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| Image: Flickr User - Bryce Edwards |
By Casey Michel
In 1815, a German, on behalf of the Russian-American Company, tried to conquer Hawaii in the name of the Tsar.
In mid-October 1815, two hundred years ago this month, a German doctor set sail from one of Russia’s fledgling American outposts. Georg Anton Schäffer, an employee of the Russian-American Company (RAC) boarded the Isabella with the ostensible purpose of earning the favor of the Hawaii’s King Kamehameha. But when he landed on Hawaii, Schäffer set the wheels in motion for a chapter of failed Pacific conquest since smothered in archives, forgotten by all but a handful of scholars.
The tale of Russia’s abortive attempt to claim the Hawaiian archipelago – then called the Sandwich Islands, sighted by Europeans for the first time only 37 years prior – includes as much autocratic realpolitik as it does imperial fumbling. It may not even be correct to call the affair a wholesale “Russian” attempt to conquer the islands; there’s no evidence that either the emperor or the foreign minister ever supported a formal annexation of the archipelago and eventually they “categorically rejected” the opportunity, as historian N. Bolkhovitinov wrote.
Rather, it was the RAC, Russia’s foremost vehicle for North American expansion, which set its gaze on the Pacific islands. The islands’ sandalwood and tobacco was too good to pass up. The strategic placement in the Pacific would link Russia into prime shipping lanes, and the opportunities for grain and other harvests could help prop the empire’s impoverished Pacific Rim outposts in Okhotsk, Kamchatka, and Sitka. It seemed a lucrative target for expansion.
Read the full story at The Diplomat