When Russia owned the West, a review of 'Glorious Misadventures'

In my review of Frontier I mentioned this book, which traces the history of the Russian American Company, which was their answer to Frontier's Hudson Bay Company or the British East India Company.  They saw the Westerners getting rich off furs and gold, and they wanted a piece of that action.  Or at least Nicolas Rezanov did.  He tried for several years to make the right connections at court to get a corporate charter approved, and investment for ships, and condemned criminals to man them.

Like the others, the first Russian expeditions were more exploratory and scientific, probing rather than conquering.    The West got a 200-year head start, however, so the English, French, and Spanish had moved past the stage of dumping criminals and orphans into the wilderness and had "self-made" colonial gentry, landowners whose interests were more or less aligned with those of their governments.

 “This prescription for a free, property-owning, taxpaying society, where ‘even the domestic servants will have the opportunity to improve their circumstances’ was of course exactly the formula by which the English colonies on the other side of America had thrived so prodigiously.”  

The Russians made up for lost time, though, driving the small population of Steller's Sea Cows to extinction in just 27 years.  It happened so quickly that we didn't even have skeletal specimens of the things until this past year.  One would think such easy sources of food would have been considered a valuable renewable resource, but people of this time period didn't believe that extinction was even possible, that it was not part of God's plan.  See this excellent post by @mountainwashere for more on the mindset.

[image link from National Geographic]

They had to work much harder to destroy the rest of the ecosystem, "harvesting" millions of fur seals, sea otters, and everything else with a pelt they could sell in the Pacific port cities of China.  Rezanov nearly started a war trying to open up the Japanese markets to their furs, as well.  He did better in Hawaii, though in the tropics they had less use for furs. 

(The endless asides for cramming in just one more extremely colorful bit of Russian history are a striking feature of the book, too.)

Of course, the small number of Russians couldn't do all this damage without help, which they got by coercing the natives, starting with the Aleuts in Alaska and working their way down the coast to the big islands like Kodiak and Vancouver and Sitka.  The Aleuts nearly went extinct, too, before there were anthropologists to study them.  Modern ones like Lars Krutak (who specializes in tattoos) have to rely mostly on the journals of Russian sea captains, which often included the sketches of semi-professional artists included in the crew.  They were not fans of the natives and their customs, which included bone piercings and the use of urine as a perfume.

Boys, if they happen to be very handsome, are often brought up entirely in the manner of girls, and instructed in all the arts women use to please man: their beards are carefully plucked out as soon as they begin to appear, and their chins are tattooed like those of the women.

These transgendered individuals were more common in the north, where they sometimes acted as shamans.

Eventually Russian outposts spread as far South as California.  The southernmost was Fort Ross, north of San Franciso, where they wanted a warmer climate to raise cattle and vegetables to feed the fur trappers and traders up north in Alaska.  The tourist videos present wholesome family fun, not Game of Thrones - style political maneuvering and drunken violence, which feature quite prominently in the book, as they do in the show Frontier.

https://www.kcet.org/shows/california-coastal-trail/discovering-russian-history-on-the-california-coast

While in California, Rezanov engaged with the Spaniards for diplomacy and trade (until they could get Ft. Ross up an running).  This was when Rezanov met the governor's daughter Conchita, and proposed marriage.

“It was an impressive coup of diplomacy – or espionage. In just over a fortnight Rezanov had gone from being an overdressed stranger with bad breath to a member of the colony’s ruling family, privy to state secrets.”  

This scurvy-licious love story inspired Juno and Avos, the longest running rock opera in the world, which has been filling seats in Moscow since 1981.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5yjj6QC-a8

(in Russian)

REFERENCES

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/glorious-misadventures-9781408822234/

http://www.akhistorycourse.org/russias-colony/table-of-contents

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/enormous-extinct-sea-cow-fossil-russian-island-spd/

http://www.akhistorycourse.org/docs/russian_american_book7.pdf

http://www.larskrutak.com/tattooing-and-piercing-among-the-alaskan-aleut/

http://www.pbs.org/harriman/1899/exploration.html