Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
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25 Kazimierz Waliszewski, Paul the First of Russia, the Son of Catherine the Great, William Heineman, New York 1913, p. 143.
26 Adami, Eine schwierige Nachbarschaft, pp. 83–91, quoted in Moessner, ‘The First Russian Ambassador to Japan’.
27 Nikolai Rezanov to Mikhail M. Buldakov, Kamchatka, 6 June 1805, quoted in Alexei Alexandrovich Istomin, ‘Dva Varianta Pisma N. P. Rezanova Grafu N P Rumiantsevu ot 17/29 iyulya 1806 g. – Sravnitelno-tekhnologichesky analyz I legenda o velikoi lyubvi’, Russkoe Otkritiye Ameriki, M, Moscow 2002.
28 John D’Wolf, A Voyage to the North Pacific and a Journey Through Siberia More than Half a Century Ago, Boston 1861 (facsimile edition Ye Galleon Press, Fairfield 1968), p. 30.
29 Rezanov’s final instructions to Baranov quoted in Viktor Lopatnikov, ‘Nikolai Rezanov’, Zolotoi Lev, no. 127–8, RFS, Moscow 2007.
4. King of Siberia
1 30 November 1793, quoted in Wilhelm Lagus, Eric Laxman, his Life, Voyages, Discoveries and Correspondence, St Petersburg 1890, p. 269.
2 This remarkable Irkutsk merchantwoman was the first Russian to transcribe the folk tale Kolobok, about a ball of dough which rolls away from its grandparents to freedom and is eaten by a fox. Ekaterina Avdeeva-Polevaya and Alexei Polevoi, Zapiski, quoted in Black, Russians in Alaska, p. 111.
3 Natalia Shelikhova, ed. and tr. by Dawn Lea Black, Alexander Petrov and Marvin W. Falk, Natalia Shelikhova, Russian Oligarch of Alaska Commerce, University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks 2010, p. xvii.
4 Or possibly Trapeznikova, daughter of a wealthy merchant and Old Believer from the northern Dvina. M. I. Tsiporukha in his essay ‘Odna iz Stroitelei Imperii na Tikhookeanskom Severe’, Istoriya Nauki I Tekhniki, no. 8, Moscow 2004, pp. 34–41, and Soviet historian L. A. Sitnikov make a slightly stronger case for Kozhevin, however. See Dawn Lea Black’s introduction to Shelikhova.
5 Under Captains Pyotr Krenitsyn and Mikhail Levashev.
6 Stephen W. Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony, University of Washington Press, Seattle 2002, pp. 53–8.
7 Engstrom, Baranov, p. 22.
8 Black, Russians in Alaska, p. 92.
9 See John Robson (ed.) The Captain Cook Encyclopædia, Chatham, London 2004, p. 62.
10 Also instead of a layer of blubber like seals they have a double coat – under layer deep and soft, upper layer coarse and waterproof. According to William Sturgis, an officer on Cook’s third voyage, their pelt ‘is 5 feet long 24–30 inches wide, rich jet black with a glossy surface and exhibits a silver colour when blown open’. See Lieutenant William Sturgis, ed. by S.W. Jackman, The Journal of William Sturgis, Sono Nis Press, Victoria 1978.
11 Black, Russians in Alaska, p. 93.
12 Shelikhova, Natalia Shelikhova, p. 34.
13 Andrei Grinev, ‘Osnovatel Russkoi Ameriki (neskol’ko shtrikhov k portretu G. I. Shelikhova)’, Istoriya Peterburga, no. 2, St Petersburg 2005.
14 Black, Russians in Alaska, p. 104.
15 Ibid., p. 105.
16 Mikhail I. Tsiporukha, ‘Odna iz Stroitelei Imperii na Tikhookeanskom Severe’, Istoriya Nauki I Tekhniki, no. 8, Moscow 2004, pp. 34–41.
