4.
IV
It was long before Rezánov slept that night. The
usual chill had come in from the Pacific as the sun
went down, and the distinguished visitor had
intimated to his hosts that he should like to exercise
on shore until ready for his detested quarters; but
Argüello dared not, in the absence of his father,
invite the foreigner even to sleep in the house so
lavishly offered in the morning; although he had
sent such an abundance of provisions to the ship
that the poor sailors were deep in sleep, gorged like
boa-constrictors; and he could safely promise that
while the Juno remained in port her larder should
never be empty. He shared the evening bowl of
punch in the cabin, then went his way lamenting
that he could not take his new friends with him.
Rezánov paced the little deck of the Juno to
keep
his blood in stir. There was no moon. The islands
and promontories on the great sheet of water were
black save for the occasional glow of an Indian
camp-fire. There was not a sound but the lapping
of the waves, the roar of distant breakers. The
great silver stars and the little green stars looked
down upon a solitude that was almost primeval, yet
mysteriously disturbed by the restless currents in
the brain of a man who had little in common with
primal forces.
Rezánov was uneasy on more scores than one.
He was annoyed and mortified at the
discovery—made over the punch bowl—that the girl he had
taken to be twenty was but sixteen. It was by no
means his first experience of the quick maturity of
southern women—but sixteen! He had never
wasted a moment on a chit before, and although he
was a man of imagination, and notwithstanding
her intelligence and dignity, he could not reconcile
properties so conflicting with any sort of feminine
ideal.
And the pressing half of his mission he had
confided to her! No man knew better than he the
value of a tactful and witty woman in the political
dilemmas of life; more than one had given him
devoted service, nor ever yet had he made a mistake.
After several hours spent in the society of this clever,
politic, dissatisfied girl he had come to the
conclusion that he could trust her, and had told her of the
lamentable condition of the creatures in the employ
of the Russian-American Company; of their chronic
state of semi-starvation, of the scurvy that made
them apathetic of brain and body, and eventually
would exterminate them unless he could establish
reciprocal trade relations with California and obtain
regular supplies of farinaceous food;
acknowledged that he had brought a cargo of Russian and
Boston goods necessary to the well-being of the
Missions and Presidios, and that he would not return
to the wretched people of Sitka, at least, without a
generous exchange of breadstuffs, dried meats, peas,
beans, barley and tallow. Not only had he no
longer the courage to witness their misery, but his
fortune and his career were at stake. His entire
capital was invested in the Company he had founded,
and he had failed in his embassy to Japan—to the
keen mortification of the Tsar and the jubilation of
his enemies. If he left the Emperor's northeastern
dominions unreclaimed and failed to rescue the
Company from its precarious condition, he hardly
should care to return to St. Petersburg.
Doña Concha had listened to this eloquent
harangue—they sat alone at one end of the long
sala while Luis at the other toiled over letters to the
Governor and his father advising them of the
formidable honor of the Russian's visit—in exactly
the temper he would have chosen. Her fine eyes
had melted and run over at the moving tale of the
sufferings of the servants of the Company—until
his own had softened in response and he had
impulsively kissed her hand; they had dilated and
flashed as he spoke of his personal apprehensions;
and when he had given her a practical explanation
of his reasons for coming to California she had
given him advice as practical in return.
He must withhold from her father and the
Governor the fact of his pressing need; they were high
officials with an inflexible sense of duty, and did all
they could to enforce the law against trading with
foreigners. He was to maintain the fiction of
belting the globe, but admit that he had indulged in a
dream of commercial relations—for a benefit strictly
mutual—between neighbors as close as the Spanish
and Russians in America. This would interest
them—what would not, on the edge of the world?
