Оуэн Мэтьюз - Glorious Misadventures - Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

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 taken 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.