17 Ibid., p. 34.
18 Grinev, ‘Osnovatel Russkoi Ameriki’.
19 Izmailov testimony quoted in Miller, Kodiak Kreol, p. 38.
20 Grinev, ‘Osnovatel Russkoi Ameriki’.
21 Miller, Kodiak Kreol, p. 19.
22 Captain Nathaniel Porlock, A Voyage Round the World, but more particularly to the North West Coast of America, John Stockdale, London 1798, p. 60.
23 Tsiporukha, ‘Odna iz Stroitelei’, p. 38.
24 Shelikhova, Natalia Shelikhova, p. xxxi.
25 Tsiporukha, ‘Odna iz Stroitelei’, p. 36.
26 Shelikhov continued to take an interest in the Kodiak children: he wrote to Delarov, ‘Do your best to teach more boys reading, writing, singing and arithmetic. Train them to be good navigators and seamen; and teach them crafts, especially carpentry. The boys who were brought here are studying music in Irkutsk, and we are paying the bandmaster fifty rubles for each of them per year. We are going to send a fine band to America to you.’ Quoted by Pavel A. Tikhmenev as ‘Letter, Shelikhov to Delarov, from Okhotsk, 30 August 1789,’ in vol. 2 (Documents) of his History of the Russian American Company, p. 21, citing no precise archival location because the ‘letters . . . most were probably lost in the destruction of company files after the sale of the Russian-American colonies’ (Grigory Shelikhov, tr. Marina Ramsay, Preface by Richard A. Pierce, A Voyage to America, 1783–1786, Limestone Press, Kingston 1981, Preface, p. iv).
27 Shelikhova, Natalia Shelikhova, p. xxxv.
28 Black, Russians in Alaska, p. 108.
29 Ibid., p. 140.
30 Miller, Kodiak Kreol, p. 31.
31 30 November 1793. Lagus, Laxman, p. 269.
32 Polnoye sobranye Zakonov Rossiskoi Imperii (Complete Law Code of the Russian Empire), St Petersburg 1830, vol. 20, no. 14,275, clauses 82–6.
33 A. V. Khrapovitskii, Dnevnik (Diary) 18 January 1782 to 17 September 1793, Universitetskaya Tipografiya, Moscow 1901, p. 45.
34 Black, Russians in Alaska, p. 119.
35 In July 1788 Catherine signed an ukaz dispatching two navy ships to the Aleutians. Along with instructions to map as much of Russia’s new territories as possible, Billings was also charged with investigating Biryukov’s accusations of abuses by Russian colonists. Probably unbeknown to the Admiralty board that dispatched the expedition, Billings also happened to be a close friend of Shelikhov and his final report was, unsurprisingly, favourable. This was not the last time that the American Company’s St Petersburg diplomacy would be scuppered by scurrilous reports from the field.
36 The tactic of creating a web of front companies is popular among Russian businessmen competing for state tenders today.
37 Samuel and Jeremy Bentham were well-to-do brothers from Houndsditch in east London. Samuel, a naval architect who had been apprenticed at Woolwich dockyard at the age of fourteen, came to Russia in 1780 to make his fortune. His break came two years later when he was presented to Prince Potemkin, a fervent Anglophile. The twenty-five-year-old Bentham was immediately hired and put in charge of the construction of Potemkin’s brand-new Black Sea fleet. He also experimented with an articulated river barge, used by Catherine during her triumphant progress through the Crimea in 1789, and with the invention that was to be Bentham Major’s greatest contribution to science, the use of watertight compartments to make safer ship hulls.
In 1785 Samuel recruited his brilliant younger brother Jeremy to Potemkin’s service. Together with their father they hired Englishmen and -women to populate a modern village with factories that Potemkin planned to create in Byelorussia. ‘Any clever people capable of introducing improvements in the Prince’s Government might meet with good encouragement’ was one of the advertisements the Benthams placed in English newspapers. ‘The Prince wants to introduce the use of beer,’ announced another. Milkmaids were recruited to service Potemkin’s ‘elegant dairy’ with ‘the best of butter and as many kinds of cheese as possible.’ Thanks to the good offices of the banker Sutherland, Potemkin’s credit was virtually limitless and the Benthams had no shortage of volunteers.
