Читать книгу The St. Petersburg Connection - Alexis S. Troubetzkoy - Страница 12

The Admiral and the Prince

It would be proper at this juncture to deviate somewhat from the principal thread of our narrative to consider the intriguing stories of two colourful individuals who unquestionably are part of the overall fabric. One was an American in the service of Russia and the other a Russian in the development of the United States.

In the summer of 1788, the fourth of the century’s Russo-Turkish wars began with Catherine’s attack of Ochakov, a strategically situated fortress on the Black Sea that controlled the mouths of the Dnieper and Bug Rivers, the key to the Crimea. The fort had been lost earlier to the Ottomans and the empress now sought to regain it.

As the Russian forces engaged the Turks, King Gustav III of Sweden grasped the moment to launch an attack against Russia through Finland, and he was soon predicting the imminent capture of St. Petersburg, what with the Russians fighting a war in the south and a war in the north. Catherine found her military resources were being stretched to their limits, and the navy’s in particular. It was clear that that the fleets had to be strengthened, especially the Baltic Sea fleet. To assist in the work, she invited a noted Dutch naval officer, Admiral Jonkeer Jan Hendrick van Kinsbergen, to enter her service, but he graciously declined. The empress then turned to her second choice: Admiral John Paul Jones, the celebrated American hero who in time came to be known as the “founder of the United States Navy.”

The compelling story of this singular individual is as inspiring as it is pathetic. Jones’s naval career had been brilliant, but his personal life was punctuated with difficulties and disappointments. John Paul (the Jones would come later) came from Kirkbean, Scotland, on England’s border, where his father served as a landscape gardener to a nobleman. At age twelve in 1759, he entered the British merchant navy as cabin boy and within seven brief years found himself the chief mate of a slave ship operating out of Jamaica. By 1770, he was master of his own vessel making several voyages to Tobago, and it was on the final run that he suffered the greatest misfortune of his life. While anchored in a West Indian port, a mutinous crew member engaged him in a deadly contre temps, insisting on a denied shore leave. In the course of the blistering exchange that took place on deck, the hot-headed sailor raised a threatening bludgeon against his superior, which Captain Paul thwarted by running the attacker through with a sword. Self-defence or not, the sensational death called for an arrest and a hearing. Rather than risk facing an admiralty court, John Paul fled to North America, to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where his brother had a small estate. He was now a fugitive from justice, a wanted man, and in an effort to conceal his identity he assumed the surname of Jones.

With the outbreak of the American Revolution, John Paul Jones travelled to Philadelphia, where friends in the Continental Congress secured for him a commission as senior lieutenant in the continental navy. The term navy is perhaps a misnomer — what later developed into a proper navy was in Jones’s time simply a small collection of lightly armed vessels whose role was to harass British shipping. It was George Washington who recognized the need for a bona fide fleet and it was he who effectively pushed the Continental Congress into such investment; the country’s first president was also the founder of the United States Navy.

In 1776, Jones took command of the Providence, a 110-foot sloop of twelve guns. He first sailed to Bermuda, where he inflicted extensive damage on the ships in harbour, and then moved on to Nova Scotia. At Canso and Arichat Harbours, Jones effectively destroyed the English fishing industry, taking sixteen British vessels as prizes of war. Canso suffered such devastation that the population virtually abandoned it. What was at one time the seat of the Nova Scotia government and an important commercial centre became a deserted village — by 1812, only five families remained.

John-Paul Jones.

Harris & Ewing, 1936. Engraving. Library of Congress.

In the period that followed, Jones sailed the Scottish and English coasts and terrorized the populations with his daring and effective raids on port towns and merchants. In between two such forays, he put another of his ships, the Ranger, into the French port of Quiberon and on entering the harbour, he fired the customary gun salute to the receiving admiral — France and the United States were allied. The entry of Jones’s warship into French territorial water on that Valentine’s Day of 1777 was a notable occasion for the United States — Admiral La Motte-Piquet returned the salute, the first time the Stars and Stripes was formally recognized by a foreign power.

