Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

by Owen Matthews

  Rezanov left Russian America believing that he had helped improve the lot of the miserable colonists and their native underlings, a thought which evidently gave him great satisfaction. ‘I saw that my single happy life leads whole peoples to their happiness, and that I may spend myself on their welfare,’ he wrote in his last letter to Baranov. ‘I have seen how a single line written by me can lighten their lot and gives me such pleasure as I could never have imagined and all this tells me that I have not been idle in this world.’14

  Baranov accepted his chief’s ‘secret instructions’ with a show of grave deference and, ignoring them like other instructions before and after, continued with business as usual as Rezanov sailed away to Russia.

  20

  The Weeping Country

  I do not believe that Your Majesty will consider it criminal when . . . I build ships and set out next year to destroy [Japanese] settlements on Matmai [Hokkaido], to push them from Sakhalin, and ravage their coasts.

  Nikolai Rezanov informs the Tsar of his personal declaration of war against the Japanese, 18061

  The deceased – blessed he is not – Rezanov must be declared the biggest scoundrel whom the D[evil] ever put into the world!’

  Georg Heinrich Langsdorff to Johann Caspar Horner, February 18082

  D’Wolf and Langsdorff were both impatient to continue immediately to Okhotsk, D’Wolf because he was eager to cash his letters of credit in St Petersburg and Langsdorff because he had become increasingly irritated by Rezanov’s high-handedness since his precious specimens had been thrown overboard in San Francisco Bay.

  ‘I, for my part, had been long enough in Sitka. Tired of living on fish, shell-fish and sea dogs, I had determined that I would depart with the first ship that should sail for Europe,’ wrote Langsdorff in his published account. Privately he excoriated Rezanov. ‘You can imagine that such an ignoramus, as Rezanov was, did not have the slightest feeling for science and also did not provide any support at all,’ he wrote to Krusenstern. ‘Everything we experienced in Brazil, the South Seas and in Kamchatka is nothing compared to the events and sad scenes I was forced to witness. Oh, how often I have remembered your well-intentioned advice [not to follow Rezanov]!’3

  But the options for leaving New Archangel were limited. The Company brig Maria had been hauled up on shore the previous autumn and used as barracks. So shoddy was her construction that she had to be partly dismantled and reassembled before she could sail again. Another transport, the Avos – ‘Unexpected Good Fortune’ – was only half-built. Rezanov resolved to keep the Juno at New Archangel until the Avos was ready. The only available boat, therefore, was the Kodiak-built Rostislav, just forty-one feet long. D’Wolf’s men had made it to Canton in the not much larger Yermak, so he suggested he repeat the feat in her even smaller and flimsier sister ship. Both D’Wolf and Langsdorff decided that the risk was preferable to remaining in Russian America. With D’Wolf skippering, the Juno’s second mate (and barber, tailor and blues-banishing fiddle player) Edward Parker promoted to first officer, Langsdorff as ship’s doctor and three Koniags and one Russian as crew, the Rostislav set out to cross 2,000 miles of the north Pacific. ‘I thank the heavens that on the first of July I was able to leave that deathtrap of Sitka and the arch-scoundrel Rezanov,’ Langsdorff wrote. ‘I have been among the living dead for the past year.’4,5

  One last piece of unfinished business remained, in Rezanov’s judgment, before he could return to St Petersburg: punishing Japan for its insolence towards the Russian Empire as represented by her ambassador – in other words, himself. The diplomatic slight he had suffered in Nagasaki would have to be righted. Dreams of revenge for his humiliation had evidently been preying on Rezanov’s mind the whole hard winter in Sitka. Already in February 1806 he had written to the emperor from Unalaska effectively informing the Tsar that he intended to declare a private war on Japan.

