Part I: The Gathering Storm (1809-1810)

Chapter 3: Thorns

She met him on a Tuesday in 1805. The summer sun was still high in the sky and she wished it would set and help her hide in the shadows behind the tavern. She knew her parents would rebuke her for her flood of tears so she fled from the house as soon as the unwelcome intruders began to roll down her pale cheeks. She curled behind an empty barrel, hidden from view by a wooden wall and a stack of flour sacks. She pulled her scarf closer over her face, covering her golden hair.

In her hand she held her tiny painting of the Virgin Mary holding an infant Jesus in her hands. She kept the icon with her always, gazing at it whenever she felt in need of strength. Anna rubbed her thumb over the painting and prayed the "Hymn to Theotokos," again and again in a murmured chant, just as her grandmother had taught her. While her mouth whispered the well-practiced prayer, in her heart she offered another supplication, asking for the Holy Mother to intercede on behalf of her sister.

Natasha, the second daughter of Ivan Smirnov, was four years elder than Anna and had the unfortunate distinction of being one of the most beautiful, unmarried girls in their village. Her sister was among those "chosen" to go to St. Petersburg.

"I warned you, Smirnov, did I not?" their neighbor Ilya said, his crooked finger pointing accusations at her grey-bearded father. "I told you to marry her as soon as she was of age, but no! You did not listen! She is much too beautiful for no harm to come upon her as she is!"

Her father, a tall man - as thin as a sapling tree- withered under Ilya's claims. "She is barely eighteen," he answered morosely, his own regret as corrosive as pests within that sapling trunk.

"Better to marry them off as young as possible so they are safe and their futures are sure," Ilya answered with a chiding click. "Do not wait so long with Anna if you wish to preserve her honor and ensure her future."

There was nothing to be done. Natasha would go, regardless of her wishes and the wishes of the family. Their lord could command his serfs to do as he pleased and his command had come.

"I want the five of the tallest young men and the five of the most beautiful women to accompany me on my carriage in St. Petersburg," he had proclaimed. These ten were to be living effigies, human decorations to gain him even more attention and distinction. The Russian bourgeois from across the empire congregated in St. Petersburg like peacocks – competing which could strut their feathers the grandest through the gilded city. As their appetites for grandeur increased, so did the taxes they required from their serfs. In the country's capital for wealth and fashion, the elites carelessly poured out the money they milked from their serfs like it came from a limitless spring and not the blood and sweat of those who worked the lands.

Anna's previous master had been a good man – fair and wise in his dealings with his serfs and responsible with his holdings. He preferred to dwell on his countryside estate and spend his time tending his affairs and hunting with his neighbors. He avoided tumbling into the nebulous quest for the esteem of the nobility. His son, however, was more lascivious in his appetites and preferred the glitter and glamor of the St. Petersburg salons and ballrooms to the quiet tedium of tending his lands. Upon the death of his father, the son's aspirations and whims were allowed to swell and rove the country unimpeded. The increase in freedom and influence did not improve the man's character and the tales of his worsening conduct grew as rank as the corpse of a rat hidden in the walls of a house.

Between the rising taxes, the increasing punishments on serfs who did not fulfill the master's expectations, and his demands for women from the village to serve him during his nights at the country estate, the villagers' anger grew like a tea kettle set over a fire.

It was only a month earlier that the village gathered to bury Anna's neighbor. The old woman died of grief after burying her only son. The lad, a boy of ten, was guilty of accidentally striking the master's hunting dog with a stone in a field. To punish his crime, the boy was set into a field as living quarry for the hounds and no intervention from his aged mother could spare his life or prevent the master from inflicting his full wrath on the erring boy. Now, the latest affront, this reaping of children away from their lands and people to serve the whims of the master far from home cut into the heart of Anna's family even deeper.

"It cannot be!" Anna's mother cried when they were told of Natasha's dubious "honor". "Who will protect her if she is that far from her male relatives? What will become of her there? How will she be married after she returns?"

Her father had roared and blustered before collapsing in on himself like a haystack in a windstorm. It was not long before the local tavern swallowed Ivan Smirnov and his sorrows. There was little the man could do other than grit his rotten teeth and work even harder to ensure they could pay their taxes and still have enough food for the coming winter.

When Anna heard the news, she remained as stoic as she was expected to, but she counted the hours until the rest of the family turned out of the house and none but her elderly grandparents remained. Under auspices of delivering her bundle of mittens to the market to sell, Anna fled from the house. If her grandmother noticed that she failed to carry the mittens, she did not mention it. Anna walked the long way to the village before finally seeking refuge in the shadows of the tavern.

