Part #57: Go-Nanboku-cho
From – “IMPERIUM ORIENTALE: The Rise of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company” by Brivibas Goštautas (Royal Livonian Press, 1956) :
1805 saw the end of the golden period for Lebedev and Benyovsky. In those four years, ever since the conquest of Matsumae and the quiet infiltration of European trade into Japan’s Sakoku, its closed market, a great deal had happened in the outside world. The Jacobin Wars raged on in Europe, as Jean de Lisieux sought to redraw the map with blood as his ink. War too was ignited between the exiled Infantes of Spain and their republican rivals in the UPSA. Russia, however, backed away from the brink of war with the Ottoman Empire, focusing on repairing and reuniting herself after her punishing civil war. The Pacific venture, which had run merrily along in the background while Russian fought Russian – at the end of a very trade long route, with the nearest big Russian town being Yakutsk, Lebedev’s men had no choice but to be self-sufficient – presented certain opportunities to the newly confirmed Emperor Paul I.
The Tsar was placed in the unenviable position of having to neutralise his many remaining political enemies without taking actions so harsh or drastic that they might reignite the civil war. Just as the British had discovered, transportation was a useful compromise between inflammatory executions and inconclusive imprisonment. Paul used this method to exile both General Sergei Vasilievich Saltykov and Ivan Grigorevich Potemkin to Yakutia. This was quite a clever strategy, certainly compared with his father’s more short-range exile of his wife Catherine to Yekaterinburg, where she was still close enough to the beating heart of Russia to continue influencing many important Russians, sowing the seeds that would, after her death, grow into the Civil War. By contrast, Yakutia was so distant from Moscow and St Petersburg that there was no chance of staying part of court gossip – as Lebedev’s men had already discovered. Therefore, Potemkin had no choice but to use his formidable talents for organisation to help improve the colony as Paul wished, in the hope that the Tsar might eventually recognise his achievements and let him return to more hospitable climes. Paul had no such intentions for Saltykov, who had only escaped execution because of the plea of his relative Nikolai, who had fought on Paul’s side during the Civil War. As it turned out, though, it was just as well for Russia that Nikolai’s argument had convinced the young Emperor…
Saltykov and Potemkin were only two of the many former Potemkinite leaders – and not a few common soldiers of suspect background – who were sent to Yakutia. They swelled the Russian population of the region, probably doubling it in fact. Ivan Potemkin’s position was unofficial and subordinate to the formal governor-general of the Russian Far East, but he soon established himself in the administrative structure – such as it was. Some of his early innovations included a more consistent teaching of at least basic Russian to the local allies and subjects sometimes recruited as workers or soldiers: among them the Yakuts, the Nivkhs of Sakhalin, and of course the Aynyu of Edzo.[1] This meant that anyone, regardless of ethnicity, could be shifted from one part of the region to another without requiring interpreters, and also helped cement Russian cultural dominance at a time when this was a hot topic in European Russia. It is possible, of course, that this was part of Ivan’s attempt to impress the Tsar.
Some emancipated serfs also came to Yakutia of their own accord, though many did not come the whole way and instead settled around Krasnoyarsk or Irkutsk. Even these, though, arguably helped develop the Russian Far East in that their presence led to the expansion of those midway towns and thus the improvement of the roads linking them to Yakutsk to the east and Yekaterinburg to the west. Although the climate was considerably harsher than European Russia, the former serfs came because the region was declared free and farmland was doled out to those who moved there. Some of them doubtless regretted it when the Tsar was forced to expand emancipation to a wide area of European Russia also a few years later, although a steady trickle continued, enamoured with the idea of owning land even if it was rather less fertile than that which they had farmed as serfs.
The exact status of the Lebedev-Benyovsky venture also needed clarification. Up until this point, it had had a vague definition, partly under the auspices of the Russian government in the Far East, partly under the Lithuanian government, but largely independent. Paul therefore declared the “Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company” in 1802, modelled on the trading companies of other European powers such as the Dutch, the French and the British. The new Company had a broad umbrella and encompassed not only Lebedev and Benyovsky’s adventures in Yakutia and Edzo, but also the establishment by Aleksandr Baranov of a fur trading colony in Alyeska.[2] Although Benyovsky knew and respected Baranov, the two ventures were as yet not really that connected and continued to run their own affairs. Nonetheless, the Company charter – from both Paul and his son Peter in his role as the Grand Duke of Lithuania – granted legitimacy to what had previously been a mad scheme, and attracted more immigration and recruitment.
