Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
Page 41
S. A. Sgibnev, ‘Rezanov i Krusenstern’, Drevnaya i Novaya Rossiya, vol. 1, no. 4,
St Petersburg 1877 . Shashkov, ‘Istoriia Russkoi Zhenshchiny’, Sobranie sochenenii S. S. Shashkova,
Tipografiya I. N. Skorokhodova, St Petersburg 1898
R. G. Skrynnikov, Sibirskaia ekspeditsiia Ermaka, Nauka, Novosibirsk 1982.
Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1994
Anna Surnik, ‘Poslednee Pismo Kemergera: Rashifrovka’, Russkaya Amerika, Vologda, no. 1, pp29–31, Vologda 1994
Leonid Sverdlov, ‘Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov (1764–1807): Khudozhestvenny Obraz I Istorichaskaya Lichnost’, Moskovsky Zhurnal, no, 8 (257), Moscow 2012
——, ed. by A.V. Postnikov, Krusenstern i Rezanov, Argo, Moscow 2006
Barbara Sweetland Smith and Redmond Barnett (eds) Russian America: The Forgotten Frontier, Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma 1990
Pavel A. Tikhmenev, tr. by Dmitry Krenov, A History of the Russian American Company (St Petersburg 1863), Limestone Press, Kingston 1979
——, (ed.), tr. by Dmitry Krenov, Supplement of Some Historical Documents to the Historical Review of the Formation of the Russian American Company (St Petersburg 1863), Limestone Press, Kingston 1979
Colin Thubron, In Siberia, Harper Perennial, London 2000
Nikolai Tolstoy, The Tolstoys: 24 Generations of Russian History 1353–1983, Hamilton, London 1983
S. L. Tolstoy, Fyodor Tolstoy Amerikanets, AIN, Moscow 1926
Mikhail I. Tsiporukha, ‘Odna iz Stroitelei Imperii na Tikhookeanskom Severe’, Istoriya Nauki I Tekhniki, no. 8, Moscow 2004
George Vernadsky, The Mongols and Russia, Yale University Press, 1953
Ralph H. Vigil, ‘The Hispanic Heritage and the Borderlands’, Journal of San Diego History, vol. 19, no. 3, summer 1973
Ilya Vinkovetsky, Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire 1804–1867, Oxford University Press, New York 2011
Irina Viter and Aleksandr Smyshlyaev, Gorod nad Avachinskoi Buhtoi (A History of Petropavlosk-Kamchatksty), Novaya Kniga, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky 2011
K. Voensky, Posolstvo N. P. Rezanova v Yaponiyu, Russkaya Starina, Moscow 1995 no. 9-10
Kazimierz Waliszewski, Paul the First of Russia, the Son of Catherine the Great, William Heineman, New York 1913
Antony Wild, The East India Company, Trade and Conquest from 1600, HarperCollins, London 2000
Igor Nikiforovich Yermolaev, Pskovsky Chinovnik Nikolai Rezanov i ego ‘Yunona i Avos’, Pskovsaya Provintsiya, Pskov, April 2004
Fiction
Gertrude Atherton, Rezanov, Authors and Newspapers Association, New York 1906
Hector Chevigny, Lord of Alaska. Baranov and the Russian Adventure, Viking Press, New York 1944.
——, Lost Empire. The Life and Adventures of Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov, MacMillan, New York 1943.
——, Russian America: The Great American Venture, 1741–1867, Viking Press, New York 1965
Andrei Voznesensky, Selected Poems of Andrei Voznesensky, Random House, New York 2000
Acknowledgements
Researching a book which touches on many worlds, as Rezanov’s story does, has been a humbling experience. It could not have been done without the help of dozens of people from St Petersburg to San Francisco who shared their expertise, scholarship, hospitality and friendship.
I would like to thank the following people in particular. In Sitka, the Tlingit woodcarver (and Blue Peter Badge-holder) Tommy Joseph keeps his people’s traditions alive – and quietly boycotted the commemoration of the handover of Alaska from one group of white colonists to another as ‘their party, not ours’. Thad Poulson of the Sitka Sentinel was generous with contacts, while Dusty Kidd of the National Parks Service and Bob Medinger of the Sitka Historical Society were kind enough to organize a lunch of local historians in my honour. David Nordlander of the Library of Congress in Washington was invaluable in tracking down the Russian American Company’s scattered archives and has been instrumental in putting much of the most important material online in the brilliant Meeting of Continents website.
