and broke up in Koshigen Bay. Ordering the forty-four survivors to build native-style dugouts near the beach, Baranov wintered on the island. They lived off shellfish and seabirds when the weather was too rough to fish. ‘At Lent we all fasted a proper fast and on Whit Monday by the Lord’s Providence part of a whale was washed up on the beach and we broke our fast with that . . . I no longer think about either bread or sugar,’ Baranov later reported to Shelikhov. Despite his desperate situation Baranov used the hungry winter months to plan improvements to the colony’s shipping, its relations with the natives and the organization of sea-otter hunting. ‘My first steps here were visited with misfortune by a cruel Fate . . . But privation and boredom I can bear with patience and I shall not rant at Providence, especially when I sacrifice to friendship.’7
By spring Baranov and his men had built and bought enough baidarkas for his entire crew and a handful of Aleut guides to continue their journey. This fragile flotilla set off across 750 miles of the north Pacific, bivouacking on unknown shores every night. The party eventually made landfall at Three Hierarchs Bay on Kodiak on 27 June 1791. He had not lost a single man on the way.
Even more important than Baranov’s personal toughness and organizational skills was his ability to control the drunken and frequently violent colonists placed in his charge. ‘You cannot spend a month without enmity and inflicting insult on your comrades and masters by second-guessing your masters’ every step,’ Baranov berated the assembled colonists on Kodiak after an abortive revolt in 1801. ‘In your own village you did nothing but feed pigs or sit in the tavern, but here you become wise, a judge of all and a high-minded minister.’8
Baron Ferdinand Wrangel, general manager of the Russian American colonies in the 1830s, would dismiss Baranov as the ‘ataman of a band of brigands’, and indeed the colony’s early correspondence is full of stories of Baranov’s fistfights – including one with James Shields – and his many amorous exploits with Aleut girls. Yet Baranov, more than any other Company officer, was able to turn a rabble of cut-throats and ne’er-do-wells into a workforce disciplined enough to ship a staggering three million rubles’ worth of furs back to the North-East American Company’s Irkutsk warehouses between 1794 and 1799.9
Shelikhov had pioneered Russian America, but it was Baranov, the Company’s tough, hard-drinking manager, who made the colonies a permanent reality. In the late summer of 1799 Baranov was ready to execute his plan to expand the Russian settlements to the rich hunting grounds of Sikta Sound, 650 miles to the south of Kodiak. His war party, led by twenty-two Russians, set sail in the Phoenix and another smaller vessel. They led a giant, if fragile, flotilla of armed Aleuts in 200 baikarkas. As they rounded the tip of what is now Baranov Island into Sitka Sound itself a sudden storm swamped thirty of the canoes and ran the Phoenix aground. Baranov and the remains of his party struggled ashore in the teeth of the gale. Sixty men had been lost.
As the survivors lay half-dead on the beach amid the wreckage of the expedition Baranov heard ‘a terrible war cry which echoed from the forests and made our flesh creep’. A desperate battle in the dark and wind ensued, Baranov and the handful of Russians fighting hand-to-hand as their Aleut hunters fled for their lives. Loading their muskets from a single flask of powder that had stayed miraculously dry, the Russians drove off the attacking tribesmen. In the morning the indestructible Baranov ordered his men to head further into hostile territory in the remaining baikarkas, where they were confronted with the unnerving sight of the massed braves of the Tlingit tribe, their faces painted half black and half red, their hair sculpted into fantastic shapes with grease and birds’ down.10
Baranov went ashore for a powwow with the Tlingit chief, Skatleut. Outnumbered and negotiating for his life, he managed to convince Skatleut of his peaceable intentions and was granted permission to build a stockade on a tiny patch of ground on the north coast of the Sound. The chief agreed to be christened Mikhail and accepted Baranov’s own chain-mail shirt as a gift. The exhausted colonists began to cut timber for the settlement that was to become Fort St Michael. Baranov duly buried one of the Empress’s iron possession plates – the only one to have ever been rediscovered – under a wooden Orthodox cross overlooking the sea.
