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

  To Xenia, Nikita and Teddy

  Like all of us sinners, General B. was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence – and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.

  —Nikolai Gogol, ‘Dead Souls’

  Contents

  Russia in 1794

  The North Pacific, 1806

  Prologue

  Introduction

  1 Man and Nature

  2 The Final Frontier

  3 The Court

  4 The King of Siberia

  5 A Nabob in St Petersburg

  6 To China

  7 Empire Builder

  8 Tsar Paul

  9 Russia’s East India Company

  10 From Newgate to Brazil

  11 Cape Horn to the Court of the Hawaiian King

  12 Nangasac

  13 Humiliation

  14 The Voyage of the Maria

  15 Baranov

  16 Hunger, Disease, Shipwreck and Death

  17 Conchita

  18 Love and Ambition

  19 I will never see you – I will never forget you

  20 The Weeping Country

  Epilogues

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Image section 1

  Image section 2

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Russia in 1794

  The North Pacific, 1806

  Prologue

  O, Russian Columbuses, scorning a grim Fate;

  Between the mounts of Ida will open a new path to the East;

  And we will plant our State on America’s shores . . .

  Mikhail Lomonosov, Russian Columbuses, 17471

  This Mister Rezanov was a dynamic fellow, hot tempered, a dedicated scribbler, a talker, with a head more inclined to making castles in the air in his study than to making great deeds come true in the world.

  Captain Vasily Golovnin2

  On a warm spring evening in May 1806, a betrothal was celebrated in the tiny fort of San Francisco, the northernmost outpost of Spain’s American empire. The single-storey adobe governor’s house, with its sweeping views over the bay, was decorated with wildflowers.3 Fresh straw had been strewn on the floor and honey cakes and sweet yellow wine set out for the guests. Tacked to the wall of the small reception room was a pair of flags. One was the newly designed red and yellow ensign of the empire of New Spain. The other, somewhat weather-beaten, was the red, white and blue civil flag of the Russian Empire.4

  The bride-to-be was the governor’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Doña María de Concepción Marcella de Arguello, a ‘bright-eyed angel’5 known to her family as Conchita. She wore a robe of white homespun cotton.6 The groom was a tall Russian with a severe face and cropped hair, prematurely grey for his forty-two years.7 His name was Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov, widower, a nobleman of the Russian Empire and master of a fur trading empire that extended from the Urals to Alaska. He wore the dark green uniform of a chamberlain to Tsar Alexander I. At his throat was the white cross of a commander of the Order of Malta, worn by the favourites of Alexander’s recently murdered father, Tsar Paul. On his chest was the diamond-encrusted star of the Order of St Anne first class, a sign of the Russian emperor’s high favour.

  Rezanov was a wealthy man, with powerful friends at court. But here in California he was also a desperate man, with madness hatching within him. Three years at sea had battered him. He had failed utterly in the primary task with which his emperor had entrusted him: an embassy to Japan to open trade with the hermit nation. He had become morbidly conscious of his own status and dignity, and donned his decorations like armour. Rezanov had also become volatile, a bully and a martinet. He wept when making patriotic toasts in honour of the emperor and played lyrical pieces on his violin, yet he did not hesitate to tell his fellow officers to go screw their mothers. He had spent much of the voyage furiously bickering, scheming and denouncing his colleagues, and his shipmates returned the favour by devoting pages of their diaries to castigating him. They called him an ‘ignoramus,’ an ‘arch rascal’8 and ‘the biggest scoundrel whom the D[evil] ever put into the world’,9 but some of them would and did follow him to the end of the earth.

  Rezanov was also a charmer, a skilled diplomat and a gambler. California was the ultimate point in his long journey from the Russian imperial court, where he had spent much of his career, to the remotest wildernesses in the world. And it was here, on the barely explored north-east coast of North America, that he hoped to find redemption in the form of a great imperial coup that would restore him to the favour of the Tsar. And perhaps personal redemption too, in the form of a new life with Conchita, the ‘beauty of the Californias’.