By 1779, Jones had been promoted to commodore in command of a squadron of American and French ships. On September 23, a spectacular confrontation with the British took place, this time between his vessel and two of the enemy. At the Battle of Flamborough Head, Jones outmanoeuvred the twenty-two-gun Countess of Scarborough and took on the fifty-gun Serapis. With clever tacking, he brought his own ship, the Bonhomme Richard,[1] alongside the larger British vessel, which he then managed to grapple and lash together with his. The two adversaries now found their gun muzzles virtually touching each other at point-blank range, spitting fire point into one another’s hulls in a murderous melee. With Jones’s smaller vessel ablaze and sinking, the British demanded surrender and it was here that the valorous American made his celebrated reply: “I have not yet begun to fight!” Samuel Eliot Morrison, the noted naval historian, describes the scene:

The British frigate was in a deplorable condition; the spars and rigging were cut away and dead and dying men lay about her decks. But the state of the Richard was even more frightful. Her rudder was hanging by one pintle, her stern frames and transoms were almost entirely shot away, the quarterdeck was about to fall into the gunroom, at least five feet of water were in the hold, and it was gaining from holes below the waterline … and her topsails were open to the moonlight.[2]

Against all odds, John Paul Jones prevailed, and within three and a half hours of the battle’s start, the Serapis surrendered. The victor moved his flag from his own doomed Richard and raised it aboard his prize of war. The impressive triumph was a climactic moment in Jones’s career — he entered the realm of legend. Within weeks, he was the subject of toasts and ballads in stately drawing rooms and in lowly taverns throughout France, America, and Holland. Ambassador Benjamin Franklin wrote to Jones, “Scarce anything was talked of at Paris and Versailles but your cool conduct and persevering bravery during the terrible conflict.” Even in England, where the British defeat was a shameful blot on the naval escutcheon, ordinary folk stood in admiration of the daring American. “Paul Jones,” declared the London Morning Post, “resembles a Jack o’ Lantern, to mislead our marines and terrify our coasts … he is no sooner seen than lost.” On his arrival in France, he was received by King Louis XVI and was presented to Queen Marie Antoinette, whom he found “a sweet girl.” The king awarded the hero a gold sword.

The Treaty of Ghent in 1783 brought a formal close to the American Revolution and the United States received recognition as an independent nation. The Continental Congress began a slow demobilization of its armed forces, rewarding its hard-fought veterans with parcels of land. Jones, however, was unready to settle down into the sedentary life of a country squire and he set about exploring the possibility of a command abroad. It was at this point that Catherine persuaded him to enter the service of Russia, largely on the recommendation of Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassador to France. By that time, Catherine had begun to disassociate herself from the British and was cozying up with the French. That Jones was anti-British and a friend of France suited her well and she appointed him rear admiral. “Jones,” she confidently predicted, “will get us to Constantinople.”

Kontradmiral Pavel Ivanovich, as he was now called, arrived in St. Petersburg in May 1788 and was well pleased with the reception he received from Catherine. “The Empress,” he declared, “with the character of a very great man, will always be adored as the most amiable and captivating of the fair sex.” Within weeks of arriving, he was dispatched to the Black Sea with orders to take command of a flotilla of ships and engage the Turks. He was further ordered to put himself under the direction of the brilliant but capricious Prince Potemkin, commander of all Russian forces in the south — and Catherine’s lover.

Jones’s new assignment was beset with difficulties from the start. In the first place, he found himself junior to another mercenary, Prince Karl Heinrich von Nassau-Siegen, with whom he had been associated earlier during their joint service with the French. A strong enmity existed between the two men stemming from an incident in which Jones at one point refused to follow certain orders from Nassau-Siegen. But an even greater burden for Jones was Potemkin’s attitude toward the fleet — the prince viewed the navy as a mere adjunct to land forces and, much to Jones’s chagrin, he used it thus in coastal campaigns. And finally, Jones was appalled at the poor physical state of the ships he commanded. Would they be effective in action?