It was not long before the sound of hooves roused her attention and she peeked her head over the barrel. There she saw the very source of her troubles riding through town. The young master, dressed in his elegant riding habit, came barreling through the center of the village on his finest black horse. She spat on the ground in anger and rose from her hiding place.

Anna did not stop to consider the consequences. The fire within her breast burned too brightly. She grabbed a stone from the ground and ran after the master to throw the stone, hoping to disrupt the horse and throw the man to the ground.

A pair of strong arms caught her as she chased down the lord's stallion. She struggled and cursed and tried to bite the arms that enfolded her, but she failed to budge them. As her fury subsided into tears, she turned and pounded against the broad chest still holding her steady. A chuckle resounded through the thick, grizzled beard of her captor. Hazel eyes danced with mirth and his cheeks were rosy with drink. He gave her a more careful perusal from her much shorter head to her untied boots.

"What is this?" her captor asked as he pried the stone from her hands. "You wish to duel with the lord of these lands, little one?"

Her face burned in her fury and she answered through gritted teeth. "If I but had a pistol, the brute would feel the sting of it!" she hissed and she clambered around him to try to gain back her stone. The bearded man laughed again and released her so quickly she nearly toppled. He quickly caught her shoulders to steady her. By this time, her target was well out of range of her meager weapon and she threw the stone at the side of the tavern instead. It fell onto the dirt with a harmless thwack.

"I see you now," he said. "You have the beauty of a flower but woe to the man who crosses your thorns! I fear it is not worth challenging that painted peacock. Come, little rose, let me see you home and ensure no pistol falls into your hands on the way."

She sniffed and rubbed the angry tears off her cheeks, but complied.

"What is your name, little rose?" he asked.

"Anna Petrovna," she answered with a haughty toss of her head that belied the tear stains on her cheeks.

"It is fitting!" he said. He used his head to point to where her fallen stone lay. "Petrovna-the rock."

"My mother tells me it is because I am as hard to move as a stone," she answered.

"It is a pleasure, Anna Petrovna. I am Nikolai Bulygin."

Oooo

Nikolai and Anna were married within the month.

"You are a navigator with good prospects. Why Anna? Her dowry is little and she grants you no status," her father protested.

"I began my life a serf, as you, and I have fought my way to where I am. I prefer a woman who must lift her head to meet me rather than one who looks down her nose upon me and thinks herself superior. My wife should feel herself indebted to me and not the other way around," he answered. "Besides, the life I have to give will not be easy and I need a woman who is strong. My little Rose fears nothing and no one. She will do for me."

In light of the uncertain future of his second daughter, Ivan Smirnov decided to ensure the prospects of his third daughter were set and sure. The little dowry was accepted by the groom, the fee to the landowner paid, and Anna became the fourteen-year-old bride of the seaman.

Anna Petrovna had never left her village. She had never seen the ocean or met someone who did not speak Russian. Her entire life had been spent within the confines of their church and market, farm and the few neighboring villages within walking distance around them. Now it seemed as though she were surrounded by nothing but miles of ocean and ice and strange peoples and beasts she had never even imagined existed.

They began their married life at the Russian outpost at Kodiak. There, Nikolai had a small, unfinished log cabin set aside for the two of them, and there he kept her while he sailed between ports. When he came home to her, again and again, he told her stories of the far-off lands he travelled to. From the Alaskan coast to the northern borders of Spanish California all the way to the kingdom of Hawaii, Russia claimed it all as theirs and the Russian-American Company's ships visited them all.

The Russian-American Company dominated trade in the Pacific. Chinese markets were hungry for otter pelts, beaver pelt top hats were the height of fashion in Europe, and European pockets were ravenous for the wealth that North American land claims and trading rights to the lucrative Pacific markets could give them. Now that the otters in Russia had been hunted to extinction, it was time to swallow up the plentiful furs waiting to be harvested from the wilds of Russian-America. Russian promyshlenniki (fur trappers), usually serfs, were sent on behest of their masters' interests to gain them wealth through fur. They left the depleted, overhunted tundra of Siberia for the Russian-American outposts along the Alaskan coast in search of bear, otter, fox, and wolf pelts to fill the holds of their boats and line the pockets of their aristocrat owners back in St. Petersburg.

The colonies of Russian-America were Russia's farthermost eastern edge, it's greatest growing border, and the chess piece they hoped would help them win the game. Across the globe, it was an age of enterprise and expansion, constant change and constant upheaval. Europe played a global game of chess with living, breathing pawns on an ever-shifting chessboard of colonies and kingdoms. Kings and emperors, lords and ladies, all spun webs of alliances and sought to write their names on maps, in blood, and in gold. Some names, like Napoleon Bonaparte, were rising to prominence like oil on water and rewriting the very maps of the globe and the rules of the game. While other previously great kingdoms sank into obscurity and extinguished glory, shrinking ever smaller as their holdings were carved away from them by rivals.