Of course, these processes were only just beginning by 1805, and still had a long way to run. There had nonetheless been some direct impacts. After visiting Edzo in 1803, Potemkin agreed to certain ideas of Benyovsky’s (while quietly ignoring the more far-fetched ones) in order to expand trade and stick the Russian boot in the Japanese door before it could close. In this Benyovsky was prophetic, although perhaps it could be said that his own actions brought about his prophecy.
The situation as it stood was always going to be unsustainable. Benyovsky had successfully infiltrated Japan by a combination of factors in one of those unlikely sequences of events that would sound implausible in a work of fiction, yet can be found in any history book. The conquest of Matsumae Han with the assistance of Aynyu rebels had been the easy part. The infinitely harder task was in keeping the knowledge of this conquest from the Japanese Court and Bakufu,[3] making them believe that the Matsumae had in fact defeated the Aynyu and the regent of the new young Daimyo, Matsumae Hidoshi, was in fact another Japanese and not Moritz Benyovsky. It is perhaps hard to believe that this situation persisted for even four years, but one must consider a number of factors that lay to Beyovsky’s advantage:
1. Matsumae was on the very frontiers of Japan, and its position meant that it was permitted certain privileges by the Shogun. The Han was of course permitted to trade with the Aynyu, whereas most Hans were forbidden foreign trade of any kind. It was exempt from the sankin kotai, a system that required other Hans to send members of the ruling house as hostages to the Bakufu in order to ensure their loyalty. It was assumed that the Matsumae were no threat to the Tokugawa. Ultimately, Matsumae’s distance and isolation meant that the Emperor and Shogun were used to having little contact with that Han: it was not as if the Russians and Lithuanians had tried to take over Koromo Han.
2. A century earlier, the Matsumae had been almost overwhelmed by an earlier Aynyu rebellion, the Shakushain Revolt. That had required imperial troops to put down, and this meant that Matsumae Han had lost its special privileges for a generation and been subject to imperial inspectors poking their noses in. Even those Matsumae who despised the Russian presence were thus hesitant to appeal to the Court or Bakufu as a means of throwing them out.
3. The Court and Bakufu themselves did not want to know. Emperor Tenmei was determined to see his reign as a bright new dawn after the disasters of the 1770s (tsunamis, earthquakes, economic meltdown) and suppressed reports of any negative news throughout his empire. This was not purely a propaganda exercise, as the Japanese people were inclined to view such disasters as omens against that Emperor’s reign. The Shogun, Tokugawa Iemochi, as usual kept his network of spies alert, but in that time was chiefly concerned with reports that the Satsuma Han – the large, rich, southern, and always independent-minded domain covering a large part of the island of Kiusiu[4] – was violating trade restrictions and becoming high-minded due to the fact that the Daimyo of Satsuma possessed a full kingdom, that of the Ryukyu islands, as his vassal. Thus the eyes of suspicion were turned to the south, not the north, and anomalous reports from Edzo were initially dismissed.
4. Benyovsky pursued a deliberate policy of secrecy and employed Sugimura Goro, the disgraced and vengeful family surgeon of the Matsumae, as his guide in Japanese affairs and effective viceroy of Edzo.
This policy thus succeeded for four years. Its end has two explanations, the romantic and the economic. As usual, the latter is more probably true, but it is the former which is remembered. The economic theory simply states that sufficient goods from Matsumae were being recognised as clearly of European manufacture for the Shogun to become suspicious regardless of the suborning of his local spies. This was doubtless achieved with the assistance of the Dutch, who were Japan’s only outlet to knowledge of the West – indeed Western science was known as Rangaku, or ‘Dutch learning’, in Japan. And the Dutch, though hamstrung by being limited to the artificial island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay as a trade post, were nonetheless jealous of their monopoly on Western trade with Japan and were just as willing as the Japanese to help crack down on other Europeans who might violate Sakoku.
