Rezanov Read online

  IV

  It was long before Rezanov slept that night. The usual chill had comein from the Pacific as the sun went down, and the distinguished visitorhad intimated to his hosts that he should like to exercise on shoreuntil ready for his detested quarters; but Arguello dared not, in theabsence of his father, invite the foreigner even to sleep in the houseso lavishly offered in the morning; although he had sent such anabundance of provisions to the ship that the poor sailors were deep insleep, gorged like boa-constrictors; and he could safely promise thatwhile the Juno remained in port her larder should never be empty. Heshared the evening bowl of punch in the cabin, then went his waylamenting that he could not take his new friends with him.

  Rezanov 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 ofwater 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 distantbreakers. The great silver stars and the little green stars lookeddown upon a solitude that was almost primeval, yet mysteriouslydisturbed by the restless currents in the brain of a man who had littlein common with primal forces.

  Rezanov was uneasy on more scores than one. He was annoyed andmortified at the discovery--made over the punch bowl--that the girl hehad taken to be twenty was but sixteen. It was by no means his firstexperience of the quick maturity of southern women--but sixteen! Hehad never wasted a moment on a chit before, and although he was a manof imagination, and notwithstanding her intelligence and dignity, hecould not reconcile properties so conflicting with any sort of feminineideal.

  And the pressing half of his mission he had confided to her! No manknew better than he the value of a tactful and witty woman in thepolitical dilemmas of life; more than one had given him devotedservice, nor ever yet had he made a mistake. After several hours spentin the society of this clever, politic, dissatisfied girl he had cometo the conclusion that he could trust her, and had told her of thelamentable condition of the creatures in the employ of theRussian-American Company; of their chronic state of semi-starvation, ofthe scurvy that made them apathetic of brain and body, and eventuallywould exterminate them unless he could establish reciprocal traderelations with California and obtain regular supplies of farinaceousfood; acknowledged that he had brought a cargo of Russian and Bostongoods necessary to the well-being of the Missions and Presidios, andthat 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 witnesstheir misery, but his fortune and his career were at stake. His entirecapital was invested in the Company he had founded, and he had failedin his embassy to Japan--to the keen mortification of the Tsar and thejubilation of his enemies. If he left the Emperor's northeasterndominions unreclaimed and failed to rescue the Company from itsprecarious condition, he hardly should care to return to St. Petersburg.

  Dona Concha had listened to this eloquent harangue--they sat alone atone end of the long sala while Luis at the other toiled over letters tothe Governor and his father advising them of the formidable honor ofthe Russian's visit--in exactly the temper he would have chosen. Herfine eyes had melted and run over at the moving tale of the sufferingsof the servants of the Company--until his own had softened in responseand he had impulsively kissed her hand; they had dilated and flashed ashe spoke of his personal apprehensions; and when he had given her apractical explanation of his reasons for coming to California she hadgiven him advice as practical in return.

  He must withhold from her father and the Governor the fact of hispressing need; they were high officials with an inflexible sense ofduty, and did all they could to enforce the law against trading withforeigners. He was to maintain the fiction of belting the globe, butadmit that he had indulged in a dream of commercial relations--for abenefit strictly mutual--between neighbors as close as the Spanish andRussians in America. This would interest them--what would not, on theedge of the world?--and they would agree to lay the matter, reinforcedby a strong personal plea, before the Viceroy of Mexico; who in turnwould send it to the Cabinet and King at Madrid. Meanwhile, he was toconfide in the priests at the Mission. Not only would their sympathiesbe enlisted, but they did much trading under the very nose of thegovernment. Not for personal gain--they were vowed to a life ofpoverty; but for their Indian converts; and as there were twelvehundred at the Mission of San Francisco, they would wink at many thingscondemnable in the abstract. He had engaged to visit them on themorrow, and he must take presents to tempt their impersonal cupidity,and invite them to inspect the rest of his wares--which the Governorwould be informed his Excellency had been forced to buy with the Junofrom the Yankee skipper, D'Wolf, and would rid himself of didopportunity offer.

  Rezanov had never received sounder advice, and had promptly acceptedit. 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 sheprove to be too young to keep a secret. Moreover, there were otherconsiderations.