—and they would agree to lay the matter,
reinforced by a strong personal plea, before the Viceroy
of Mexico; who in turn would send it to the
Cabinet and King at Madrid. Meanwhile, he was to
confide in the priests at the Mission. Not only
would their sympathies be enlisted, but they did
much trading under the very nose of the
government. Not for personal gain—they were vowed to
a life of poverty; but for their Indian converts;
and as there were twelve hundred at the Mission of
San Francisco, they would wink at many things
condemnable in the abstract. He had engaged to visit
them on the morrow, and he must take presents to
tempt their impersonal cupidity, and invite them to
inspect the rest of his wares—which the Governor
would be informed his Excellency had been forced
to buy with the
Juno from the Yankee skipper,
D'Wolf, and would rid himself of did opportunity
offer.
Rezánov had never received sounder advice, and
had promptly accepted it. Now, as he reflected that
it had been given by a girl of sixteen, he was divided
between admiration of her precocity and fear lest
she prove to be too young to keep a secret.
Moreover, there were other considerations.
Rezánov, although in his earlier years he had so
far sacrificed his interests and played into the hands
of his enemies, in avoiding the too embarrassing
partiality of Catherine the Great, had nevertheless held
a high place at court by right of birth, and been a
man of the world always; rarely absent from St.
Petersburg during the last and least susceptible part
of the imperial courtesan's life, the brief reign of
Paul, and the two years between the accession of
Alexander and the sailing of the Nadeshda.
Moreover, there was hardly another court of importance
in Europe with which he was not familiar, and few
men had had a more complete experience of life.
And the life of a courtier, a diplomat, a traveller,
noble, wealthy, agreeable to women by divine right,
with active enemies and a horde of flatterers, in
daily contact with the meaner and more
disingenuous corners of human nature, is not conducive
to a broad optimism and a sweet and immutable
Christianity. Rezánov inevitably was more or less
cynical and blasé, and too long versed in the ways
of courts and courtiers to retain more than a
whimsical tolerance of the naked truth and an
appreciation of its excellence as a diplomatic manoeuvre.
Nevertheless, he was by nature too impetuous ever
to become under any provocation a dishonest man,
and too normally a gentleman to deviate from a
certain personal code of honor. He might come to
California with fair words and a very definite
intention of annexing it to Russia at the first
opportunity, but he was incapable of abusing the
hospitality of the Argüellos by making love to their
sixteen-year-old daughter. Had she been of the years
he had assumed, he would have had less scruple in
embarking upon a flirtation, both for the pastime
and the use he might make of her. A Spanish
beauty of twenty, still unmarried, would be more
than his match. But a child, however precocious,
inevitably would fall in love with the first
uncommon stranger she met; and Rezánov, less vain than
most men of his kind, and with a fundamental
humanity that was the chief cause in his efforts to
improve the condition of his wretched promuschleniki,
had no taste for the rôle of heart-breaker.
But the girl had proved her timeliness; would, if
trustworthy, be of further use in inclining her
father and the Governor toward such of his
designs as he had any intentions of revealing; and,
weighing carefully his conversations with her, he
was disposed to believe that she would screen and
abet him through vanity and love of intrigue. After
the dinner, in the seclusion of the sala, he had taken
pains to explore for the causes of her mental
maturity. Concha had told him of Don José Argüello's
ambition that his children in their youth should have
the education he had been forced to acquire in his
manhood; he had taught them himself, and
notwithstanding his piety and the disapproval of the
priests, had permitted them to read the histories,
travels, and biographies he received once a year
from the City of Mexico. Rezánov had met
Madame de Staël and other
bas bleus, and given
them no more of his society than politeness
demanded, but although astonished at the amount of
information this young girl had assimilated, he
found nothing in her manner of wearing her
intellectual crown to offend his fastidious taste. She
was wholly artless in her love of books and of
discussing them; and nothing in their contents had
disturbed the sweetest innocence he had ever met. Of
the little arts of coquetry she was mistress by
inheritance and much provocation, but her unawakened
inner life breathed the simplicity and purity of the
elemental roses that hovered about her in his
thoughts. Her very unsusceptibility made the game
more dangerous; if it piqued him—and he aspired
to be no more than human—he either should have
to marry her, or nurse a sore spot in his conscience
for the rest of his life; and for neither alternative
had he the least relish.
