“There’s no more Russian fort,” a Hawaiian tourist official curtly informed me when I visited the island of Kauai on a recent sailing trip through the South Pacific. Wide-eyed and speechless, I listened to her as she explained that Kauai’s Russian Fort Elizabeth State Historical Park—founded in 1970 around a fort built by a Russian mission that visited the Hawaiian islands in 1815-1817—was recently renamed the Pā‘ula‘ula State Historic Site. Pā‘ula‘ula means ‘red enclosure’ in the Hawaiian language and refers to the red volcanic dirt and rocks in the site’s vicinity. According to local historians, Pā‘ula‘ula was the original name of the sacred place where the Russian fort was built. I was slightly comforted that Uber still uses the hybrid name Russian Fort Elizabeth State Historical Park/ Pā‘ula‘ula State Historic Site, but I naturally wondered what had changed since my previous visit in 2017 when the Russian fort’s name was uncontroversial.
I had first gone to Kauai in the waning days of my academic career to celebrate my 40th birthday. I knew the island boasted the ruins of a Russian fort, but not much else. As I found out, the ruins had endured long enough to be celebrated the week before I arrived, on the occasion of the fort’s bicentennial. I was told it was a grand affair involving the Russian ambassador to the United States—the then-newly arrived successor of the odious Sergei Kislyak, who had been recalled amid broad suspicion that he was a spymaster. I was content to make a less hyped visit with my wife, whose White Russian émigré heritage resonates strongly with remnants of what her community still calls “the Russia we have lost.”
A colorful history
How did there come to be a Russian fort in Hawaii? Russia is a Pacific power as much as an Atlantic one. Two-thirds of its territorial expanse lies in Asia, which its explorers and military men traversed and subdued in the 17th century. Russia’s march did not end there. By the 1740s, Russian traders were active in Alaska, where their increasing business interests soon expanded into full colonization. In 1799, Tsar Paul I chartered the Russian-American Company (RAC), which received broad political responsibility under its first leader, Aleksandr Baranov. Ever more prosperous, the RAC opened trade routes to the northern California coast, where in 1812 it established Fort Ross (still extant and maintained as a state park museum), and to Hawaii, where the company traded Arctic furs and skins for essential supplies.
In this developing commercial nexus, a Russian vessel, called the Bering after the Danish explorer who discovered the eponymous strait, embarked on an adventure that has gone down in Russian history as “the Hawaiian Spectacular.” The Bering started life as an American ship, originally christened the Atahualpa,/ after the ill-fated Incan Emperor. In 1813, the RAC bought the vessel for the tidy price of 20,000 sealskins, due in payment after its first voyage under the Russian flag. Departing Alaska, it sailed to Siberia before proceeding to Hawaii for supplies. After calling at Oahu, it sprung a leak but continued to Kauai, where in January 1815 a gale ran it aground in Waimea Bay, stranding the crew.
By that time in Hawaii’s history, the famous King Kamehameha had consolidated his rule over almost all of the archipelago. The only hold out was Kauai, whose King Kaumuali‘i stubbornly clung to independence. In a show of strength, Kaumuali‘i confiscated the Bering’s cargo, as well as the personal possessions of its crew, who in April 1815 secured passage back to Alaska.
To resolve the issue of the Bering’s cargo, Baranov dispatched a Bavarian doctor called Georg Anton Schäffer to negotiate a settlement. Schäffer had entered Russian military service a few years earlier. His major exploit was a failed attempt to develop combat balloons in the war against Napoleon. Shortly thereafter, he took a post as a ship’s doctor and embarked for Alaska. His relations with his captain were so poor that he was disembarked there, but Baranov hated the captain so much that he hired Schäffer to work for the RAC out of spite.
Schäffer sailed to Oahu, where Kamehameha had moved his capital. Arriving in November 1815, he presented himself as a man of science sent to explore the islands, but eventually pleaded for royal assistance with the Bering. Kamehameha warmed to Schäffer despite the machinations of American traders who distrusted him, but concluded that Kauai was outside of his control and that Schäffer would have to deal with Kaumuali‘i himself. Supported by a Russian ship sent from Alaska, and a second Russian ship that had coincidentally appeared in Hawaiian waters, in May 1816 Schäffer traveled to the outlying island.