The romantic explanation ties into the economic. It states that, at last in 1805, the young Daimyo of Matsumae came to give homage to the Emperor as he should have done upon gaining his position. Hidoshi was no longer able to realistically claim the situation was still too unstable to make the journey, and so he did. He was accompanied by an ‘Aynyu servant’, who aroused much talk in each of the towns that Hidoshi and his entourage visited enroute to Kyoto. Few Japanese had ever actually seen an Aynyu, and to many – even the educated – all barbarians were the same, a reflection of the system of isolation. Thus it was that Hidoshi indeed gave homage to the Emperor in Kyoto, though Tenmei was by that point ailing from an illness, though he was not old. It would be in a few months’ time that Tenmei would be one of the few Japanese Emperors of this period not to be forced to abdicate or deposed: he would die whilst upon the Chrysanthemum Throne.
Hidoshi then left for Edo to establish relations with the Shogun. Even at this point it seems that the Russian venture might have escaped discovery. Tokugawa Iemochi remained concerned both with the intransigence of Satsuma and a problem of imperial succession. Emperor Tenmei’s son Crown Prince Yasuhito had…dangerous ideas. He was familiar both with Rangaku and with Chinese writings, and had developed a philosophy not unlike Bourbon absolutism, indeed possibly derived from it. He was dangerous enough for Tokugawa to consider assassination, but the fallout would be problematic. Despite his best efforts, Tenmei had no more sons, only five daughters. It might be possible for the Emperor to make a pragmatic sanction and adopt a male child from another branch of the imperial family as his son,[5] but this would first require that he had no sons of his own. Thus the business of diplomacy, the letter and the knife, went back and forth from Kyoto to Edo as the two leaders of Japan pondered the problem.
In the midst of all this came Daimyo Hidoshi and his Aynyu servant. Hidoshi met with Tokugawa and submitted to the Shogun as the system required, but it was at this point that things started to go awry. Tokugawa had a Dutch trader at the Bakufu. Bringing the Dutch out of Nagasaki was unorthodox and probably illegal, but the Shogun made his own law. The Dutchman, a trader named Pieter Roggeveen, had probably been invited there by Tokugawa so the Shogun’s agents could ask him about possible European influences on Crown Prince Yasuhito’s ideas. But this is supposition: no records survive of such subterfuge.
In any case, the Dutchman immediately recognised the ‘Aynyu servant’ of Hidoshi as a European – none other than Ulrich Münchhausen, Captain of Marines on the Lithuanian flagship Skalvis. Roggeveen spoke out, partly in surprise and partly in outrage, and knew that someone (presumably the Russians) had indeed suborned the Matsumae.
Tokugawa immediately ordered the arrest of Hidoshi and Münchhausen, regardless of the Daimyo’s protests and attempted explanations. While they were imprisoned, he questioned Roggeveen in more detail and ascertained the Dutchman’s conclusions. Matsumae must pay, he decided, and it would start with its Daimyo.
Unfortunately for Tokugawa, when he summoned the guard to bring back Hidoshi and Münchhausen in chains, they found the cells empty. In an act of unlikely courage worthy of any of his father’s tall tales, Münchhausen had broken the two of them out of the dungeons and fled. For all Tokugawa’s spies and soldiers, they were never found. It later emerged that Hidoshi commandeered a fishing boat in Edo harbour and Münchhausen threatened its crew until they sailed all the way back to Matsumae – an epic voyage later commemorated in the Russian epic opera Lodka (“The Boat”) by Konstantin Vereshchagin, which unusually includes some verses with Japanese lyrics.
Deprived of this prey, Tokugawa ordered the drawing up of a punishment army and the acquisition of sufficient ships to carry them across the Tsugaru Strait to Edzo. As usual, he raised a levy from each of the Hans, each contributing troops to the operation. However, Satsuma and a number of other Hans were rather late and sent fewer troops than their requirement. Tokugawa made a note to deal with this southern problem after he had crushed Matsumae and driven the barbarians out: after all, he would have an army ready to do it with.
Except, of course, it did not happen that way.