The former prime minister William Petty-FitzMaurice, first Marquess of Lansdowne, had his doubts both about Potemkin’s trustworthiness and the Bentham boys’ business acumen. ‘Both your sons are too liberal in their temper to adopt a mercantile spirit,’ Landsdowne wrote to their father, his friend Jeremiah Bentham. ‘And your Sam’s mind will be more occupied with fresh inventions than with calculating compound interest which the dullest man in Russia can perhaps do as well.’
Unfortunately many of the English recruits turned out to be a ‘Newcastle mob, hirelings from that rabble town’. Despite Jeremy’s brilliant idea of making the factories circular so that managers could supervise the workforce from one central observation point, the Byelorussian experiment failed. The milkmaids and gardener that Jeremy had take
n on turned out to be woefully underqualified – the latter was a ‘shameless imposter who had not even planted a single blade of grass’ while ‘Mamzel has not made a single cheese.’
Jeremy returned to England to turn his brilliant brain to less mundane tasks, such as designing a circular prison known as the panopticon, which was actually constructed at Millbank on the site of the modern-day Tate Britain, and formulating his ‘felicific calculus’ with its classification of twelve pains and fourteen pleasures by which the ‘happiness factor’ or ‘utility’ of any action might be tested. But Sam remained in Russia. He dabbled in trading English cloth across Russia’s rivers from Riga on the Baltic to Kherson on the Black Sea. Naturally enough his interest turned to Russia’s other waterways, the great rivers of Siberia. In 1788 Potemkin sent Samuel Bentham to Siberia with a broad-ranging commission which included commanding two battalions of troops, creating a new military engineering school in Irkutsk, discovering new lands, pursuing diplomacy with the Mongols and even ‘opening trading links with Japan and Alaska’.
It is possible that Shelikhov and Bentham already knew each other from St Petersburg; they certainly spent much time together in Irkutsk. The two young men shared an imaginative enthusiasm for the potential of Siberia and the creation of a Russian maritime empire on the Pacific. The Englishman took the opportunity to travel from Irkutsk to the Chinese border-trading entrepôt of Maimichin and beyond, to the river port of Nerchinsk, where he studied the design of Chinese junks. Shelikhov attempted to recruit Bentham to his own business, which badly needed expert naval architects and professional commanders. But he could not hope to compete with Potemkin’s vast wealth and network of patronage, and Bentham was soon recalled to the Black Sea to fight the Empress’s new Turkish war.
After his return to Britain Brigadier General Sir Samuel Bentham became the inspector general of works for the Royal Navy, and was responsible for the fleet that won Trafalgar.
38 In May 1797 the North Eastern Eagle set a company speed record, logging 600 miles in seven days en route from Okhotsk to Yakutat.
39 Shelikhova’s report to ‘His Radiance’ Count Zubov of 18 November 1795. Shelikhova, Natalia Shelikhova, p. 51.
40 Black, Russians in Alaska, p. 114.
41 Ibid., p. 122.
42 Ibid., p. 95.
43 20 May 1795, quoted in Pavel A. Tikhmenev, tr. Dmitry Krenov, Supplement of Some Historical Documents to the Historical Review of the Formation of the Russian American Company, St Petersburg 1863 (reprinted by Limestone Press, Kingston 1979) vol. 2, p. 128.
5. A Nabob in St Petersburg
1 Fitzgerald Molloy, The Russian Court in the Eighteenth Century, Hutchinson, London 1905, p. 202.
2 Dixon, Catherine the Great, p. 307.
3 John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend, Folio Society, London 1999, p. 308.
4 www.ceremonija.lv/pages/zubov.ru.php.