He dismissed the subject at last with an impatient
shrug. Perhaps he was a conceited ass, as his
English friends would say; perhaps the Governor would
be more amenable than she had represented. No
man could forecast events. It was enough to be
forearmed.
But his thoughts swung to a theme as little
disburdening. His needs, as he had confided to
Concha, were very pressing. The dry or frozen fish,
the sea dogs, the fat of whales, upon which the
employees of the Company were forced to subsist in
the least hospitable of climes, had ravaged them
with scorbutic diseases until their numbers were so
reduced by death and desertion that there was
danger of depopulation and the consequent bankruptcy
of the Company. Since June of the preceding year
until his departure from New Archangel in the
previous month, he had been actively engaged in
inspection of the Company's holdings from Kamchatka
to Sitka: reforming abuses, establishing schools
and libraries, conceiving measures to protect the
fur-bearing animals from reckless slaughter both
by the promuschleniki and marauding foreigners;
punishing and banishing the worst offenders against
the Company's laws; encouraging the faithful, and
sharing hardships with them that sent memories of
former luxuries and pleasures scurrying off to the
realms of fantasy. But his rule would be
incomplete and his efforts end in failure if the miserable
Russians and natives in the employ of the
Company were not vitalized by proper food and cheered
with the hope of its permanence.
In Santiago's story of the Russian visitor's
achievements and status there was the common
mingling of truth and fiction the exalted never fail
to inspire. Rezánov, although he had accomplished
great ends against greater odds, was too little of a
courtier at heart ever to have been a prime favorite
in St. Petersburg until the accession of a ruler with
whom he had something in common. A dissolute
woman and a crack-brained despot were the last to
appreciate an original and independent mind, and
the seclusion of Alexander had been so complete
during the lifetime of his father that Rezánov barely
had known him by sight. But the Tsarovitz,
enthusiastic for reform and a passionate admirer of
enterprise, knew of Rezánov, and no sooner did he
mount his gory throne than he confirmed the
Chamberlain in his enterprise, and two years later made
him a Privy Counsellor, invested him with the order
of St. Ann, and chose him for the critical embassy
to the verdant realm with the blind and gateless
walls.
Rezánov had conquered so far in life even less by
address than by the demonstration of abilities very
singular in a man of his birth and education. When
he met Shelikov, during the Siberian
merchant-trader's visit to St. Petersburg in 1788, he was a
young man with little interest in life outside of its
pleasures, and a patrimony that enabled him to
command them to no great extent and barely to
maintain the dignity of his rank. Shelikov's plan
to obtain a monopoly of the fur trade in the islands
and territories added by his Company to Russia,
possibly throughout the entire possession, thus
preventing the destruction of sables, seals, otters, and
foxes by small traders and foreigners, interested
him at once; or possibly he was merely fascinated
at first by the shrewd and dauntless representative
of a class with which he had never before come
in contact. The accidental acquaintance ripened
into intimacy, Rezánov became a partner in the
Shelikov-Golikov Company, and married the
daughter of his new friend. After the death of his
father-in-law, in 1795, his ambitions and business
abilities, now fully awake, prompted him to obtain
for himself and his partners rights analogous to
those granted by England to the East India
Company. Shelikov had won little more than half the
power and privileges he had solicited of Catherine,
although he had amalgamated the two leading
companies, drawn in several others, and built ships and
factories and forts to protect them. And if the
regnant merchants made large fortunes, the
enterprise in general suffered from the rivalries between
the various companies, and above all from lack of
imperial support.
Rezánov, his plans made, brought to bear all the
considerable influence he was able to command,
called upon all his resources of brain and address,
and brought Catherine to the point of consenting
to sign the charter he needed. Before it was ready
for the imperial signature she died. Rezánov was
forced to begin again with her ill-balanced and
intractable son. Natalie Shelikov, his famous
mother-in-law, the old shareholders of the Company, and
the many new ones that had subscribed to Rezánov's
ambitious project, gave themselves up to despair.