  Rezanov, although in his earlier years he had so far sacrificed hisinterests and played into the hands of his enemies, in avoiding the tooembarrassing partiality of Catherine the Great, had nevertheless held ahigh place at court by right of birth, and been a man of the worldalways; rarely absent from St. Petersburg during the last and leastsusceptible part of the imperial courtesan's life, the brief reign ofPaul, and the two years between the accession of Alexander and thesailing of the Nadeshda. Moreover, there was hardly another court ofimportance in Europe with which he was not familiar, and few men hadhad a more complete experience of life. And the life of a courtier, adiplomat, a traveller, noble, wealthy, agreeable to women by divineright, with active enemies and a horde of flatterers, in daily contactwith the meaner and more disingenuous corners of human nature, is notconducive to a broad optimism and a sweet and immutable Christianity.Rezanov inevitably was more or less cynical and blase', and too longversed in the ways of courts and courtiers to retain more than awhimsical tolerance of the naked truth and an appreciation of itsexcellence as a diplomatic manoeuvre. Nevertheless, he was by naturetoo impetuous ever to become under any provocation a dishonest man, andtoo normally a gentleman to deviate from a certain personal code ofhonor. He might come to California with fair words and a very definiteintention of annexing it to Russia at the first opportunity, but he wasincapable of abusing the hospitality of the Arguellos by making love totheir sixteen-year-old daughter. Had she been of the years he hadassumed, he would have had less scruple in embarking upon a flirtation,both for the pastime and the use he might make of her. A Spanishbeauty of twenty, still unmarried, would be more than his match. But achild, however precocious, inevitably would fall in love with the firstuncommon stranger she met; and Rezanov, less vain than most men of hiskind, and with a fundamental humanity that was the chief cause in hisefforts to improve the condition of his wretched promuschleniki, had notaste for the role of heart-breaker.

  But the girl had proved her timeliness; would, if trustworthy, be offurther use in inclining her father and the Governor toward such of hisdesigns as he had any intentions of revealing; and, weighing carefullyhis conversations with her, he was disposed to believe that she wouldscreen and abet him through vanity and love of intrigue. After thedinner, in the seclusion of the sala, he had taken pains to explore forthe causes of her mental maturity. Concha had told him of Don JoseArguello's ambition that his children in their youth should have theeducation he had been forced to acquire in his manhood; he had taughtthem himself, and notwithstanding his piety and the disapproval of thepriests, had permitted them to read the histories, travels, andbiographies he received once a year from the City of Mexico. Rezanovhad met Madame de Stael and other bas bleus, and given them no more ofhis society than politeness demanded, but although astonished at theamount of information this young girl had assimilated, he found nothingin her manner of wearing her intellectual crown to offend hisfastid
ious taste. She was wholly artless in her love of books and ofdiscussing them; and nothing in their contents had disturbed thesweetest innocence he had ever met. Of the little arts of coquetry shewas mistress by inheritance and much provocation, but her unawakenedinner life breathed the simplicity and purity of the elemental rosesthat hovered about her in his thoughts. Her very unsusceptibility madethe game more dangerous; if it piqued him--and he aspired to be no morethan human--he either should have to marry her, or nurse a sore spot inhis conscience for the rest of his life; and for neither alternativehad he the least relish.

  He dismissed the subject at last with an impatient shrug. Perhaps hewas a conceited ass, as his English friends would say; perhaps theGovernor would be more amenable than she had represented. No man couldforecast 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 frozenfish, the sea dogs, the fat of whales, upon which the employees of theCompany were forced to subsist in the least hospitable of climes, hadravaged them with scorbutic diseases until their numbers were soreduced by death and desertion that there was danger of depopulationand the consequent bankruptcy of the Company. Since June of thepreceding year until his departure from New Archangel in the previousmonth, he had been actively engaged in inspection of the Company'sholdings from Kamchatka to Sitka: reforming abuses, establishingschools and libraries, conceiving measures to protect the fur-bearinganimals from reckless slaughter both by the promuschleniki andmarauding foreigners; punishing and banishing the worst offendersagainst the Company's laws; encouraging the faithful, and sharinghardships with them that sent memories of former luxuries and pleasuresscurrying off to the realms of fantasy. But his rule would beincomplete and his efforts end in failure if the miserable Russians andnatives in the employ of the Company were not vitalized by proper foodand cheered with the hope of its permanence.

  In Santiago's story of the Russian visitor's achievements and statusthere was the common mingling of truth and fiction the exalted neverfail to inspire. Rezanov, although he had accomplished great endsagainst greater odds, was too little of a courtier at heart ever tohave been a prime favorite in St. Petersburg until the accession of aruler with whom he had something in common. A dissolute woman and acrack-brained despot were the last to appreciate an original andindependent mind, and the seclusion of Alexander had been so completeduring the lifetime of his father that Rezanov barely had known him bysight. But the Tsarovitz, enthusiastic for reform and a passionateadmirer of enterprise, knew of Rezanov, and no sooner did he mount hisgory throne than he confirmed the Chamberlain in his enterprise, andtwo years later made him a Privy Counsellor, invested him with theorder of St. Ann, and chose him for the critical embassy to the verdantrealm with the blind and gateless walls.