  The bride’s father, Don José Dario Arguello, commander of the San Francisco garrison, was a man from a very different world from Rezanov’s. He had been born a peasant in the pueblo of Santiago de Querétaro in modern-day Mexico. He was tall but dark-skinned, and through intelligence and determination he had risen through the ranks of the Spanish dragoons. As a twenty-eight-year-old sergeant he showed his mettle by taking command of a party of colonists after the murder of their officer and leading them to found a new settlement named for Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles.10 It was a humble little place, one of the poorest missions in California, but Don José Dario doubtless hoped that his settlement of Los Angeles might amount to something one day. Arguello was now fifty-three years old, a trusted servant of the empire of New Spain, a pious man deeply attached to his wife and thirteen surviving children.

  Arguello clearly had mixed feelings about the proposed marriage. Rezanov had burst in upon his family’s quiet lives less than a month before in a battered American-built brig, his breath foul from scurvy and starving in his finery. In the intervening weeks he proceeded to turn Arguello’s carefully ordered world on its head. First the Russian busied himself with making friends with the local Franciscan friars and encouraging them to break the Spanish empire’s ban on trade with the outside world.11 He flirted with Arguello’s eldest daughter – perfectly respectably, always with a duenna present. Then, scorning all objections of rank, faith and politics, he proposed marriage to Conchita and the girl had immediately accepted. Though they had no common language other than Rezanov’s Frenchified, improvised Spanish, the Russian had clearly made an impression.

  Of course he had. Rezanov was a professional courtier: he knew how to dazzle, and to charm, and to make himself indispensable. He had spent much of his life in St Petersburg, Europe’s most glittering court now that the French one at Versailles has been so rudely decapitated. He was by far the most impressive and worldly man that Conchita had ever met. Small wonder that she enthusiastically agreed to the Russian’s offer, even though it meant she would be taken to St Petersburg, half a world away. But to Arguello the betrothal meant that he would most probably lose his daughter for ever. Nor was Conchita’s suitor even a Roman Catholic.

  Perplexed he might be by his fast-taking future son-in-law, but Comandante Arguello was determined to put on a good show for an event as momentous as his eldest daughter’s engagement. Dancing was arranged in the modest hall of his residence. A band of soldiers was assembled from among the fort’s forty-strong garrison, and they played the barrego, a courtly Spanish minuet, on
violins and guitars. The Russians took their turn by playing English country dances. Rezanov performed on his fiddle and danced with his dark-eyed Conchita.

  ‘She was lively and animated, had sparkling love-inspiring eyes, beautiful teeth, pleasing and expressive features, a fine form, and a thousand other charms, yet her manners were perfectly simple and artless,’ wrote Rezanov’s German doctor and the expedition’s natural historian, Georg von Langsdorff. For dinner the party was treated to ‘an excellent soup of pulse and vegetables, with roasted fowls, a leg of mutton, different vegetables dressed in various ways, salad, pastry, preserved fruits and many very nice sorts of food, the produce of the dairy . . . the wine, which was the production of the country, was but of an ordinary quality, but was succeeded by super-excellent hot chocolate’.12

  Bullfights had been arranged for the next day, and bear-baiting. Arguello dispatched eight soldiers at dawn to find the required wild animal, and they returned at dusk dragging a large brown bear, its limbs bound and carried on a bier of stretched ox hide. Langsdorff observed the bear ‘splash about in the water to cool himself . . . No-one dared venture near him for he growled, gnashed his teeth and seemed very indignant at the treatment he received.’13 None of the Russians was tactless enough to comment that their hosts were proposing to bait their national animal to death the following day. The connection certainly did not occur to Arguello, as artless in his manners as his daughter. But in any case the poor bear died in the night, so in the end the company had to make do with traditional Spanish bulls instead.