5 Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova, tr. Kyril FitzLyon, The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova, Duke University Press, Durham 1995.
6 V. K. Napper Odessa v Perviye Epokhi ee Sushestvovaniye, Optiumum, Odessa 2007, p. 191.
7 Natalia Shelikhova confirmed Zubov’s crucial role in a letter to Archpastor Juvenaly on 10 November 1795, after her husband’s death: ‘I wrote about this to His Radiance Count Platon Aleksandrovich Zubov, who has protected my company, and because of his protection, ploughmen and craftsmen were selected for the company in order for them to settle in America, along with the sending, by Your Beatitude, of the Russian Orthodox spiritual mission. I hope that His Radiance will report on that subject to Her Majesty.’
8 Engstrom, Baranov, p. 62.
9 Only one would ever return. Their expedition proved disastrous not only for Shelikhov but for the divines themselves. Iosaf would be appointed bishop of Kodiak in 1799, but drowned alongside James Shields in the wreck of the Phoenix later that year. Hieromonk Yuvenaly, a former artillery officer, became an enthusiast of forced baptism and would be murdered by natives in 1795. Hieromonk Afanasii, a former serf, went mad and never saw his homeland again. Hieromonk Makarii, after eight years in the colonies, would make a secret dash to vent a list of bitter complaints against the company personally to the Emperor Paul. But unlike his mother Catherine, who always turned a sympathetic ear to such whistle-blowers, Tsar Paul punished Makarii for leaving his post without his superiors’ authority. Archdeacons Stefan and Nektarii got into such a desperate feud with Baranov over the colonists’ drinking and whoring that they locked the church at Easter, and only opened it when Baranov threatened to hang Nektarii from the bell tower. Only Novices Asaf and Herman escaped the monumental catastrophe that providence had prepared for the party. Asaf’s fate is unrecorded. But Herman left the vice-ridden Kodiak in 1808 to become a hermit on nearby Spruce Island, lived until the age of seventy-seven and was later canonized as St Herman of Alaska.
10 Sverdlov, ‘Rezanov: Obraz I Lichnost’.
11 Miller, Kodiak Kreol, p. 83.
12 Shelikhov/Pierce, Voyage, p. 132.
13 Miller, Kodiak Kreol, p. 23.
14 Rezanov, letter to the directors of the RAC from Novoarkhangelsk, 18 November 1806, Dimitryshkin, The Russian American Colonies 1768–1867, Oregon Historical Society, Portland 1989, p. 62.
15 Black, Russians in Alaska, p .111.
16 De Haro quoted in Miller, Kodiak Kreol, p. 49.
17 Iosaf’s complaint quoted in Hieromonk Gideon, tr. with an introduction and notes by Lydia Black, The Round the World Voyage of Hieromonk Gideon 1803–1809, Limestone Press, Fairbanks 1989, p. 86.
18 Engstrom, Baranov, p. 66.
6. To China
1 Quoted in Reid, Shaman’s Coat, p. 78.
2 Shelikhova, Natalia Shelikhova, p. 39.
3 ww.ru.rodovid.org (see Zapis’ 625661).
4 Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1994, vol. III, A Century of Advance, vol. IV, East Asia, pp. 1756–7.
5 Lo-Shu Fu (ed.), A documentary chronicle of Sino-Western relations, vol. 1, 1644–1820, University of Arizona Press, Tucson 1966, p. 24.
6 Ibid., p. 332.
7 Charles William Vane, Marquis of Londonderry, Recollections of a Tour in the North of Europe in 1836–1837, Richard Bentley, London 1838, vol. 2, pp. 214–15. Even at the end of the nineteenth century travellers found the sharp contrast between the two trading towns a shock. ‘One moment you are in a Russian provincial village with its characteristic shops, log houses, golden domed churches, droshkies, soldiers and familiar peasant faces,’ wrote the young American diplomat George Kennan in 1891. ‘The next moment you pass behind the high screen that conceals the entrance to the Mongolian town and you find yourself apparently in the middle of the Chinese empire, you can hardly believe that you have not suddenly been transported on the magical carpet of the Arabian nights over a distance of a thousand miles.’ George Kennan, Siberia and the exile system, Century, New York 1891, p. 108.