Dispirited or not, Kontradmiral Pavel rapidly established himself in the eyes of his crew as an admired leader and a brilliant tactician. On the eve of encountering the enemy at the Battle of Liman, he mustered his men and urged them to victory. “I see in your eyes the souls of heroes,” he declared. “We shall all learn together to conquer or to die for the country!” (Note: the country, not our country.) Were it not for the prospect of imminent battle, there was something droll about it all. An American commanding officer was extolling Russian naval officers to victory against the Turks, addressing them in the French language. With the successful outcome of that particular engagement, Jones’s stock increased even further.

In time, the endless and tiresome feuding between Nassau-Siegen and Jones became so serious that Potemkin could no longer bear it. He requested the recall of Jones to St. Petersburg. Returned to the capital in early 1789, the unhappy but relieved Jones plunged himself into a variety of schemes to strengthen Russian-American maritime cooperation. Proposals were drawn up for the suppression of the Barbary pirates, for direct naval alliances between the two countries, for joint partnerships in shipbuilding, and for bilateral naval action in the Black Sea. As he awaited government reaction to these initiatives, the unfortunate man became embroiled in a scandal so dire that by the year’s end he had to exit the country. A twelve-year-old delivery girl reported that the kontradmiral had attempted to rape her, a charge Jones heatedly denied. “The charge against me is an ignoble fraud,” he wrote to Potemkin. “I love women, I confess, and the pleasures which one enjoys only with their sex, but any enjoyments which it would be necessary to take by compulsion are horror to me.… I give you my word as a soldier and as an honest man that, if the girl in question has not at all passed through other hands than mine, she must still have her virginity.”

Unsurprisingly, the sensational accusation became the focus of much whispered gossip in the city, with John Paul indignantly claiming that the whole matter was the perfidious intrigue of his archrival, Nassau-Siegen. Formal charges were laid, but the matter never reached the justice courts and the case against him remained inconclusive. The court and St. Petersburg society, however, effectively washed their hands of Jones — he was a thorough embarrassment and ostracized. The French ambassador at the time commented in his memoir, “The enemies of Paul Jones, not being able to endure the triumph of a man whom they looked upon as an adventurer, rebel and corsair, determined to destroy him.”

By December 1789, Catherine had given him permission to retire from Russia, which he did in humiliation, but he did carry away with him the Order of St. Anna. On his way home to Paris, he passed through Warsaw and called on Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the volunteer hero of the American Revolution. Jones tried unsuccessfully to have the Pole intercede on his behalf to King Gustav IV of Sweden for an appointment to the Swedish navy — which was continuing to be at war with Russia. Interesting times, those were.

Jones returned to Paris, impecunious, embittered, and broken physically as well as in spirit. Apart from a few supporters, he was all but forgotten in the United States. On July 18, 1792, he died with his face down on the bed but feet firmly planted on the floor. In the words of one historian, “It must have been simply his nature to confront the one inevitable defeat in a posture which symbolized the spirit of, ‘I have not yet begun to fight.’”

The admiral’s body was conveyed through the hot, dusty streets of Paris to the cemetery. A detachment of uniformed gendarmerie and a tiny entourage of servants and faithful tradesmen accompanied the remains to the Protestant cemetery of Saint Louis. An admiring Frenchman graciously provided funds for a lead coffin and alcohol to preserve the body in case the Americans ever wished to reclaim the remains of their forgotten hero.

Over a century later, Horace Porter took up his post as U.S. ambassador to France. A fervent admirer of John Paul Jones, Porter was determined to secure for the admiral a rightful place in the pantheon of American heroes, and to this end he petitioned President Theodore Roosevelt for assistance. Languishing in an unknown grave across the ocean was a fighting hero of the American Revolution — a man of action, a man of daring, characterized by Benjamin Franklin as “sturdy, cool and [possessing] determined bravery.” A man, in other words, like Roosevelt himself. The media-savvy president was easily persuaded, and he allocated $35,000 dollars to help conduct a search for the remains of “The Father of the American Navy.” The public-relations outcome of such an undertaking was not to be missed.