King Kaumuali‘i understood that Russia was a mighty power that could be a useful ally against Kamehameha. Sensing an opportunity and vastly exceeding his authority, Schäffer signed an alliance with Kaumuali‘i, which nominally made Kauai a Russian protectorate. He also made a deal for the return of what remained of the Bering’s cargo and compensation for the missing portion. Kaumuali‘i provided Schäffer with 300 Hawaiian laborers to build fortifications. The two forts, named for Tsar Alexander I and the Napoleonic-era military commander Prince Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, were small earthwork structures. Hardly any trace of them survives today beyond information panels. Fort Elizabeth, which was named for Alexander I’s consort, rose on a Hawaiian holy site near Waimea Bay that contained graves of local political and religious leaders. Built with red basalt stones and arranged in the approximate star shape of a traditional European fortress, its walls reached twenty feet high and extended up to 450 feet across. Armaments from Schäffer’s ships were disembarked for the defenses. Fort Elizabeth also housed Hawaii’s first Russian Orthodox church.
In June 1816, Schäffer and Kaumuali‘i signed a new agreement to conquer Kamehameha’s kingdom and place Kaumuali‘i in power as Russia’s puppet ruler over all Hawaii. Kaumuali‘i provided 500 warriors for the campaign. Schäffer bought two more American ships, sending the bill back to an increasingly nervous Baranov, and wrote to St. Petersburg to inform the imperial government of his exploits and request reinforcements.
By autumn, however, the scheme started to fall apart. In September, another Russian ship arrived off Oahu as part of an around-the-world voyage. Its captain knew nothing of recent local events and was astonished when Kamehameha assembled a war party to repel what he expected to be an attack. The Russians convinced him that Schäffer’s escapade was a rogue operation with no government support and then left without making contact with the doctor on Kauai but reporting his activities to the authorities.
No help would be forthcoming. In the spring of 1817, the RAC’s main office in St. Petersburg finally received Schäffer’s reports and instructed Baranov to fire him as soon as he returned to Alaska. When Schäffer’s separate letters to the government arrived in August, presaged by reportage in European newspapers, Russia’s foreign minister, Count Karl Nesselrode, commissioned a review that eventually concluded that the disadvantages of acquiring Hawaii far outweighed any potential advantages. Alexander I concurred, and in March 1818 the RAC was officially denied permission to pursue the project, although the Tsar commanded it to disengage in the most diplomatic way possible. He also allowed it to conduct trade in Hawaii and bestowed on Kamehameha the Order of St. Anne, a decoration normally reserved, then as now, for heads of foreign royal houses.
By that time, Schäffer was long gone. In July 1817, local Americans who had come into his employ defected from his forces. Alarmed that Schäffer had no official support from home and was losing strength on the ground, indigenous Kauaians forced him to leave by boat. He returned to one of the earthwork forts, but could not hold out and was embarked with all other Russian personnel to Oahu. Although Kamehameha threatened him with arrest, he was permitted to leave for Shanghai, leaving his men behind. Helped by a Swedish agent who occasionally worked for the RAC, Schäffer returned to Russia, where he continued to advocate annexing Hawaii. Once again, the government refused. The RAC then sued him for financial losses resulting from his actions in Hawaii. Schäffer countersued for his expenses. An uneasy settlement resolved the case by requiring him to leave Russia for good. He found employment in Brazil, where he had stopped on his return from Hawaii and charmed its future Empress Maria Leopoldina. The Brazilian government engaged him to attract German settlers, a venture in which he enjoyed some success, despite some fraudulent practices, before his death in 1836.