The life of the colonies was a desperate hand-to-mouth existence largely because of the precariousness of the supply chain from Okhotsk. Between 1797 and 1802 no Russian ships at all reached America. A second Three Hierarchs was wrecked in spring 1797 and the Orel in August that same year. Baranov’s beloved Phoenix was lost in 1799 returning from Okhotsk with vital supplies – and the less vital, in the eyes of Baranov at least, newly anointed Bishop Iosaf. Only the arrival of the Boston ship Enterprize under Captain George Winship in 1800 saved Kodiak from starvation after she bartered $6,542 of goods – mostly food – for furs, which Winship then went on to exchange for trade goods such as tea, silk, cotton and porcelain in Canton.
The Atlantic triangle trade, the basis of many great British and American trading fortunes, involved shipping British cloth and manufactures to Africa and exchanging them for slaves, which were then transported to the West Indies and bartered in turn for rum and sugar for sale in England. The less well-known Pacific triangle had been pioneered by Boston men in the late eighteenth century. Bartering American manufactures for Alaskan fur, fur for China tea and selling the tea back in New England exponentially increased the profits of any merchant who could master it.
In February 1784 the Boston ship Empress of China docked at New York with China tea bought with $120,000 silver dollars in cash and cleared a profit of $30,727. But by trading cheap goods – tin, iron, copperware, brass kettles, wire beads, muskets, looking glasses, rum, molasses powder, flints, lead, knives, nails and dry goods – for furs on the north-west coast of America and bartering those same furs for tea in Canton the Boston men could fill their ships with the same amount of tea for an outlay of just $17,000.11 That meant seven times more profit. By 1800 an average of ten Boston ships were trading in Russian America every year. The availability of cheap credit and maritime insurance, sound ships and plentiful manufactured goods meant that American merchants could deploy more ships to the north Pacific in a year than the Russian Empire was able to send to its colonies in two decades.
For Baranov the Boston me
n’s arrival meant good conversation, solid shipboard fare and plentiful supplies of rum, enlivening an otherwise grim life punctuated only by outbreaks of scurvy, news of native attacks and shipwrecks. Baranov took no notice of the grave warnings against contact with foreigners periodically issued by the Company, which seemed to think if the interlopers were ignored they might go away. But it was John O’Cain, an Irish-American seaman with an eye for the main chance, who proposed a revolutionary idea to Baranov that would bind the Russian colonies to the Bostonians in a close alliance.
O’Cain had been first mate of the Boston boat Phoenix (no relation to the Company ship of the same name) under Henry Moore and had struck up a friendship with Baranov when the vessel called at Kodiak in 1794–5. By 1803 he had returned in his own ship – the O’Cain – with the usual trade goods. But this time he offered Baranov an intriguing joint venture: O’Cain would borrow a party of trained Aleuts and take them on a long-range expedition to the rich hunting grounds of California. The RAC would provide the hunters, O’Cain the transport, and the two would split the bag fifty-fifty at the season’s end. It worked. O’Cain returned the Aleuts safe and well at the end of the season along with a large crop of sea-otter pelts. Thus by ignoring Company instructions and making friends with the Bostonians Baranov kept his warehouses full of furs.
However, these far-ranging expeditions, whether by Boston ship or under the hunters’ own paddle power, carried special dangers. The Tlingit of mainland Alaska were far more dangerous to the Russians and Aleuts than the Koniags had ever been.12 The Tlingit had been trading sea-otter pelts on their own account with visiting Boston ships for a decade before Baranov’s arrival at Sitka in 1799. Crucially for the gathering showdown, the Yankees were willing to pay for pelts in guns and powder. A single pelt could be traded for a good New England musket worth two to three pounds sterling or nearly fifty Spanish dollars. But by 1802 the Russians’ devastatingly efficient parties of Aleut hunters based at Fort St Michael on Sitka Sound were having the usual fatal impact on the local otter population. The Tlingit leaders of south Alaska resolved to put a stop to the Russians’ depradations and protect their threatened hunting grounds.
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 25