Most commentators have attributed the Russian victory to technological superiority, which is at best an oversimplification and at worst utter nonsense. Even with regards to the direct armed clashes, training played as big a part as the presence of firearms. The Japanese knew of muskets, but had deliberately banned them from the islands in the 17th century as part of the Sakoku policy, with the justification that the impersonal nature of firearms destroyed the honour and chivalry of the samurai. This was quite a reasonable claim, as guns indeed led to the end of the knight in Europe. But back when the early Tokugawa Shogunate had banned muskets, they had been imprecise, slow-loading matchlocks that could still be matched in destructive power by skilled longbowmen. Thus the ban had been realistic: it was possible to enforce it, defeating a small number of musket-armed men with the gunless regular army. However, the Russian infantry, though not the best-trained in the world, could fire one or two rounds a minute from comparatively far more accurate weapons – and a few of their elite snipers bore rifles, the very antithesis of a chivalrous view of warfare.[6]
The “Russian” force on Edzo of course included many others. There were many Lithuanians, and German mercenaries in the service of both Russians and Lithuanians, and there were Benyovsky’s Aynyu cadres (who were highly motivated to prevent Japanese rule coming over Edzo again), some of them trained in European warfare. There were even a few Matsumae sympathisers who took up arms against the Shogun’s army, either because they held grudges like Sugimura, or because they genuinely believed the Russians would be a lighter hand than Tokugawa’s.
However, if all or most of the large Japanese force had actually landed in Edzo, it is likely that the numerically inferior Russian force would still have been swept away, swamped by the horde of well-disciplined if technologically inferior soldiers. The Russians were saved by the same factor that had saved England from Spain in the sixteenth century, and Japan herself from the Mongols in the thirteenth: Edzo was an island. The strait of Tsugaru separated it from the island of Niphon[7] and this meant that the army needed a fleet to cross. Tokugawa assembled pressed boats from all over Japan, but these were mostly little ships, fishing craft and the like. After all, Japan had little need of trade ships or armed escorts for them.
This would have sufficed if the Strait had been uncontested; but it was not. Benyovsky learned from Sugimura’s agents in Niphon that the Shogun’s army was approaching the ports, and summoned all the warships that the Company had at its command – by this point, fourteen frigates and obsolete ships of the line, and perhaps twenty smaller brigs and sloops. It was a force that would have been wiped out even by Admiral Villeneuve’s battered Republican French sailfleet, yet to the Japanese it was death.
It is hard perhaps to explain the metamorphosis that those ships underwent in the Japanese consciousness. The inhabitants of Nagasaki had seen Dutch ships docked at Deshima and the occasional other European ship passing through, such as one of the expeditions of La Pérouse. They even made drawings of those ships and learned some theory of shipbuilding via Rangaku. Yet they were otherworldly, remote, barbarian affairs. Once upon a time – the Russians later tried to suppress knowledge of this – before the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Japanese had built quite serviceable galleons to Spanish plans and sailed them around the world, as well as smaller ocean-voyaging trade ships to travel throughout the East Indies. Now, though, that knowledge was long gone. Suddenly, those distant barbarian ships were wooden dragons blazing with fire and iron. Few living Japanese had ever seen a cannon fire. Many saw it on that day, but few of them were lived to tell the tale.
Of course, the Russians were still limited by their numbers. At least a quarter of the Japanese ships made it through the Russian blockade and landed their troops in Edzo. They even won some battles, especially against undisciplined Aynyu irregulars, and retook some towns for a while. Yet in the end the Russians carried the war. This was indeed partly due to their superiority in firearms, training and above all artillery (borrowed from one of the ships) but there was also a mundane factor at work. The Tokugawa Shogunate had kept the peace in Japan through political manipulation, assassination and repression for two centuries. The last major war in Japan had been the Shimabara Rebellion of the 1630s, which had come about in response to the creation of Sakoku itself. Thus it was that no matter how disciplined the Japanese armies were, no matter how many stories of heroic samurai their officers had been raised upon, they were a mass of green recruits. That factor would have been a great disadvantage even if they had had the same weapons as their enemies.
The Russians, by contrast, included not only veterans of the recent conflict on Edzo, but at least half a regiment’s worth of troops who had fought for years in the Russian Civil War on the side of the Potemkinites. Paul had exiled them to Yakutia, and Benyovsky had found a use for them. Destroying Japanese armies.
Many commentators, not least Benyovsky himself, wrote of that war. The impression one receives from reading their accounts is that the Japanese were very impressive fighters, strongly disciplined and motivated, and rarely surrendering, usually fighting to the death. Yet one cannot escape the fact that this history was written by the victors. The great army that Tokugawa had compiled had been almost completely annihilated: some volleyed down on Edzo, far more drowned in the Strait of Tsugaru. It was the greatest disaster in Japanese naval history since the Battle of Myeongnyang against the Coreans, two centuries before, when a Corean force outnumbered ten to one had wiped out a Japanese fleet. In fact the situations were similar: the Coreans had won partly because of the leadership of Admiral Yi Sun-sin and partly because of technological superiority, for their timberclad Panokseon ships had been impervious to the attacks of the Japanese Atakebunes.