Shortly after Schäffer’s departure from Kauai, Fort Elizabeth was taken over by forces loyal to Kamehameha, but the Hawaiian king failed to conquer the whole of Kauai before his death in 1819. Two years later, his son and successor Kamehameha II captured Kaumuali‘i through a ruse and seized his domains. Fort Elizabeth soon became obsolete and was abandoned in 1853. Eleven years later it was officially decommissioned and its armaments sold for scrap.
In parallel developments, Russia’s Pacific emporium shrank considerably. In 1842, the RAC sold Fort Ross due to its lack of profitability. Twenty-five years later, Russia famously sold all of Alaska to the United States. The RAC ceased operations in 1881. Russia’s future actions in the Pacific were confined to continental Asia, where it battled Japan over regional hegemony until World War II. Fort Elizabeth’s walls crumbled to the piles of basalt currently there, but remained very much part of the local landscape.
Fresh intrigue
In the five years before my recent return, the fort was the site of another Russian intrigue. Indigenous Hawaiians had become vocal about restoring their cultural heritage. Several local organizational agendas adopted renaming Fort Elizabeth, for the presence of a Russian fort evoked objectionable memories of colonialism. Indigenous arguments were not totally unfair. Russia’s presence was never recognized or even acknowledged by its own government, which explicitly disclaimed annexation twice and only endorsed peaceful commercial relations. Schäffer’s dubious episode on Kauai had lasted little more than a year, and he was not even Russian, nor were most of the men under his command. The fort itself was on sacred native ground, and it was built by Hawaiian laborers.
On the other side of the issue, a recent Russian immigrant called Elena Branson (née Chernykh) began to agitate against the indigenous renaming campaign. Her position found some resonance among Hawaii’s ethnic Russian community, which boasts a 200-year history apart from Fort Elizabeth and has been enriched by successive waves of immigration from Russia throughout its turbulent modern history. The full scope of Branson’s activities remains unknown, but she helped organize the bicentennial ceremony that preceded my first visit. The celebratory occasion apparently entertained discussion of fully restoring the fort. Branson also helped arrange an all-expense-paid visit for five Kauaian community leaders, whom she led to a Russian-American “peace conference” held in Russia in 2019. One of them, Kauai County Councilwoman Felicia Cowden, was later fined for ethics violations in relation to the trip. The travel funds were reportedly advanced by the Russian Cultural Center in New York and financed by Washington, D.C.’s American University, whose Carmel Institute for Russian Culture and History has been accused of facilitating pro-Russian public diplomacy, cooperated closely with Ambassador Kislyak before his removal, held events in partnership with the Russian embassy, and enrolled the scandalous Maria Butina, among other unfortunate associations. In 2016, the Institute’s founder Susan Carmel (formerly Susan Carmel Lehrman) received an Order of Friendship Award personally bestowed by Vladimir Putin.
Public pressure in Hawaii staved off renaming for a while, and various compromise solutions were advanced but not adopted. But the writing was on the wall. On March 20, 2021, an eight-foot bronze statue of King Kaumuali‘i commissioned by an organization called Friends of King Kaumuali‘i was dedicated at the site’s entrance. One of Kaumuali‘i’s descendants served as the model.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, matters in Hawaii came to a head. Branson’s activities attracted the attention of the FBI, which raided her New York apartment, and she abruptly returned to Moscow. Shortly thereafter, vandals defaced the fort site’s welcome sign, using spray paint to black out the word “Russian.” In June of that year, the Hawaiian Board of Land Management voted to change the name to just Pā‘ula‘ula State Historic Site, eliminating all trace of the site’s fleeting connection to Russia from official nomenclature.
The symbolic effect is harsh. Russia’s history in the Pacific deserves to be remembered as much as any other country’s, regardless of its current government’s outrages. Schäffer’s episode, however ill-fated, was so bizarre and so eccentric that its legend will remain entertaining for as long as Kauai protrudes from the azure waters surrounding it. The sign may no longer say “Russian Fort,” but as long as interested people keep the story alive, the discerning visitor may be able to explore its history all the same.