In Juneau, I would like to thank bookshop owner and scholar Dee Longenbaugh for searching out hard-to-find monographs on Rezanov – and for keeping in touch over several years with latest titbits which have come her way. Jim Simard at the Alaska State Archive and Steve Hendrickson at the Alaska State Museum helped me sift the often chaotic archives the Russians left behind them when they abandoned their American colony. Alan Engstrom – the biographer of Alexander Baranov and discoverer of the true fate of Chirikov’s crewmen in Jakobi Bay – drove me around Juneau and introduced me to key Russian America scholars in both Alaska and Moscow.
In Kodiak, I explored the storm-lashed Artillery Point with Marnie Leist of the Alutiiq Museum. Father Ioann of the Holy Resurrection Cathedral in Kodiak keeps the Orthodox tradition alive in the church originally paid for by Alexander Baranov, and generously allowed me to examine the relics of Saint Hermann of Alaska kept in his church. Deacon Innocent (Phil Hayes) arranged for me to visit Spruce Island – no easy feat, since communication was largely by text message picked up once every few days by the monks on the one remote point on the island with faint reception. The Fathers of St Michael’s Skete (who modestly insisted that they not be named to avoid worldly vanity) rode five-foot high swells to transport me across the straits to their island home and graciously guided me around the habitations of St Hermann and his followers.
In San Francisco, Alla Sokoloff was kind enough to drive me to Benicia to pay our respects at Conchita Arguello’s grave. Natalie Sabelnik of the Congress of Russian Americans introduced me to local historians and let me browse her archive – a fascinating collection of flotsam washed up after the disappearance of the Russian empire and the scattering of many of its brightest and best to California, in Rezanov’s footsteps.
At Fort Ross, Sarah Sweedler and Marion MacDonald were incredibly generous with their time and Hank Birnbaum keeps the Russian language alive at the Fort by marching platoons of musket-bearing schoolchildren around the compound to the command of ‘Levo! Levo!’
In Moscow, Vladimir Kolychev is the energetic head of the Russian American Society and indefatiguable organizer of events, from simultaneous bell-ringing in churches in Moscow and Kodiak to outings to productions of Junona I Avos. Kolychev is a great admirer of Rezanov and asked me ‘not to be too hard on his memory’: I hope he judges that I have been fair, at least. Dr Alexander Petrov has continued the late Professor Nikolai Bolkhovitinov’s rigorous scholarship of Russian America. I greatly enjoyed open-air debates under the plane trees in a museum garden with Leonid Sverdlov, another of the greatest living experts on Rezanov.
In St Petersburg, Andrei Grinev has been kind enough to answer streams of questions on the finer points of Company history, and the Kunstkammer’s Sergei Korsun gave me an in-depth tour of the unique Tlingit articles collected by Lisiansky in 1804. In Kamchatka, Irina Vitter of the regional public library loaded me with advice and monographs, while I stayed at the home of Martha Madsen, a proud Kamchatkan by adoption.
I am particularly grateful to two scholars who took the time to read all or part of the manuscript and saved me from many embarrassing mistakes. Professor William McOmie of Kanagawa University in Yokohama worked through the Japanese sections several times over. Victoria Moessner, translator of Löwenstern’s diaries, spent many days correcting and commentating my account of Rezanov’s voyages. My dear friends and colleagues Andrew Meier and Mark Franchetti both made invaluable suggestions on structure and style.
Michael Fishwick at Bloomsbury is the world’s finest editor – not least because he knows what your book should really be about even if you don’t. He is ably assisted by Anna Simpson and Oliver Holden-Rea. My agent Natasha Fairweather is an old and dear friend and mentor, who is also a fine deal-maker. If I am any historian at all it is thanks to my tutors at Christ Chur
ch, the late Patrick Wormald, William Thomas and Katya Andreyev.
Finally I would like to thank my wife Ksenia, who spent hours speed-reading tedious Russian archival sources as I took notes and who tolerated my long absences on the road in pursuit of my elusive hero.
‘A dynamic fellow, hot tempered, a dedicated scribbler…’ Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov in the uniform of a Court Chamberlain and wearing the Order of St Anne First Class; this portrait was painted just before he left Russia for the last time in July 1803 and hung in the boardroom of the Russian American Company in St Petersburg.