Russia played to win the game. The Russian Empire pushed against its borders on all sides like a swollen river overflowing and washing away its former banks. It swallowed up other countries until it became the third largest empire in the history of the world. Under Tsar Alexander I, the Finnish War, Russo-Turkish War, Caucasian War, and Russo-Persian War all raged, rewriting the boundaries of "Russia" again and again.

Anna Petrovna, third daughter of a peasant farmer, knew little of great men or kingdoms or battles or colonies. She could neither read nor write nor find Russian-America on a map, but she now called the little outpost on Kodiak her home and quickly learned to speak a conversational amount of Aleut.

"We will not live here for long," her husband told her when they first arrived. "The capital of the Russian-American Company will soon move farther south to New Archangel where a new fort is being built on the site where the old one was destroyed by the Tinglit."

As with the other Russian outposts, Kodiak was peopled by a hodge-podge of serfs, Siberian exiles, promyshlenniki, paid colonists, and military officials and merchants seeking their fortunes from the frontier. Kodiak housed over four-hundred people -both Russian colonists and their retinue of indigenous fur trappers. They called them "Aleuts" due to their origin from the Aleutian Islands (though they came from a variety of different people groups). The Siberian-trained promyshlenniki, while adept at hunting land mammals, proved ill-equipped for hunting marine mammals in the frigid north Pacific waters. To fill their holds with fur (and their bellies with food), they required the extensive hunting and tracking skills of the Aleut men and women.

The Aleut, however, proved reticent to grant the Russians sole control over their freedom and even more reticent to lay down their lives for the dangerous journeys the extensive and intensive fur-trade required. They preferred to stay close to their homes with their families. This was easily remedied when the Russian took entire villages hostage and forced the Aleut to choose between life as a conscripted laborer or accept the deaths of those they loved. Thus, many an Aleut man left their families behind to travel the Pacific gathering otter pelts. And many an Aleut woman "chose" to become the wife of a Russian fur trader rather than see her family die at the point of a Russian musket.

While disease and conscripted labor subdued the previous inhabitants of Kodiak and the Aleutian Islands, the Tinglit of New Archangel and Yakutat were less amenable to Russian invasion. When the nearby outpost at Yakutat was attacked by the Tinglit, all the colonists were either killed or taken captive. In retribution, the Russian-American company decided to try to pretend they were a British trading vessel, lure the Tinglit onboard with promises of trade, and imprison those guilty of the raid. Nikolai was sent to lead the mission. He managed to recapture a canon from the destroyed fort, but he failed to rescue any of the hostages or ensnare any of the perpetrators.

"The next journey, I will bring you along," Nikolai told her again and again as he left her in the quiet colony. Inevitably, the "next" journey was too dangerous and she was forced to wait for him on Kodiak.

She filled her days as best she could. The colonists were encouraged to plant crops and so become more self-supporting. She tried to grow her own little garden outside their cabin. The short growing season yielded little other than potatoes, beets, and carrots and she missed bread so much she nearly cried. The tiny rations of wheat flour they were able to obtain from passing ships were barely enough to give her a reprieve from the never-ending meals of fish. Salted fish. Dried fish. Smoked fish. Fresh fish. She hated the sight of it all, but loved it at the same time, because it kept her alive during the long, lonely winters and she heard enough stories from the other colonists of the winters without fish to make her love it all the more.

She kept her little icon of the Virgin Mary with her everywhere she went, rubbing her thumb over the painted figure as she chanted the prayers of her childhood. She rubbed the more fervently when she carried their first child. She bathed the icon in tears when she buried that same child in the cold winter earth and shouted at Nikolai for his absence.

When smallpox came, it tore through the outpost like a forest fire and the Aleut suffered the most losses. Anna barely came through, but her second born babe did not. Nikolai returned from his next journey to a wife nearing her deathbed and he nursed her back to health. He swore he would never leave her again and on his next journey, she would be by his side.

ooooooo

Nikolai carried the world in his sails. As a young man, when his parents failed to pay their taxes to their landlord, Nikolai was conscripted into the navy and his anchor to the agrarian life was cut for good. From navy ships on the Black Sea to merchant vessels to Europe to his current post as a navigator with the Russian- American Company, Nikolai had seen the world and built a name and place for himself along the way.