  By strengthening our American establishments and building ships we may oblige the Japanese government to open the trade which their people most earnestly desire. I do not believe that Your Majesty will consider it criminal when, aided by such noble assistants as Khvostov and Davydov, I build ships and set out next year to destroy their settlements on Matmai [Hokkaido], to push them from Sakhalin, and ravage their coasts. By cutting off their supply of fish and depriving 200,000 people of their food we will force them to open up trade with us. I hear that they have even dared to establish a trading post on Urup. If it be Your Will, Most Gracious Sovereign, punish me as a criminal for taking action without your command; but my conscience will reproach me more if I let time pass in vain and do not make this sacrifice to Your Glory particularly when I see that I may help effectuate the fulfillment of your Imperial Majesty’s High Intentions.’6

  Rezanov enclosed carefully thought-out details of his coming campaign against the Japanese. A Russian colony would be founded on Sakhalin, he informed the Tsar, guarded by artillery and a garrison, while Company ships rounded up the light Japanese coastal craft. ‘These raids, especially if repeated several times, would cause popular unrest in Japan which would compel the government to agree to a mutually profitable peaceful agreement.’7 A month later, just before his departure for California, Rezanov followed this letter up with a personal missive to the Shogun, informing him that all lands to the north of Hokkaido were henceforth to be considered part of the Russian Empire and any settlements found upon them would be destroyed.8

  Rezanov had made many winning gambles in his life. His unilateral declaration of war on Japan, it turned out, would not be one of them. Coastal raids would not force the Japanese to trade, and the Tsar’s ‘High Intentions’ most certainly did not include authorizing Rezanov to start a war against Russia’s Pacific – in every sense – neighbour. Nonetheless, far from St Petersburg and with the prospect of a return post many months distant, Rezanov busied himself with preparations for hostilities. He ordered Baranov to build stockades for the Japanese prisoners-of-war that he intended – his new-found enthusiasm for Adam Smith notwithstanding – to send to Russian America as slave labourers.

  The war party, consisting of the Juno under Davydov and the Avos under Khvostov, was ready for sea by the end of July. However, as his long-planned punitive expedition became a reality Rezanov suddenly got cold feet. He would first return to St Petersburg to confer with the Tsar, he told Davydov on 21 July. A few days later Rezanov changed his mind again: no, he would lead the expedition personally, he told his captains, and both ships would immediately attack Sakhalin. Just before the ships finally set sail from Sitka on 27 July Rezanov changed the plan a third time: the Avos was to sail direct to Sakhalin while the Juno would deliver Rezanov to Okhotsk and join up with the Avos later in the year.

  On board the Juno as she headed west, Rezanov penned a long and detailed instruction to Khvostov on the conduct of the coming operation. All Japanese commercial goods he found on Sakhalin were to be destroyed, Rezanov wrote; all Japanese taken prisoner, and the native ‘hairy Ainu’ tribesmen of Sakhalin and Hokkaido promised the protection of the Tsar. Khvostov was also to make sure to kidnap a Japanese priest and the ‘heathen relics’ from any temples they might find, for the future benefit of Japanese prisoners in Russian America. ‘The Japanese in the free conduct of their faith might be more satisfied with their relocation and might eventually settle down, thus attracting their fellow countrymen.’ In conclusion Khvostov was sworn to secrecy as to the purpose of the expedition.

  So far, so clear – Khvostov was off to war, on written orders from the Tsar’s representative. After a record run across the north Pacific the Juno anchored off Okhotsk in late August 1806. Rezanov, with his luggage, was rowed ashore. Yet even as he installed himself in the Company’s offices he changed his mind one final time and distanced himself from the expedition he had planned for so long. ‘The recent break in the foremast, contrary winds hindering your navigation and the lateness of the autumn season oblige you now to hasten to America,’ Rezanov wrote from Okhotsk town to K
hvostov, a few hundred yards away on board the Juno in Okhotsk Bay. ‘The designated time for your meeting with [the Avos] has passed . . . and the fishing season has ended, so the hoped-for success can no longer be realized, so, everything considered, I find it better for you to abandon the previous orders and proceed to America.’ But at the same time if Khvostov happened to pass Sakhalin, Rezanov wrote, he should ‘attempt to win the natives’ favour with gifts and medals.’9

  Was the mission cancelled or not? Khvostov rushed ashore to clarify these confusing orders, but was told that Rezanov had left town in a hurry and was already over the hills and en route to St Petersburg. So Rezanov’s ambiguous final order apparently left it up to Khvostov to decide whether to proceed or not. One can only conclude that Rezanov’s backtracking was his way of covering his back in case the expedition failed while leaving open the possibility of gaining the credit if it succeeded.