After extensive explorations, the body was eventually found and exhumed in 1905. The 113-year-old corpse was perfectly preserved, and in such fine shape that a meaningful autopsy was possible. The final diagnosis stated that cause of death was end-stage kidney failure as a result of viral or bacterial infection, coupled with pneumonia.

John Paul Jones’s body was transferred to a fresh coffin and draped with the Stars and Stripes — the first instance of such honour. It was then formally paraded through the city’s boulevards out of Paris to Cherbourg and placed on board the U.S.S. Brooklyn, one of four cruisers sent by Roosevelt to convey the remains to American shores. The remains of the great admiral today lie in the crypt of the imposing chapel of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. In front of the sarcophagus are the words “He gave our navy its earliest traditions of heroism and victory.”

The appalling humiliation John Paul Jones suffered and the unhappy conclusion to his brilliant career was, in his own words, through “the meanness and absurdity of the intrigues that were practiced for my persecution in St. Petersburg.” A poignant ending of the remarkable Kontradmiral Pavel Ivanovich Jones.

An equally engaging and out-of-the-ordinary tale may be had of a Russian aristocrat in the United States, in the wilds of the country’s frontier.

In 1792, there stepped ashore in Baltimore a nobleman, Prince Dimitri Dimitrievich Gallitzin. He came as a visitor but stayed as a resident, the first notable permanent emigrant from Russia to the United States. Today, in the village of Loretto, Pennsylvania, ninety miles east of Pittsburgh, his remains lie in the Church of St. Michael.

Dimitri Dimitrievich came from one of the noblest families in Russia, one of ancient lineage. The Gallitzin estate outside Moscow was considered to be among the finest private homes in the country, much admired by Alexander I. (Much later, Stalin took it for his country residence.) Over the centuries, members of the family unfailingly played leading roles in government, in the military, and in Russia’s social and cultural life. So distinguished was the name, that the prophetic story is told of one very young family member who, in being told about Jesus, innocently inquired, “Was he also a Gallitzen?”

Dimitri’s father was a diplomat, for many years serving as Russia’s ambassador to Holland. A wise, witty, worldly man, the prince was a product of the Enlightenment. Among his vast circle of friends were Voltaire and Diderot; the foremost thinkers of the time frequented his embassy in The Hague. It was in this residence that Empress Catherine at one time bounced the young Dimitri on her knee. So charmed was she by the delightful three-year-old, that she commissioned him an officer in the Guards Regiment.

The boy’s mother was Countess Adelheid Amalie von Schmettau, the daughter of a Prussian field marshal. In her earlier years of marriage to the prince, she was, for lack of better word, a flower child; Rousseau’s noble savage was her inspiration. The young, irrepressible Amelia persuaded her husband to permit her to move to the couple’s country estate some miles outside The Hague — it was called Niethuis, or “nobody home.” Once installed there, she cut off her long locks and donned the plainest of clothes, giving her time over to the study of Plato and Aristotle and to the care of her children, each of whom she addressed as “our dear Socrates.” The unfortunate children were subject to cold baths and pitch-dark bedrooms. Whenever they cried — and cry they did, despite mother’s exhortations to the contrary — Amelia comforted them with Socratic dialogue.

In 1783, when young Dimitri was a lad of thirteen years, his mother fell seriously ill, so ill that the boy’s headmaster counselled her to receive his own confessor. Although Amelia had been born a Roman Catholic, the church had meant little to her. Nevertheless, she agreed to meet the priest and in the days that followed as the sickness progressed, she promised herself and the confessor that if God spared her, she would seriously study religion. Amelia survived her illness, made good on her promise and two years later was received into the Church as a full communicant. At age seventeen, Dimitri followed suit and converted to Catholicism, forsaking the Orthodox Church into which he was born.