For a time the outlook was dark. The personal
enemies of Rezánov and the bitter and persistent
opponents of the companies threw themselves
eagerly into the scale with tales of brutality of the
merchants and the threatened extirpation of the
fur-bearing animals. Paul announced his attention to
abolish all the companies and close the colonies to
traders big and little.
But the enemy had a very subtle antagonist in
Rezánov. Apparently dismissing the subject, he
applied himself to gaining a personal ascendancy over
the erratic but impressionable Tsar. No one in the
opposing camp could compare with him in that fine
balance of charm and brain which was his peculiar
gift, or in the adroit manipulation of a mind
propelled mainly by vanity. He studied Paul's moods
and character, discovered that after some senseless
act of oppression he suffered from a corresponding
remorse, and was susceptible to any plan that would
increase his power and add lustre to his name. The
commercial and historic advantages of prosperous
northeastern possessions were artfully instilled. At
the opportune moment Rezánov laid before him a
scheme, mature in every detail, for a great
company that would add to the wealth of Russia, and
convince Europe of the sound commercial sense and
immortal wisdom of its sovereign. Without more
ado he obtained his charter.
This momentous instrument granted to the
"Russian-American Company under our Highest
Protection," "full privileges, for a period of twenty years
on the coast of northwestern America, beginning
from latitude 55 degrees north, and including the
chain of islands extending from Kamchatka
northward, and southward to Japan; the exclusive right
to all enterprises, whether hunting, trading, or
building, and to new discoveries; with strict prohibition
from profiting from any of these pursuits, not only
to all parties who might engage in them on their
own responsibility, but also to those who formerly
had ships and establishments there, except those who
have united with the new Company." All private
traders who refused to join the Company were to
be allowed to sell their property and depart in
peace.
Thus was formed the first of the Trusts in
America; and the United States never has had so
formidable a menace to her territorial greatness as
this Russian nobleman who paced that night the
wretched deck of the little ship he had bought from
one of her skippers. Perturbed in mind at his
recent failures and immediate prospects, he was no
less determined to take California from the
Spaniards either by absorption or force.
On his way from New Archangel to San
Francisco he had met with his second failure since
leaving St. Petersburg. It was his intention to move
the Sitkan colony down to the mouth of the
Columbia River; not only pressed by the need of a more
beneficent soil, but as a first insidious advance upon
San Francisco Bay. Upon this trip it would be
enough to make a survey of the ground and bury a
copper plate inscribed: "Possession of the
Russian Empire." The Juno had encountered terrific
storms. After three desperate attempts to reach
the mouth of the river, Rezánov had been forced to
relinquish the enterprise for the moment and hasten
with his diseased and almost useless crew to the
nearest port. It was true that the attempt could be
made again later, but Rezánov, sanguine of
temperament, was correspondingly depressed by failure
and disposed to regard it as an ill-omen.
An ambassador inspired by heaven could have
accomplished no more with the Japanese at that
mediaeval stage of their development than he had
done, and the most indomitable of men cannot yet
control the winds of heaven; but sovereigns are
rarely governed by logic, and frequently by the
favorite at hand. The privilege of writing personally
to the Tsar, in his case, meant more and less than
appeared on the surface. It was a measure to keep
the reports of the Company out of the hands of the
Admiralty College, its bitterest enemy, and always
jealous of the Civil Service. Nevertheless, Rezánov
knew that he had no immediate reason to apprehend
the loss of Alexander's friendship and esteem; and
if he placed the Company, in which all the imperial
family had bought shares, on a sounder basis than
ever before, and doubled its earnings by insuring the
health of its employees, he would meet, when in St.
Petersburg again, with practically no opposition to
his highest ambitions. These ambitions he
deliberately kept in a fluid state for the present.
Whether he should aspire to great authority in the
government, or choose to rule with the absolute
powers of the Tsar himself these already vast
possessions on the Pacific—to be extended indefinitely
—would be decided by events. All his inherited and
cultivated instincts yearned for the brilliant and
complex civilizations of Europe, but the new world
had taken a firm hold upon his humaner and
appealed more insidiously to his despotic.