  Unfortunately for all concerned – but mostly for himself and his fellow captain Davydov – Khvostov interpreted Rezanov’s last orders as meaning that he should proceed if not prevented by weather and the damaged mast. ‘The ambiguity of this instruction placed Khvostov in no little difficulty,’ wrote Vice Admiral Alexander Shishkov in his foreword to Khvostov’s diaries, published in 1810. ‘However, considering that Rezanov could not cancel an expedition of which he had already informed the Emperor . . . [and believing that ] Rezanov had apparently not cancelled the expedition entirely but merely postponed it, Khvostov decided to go to Sakhalin.’10

  As Rezanov had anticipated, the firepower of the Juno was indeed devastating to the fragile Japanese fishing fleets and settlements. Over the next six months the Juno and Avos burned the settlements on Aniva Island, Urup and Kunashiv, torching warehouses and fishing nets and taking six Japanese prisoners and capturing supplies of millet, fish and salt. Well pleased with their haul, Khvostov and Davydov returned triumphantly to Okhotsk, only to be thrown in jail in irons for waging an illegal war. There they would have remained, at the mercy of the Okhotsk port commander Captain Ivan Bukharin, a personal enemy of Khvostov’s if local sympathizers had not helped them escape. Khvostov and Davydov then made their way as starving fugitives with only the clothes they stood up in to Irkutsk, where they were able to appeal to the governor of Siberia and to the naval ministry in St Petersburg. ‘None of us knew the level of empowerment of His Excellency the chamberlain and had no right to ask,’ Khvostov wrote in his plaintive petition to Admiral Chichagov at the Navy Ministry. The two captains’ names were finally cleared only in 1809.

  But it was the commander of Russia’s second round-the world expedition who was to feel the full consequences of Rezanov’s war. On landing at Kunashiri on the Kurile Islands in 1811, Captain Vasily Golovnin was invited to tea in a Japanese fort. But when he and his officers tried to leave they were surrounded by soldiers, disarmed and taken prisoner. ‘The governor [of Kunashiri], who had hitherto conversed in a soft and gentle voice now altered his tone and spoke loudly and with warmth,’ wrote Golovnin in his memoirs. ‘He frequently mentioned “Resanoto” [Rezanov] and “Nicola-Sandrejetsch” [Nikolai Alexandrovich Khvostov] and struck several times on his sabre.’11 Golovnin was to spend two years in Japanese captivity before he was able to persuade the authorities that Khvostov and Davydov were not acting on government orders. ‘Rezanov himself brought much harm to the RAC and himself ruined much of what he had created,’ wrote Golovnin; understandably, he was not Rezanov’s greatest fan.

  So ended Russia’s first attempt to open relations with Japan. There would not be another for a generation. Indeed Japan and Russia are technically at war still, for in the final days of World War II Joseph Stalin seized the South Kurile Islands – the same islands that Rezanov had first claimed for the Russian Empire in 1806 – and the Japanese have never signed a peace treaty with Moscow as a result.

  Rezanov himself would never learn of the series of unfortunate events that his contradictory orders had set in train. As Khvostov was rowed ashore to Okhotsk in search of clarification, Rezanov was high-tailing it up the trail to the Stanovoi Mountains. Once across the range, Rezanov kept up a punishing pace across the marshlands the Yakut called ‘the weeping country’. ‘I galloped over the chain of the Okhotsk Mountains day and night without leaving the saddle,’ he wrote to his St Petersburg friend Count Ivan Maletsky. This was an exaggeration. Transporting a single grandee and his entourage post-haste across Siberia was a vast enterprise. Rezanov travelled with his valet, four Cossack bodyguards, Yakut guides, plus tents, bedding and provisions for six weeks. The train would have required at least sixty horses. Nonetheless Rezanov clearly drove his suite west as fast as the lumbering pack animals would allow.

  ‘At this late time in the autumn I was forced to ford half-frozen rivers. I was warmed by fast riding during the day but by spending the night in the snow I became so ill with cold that I suddenly fell from my horse and remained unconscious for twenty-four hours. In this condition I was taken to a Yakut yurt on the Aldan River on 7 October. Here I regained my senses but was obliged to wait until the river froze,’ Rezanov reported from Yakutsk. ‘When it froze I galloped here on 23 October, where I suffered a severe relapse. I fought with death and this is only the second day since I left my bed. Now I am waiting for snow and when it comes I will ride without stopping on the way.’12

  Despite his fever Rezanov was cheered by his new celebrity status as a member of the famous round-the-world expedition. ‘Arriving in Yakutsk I saw the gratitude of my countrymen; all the town came out to greet me and invited us to their houses one after the other,’ he wrote in evident satisfaction. Rezanov pressed on up the frozen Lena to Irkutsk, where the reception was even warmer.

