The Russian Attempt to Colonise Hawaii
Kaumualii had been the ruler of Kauai and Niihau, the two northernmost islands of the Hawaii archipelago and the last ones to remain independent after the rest of the Hawaiian islands were unified into the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1795 under Kamehameha I or “Kamehameha the Great”. Kaumualii was forced to surrender in 1810, retaining de facto rule of his islands, but de jure swearing allegiance to King Kamehameha.
In January 1815, a ship, the Bering, belonging to the Russian-American Company (RAC) that was administering Russia’s only overseas colony in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, was caught in a storm and ran aground at Waimea on Kauai. (The first contact Hawaii had with Europeans was on 20 January 1778, when British Captain James Cook—most famous as the explorer and settler of Australia—came ashore at Waimea. This is the origins of Kauai’s slogan: “Hawaii’s Original Visitor Destination”.) Despite an agreement that the Russians would give Kaumualii the wrecked Bering in exchange for his hospitality, Kaumualii and his men seized the ship and looted its cargo.
Once the Russians were evacuated in March 1815, RAC governor Alexander Baranov, a veteran of the RAC’s predecessor, the Shelikhov-Golikov Company, and the last non-Naval governor of the colony, debated launching a punitive raid against Kaumualii. In the end, Georg Schäffer, a German former physician, was sent on a mission to try to recover the value of the stolen property peacefully. Schäffer was not one of Baranov’s finest men—they were off dealing with the new Fort Ross possession in California, among other things—and seems to have been chosen essentially because there was nobody else. Schäffer’s instructions were to make nice with King Kamehameha and engage in scientific exploration, until such a moment as raising the question of compensation became propitious. Schäffer was told to focus particularly on sandalwood, to gain trade privileges and if possible a monopoly.
Schäffer’s initial reception by King Kamehameha in November 1815 was cool—the King was a close ally of the Americans—but relations improved within a month, after Schäffer displayed the usefulness of Russian medical advances, treating the Hawaiian monarch for a heart illness and his favourite wife for a severe fever. Parcels of land were sold to Schäffer and Schäffer then embarked on a tour to explore the Hawaiian Islands.
Schäffer landed on Kauai in May 1816 and five days later was astonished and delighted when Kaumualii agreed to not only return all remaining Bering property, but give the Russians a monopoly over the sandalwood trade and pledged his allegiance to the Tsar. In July, Schaffer signed another treaty, this one secret, wherein Kaumualii offered troops to help the Russians expand the Tsar’s apparent new realm by conquering the islands of Oahu, Maui, and Lanai, and assistance in constructing military bases, three of which were ultimately built: the best known is Fort Elizabeth near Waimea, plus Fort Alexander, named for the Emperor, and Fort Barclay-de-Tolly.
The problem was that Kaumualii had no intention of become a Russian vassal: what he wanted was Russian help in freeing himself from being Kamehameha’s vassal and expanding his Kingdom to include all the “Sandwich Islands” he regarded as belonging to him, and perhaps to make a bid for Kamehameha’s Throne. The pattern of European colonial officials being manipulated by native peoples to settle local scores was a recurring one, and Schäffer got completely swept away by Kaumualii’s intrigue. It all ended in tears—and rather quickly.
By September 1816, the Russians had been evicted from Oahu and soon the Americans came in behind Kamehameha’s counter-revolution, which succeeded by early July 1817 in forcing Schäffer to scramble to Fortress Alexander and take a ship off Hawaii. Schäffer’s rapid and ignominious departure left perhaps 100 Russians and allied Aleuts stranded on Oahu, where they remained for more than half-a-year.
The first Saint Petersburg heard of Schäffer’s Hawaiian venture was in March 1817 and the orders to Baranov were to use his own best judgment in managing the Hawaiian affair, but to ensure Schäffer undertook no “subsequent expeditions, as he is a foreigner, and it was not for the Russians that he accumulated these acquisitions”. The transmission of these orders was slow, and information coming from Hawaii was even slower.
In August 1817, the Special Council in Petersburg that managed the RAC received Schäffer’s triumphal letter relaying Kaumualii’s application for Russian citizenship and pledge to transfer “all islands under his domain and the inhabitants thereon to His Imperial Majesty”. This report must have been a year and more old, but it led the Russian Court to hesitate about the way forward in Hawaii during the summer of 1817, especially after Russia’s apparent moves in the Pacific started to gain international media attention. This spotlight was more likely to induce the U.S. to a strong response; by the same token, it now meant not backing Schäffer would reflect negatively on the prestige of Russia.
Ultimately, on in March 1818, Tsar Alexander I (r. 1801-25) issued a final command to abandon all attempts to colonise Hawaii: “these islands … are not only without significant benefit to Russia but, on the contrary, in many regards they are burdened with very weighty inconveniences”. The primary concern for Russia’s government was maintaining good relations with the United States. Alexander hoped to draw the U.S. into his “Holy Alliance”, the coalition of Christian States committed to preventing a repeat of Napoleon’s institutionalised French Revolution that Alexander had just led the way in destroying. Alexander also had an eye on Britain, which was deeply concerned about displacing Napoleonic with Russian hegemony on the European Continent. Specifically, Alexander did not want to do anything to ease British options in dealing with the rebellion spreading through Spanish America.
Permission was granted in due course for the RAC to retain the toe-holds the Russians still had on Kauai, the trading posts and land parcels, but it was only in August 1818 that Alexander I learned fully of the disaster that his nominal agents had endured on Hawaii the previous year.
Schäffer still had not given up hope. Schäffer’s attempt to meet Alexander during the Tsar’s trip to Aachen, Denmark, in July 1818 was brushed off, but into 1819 Dr. Schäffer was writing to the Tsar asking for permission and support to have another crack at conquering Hawaii, increasingly playing on the strategic argument that it would enhance Russia vis-à-vis the United States, which, as indicated above, was exactly the wrong track to take with the Emperor. Some in the RAC backed Schäffer, if only to try to recover the losses—which now included not only the Bering cargo but 200,000 rubles (in 1810s money, an awful lot) sunk into the mirage of a colonial administration that had evaporated in fourteen months.
Most in the RAC, however, wanted nothing further to do with Schäffer. As a German, Schäffer had always been somewhat distrusted, and now he was seen as a lunatic whose fantasies had cost the Company an absurd amount of money. The RAC even sued Schäffer for the damages; he counter-sued, and eventually it was agreed by all that the easiest option was simply to send Schäffer back to Germany. Not that he ever stayed there.
Schäffer soon went off to Brazil, recently separated from Portugal to try to insulate itself from the chaos the liberals had caused in the metropole, where he insinuated himself into the Court of Emperor Dom Pedro I (r. 1822-31), got involved in forming the new State’s army, initiated a wave of German immigration to Brazil, and tried to get himself appointed as a Brazilian ambassador to Europe, among other things, each of these ventures including hairbrained elements that made the Brazilians thankful for Schäffer’s death in 1836.