  Little did the Arguellos suspect as they drank and danced into the chilly evening that their courteous and impressive guest was viewing the rich lands of California with the envious eye of empire. Or that within a decade the southernmost outpost of Russia would be planted in modern-day Sonoma County, just seventy miles to the north of where they toasted Conchita’s future happiness.

  Introduction

  I shall never see you –

  I shall never forget you.

  Andrei Voznesensky, Junona i Avos1

  Those of depraved minds go nowadays to America solely with the aim of growing rich and then upon their return journey fritter it away in a few days, scattering like dust the riches obtained by many years of other peoples’ tears. Can such desperate people respect their fellow beings? The poor [native] Americans are, to Russia’s shame, sacrificed to their debauchery.

  Nikolai Rezanov, quoted by Hieromonk Gideon2

  I first heard of Nikolai Rezanov in the summer of 1986. I was fifteen years old and visiting my mother’s sister Lenina in her cluttered apartment on Frunzenskaya Embankment in Moscow. I had no inkling that I was living through the old Soviet Union’s last summer, the final months of calm before the winds of change that were to scatter the old order began to blow. Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power the previous year, and was just about to open the twin Pandora’s boxes of glasnost and perestroika. But that summer the certainties of the Soviet empire and the Communist Party had not yet been shaken by the ghosts of exhumed history, nor by unvarnished news of the unfolding Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. Orderly queues still formed outside Lenin’s mausoleum; Western cars were unknown on the traffic-free streets of Moscow, and buildings were still decorated with huge heroic posters celebrating socialist labour.

  Various chaperones had been assigned by my aunt to guide me around the capital during those dusty summer holiday weeks. One of them – Victor Elpidiforovich, a war veteran who wore a pinstriped jacket with an impressive collection of medals – announced the dramatic news that tickets had been procured to Moscow’s number-one hit show, the rock opera Junona i Avos. The title is incomprehensible, even in Russian, if you don’t know that it refers to the names of two ships. But everybody in the Soviet Union did know. The show had premièred five years before, at the Theatre of Lenin’s Communist Youth League – colloquially known as LenKom – just off Pushkin Square. It had been an immediate sensation, and remained so for years: in the spring of 2013 Junona i Avos is still playing to packed houses. In the mid-1980s fans would queue for days for tickets for the performances, which occurred, with characteristic Soviet indifference to the laws of supply and demand, only once a fortnight. In those innocent days it was still considered deeply shameful to purchase a ticket at an inflated price from free-market ‘speculators’.

  The show was indeed an overwhelming and moving spectacle. The story, based on historical fact but heavily embellished by librettist Andrei Voznesensky, begins with Nikolai Rezanov, a handsome Russian aristocrat and intimate of the Tsar, arriving in Spanish California with the two eponymous ships of the title. Russia’s American empire – the first time I had ever heard of such a thing – is expanding southwards, and Rezanov eyes the rich lands of California with a view to conquering them. The Spanish are depicted as religious, effete and decadent. The Russians, in their smart tsarist naval uniforms, are bluff, energetic and down to earth.

  This being an opera, it is a love story. Being Russian, it’s also of course a tragedy. Rezanov and Conchita, daughter of the Spanish governor, fall in love. Her father and the Catholic priests who surround him are horrified. In the fictionalized version Conchita’s fiery Spanish fiancé – invented by the librettist – even fights a duel with the upstart Russian suitor. Rezanov’s own officers warn him that the Tsar will have to give permission for him to marry a foreigner and a Catholic. Our hero brushes aside all objections: on wings of love, he will rush to St Petersburg, petition the Tsar and return to marry Conchita. She does not dare believe it. ‘I will never see you: I will never forget you’ is the couple’s last duet, still as famous in Russia as the theme from Jesus Christ Superstar is in the West. On the road home Rezanov falls from his horse and dies. But Conchita, disbelieving rumours of his demise, continues to wait for her lover for thirty-five years. She ends her days a nun, faithful to his memory.

