Glorious Misadventures, by Owen Mathews – review

So: Russia’s imperial possessions on the Pacific North West of America. Remember those? No. Me neither. Something vague about the Russians flogging a bit of Alaska to the United States in the middle of the 19th century perhaps. But until I’d read this book I didn’t know that at one point

Continental Russian America, not counting the Aleutian Islands, stretched 1,400 miles from its Eastern Tip (today called Cape Prince of Wales, by little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait) to its southwestern boundary near Sitka. If laid on top of the Continental United States, the territory — which closely corresponds to the modern state of Alaska — would stretch from California to Florida.

Nor did I know that serious and not wholly implausible plans were entertained of the Tsar ruling California and Hawaii from St Petersburg. The man who most entertained them — and who we meet in medias res in 1806 as a widower of 42 getting engaged to the daughter of the Spanish Governor of San Francisco — was Nikolai Rezanov. Once a court favourite — a consigliere to Catherine the Great’s arrogant young lover Zubov — he was now on his uppers: prickly about his status, on the other side of the world from St Petersburg, and carrying the stink of failure after having headed a mission to open Japan to Russian trade that could not have failed more dismally. This was a last roll of the dice.

Like most if not all imperial adventures, the civilising mission (ho ho) followed the money. Ever since the first Cossack pirate found a way through the Bering Strait, fur, or ‘soft gold’, was what they were all after. The discovery that in Chinese entrepot towns the pelt of a single sea-otter would fetch the equivalent of two years’ salary for an ordinary seaman was all anyone needed to know.