Moreover, Europe, torn up by that human earthquake,
Napoleon Bonaparte, must lose the greater half of
its sweetness and savor. All that, however, could
be determined upon his return to St. Petersburg in
the autumn.
But meanwhile he must succeed with these
Californians, or they might prove, toy soldiers as they
were, more perilous to his fortunes than enemies at
court. He could not afford another failure; and
news of this attempt and an exposition of all that
depended upon it were already on the road to the
capital of Russia.
He had known, of course, of the law that forbade
the Spanish colonies to trade with foreign ships,
but he had relied partly upon the use he could make
of the orders given by the Spanish King at the
request of the Tsar regarding the expedition under
Krusenstern, partly upon his own wit and address.
But although the royal order had insured him
immediate hospitality and saved him many wearisome
formalities, he had already discovered that the
Spanish on the far rim of their empire had lost
nothing of their connate suspicion. Rather, their
isolation made them the more wary. Although they
little appreciated the richness and variousness of
California's soil, and not at all this wonderful bay
that would accommodate the combined navies of the
world, pocketing several, the pious zeal of the clergy
in behalf of the Indians, and the general policy of
Spain to hold all of the western hemisphere that
disintegrating forces would permit, made her as
tenacious of this vast territory she had so sparsely
populated as had she been aware that its
foundations were of gold, conceived that its climate and
soil were a more enduring source of wealth than
ever she would command again. If Rezánov was
not gifted with the prospector's sense for
ores—although he had taken note of Argüello's casual
reference to a vein of silver and lead in the Monterey
hills—no man ever more thoroughly appreciated the
visible resources of California than he. Baránhov,
chief-manager of the Company, had talked with
American and British skippers for twenty years, and
every item he had accumulated Rezánov had
extracted. To-day he had drawn further
information from Concha and her brothers; and their
artless descriptions as well as this incomparable bay
had filled him with enthusiasm. What a gift to
Russia! What an achievement to his immortal
credit! The fog rolled in from the Pacific in great
white waves and stealthily enfolded him, obliterated
the sea and the land. But he did not see it.
Apprehension left him. Once more he fell to dreaming.
In the course of a few years the Company would
attract a large population to the mouth of the
Columbia River, be strong enough to make use of
any favorable turn in European politics and sweep
down upon California. The geographical position
of Mexico, the arid and desolate, herbless and
waterless wastes intervening, would prohibit her
sending any considerable assistance overland; and,
all powerful at court by that time, he would take
care that the Russian navy inspired Spain with a
distaste for remote Pacific waters. He had long
since recovered from the disappointment induced
by the orders compelling him to remain in the
colonies. The great Company he had heretofore
regarded merely as a source of income and a means of
advancing his ambitions, he now loved as his child.
Even during the marches over frozen swamps and
mountains, during the terrible winter in Sitka when
he had become familiar with illness and even with
hunger, his ardor had grown, as well as his
determination to force Russia into the front rank of
Commercial Europe. The United States he barely
considered. He respected the new country for
the independent spirit and military genius that
had routed so powerful a nation as Great Britain,
but he thought of her only as a new and tentative
civilization on the far shores of the Atlantic. After
some experience of travel in Siberia, and knowing
the immensity and primeval conditions of
northwestern America, he did not think it probable that
the little cluster of states, barely able to walk alone,
would indulge in dreams of expansion for many
years to come. He had heard of the projected
expedition of Lewis and Clarke to the mouth of the
Columbia, but—perhaps he was too Russian—he
did not take any adventure seriously that had not
a mighty nation at its back. And as it was almost
the half of a century from that night before the
American flag flew over the Custom House of
Monterey,
there is reason to believe that Russian
aggression under the leadership of so energetic and
resourceful a spirit as Nicolaï Petrovich de Rezánov
was in a fair way to make history first in the New
Albion of Drake and the California of the
incompetent Spaniard.