Even in Hawaii, Russia is Taboo: The Fate of Fort Elizabeth
“There’s no more Russian fort,” a Hawaiian tourist official curtly informed me when I visited the island of Kauai on a recent sailing trip through the South Pacific. Wide-eyed and speechless, I listened to her as she explained that Kauai’s Russian Fort Elizabeth State Historical Park—founded in 1970 around a fort built by a Russian mission that visited the Hawaiian islands in 1815-1817—was recently renamed the Pā‘ula‘ula State Historic Site. Pā‘ula‘ula means ‘red enclosure’ in the Hawaiian language and refers to the red volcanic dirt and rocks in the site’s vicinity. According to local historians, Pā‘ula‘ula was the original name of the sacred place where the Russian fort was built. I was slightly comforted that Uber still uses the hybrid name Russian Fort Elizabeth State Historical Park/ Pā‘ula‘ula State Historic Site, but I naturally wondered what had changed since my previous visit in 2017 when the Russian fort’s name was uncontroversial.
I had first gone to Kauai in the waning days of my academic career to celebrate my 40th birthday. I knew the island boasted the ruins of a Russian fort, but not much else. As I found out, the ruins had endured long enough to be celebrated the week before I arrived, on the occasion of the fort’s bicentennial. I was told it was a grand affair involving the Russian ambassador to the United States—the then-newly arrived successor of the odious Sergei Kislyak, who had been recalled amid broad suspicion that he was a spymaster. I was content to make a less hyped visit with my wife, whose White Russian émigré heritage resonates strongly with remnants of what her community still calls “the Russia we have lost.”
A colorful history
How did there come to be a Russian fort in Hawaii? Russia is a Pacific power as much as an Atlantic one. Two-thirds of its territorial expanse lies in Asia, which its explorers and military men traversed and subdued in the 17th century. Russia’s march did not end there. By the 1740s, Russian traders were active in Alaska, where their increasing business interests soon expanded into full colonization. In 1799, Tsar Paul I chartered the Russian-American Company (RAC), which received broad political responsibility under its first leader, Aleksandr Baranov. Ever more prosperous, the RAC opened trade routes to the northern California coast, where in 1812 it established Fort Ross (still extant and maintained as a state park museum), and to Hawaii, where the company traded Arctic furs and skins for essential supplies.
In this developing commercial nexus, a Russian vessel, called the Bering after the Danish explorer who discovered the eponymous strait, embarked on an adventure that has gone down in Russian history as “the Hawaiian Spectacular.” The Bering started life as an American ship, originally christened the Atahualpa,/ after the ill-fated Incan Emperor. In 1813, the RAC bought the vessel for the tidy price of 20,000 sealskins, due in payment after its first voyage under the Russian flag. Departing Alaska, it sailed to Siberia before proceeding to Hawaii for supplies. After calling at Oahu, it sprung a leak but continued to Kauai, where in January 1815 a gale ran it aground in Waimea Bay, stranding the crew.
By that time in Hawaii’s history, the famous King Kamehameha had consolidated his rule over almost all of the archipelago. The only hold out was Kauai, whose King Kaumuali‘i stubbornly clung to independence. In a show of strength, Kaumuali‘i confiscated the Bering’s cargo, as well as the personal possessions of its crew, who in April 1815 secured passage back to Alaska.
To resolve the issue of the Bering’s cargo, Baranov dispatched a Bavarian doctor called Georg Anton Schäffer to negotiate a settlement. Schäffer had entered Russian military service a few years earlier. His major exploit was a failed attempt to develop combat balloons in the war against Napoleon. Shortly thereafter, he took a post as a ship’s doctor and embarked for Alaska. His relations with his captain were so poor that he was disembarked there, but Baranov hated the captain so much that he hired Schäffer to work for the RAC out of spite.
Schäffer sailed to Oahu, where Kamehameha had moved his capital. Arriving in November 1815, he presented himself as a man of science sent to explore the islands, but eventually pleaded for royal assistance with the Bering. Kamehameha warmed to Schäffer despite the machinations of American traders who distrusted him, but concluded that Kauai was outside of his control and that Schäffer would have to deal with Kaumuali‘i himself. Supported by a Russian ship sent from Alaska, and a second Russian ship that had coincidentally appeared in Hawaiian waters, in May 1816 Schäffer traveled to the outlying island.