  It’s hard to imagine today quite how extraordinary it was to see a Russian aristocrat and tsarist officers cast as heroes on a Soviet stage. The production also featured a vast icon of the Virgin looming over the actors, and haunting Orthodox liturgy. There were references to the ‘Lord Emperor’, and the tsarist flag was raised in triumph at the finale. The director, Mark Zakharov, was amazed when the censors passed the opera uncut. But Junona i Avos caught the mood of the moment. As Russians awoke to the disintegration of the Soviet empire, here was a nostalgic story of a lost empire in America. And as Gorbachev pressed for détente with the West, the romance of Rezanov and Conchita reminded us that love could cross national boundaries. Junona i Avos conjured up a romantic vision of pre-Soviet Russia even as audiences began to contemplate the reality of a post-Soviet Russia.

  What impressed me most was that the story of Junona i Avos was largely true. Russia really did once have an American empire. By 1812 the border of the Tsar’s dominions was on what is today called the Russian River, an hour’s drive north of San Francisco along California’s Highway 1. Russia also – briefly – had a colony on Hawaii. Rezanov spent much of his life passionately advocating the idea that America’s west coast could be a province of Russia, and the Pacific a Russian sea. This was no mad pipe dream but a very real possibility.

  As Rezanov set off from St Petersburg bound for the Pacific on a July morning in 1803, he was sailing into a world changing faster than ever in history. France, the greatest power in continental Europe, had recently been convulsed by revolution, but was now ruled by an upstart Corsican busy redrawing the map of the world. Napoleon had conquered – and then lost – Egypt, defeated Prussia and Spain and overrun Italy and much of Germany. He had even plotted with Russia’s Tsar Paul to seize India from Britain.

  The newly-founded British empire had been created by a couple of decisive battles and could, Napoleon wrote to Paul, be undone just as quickly. The memory of England’s two great colonial coups was still only a generation old: in 1757 the British East India Company’s General Robert Clive had broken the Mogul empire at the Battle of Plassey. Two y
ears after that, Major General James Wolfe’s daring attack on the fortress of Quebec ensured that the vast territory of New France, stretching across much of modern Canada, had come under the British crown.

  It was an age of prodigies of conquest, navigation and empire-building. Napoleon had shown the way, but his alliance with Russia had collapsed with Tsar Paul’s murder in 1801. Nonetheless, the time had come, Rezanov believed, for Russia to make her own move on the world stage. But her bold imperial gambit would be in the New rather than the Old World. Russia would colonize America from the west.

  Rezanov’s instrument was to be, like Clive of India’s, a powerful private company. The Russian American Company, founded by Rezanov in 1799 with an exalted list of shareholders headed by the Tsar himself, was closely modelled on Britain’s East India Company. It had a royal charter, the right to raise armies and dispense justice, and a trade monopoly designed to bring both dominion and profit.

  Since the 1780s Russian merchant-adventurers had established a hold – albeit a precarious one – on the Pacific shore of America. A string of lonely stockades and forts manned by a motley array of convicts, fur trappers and foreign desperadoes spanned 4,000 miles of the northern Pacific rim from the Kamchatka peninsula through the Aleutian archipelago to the newly founded capital of Russian America at New Archangel – modern Sitka – at the southern end of the present-day US state of Alaska. Nonetheless Rezanov was convinced that the unclaimed 1,500 miles of territory that separated New Archangel from San Francisco was ripe for the taking – as was the sparsely populated and barely defended empire of New Spain that lay beyond.3

  ‘Your Excellency perhaps may laugh at my far-reaching plans, but I am certain that they will prove exceedingly profitable ventures. If we had men and means even without any great sacrifice on the part of the treasury all this country could be made a corporeal part of the Russian Empire,’ Rezanov wrote to his patron the minister of commerce after his return from California in 1806. ‘Not through petty enterprise but by great undertakings have mighty commercial bodies achieved rank and power.’