8 George Alexander Lensen, ‘Early Russo-Japanese Relations’, Far Eastern Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1, November 1950, pp. 17–22.
9 Rezanov letter to Buldakov, quoted in Istomin, ‘Dva Varianta Pisma’.
10 S. S. Shashkov, ‘Istoriia Russkoi Zhenshchiny’, Sobranie sochenenii S. S. Shashkova, Tipografiia I. N. Skorokhodova, St Petersburg 1898, p. 762.
7. Empire Builder
1 Tsiporukha, ‘Odna iz Stroitelei’, p. 36.
2 Ibid., p. 38.
3 Irkutsk, 11 June 1794, Shelikhova, Natalia Shelikhova, p. 44.
4 31 January 16 1796, Ibid., p. 34.
5 Tsiporukha, ‘Odna iz Stroitelei’, p. 41.
6 The same building also has a façade on ul Pestela 27. The house was bought by the Greek Prince Alexander Murusi, who rebuilt in eclectic style in 1874–7.
7 Letter to Buldakov quoted in Istomin, ‘Dva Varianta Pisma’.
8 Alexei Polevoi, Zapiski, quoted in introduction to Shelikhov/Pierce, Voyage, p. 30.
9 S
helikhova, Natalia Shelikhova, p. 44.
10 Ibid., p51.
11 Rezanov, Voyage to Nueva California, p. 46.
12 Nikita Nikitich Demidov to Natalia A. Shelikhova – sent from St Petersburg on 10 December 1795, received in Irkutsk on 26 January 1796, answered on 7 February 1796. Shelikhova, Natalia Shelikhova, p. 67.
13 Molloy, Russian Court, p. 268.
8. Tsar Paul
1 Parfenov, Russian Empire, episode 6.
2 Ibid.
3 Captain George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World in the Years 1790, 1791, 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795. G. G. and J. Robinson and J. Edwards, London 1798, vol. 2, pp. 502–3.
4 Ibid., pp. 500–1.
5 Rezanov, Voyage to Nueva California, p. 41.
6 Black, Russians in Alaska, p. 113.
7 Engstrom, Baranov, p. 63.
8 Tsiporukha, ‘Odna iz Stroitelei’, p. 40.
9 Yermolaev, ‘Pskovsky Chinovnik Rezanov’.
10 Molloy, Russian Court, p. 298.
11 Ibid., p. 312.
12 St Petersburg, 18 March 1800. See Alex Zotov, ‘The Failed Franco-Russian Expedition to India: Diplomatic Correspondence’ on www.history-gatchina.ru and Prince S. Vorontsov’s Archive, Moscow 1870–95, vol. XXIX, p. 390.
13 Waliszewski, Paul, p. 363.
14 Ibid., p. 379.
15 Zotov, ‘Expedition to India’.
9. Russia’s East India Company
1 Quoted in Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsyky, His Life and Work, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1971, p. 646.
2 Sverdlov, ‘Rezanov: Obraz I Lichnost’.
3 Clarence Manning, Russian Influence on Early America, NY Library Publishers, New York 1953, pp. 27–38.
4 Anthony Wild, The East India Company, Trade and Conquest from 1600, HarperCollins, London 2000.
5 Semen B. Okun, tr. Carl Ginsburg, Preface by Robert L. Kerner, The Russian American Company, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. 1955, p. 50.
6 Black, Russians in Alaska, p. 95.
7 Gideon, Voyage, p. 101.
8 Black, Russians in Alaska, p. 155.
9 Gideon, Voyage, p. 99.