  ‘Here in Irkutsk I heard even more of their praises and allowed myself to be dragged all over town, simply out of my generosity of spirit, for I drew no pleasure from it. This same generosity prompted me to give a lunch and ball for the whole town in the House of Scholarship, followed by supper for three hundred. This cost me two thousand rubles.’ The party Rezanov threw in his own honour dazzled society and entered into local legend for the lavishness of the entertainment. The Irkutsk merchant Ivan Kalashnikov recorded that the ‘breakfast with dancing began at eleven and continued until the early hours of the next day’.13

  However Rezanov’s three-month sojourn in Irkutsk did not solely comprise gala lunches. News reached him that the Nadezhda and Neva had safely docked in St Petersburg and that their crews had been treated to a rousing welcome. The Empire, reeling from the disastrous defeat at Austerlitz the previous year, was badly in need of some good news, and of a few heroes.14 Lisiansky, defying orders to wait for the Nadezhda to catch up in the Baltic, had actually pipped Krusenstern to the post and arrived at Kronstadt on 6 August 1806, a week before his chief, to become a national hero. The Tsar decorated all the voyagers lavishly. And if any ambiguity remained as to who had been in charge of the expedition it was put to rest by the Emperor’s rescript conferring the Order of St Vladimir third class on Krusenstern, which began, ‘By Our Will you were entrusted with leadership of the expedition . . .’ Calculated or not, this was a blow to Rezanov. He wrote self-pityingly to Buldakov, ‘Thank God it is all over, all have been rewarded and only I wish for nothing. I think not of that, and feel nothing.’15

  Each post seemed to bring more bad news. It is likely – though not confirmed by the Company’s usually scrupulous letter books – that the fast-moving Rezanov finally received the letters Rumiantsev had sent from St Petersburg expressly and vociferously forbidding him to mount any military action against Japan. Doubtless this made for uncomfortable reading, and would have been more so if Rezanov had known that Khvostov had actually gone ahead with the planned raids.

  He was also still ill. From the symptoms he reports it seems likely that he had pneumonia, with a fever that rose and fell sporadically for several months. Certainly by the end of January, still in Irkutsk, Rezanov suffered a relapse so severe that he believed that he was dyi
ng. ‘The letter from Mother [Natalia Shelikhova] and the children received today by courier upset all of my wounds,’ he wrote to his brother-in-law in late January 1807. ‘They were expecting me by the New Year, but they do not know that perhaps I shall not see them again while I live.’16

  Shelikhova was evidently staying with her surviving daughter Avdotia at the Buldakov house in St Petersburg. The old lady had not hesitated to inform her son-in-law that he had seriously damaged his reputation in the capital with his hysterical letter from Kamchatka and his private Japanese war. ‘Mother writes that I am the reason that the Count [Rumiantsev] is displeased with me, but he promises to be as benevolent towards me as previously, and wishes me all manner of good. I am sorry that the old woman is aggrieved. I regret that the Count makes no allowances for my weakness. I was upset in the extreme and wrote in anger.’17

  This last letter is full of spelling mistakes and was probably dictated to a secretary over four days between 24 and 27 January 1807. ‘My strength is leaving me; I will see [Anna] before you,’18 he wrote – or dictated – miserably. But at least Ivan Pil, the governor of Irkutsk, was a regular visitor, attending the celebrity invalid twice a day. Rezanov was most concerned for the fate of his children and was comforted that Rumiantsev had taken them under his protection. ‘Mother writes that Count N. P. [Rumiantsev] is sending people to ask after my orphans. My tears are flowing, and gratitude has evoked them . . . My only remaining wish is that my labours are pleasing to my Monarch. Believe me that I need for nothing.’

  A week later he was feeling well enough to take to the road again. By 1 March, after another three gruelling weeks on the road, he had reached the trading entrepôt of Krasnoyarsk, on the Yenisei River. Rezanov, usually a prolific correspondent, wrote no more letters on this last stage of his journey. By the time he reached the town on 8 March 1807, he was unconscious. His Cossack escorts carried him from his kibitka (a small closed travelling carriage) to the house of the merchant Rodyukov. Rezanov died the same day.