Russian adventurers opened up Russia’s New World by zig-zagging across Siberia’s three great river systems. The Cossack river-pirate-turned-conquistador Yermak Timofeyevich (left) led a raiding party of renegades into Siberia in search of fur and gold and overthrew the Tatar Khanate of Sibir in 1582. The Eastern Sea (below) was Russia’s final frontier: Peter the Great sent captains Vitus Bering and Alexei Chirikov to explore the ‘Great Land’ rumoured to lie beyond it – and claim it for Russia. Chirikov made landfall in modern-day Alaska in July 1741.
The world seen from the top, showing America as a natural extension of Siberia. This map was drawn in 1763 by Mikhail Lomonosov, a leading proponent of further exploration and conquest of the Great Land.
The natives of the Aleutian Islands had hunted sea otters with spears from kayaks made of sealskin stretched over a wooden frame for centuries. Russian colonists put them to work and quickly devastated the sea otter populations of the region.
The deep, lustrous fur of sea otters is the thickest and warmest of any mammal. In 1780 a single five-foot-long sea otter pelt was worth more than an ordinary seaman’s annual salary in the markets of Canton, a discovery which triggered a fur-rush to the North Pacific.
The Empress Catherine the Great shared Peter the Great’s ambitions to expand Russia’s Empire into America – but was wary of ruthless merchants like Shelikhov.
Born into a humble merchant family in Rylsk, Grigory Shelikhov became the millionaire master of Russia’s greatest fur-trading empire as well as one of the boldest explorers of his age. He founded a colony on Kodiak, but his reputation was forever tainted as a butcher of natives. His daughter’s marriage to Rezanov was Shelikhov’s bid for respectability – and for influence at court.
The Bronze Horseman – or the Copper Horseman in Russian – was Catherine the Great’s monument to Peter the Great. The casting took French sculptor Etienne Falconet twelve years and was the talk of St Petersburg as Rezanov grew up; it was finally unveiled (below) in 1782. The Horseman through Japanese eyes (right): a sketch by the sailor Kankai Ibun who accompanied Rezanov to Japan in 1806.
The Courtiers. Gavriil Derzhavin (above left), poet and politician and family friend of the Rezanovs, was Nikolai’s unfailing patron. Count Nikolai Rumiantsev (right) was one of Russia’s great magnates, a cousin of Tsar Alexander I, who ran the powerful Ministry of Commerce. He recognised the political and commercial potential of a Russian round-the-world expedition.
Prince Platon Zubov was Catherine the Great’s last, and most cynical, lover-favourite. When they met, the Empress was sixty; he was twenty-two. She showered him with money and titles. Zubov’s morning receptions ‘resembled the levées of a French Royal mistress’ and his private court was a carousel of bribery and favour. Rezanov became one of Zubov’s secretaries in 1793.
Tsar Paul sent Russian armies deep into Europe and planned a joint Russo-French land and naval assault on British India with Napoleon. Above, an army of 20,000 Cossacks was en-route to India when Paul was assassinated in 1801; Below, General Alexander Suvorov is greeted by cheering crowds as Russian troops occupy Milan in April 1799.
Modelled on Britain’s East India Company, the Russian American Company would, Rezanov believed, make the Pacific a Russian sea. The Company had the power to issue money and have its own armed forces, and its Royal Charters – from both Paul I and Alexander I – allowed the Company to fly a flag almost identical to Russia’s own.
Catherine the Great’s dwarfish, paranoid son Paul hated his mother and when he finally succeeded her in 1796 set about undoing many of her reforms. His disastrous reign lasted just four years, four months and four days before he was murdered by discontented aristocrats.
Happily for Russia, Tsar Paul’s son Alexander took after his grandmother, Catherine the Great. He began his reign as an enthusiastic reformer and backed Rezanov’s grand plans for pushing Russia’s empire into southern Alaska and beyond. He made Rezanov’s son a royal page.
Adam Johann von Krusenstern (left) conceived the idea of a Russian round-the-world voyage while serving with the British Royal Navy in the Pacific. The expedition was approved by the Tsar in 1803 – but with the addition of Rezanov as Ambassador to Japan. Both men believed they were in charge of the voyage, with fateful results. Krusenstern recruited his old friend from Royal Navy days, Yury Lisiansky (right), to buy two ships.