King Kaumuali‘i understood that Russia was a mighty power that could be a useful ally against Kamehameha. Sensing an opportunity and vastly exceeding his authority, Schäffer signed an alliance with Kaumuali‘i, which nominally made Kauai a Russian protectorate. He also made a deal for the return of what remained of the Bering’s cargo and compensation for the missing portion. Kaumuali‘i provided Schäffer with 300 Hawaiian laborers to build fortifications. The two forts, named for Tsar Alexander I and the Napoleonic-era military commander Prince Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, were small earthwork structures. Hardly any trace of them survives today beyond information panels. Fort Elizabeth, which was named for Alexander I’s consort, rose on a Hawaiian holy site near Waimea Bay that contained graves of local political and religious leaders. Built with red basalt stones and arranged in the approximate star shape of a traditional European fortress, its walls reached twenty feet high and extended up to 450 feet across. Armaments from Schäffer’s ships were disembarked for the defenses. Fort Elizabeth also housed Hawaii’s first Russian Orthodox church.
In June 1816, Schäffer and Kaumuali‘i signed a new agreement to conquer Kamehameha’s kingdom and place Kaumuali‘i in power as Russia’s puppet ruler over all Hawaii. Kaumuali‘i provided 500 warriors for the campaign. Schäffer bought two more American ships, sending the bill back to an increasingly nervous Baranov, and wrote to St. Petersburg to inform the imperial government of his exploits and request reinforcements.
By autumn, however, the scheme started to fall apart. In September, another Russian ship arrived off Oahu as part of an around-the-world voyage. Its captain knew nothing of recent local events and was astonished when Kamehameha assembled a war party to repel what he expected to be an attack. The Russians convinced him that Schäffer’s escapade was a rogue operation with no government support and then left without making contact with the doctor on Kauai but reporting his activities to the authorities.
No help would be forthcoming. In the spring of 1817, the RAC’s main office in St. Petersburg finally received Schäffer’s reports and instructed Baranov to fire him as soon as he returned to Alaska. When Schäffer’s separate letters to the government arrived in August, presaged by reportage in European newspapers, Russia’s foreign minister, Count Karl Nesselrode, commissioned a review that eventually concluded that the disadvantages of acquiring Hawaii far outweighed any potential advantages. Alexander I concurred, and in March 1818 the RAC was officially denied permission to pursue the project, although the Tsar commanded it to disengage in the most diplomatic way possible. He also allowed it to conduct trade in Hawaii and bestowed on Kamehameha the Order of St. Anne, a decoration normally reserved, then as now, for heads of foreign royal houses.
By that time, Schäffer was long gone. In July 1817, local Americans who had come into his employ defected from his forces. Alarmed that Schäffer had no official support from home and was losing strength on the ground, indigenous Kauaians forced him to leave by boat. He returned to one of the earthwork forts, but could not hold out and was embarked with all other Russian personnel to Oahu. Although Kamehameha threatened him with arrest, he was permitted to leave for Shanghai, leaving his men behind. Helped by a Swedish agent who occasionally worked for the RAC, Schäffer returned to Russia, where he continued to advocate annexing Hawaii. Once again, the government refused. The RAC then sued him for financial losses resulting from his actions in Hawaii. Schäffer countersued for his expenses. An uneasy settlement resolved the case by requiring him to leave Russia for good. He found employment in Brazil, where he had stopped on his return from Hawaii and charmed its future Empress Maria Leopoldina. The Brazilian government engaged him to attract German settlers, a venture in which he enjoyed some success, despite some fraudulent practices, before his death in 1836.