  Rezanov had conquered so far in life even less by address than by thedemonstration of abilities very singular in a man of his birth andeducation. When he met Shelikov, during the Siberian merchant-trader'svisit to St. Petersburg in 1788, he was a young man with littleinterest in life outside of its pleasures, and a patrimony that enabledhim to command them to no great extent and barely to maintain thedignity of his rank. Shelikov's plan to obtain a monopoly of the furtrade in the islands and territories added by his Company to Russia,possibly throughout the entire possession, thus preventing thedestruction of sables, seals, otters, and foxes by small traders andforeigners, interested him at once; or possibly he was merelyfascinated at first by the shrewd and dauntless representative of aclass with which he had never before come in contact. The accidentalacquaintance ripened into intimacy, Rezanov became a partner in theShelikov-Golikov Company, and married the daughter of his new friend.After the death of his father-in-law, in 1795, his ambitions andbusiness abilities, now fully awake, prompted him to obtain for himselfand his partners rights analogous to those granted by England to theEast India Company. Shelikov had won little more than half the powerand privileges he had solicited of Catherine, although he hadamalgamated the two leading companies, drawn in several others, andbuilt ships and factories and forts to protect them. And if theregnant merchants made large fortunes, the enterprise in generalsuffered from the rivalries between the various companies, and aboveall from lack of imperial support.

  Rezanov, his plans made, brought to bear all the considerable influencehe was able to command, called upon all his resources of brain andaddress, and brought Catherine to the point of consenting to sign thecharter he needed. Before it was ready for the imperial signature shedied. Rezanov was forced to begin again with her ill-balanced andintractable son. Natalie Shelikov, his famous mother-in-law, the oldshareholders of the Company, and the many new ones that had subscribedto Rezanov's ambitious project, gave themselves up to despair. For atime the outlook was dark. The personal enemies of Rezanov and thebitter and persistent opponents of the companies threw themselveseagerly into the scale with tales of brutality of the merchants and thethreatened extirpation of the fur-bearing animals. Paul announced hisattention to abolish all the companies and close the colonies totraders big and little.

  But the enemy had a very subtle antagonist in Rezanov. Apparentlydismissing the subject, he applied himself to gaining a personalascendancy over the erratic but impressionable Tsar. No one in theopposing camp could compare with him in that fine balance of charm andbrain which was his peculiar gift, or in the adroit manipulation of amind propelled mainly by vanity. He studied Paul's moods andcharacter, discovered that after some senseless act of oppression hesuffered from a corresponding remorse, and was susceptible to any planthat would increase his power and add lustre to his name. Thecommercial and historic advantages of prosperous northeasternpossessions were artfully instilled. At the opportune moment Rezanovlaid before him a scheme, mature in every detail, for a great companythat would add to the wealth of Russia, and convince Europe of thesound commercial sense and immortal wisdom of its sovereign. Withoutmore ado he obtained his charter.

  This momentous instrument granted to the "Russian-American Companyunder our Highest Protection," "full privileges, for a period of twentyyears on the coast of northwestern America, beginning from latitude 55degrees north, and including the chain of islands extending fromKamchatka northward, and southward to Japan; the exclusive right to allenterprises, whether hunting, trading, or building, and to newdiscoveries; with strict prohibition from profiting from any of thesepursuits, not only to all parties who might engage in them on their ownresponsibility, but also to those who formerly had ships andestablishments there, except those who have united with the newCompany." All private traders who refused to join the Company were tobe allowed to sell their property and depart in peace.

  Thus was formed the first of the Trusts in America; and the UnitedStates never has had so formidable a menace to her territorialgreatness as this Russian nobleman who paced that night the wretcheddeck of the little ship he had bought from one of her skippers.Perturbed in mind at his recent failures and immediate prospects, hewas no less determined to take California from the Spaniards either byabsorption or force.

  On his way from New Archangel to San Francisco he had met with hissecond failure since leaving St. Petersburg. It was his intention tomove the Sitkan colony down to the mouth of the Columbia River; notonly pressed by the need of a more beneficent soil, but as a firstinsidious advance upon San Francisco Bay. Upon this trip it would beenough to make a survey of the ground and bury a copper plateinscribed: "Possession of the Russian Empire." The Juno hadencountered terrific storms. After three desperate attempts to reachthe mouth of the river, Rezanov had been forced to relinquish theenterprise for the moment and hasten with his diseased and almostuseless crew to the nearest port. It was true that the attempt couldbe made again later, but Rezanov, sanguine of temperament, wascorrespondingly depressed by failure and disposed to regard it as anill-omen.