And yet, many historically-aware Japanese writers pointed out acidly, that fleet at Myeongnyang would have stood a better chance against the Russians if it had somehow been brought to the here and now. After all, it had consisted of real warships, and they had been armed with cannon – which was more than one could say for anything Tokugawa could field.
The institution of Sakoku had been partly due to Japan’s defeat in the Imjin War with the Coreans and Chinese, not least due to that battle. Now it was openly asked whether that isolation had been the right course of action. Murmurs against Tokugawa spread throughout the islands, and nowhere were they stronger than Kiusiu, where the Satsuma fanned the flames. Sikoke[8] too came out as a hotbed of anti-Shogunate feeling, doubtless because its Hans had realised that Tokugawa must have little means of attacking any other island. More significantly, the Choshu Han of southern Niphon, another large and powerful Han, declared an alliance with the Satsuma. The Choshu had had a grudge against the Shogunate ever since a Shogun had deported them to their present remote domain from a previous position of power nearer the centre of Niphon.
These murmurs of discontent needed a cause to rally around, and they soon had one. Emperor Tenmei died – if one believes the poets, upon hearing the news of the disaster of the Tsugaru Straits. Tokugawa, struggling to cope with the repeated setbacks, immediately produced documents claiming that Tenmei had adopted Kojimo, a noble from one of the Sesshu Shinnoke (the Four Cadet Branches of the Imperial House of Japan) as his son on his deathbed. It is almost certain that this was falsified, but Kojimo was presented with the Three Sacred Treasures in Kyoto and thus coronated. However, from the start his reign was hollow. Two of his predecessor’s four chief ministers, his Naidaijin (Minister of the Centre) and Udaijin (Minister of the Right) refused to recognise Kojimo as emperor, and fled into the south.
Kojimo quickly installed new men in those posts, but his credibility took a blow when it transpired that Crown Prince Yasuhito was indeed claiming the Chrysanthemum Throne from exile in the south (having escaped the Shogun’s assassins) and was backed by the rebellious armies of Satsuma, Choshu, and others. They had sent few soldiers to turn the Strait of Tsugaru red with their blood, while Tokugawa’s allies had sent many. Thus, while the supporters of Yasuhito were outnumbered, they were able to hold their own against Kojimo and Tokugawa.
Therefore, Matsumae was forgotten. The Russians had sustained losses in the battles, but now they emerged in a strong position. Though the official trade routes to Japan were closed, the civil war meant that the Pacific Company was soon doing record business. After the defeat, all the Japanese factions wanted European firearms. The southern alliance soon found itself in control of Nagasaki and the Dutch learning that flowed through it, and – with that Japanese knack for duplication that has astonished many Europeans through the ages – were soon building their own advanced European muskets, if not necessarily always matching them with the appropriate training.
Deprived of this, the Shogun’s forces turned to the only alternative source they had, no matter how ironic it was: initially without Tokugawa’s knowledge, they purchased weapons and plans from Moritz Benyovsky.
So, while Japan tore itself apart and the Russians and Lithuanians grew fat on the proceeds, all seemed well for Benyovsky’s mad venture in the East. Yet Japan was one thing. China was quite another. And all those Russians settling in the Amur valley had been brought to the attention of the Guangzhong Emperor…
[1] Recall – the Ainu of Edo (Hokkaido), to use OTL spelling.
[2] Pretty much as OTL except Baranov started a few years earlier (1795 rather than 1799).
[3] Shogunate, or the Shogun’s ‘court’.
[4] Old spelling of Kyushu, retained in TTL.
[5] Indeed this happened in OTL a generation earlier, when Emperor Go-Momozono had no sons and adopted an heir descended from an earlier Emperor’s daughter. However, this did not happen in TTL as Go-Momozono had a son (Tenmei).
[6] Yet another legacy of European interest in rifles after Frederick’s use of them in the assassination of his brother back in 1749.
[7] Honshu – not to be confused with ‘Nippon’.
[8] Shikoku.