His prospects were even brighter four years into their marriage when he was given a task that would define the future of Russian-America. With the influx of greedy-eyed British, French, Spanish, and Yankee traders also inching their way into the Pacific coast, the Russian-American Company decided to establish Russian forts and colonies to claim the region as their own. Navigator Bulygin's journey was to identify a suitable port and site for a future colony in Oregon Country (modern-day Washington and Oregon). This would then seal Russia's claims to the region of the Pacific coast stretching from Alaska to California.

True to his word, he brought his wife along.

"We may be at sea for two years…or four years. I cannot be parted from you for that long," he told his wife. She agreed, more than willing to leave the lonely outpost at Kodiak and see more of the warmer waters south which she'd heard so many tales about.

Two months into their journey from New Archangel, they passed Vancouver Island and came upon the northernmost tip of Oregon Country. Nestled between the restless seas and the glacier-capped mountains lay an impenetrable forest and a land blanketed with constant rain. If the towering ocean cliffs and moss-laden forests were not enough to make sailors hesitant to veer near the shores, the tales of the hostility of the native population made them shake in their seal skin boots.

"Find out if the natives will trade their furs for your wares and if they are amenable to doing what you tell them," the chief manager of the Russian-American Company told Bulygin. "Seek their love and friendship in every way, not by inspiring a fear based on your superiority of firearms."

The Sv. Nikolai left Kamchatka with their hold full of buttons, beads, fake pearls, cotton cloth, and iron instruments, all set aside in hopes of bending the natives to their wills and transforming the goods into furry gold. But with the plentiful trading ships of the British, Yankees, and French also seeking their own fortunes in fur, with plenty of muskets and bolts of woolen cloth and iron tools to trade, the natives of the Oregon Country coast could afford to be particular.

And the Makah, Quileute, Nootka, and Hoh were not peoples used to being told what to do…or allowing outsiders into their fiercely guarded territories.

It was shortly after passing the Juan De Fuca Strait that their schooner met a storm. What began as a gentle breeze bloomed into a furious squall which mercilessly battered their ship farther and farther towards the land. The wind then extinguished, leaving the boat drifting helplessly. When anchor after anchor snapped in the current, they could not more stop their progression towards the coast than they could fly and they were eventually stranded on a sand bar by La Push.

"Unload. Quickly as possible," Nikolai Bulygin shouted after they ran aground. Sails became tents, as many clothes and tools as could be carried were layered upon each man and woman, and foodstuffs and weapons were thrown from the ship and to the shore. All the while the dark eyes and arrows of natives peered at the bounty from the shore. They were outnumbered, badly. It would take but a strike of a match for this situation to explode into a bloodbath and fear flooded the eyes of the crew like the sea would now flood their wrecked ship.

"Stay close to me, little rose," Nikolai whispered to her as he piled the guns and powder on the shore. "I will protect you."

She nodded and curled up within one of the make-shift tents to warm up by the far. The rain drizzled unceasingly upon the canvas. She knew Nikolai meant what he said, but he was as powerless to protect her now as he was when smallpox tore through their village. For now, she was the only Russian woman within a thousand miles. She took out her little painting of the Holy Mother and held it in her hands, closed her eyes, and prayed again.

Then she gathered some stones into her hands, just in case.

ooooo

Notes:

I can't find anything on how old Bulygin was or where Anna was from. Was she a serf? How old was she when they married? The legal age of marriage in Russia at this point was 13. Had they been married five years or one? Where did they meet? I don't know so I tried to come up with as historically accurate a backstory as I could.

Did Anna actually live in Kodiak? I found a very obscure reference to Bulygin having bought a house there, but I don't have dates or any other information. Since it's the only firm fact I've got, I'm going to run with it. The mission to Yakutat is the only other firm piece of background I have on Bulygin. Both of these references come from "The Lives of the First Russian Settlers in Alaska," on AlaskaWeb.

The Russian term "Aleut" is what they label all the peoples of the Aleutian Islands. However, some of these peoples include the Unangan, Sugpiag (sometimes called Alutiiq), and a variety of other peoples. I am going to continue to use the term "Aleut" since the parts that refer to these people are written from the Russian perspective.

The schooner, the SV. Nikolai, had two Kodiak Aleut women onboard. Were they wives of the Russian fur trappers or the Aleut fur trappers? Why were they on the journey? Also, one member was half-Aleut, half-Russian. There was also and Englishman.

"Seek their love and friendship in every way, not by inspiring a fear based on your superiority of firearms." Is a quote from a letter by Baranov, the manager of the Russian-American Company, describing his orders to Bulygin.

I garnered a lot of my details on life as a serf (including the tale of Natasha and the neighbor boy) from:

GORSHKOV, B. (2005). Life under Russian Serfdom: The Memoirs of Savva Dmitrievich Purlevskii, 1800-1868. BUDAPEST; NEW YORK: Central European University Press.