Shortly after Schäffer’s departure from Kauai, Fort Elizabeth was taken over by forces loyal to Kamehameha, but the Hawaiian king failed to conquer the whole of Kauai before his death in 1819. Two years later, his son and successor Kamehameha II captured Kaumuali‘i through a ruse and seized his domains. Fort Elizabeth soon became obsolete and was abandoned in 1853. Eleven years later it was officially decommissioned and its armaments sold for scrap.
In parallel developments, Russia’s Pacific emporium shrank considerably. In 1842, the RAC sold Fort Ross due to its lack of profitability. Twenty-five years later, Russia famously sold all of Alaska to the United States. The RAC ceased operations in 1881. Russia’s future actions in the Pacific were confined to continental Asia, where it battled Japan over regional hegemony until World War II. Fort Elizabeth’s walls crumbled to the piles of basalt currently there, but remained very much part of the local landscape.
Fresh intrigue
In the five years before my recent return, the fort was the site of another Russian intrigue. Indigenous Hawaiians had become vocal about restoring their cultural heritage. Several local organizational agendas adopted renaming Fort Elizabeth, for the presence of a Russian fort evoked objectionable memories of colonialism. Indigenous arguments were not totally unfair. Russia’s presence was never recognized or even acknowledged by its own government, which explicitly disclaimed annexation twice and only endorsed peaceful commercial relations. Schäffer’s dubious episode on Kauai had lasted little more than a year, and he was not even Russian, nor were most of the men under his command. The fort itself was on sacred native ground, and it was built by Hawaiian laborers.
On the other side of the issue, a recent Russian immigrant called Elena Branson (née Chernykh) began to agitate against the indigenous renaming campaign. Her position found some resonance among Hawaii’s ethnic Russian community, which boasts a 200-year history apart from Fort Elizabeth and has been enriched by successive waves of immigration from Russia throughout its turbulent modern history. The full scope of Branson’s activities remains unknown, but she helped organize the bicentennial ceremony that preceded my first visit. The celebratory occasion apparently entertained discussion of fully restoring the fort. Branson also helped arrange an all-expense-paid visit for five Kauaian community leaders, whom she led to a Russian-American “peace conference” held in Russia in 2019. One of them, Kauai County Councilwoman Felicia Cowden, was later fined for ethics violations in relation to the trip. The travel funds were reportedly advanced by the Russian Cultural Center in New York and financed by Washington, D.C.’s American University, whose Carmel Institute for Russian Culture and History has been accused of facilitating pro-Russian public diplomacy, cooperated closely with Ambassador Kislyak before his removal, held events in partnership with the Russian embassy, and enrolled the scandalous Maria Butina, among other unfortunate associations. In 2016, the Institute’s founder Susan Carmel (formerly Susan Carmel Lehrman) received an Order of Friendship Award personally bestowed by Vladimir Putin.
Public pressure in Hawaii staved off renaming for a while, and various compromise solutions were advanced but not adopted. But the writing was on the wall. On March 20, 2021, an eight-foot bronze statue of King Kaumuali‘i commissioned by an organization called Friends of King Kaumuali‘i was dedicated at the site’s entrance. One of Kaumuali‘i’s descendants served as the model.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, matters in Hawaii came to a head. Branson’s activities attracted the attention of the FBI, which raided her New York apartment, and she abruptly returned to Moscow. Shortly thereafter, vandals defaced the fort site’s welcome sign, using spray paint to black out the word “Russian.” In June of that year, the Hawaiian Board of Land Management voted to change the name to just Pā‘ula‘ula State Historic Site, eliminating all trace of the site’s fleeting connection to Russia from official nomenclature.
The symbolic effect is harsh. Russia’s history in the Pacific deserves to be remembered as much as any other country’s, regardless of its current government’s outrages. Schäffer’s episode, however ill-fated, was so bizarre and so eccentric that its legend will remain entertaining for as long as Kauai protrudes from the azure waters surrounding it. The sign may no longer say “Russian Fort,” but as long as interested people keep the story alive, the discerning visitor may be able to explore its history all the same.
READ NEXT
Erdogan’s Hour of Triumph
Christian Heritage: Worthy of Celebration
No Whites, Please.