  An ambassador inspired by heaven could have accomplished no more withthe Japanese at
that mediaeval stage of their development than he haddone, and the most indomitable of men cannot yet control the winds ofheaven; but sovereigns are rarely governed by logic, and frequently bythe favorite at hand. The privilege of writing personally to the Tsar,in his case, meant more and less than appeared on the surface. It wasa measure to keep the reports of the Company out of the hands of theAdmiralty College, its bitterest enemy, and always jealous of the CivilService. Nevertheless, Rezanov knew that he had no immediate reason toapprehend the loss of Alexander's friendship and esteem; and if heplaced the Company, in which all the imperial family had bought shares,on a sounder basis than ever before, and doubled its earnings byinsuring the health of its employees, he would meet, when in St.Petersburg again, with practically no opposition to his highestambitions. These ambitions he deliberately kept in a fluid state forthe present. Whether he should aspire to great authority in thegovernment, or choose to rule with the absolute powers of the Tsarhimself these already vast possessions on the Pacific--to be extendedindefinitely--would be decided by events. All his inherited andcultivated instincts yearned for the brilliant and complexcivilizations of Europe, but the new world had taken a firm hold uponhis humaner and appealed more insidiously to his despotic. Moreover,Europe, torn up by that human earthquake, Napoleon Bonaparte, must losethe greater half of its sweetness and savor. All that, however, couldbe determined upon his return to St. Petersburg in the autumn.

  But meanwhile he must succeed with these Californians, or they mightprove, toy soldiers as they were, more perilous to his fortunes thanenemies at court. He could not afford another failure; and news ofthis attempt and an exposition of all that depended upon it werealready on the road to the capital of Russia.

  He had known, of course, of the law that forbade the Spanish coloniesto trade with foreign ships, but he had relied partly upon the use hecould make of the orders given by the Spanish King at the request ofthe Tsar regarding the expedition under Krusenstern, partly upon hisown wit and address. But although the royal order had insured himimmediate hospitality and saved him many wearisome formalities, he hadalready discovered that the Spanish on the far rim of their empire hadlost nothing of their connate suspicion. Rather, their isolation madethem the more wary. Although they little appreciated the richness andvariousness of California's soil, and not at all this wonderful baythat would accommodate the combined navies of the world, pocketingseveral, the pious zeal of the clergy in behalf of the Indians, and thegeneral policy of Spain to hold all of the western hemisphere thatdisintegrating forces would permit, made her as tenacious of this vastterritory she had so sparsely populated as had she been aware that itsfoundations were of gold, conceived that its climate and soil were amore enduring source of wealth than ever she would command again. IfRezanov was not gifted with the prospector's sense for ores--althoughhe had taken note of Arguello's casual reference to a vein of silverand lead in the Monterey hills--no man ever more thoroughly appreciatedthe visible resources of California than he. Baranhov, chief-managerof the Company, had talked with American and British skippers fortwenty years, and every item he had accumulated Rezanov had extracted.To-day he had drawn further information from Concha and her brothers;and their artless descriptions as well as this incomparable bay hadfilled him with enthusiasm. What a gift to Russia! What anachievement to his immortal credit! The fog rolled in from the Pacificin great white waves and stealthily enfolded him, obliterated the seaand the land. But he did not see it. Apprehension left him. Oncemore he fell to dreaming. In the course of a few years the Companywould attract a large population to the mouth of the Columbia River, bestrong enough to make use of any favorable turn in European politicsand sweep down upon California. The geographical position of Mexico,the arid and desolate, herbless and waterless wastes intervening, wouldprohibit her sending any considerable assistance overland; and, allpowerful at court by that time, he would take care that the Russiannavy inspired Spain with a distaste for remote Pacific waters. He hadlong since recovered from the disappointment induced by the orderscompelling him to remain in the colonies. The great Company he hadheretofore regarded merely as a source of income and a means ofadvancing his ambitions, he now loved as his child. Even during themarches over frozen swamps and mountains, during the terrible winter inSitka when he had become familiar with illness and even with hunger,his ardor had grown, as well as his determination to force Russia intothe front rank of Commercial Europe. The United States he barelyconsidered. He respected the new country for the independent spiritand military genius that had routed so powerful a nation as GreatBritain, but he thought of her only as a new and tentative civilizationon the far shores of the Atlantic. After some experience of travel inSiberia, and knowing the immensity and primeval conditions ofnorth-western America, he did not think it probable that the littlecluster of states, barely able to walk alone, would indulge in dreamsof expansion for many years to come. He had heard of the projectedexpedition of Lewis and Clarke to the mouth of the Columbia,but--perhaps he was too Russian--he did not take any adventureseriously that had not a mighty nation at its back. And as it wasalmost the half of a century from that night before the American flagflew over the Custom House of Monterey, there is reason to believe thatRussian aggression under the leadership of so energetic and resourcefula spirit as Nicolai Petrovich de Rezanov was in a fair way to makehistory first in the New Albion of Drake and the California of theincompetent Spaniard.