Hermann Ludwig von Löwenstern (left), scion of a German Baltic family in Russian service, was the Nadezhda’s fourth lieutenant and cartographer. He wrote an uncensored diary of the voyage, dedicated in large part to denunciations of Rezanov’s arrogance. Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff (right) was a medical doctor, naturalist and anthropologist who attached himself to the expedition in Copenhagen by agreeing to serve as Rezanov’s personal physician. He followed his chief all the way to San Francisco.
Langsdorff, with his cultivated eye, found the tattooed natives ‘handsome and well-made … a model for the Apollo of Belvedere’.
The Nadezhda reached the Pacific island of Nukakhiva in April 1804. Natives swam out to the ship; to the delight of officers and men the Nuhakhivan women were happy to dispense sexual favours in exchange for iron trinkets, which they held in their mouths as they swam home.
Count Fyodor Tolstoy, ‘The American’, ‘a dangerous madcap’ whose drunken pranks almost got him clapped in irons. At Nukakhiva he had himself tattooed; in later life he killed thirteen men in duels.
The French renegade Jean Cabri deserted a merchant ship and married into the Nukakhivan royal family. He abandoned his native wife and children when a squall swept the Nadezhda out to sea with him on board.
The Nadezhda moored in Avacha Bay by the settlement of Petropavlovsk on Kamchatka, the remotest port in continental Russia.
The Nadezhda in Nagasaki Bay, disarmed of all her gunpowder, is towed to a safer anchorage by Japanese oared barges as her sailors salute from the yardarms.
‘Rezanov shows himself to the people of Japan’ – Löwenstern’s sarcastic caption to his cartoon of the Ambassador urinating into Nagasaki harbour in full view of Japanese gawkers. Rezanov ‘loses a great deal in the eyes of the Japanese who observe etiquette so strictly,’ he wrote.
Clockwise from top left: Rezanov at Megasaki, loafing among the Tsar’s presents for the Japanese Emperor in his dressing gown; drinking brandy with his cronies; ordering his Marine guard to arrest a drunken Fyodor Shmelin.
Dr Wilhelm Gottfried Tilesius’s sketches of Japanese skiffs and official translators – known as tolks – whose impenetrable politeness Rezanov found so exasperating.
Rezanov as the Japanese saw him, resplendent in his Chamberlain’s uniform and decorations. His visit to Nagasaki spurred fierce debate at the highest levels of Japanese society over contact with the outside world. Eventually advocates of sakoku – the philosophy of isolation – prevailed and the Russians were sent home empty-handed.
San Francisco was the northernmost outpost of Spain’s American Empire, founded in 1776 in direct response to Russian Imperial ambitions in California. Rezanov arrived there in April 1806, scurvy-stricken and starving in his finery. The Russians found the settlement ‘small and mean’, but Rezanov fell in love with the Spanish governor’s daughter.
Rezanov dreamed of turning the Russian American Company’s precarious and slovenly Alaskan settlements into a well-ordered empire stretching far into California. But ships, men, food and even ir
on was in short supply – there was not enough spare metal to mint real coins, so the Company printed its own rubles on squares of seal hide (above). Alexander Baranov (left) was the Company’s general manager for nineteen years and founded the colony in blood.
Russian America on a US map printed in Washington in 1860. In the aftermath of the Crimean War it became clear that Russia’s navy could no longer defend her American possessions. The Tsar offered the vast territory to the British but Lord Palmerston refused; in 1867 Alaska was sold for $7.2 million – or about 2 cents per acre – to the United States.
The Russian American Company’s colony at Fort Ross, in modern-day Sonoma County in California, was the southernmost outpost of the Russian Empire between 1812 and 1842. Today it is preserved as a state park.
A Note on the Author
Owen Matthews read modern history at Oxford before becoming a journalist. He covered conflicts in Bosnia, Lebanon, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq, and was Moscow Bureau Chief for Newsweek magazine.
His first book, Stalin’s Children, was published to critical acclaim in 2008, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Orwell Prize for political writing, and selected as one of the Books of the Year by the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator. It has been translated into twenty-eight languages and the French version was shortlisted for the Prix Medicis 2009.