Prince Gallitzin did not take seriously either his wife’s conversion — which he deemed another capricious phase, similar to her Socratic period — or that of his son. He did, however, feel that it was time for the boy to enter military service and, through Amelia’s Germanic connections, young Dimitri was duly appointed as aide-de-camp to General von Lillien, commander of the Austrian troops in Brabant. Dimitri served two years at that posting. Amelia then determined that her son would best be served by travel and, on the suggestion of her father, she persuaded her husband to endorse the idea of having their son spend time in America. The prince, a keen admirer of George Washington and the American Constitution, thought this an excellent idea, and thus it was that young Dimitri came ashore in Maryland in October 1792.

The new arrival carried a letter of introduction to Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore, the first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States. Here he found a cordial welcome and was soon quite at home in his new surroundings. Dimitri took up serious study of the church and within two years, he was determined to become ordained. The good bishop deemed the decision precipitous and he urged the young man to consult with his parents. Amelia, who by then had lost all interest in her conversion, received Dimitri’s news with horror and was appalled by the idea that her boy should become a priest. At first these developments were kept secret from the prince, but it did not take long for him to discover his son’s stunning intentions. That a scion of the Gallitzin family, traditional pillars of orthodoxy, would convert to Catholicism was bad enough; an ordination into that alien church was unthinkable. The desperate prince wrote to his wife, “Above all, I beg you to discuss that which is properly our common trouble and to seek some means of solving it. I do not know what to write to my son.”

At this stage, serendipity came into play. Notice was received from Russia that the commission bestowed by Catherine years earlier upon the infant child had now come due. Dimitri was ordered to return to Russia to join the guards regiment. But the young man, having received the summons together with pleading letters from his parents, remained adamant. Nothing would dissuade him from his declared intention. On March 18, 1795, he kneeled before Bishop Carroll to be ordained and tonsured. Prince Dimitri Dimitrievich Gallitzin became Father Dimitri.

At the time, there was a shortage of priests in the Maryland parishes, particularly in Baltimore, but Father Dimitri’s calling was for missionary work. He successfully persuaded Bishop Carroll to assign him deep into the distant countryside, over a week’s journey west, beyond the crest of the Allegheny Mountains. Here in the forests and mountains of the remote wilderness, the young priest made his home for over forty years, building a church here, converting there, “labouring in God’s vineyards.” He purchased twenty thousand acres of land in the greater the Loretto area, which he then sold for one quarter the price to impoverished settlers. In the village itself, he built a church at his expense, plus a grist mill and a sawmill — all to enable his parishioners to cope better with the vicissitudes of frontier life.

In 1808, Dimitri’s father died and he received notice that the tsar had disinherited him, “by reason of your Catholic faith and your ecclesiastical profession.” It was devastating news, for he had borrowed heavily in expectation of the inheritance. Now without funds, good Father Dimitri nevertheless pursued his initiatives, soon falling into greater and greater debt. He occasionally received small sums from his sister. King William V of Holland once sent Dimitri $2,000 dollars under the pretext that it was a payment for some insignificant items left behind at the royal palace from the days when the two were boys together at play. Another time, in desperation the priest travelled to Washington to seek assistance from the Russian ambassador to whom he owed money. Historian Alexander Tarsaidze picks up the story:

The minister suggested that the discussion of financial matters be postponed until after dinner. Present at dinner were Henry Clay and the Dutch Envoy. After the plates had been removed, a servant brought in a candle to be used by the gentlemen in lighting their cigars. The Russian Minister rolled a spill, thrust it into the flame of the candle, lighted his cigar leisurely and smiled. A black ash was all that remained of the $5,000 bond.[3]

Dimitri struggled on, never out of debt but always confident that somehow God would provide. His fiscal irresponsibility provoked more than one tempest with the presiding bishops, but ultimately they appeared accepting of the situation and often came to the rescue.

Gallitzin was more than once proposed for a bishopric: in Bardstown, Kentucky; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; and Cincinnati. All these he declined in favour of continuing his rural work in the verdant hills of western Pennsylvania. At the time of his death, there were an estimated ten thousand parishioners within his church’s district. The turnout for his funeral was massive and as the remains were being lowered into the crypt the choir intoned, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my strength.