On his way from New Archangel to San Fran-cisco he had met with his second failure since leav-ing St. Petersburg. It was his intention to move the Sitkan colony down to the mouth of the Colum-bia River; not only pressed by the need of a more beneficent soil, but as a first insidious advance upon San Francisco Bay. Upon this trip it would be enough to make a survey of the ground and bury a copper plate inscribed: "Possession of the Rus-sian Empire." The Juno had encountered terrific storms. After three desperate attempts to reach the mouth of the river, Rezanov had been forced to relinquish the enterprise for the moment and hasten with his diseased and almost useless crew to the nearest port. It was true that the attempt could be made again later, but Rezanov, sanguine of tem-perament, was correspondingly depressed by failure and disposed to regard it as an ill-omen.
An ambassador inspired by heaven could have accomplished no more with the Japanese at that mediaeval stage of their development than he had done, and the most indomitable of men cannot yet control the winds of heaven; but sovereigns are rarely governed by logic, and frequently by the fav-orite at hand. The privilege of writing personally to the Tsar, in his case, meant more and less than appeared on the surface. It was a measure to keep the reports of the Company out of the hands of the Admiralty College, its bitterest enemy, and always jealous of the Civil Service. Nevertheless, Rezanov knew that he had no immediate reason to apprehend the loss of Alexander's friendship and esteem; and if he placed the Company, in which all the imperial family had bought shares, on a sounder basis than ever before, and doubled its earnings by insuring the health of its employees, he would meet, when in St.
Petersburg again, with practically no opposition to his highest ambitions. These ambitions he delib-erately kept in a fluid state for the present.
Whether he should aspire to great authority in the government, or choose to rule with the absolute powers of the Tsar himself these already vast pos-sessions on the Pacific--to be extended indefinitely --would be decided by events. All his inherited and cultivated instincts yearned for the brilliant and complex civilizations of Europe, but the new world had taken a firm hold upon his humaner and appealed more insidiously to his despotic. More-over, Europe, torn up by that human earthquake, Napoleon Bonaparte, must lose the greater half of its sweetness and savor. All that, however, could be determined upon his return to St. Petersburg in the autumn.
But meanwhile he must succeed with these Cali-fornians, or they might prove, toy soldiers as they were, more perilous to his fortunes than enemies at court. He could not afford another failure; and news of this attempt and an exposition of all that depended upon it were already on the road to the capital of Russia.
He had known, of course, of the law that forbade the Spanish colonies to trade with foreign ships, but he had relied partly upon the use he could make of the orders given by the Spanish King at the request of the Tsar regarding the expedition under Krusenstern, partly upon his own wit and address.
