Germans, Baltic Germans, and Native Hawaiians

So how many German connections for a so-called Russian Fort on the Hawaiian island of Kauai could there be? More than you might expect. We’ll start with a Bavarian/Franconian physician and adventurer named Georg Anton Aloysius Schäffer (1779-1836), who was employed by the Alaska-based Russian-American Company. In that capacity, Schäffer briefly worked with Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans, Russians, Baltic Germans, and fellow Germans in Hawaii to construct not one, but three fortifications on the island of Kauai. Before getting kicked off the island of Kauai by King Kaumuali‘i in 1817, Schäffer’s delusions of grandeur had led to political tension all across the globe, from St. Petersburg, Russia to Hawaii and New Archangel (now Sitka), Alaska. Besides the Schäffer debacle, there are other Germanic elements, ranging from the many Baltic Germans in the service of the Russian Empire at that time, to a Russian tsarina who was born a German princess. How a “Russian” fort in Kauai finally got a Hawaiian name 206 years after it was built is quite a story.

The information display at the former Russian Fort Elizabeth in Kauai now displays its Hawaiian name: Pā‘ula‘ula (Hawaiian Fort and Residence of Kaua‘i King Kaumuali‘i). In June 2022 the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources voted unanimously to rename Russian Fort Elizabeth State Historical Park. The fort complex in Waimea is now known as Pā‘ula‘ula State Historic Site. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

The Russian Fort That Wasn’t Russian – and the Russian Agent
Many years before “Mad Vlad” Putin started his war of Ukrainian conquest in February 2022, a campaign had begun with the goal of changing the name of Russian Fort Elizabeth Historical Park, a Hawaii state park on the island of Kauai. On one side of the controversial debate were people, mostly Russian Americans and Russians, who wanted the site’s name to remain as it was, or at least have a dual Russian/Hawaiian name. On the other side were mostly Native Hawaiians and their supporters, who were proposing a Hawaiian name for the site. In May 2022, federal criminal charges were filed against Elena Branson (aka Elena Chernykh), a dual US-Russian citizen alleged to have acted as a secret agent for Russia, and who had failed to register as a foreign agent in the USA while lobbying to keep Fort Elizabeth’s “Russian” label. Before the charges were filed, Branson/Chernykh had already returned to Russia to avoid prosecution.

Twenty years before the Russian agent incident, in 2002, Peter R. Mills, a professor of archaeology at the University of Hawaii Hilo, had published Hawaii’s Russian Adventure: A New Look at Old History (paperback edition, 2018), in which he advocated a reassessment of the fort’s history and its name. The central theme of his book was that the so-called “Russian” fort was in fact a Hawaiian fort, built primarily by Native Hawaiians and sponsored by a Kauaian king. In his book Mills argues that, although the Russian-American Company (RAC) was behind the construction of three forts on Kauai, it was only due to King Kaumualiʻi’s approval and efforts that the forts were constructed. Kaumualiʻi was the last independent royal ruler of the islands of Kauai and Niihau. The Hawaiian islands were not all united under King Kamehameha II as the Kingdom of Hawai‘i until September 1821. Before that unification, Kauai had been a separate kingdom that kings Kamehameha I and Kamehameha II had long tried to conquer.

It was this royal Hawaiian political situation that Schäffer was able to exploit for a time – until he went too far. The Franconian doctor had studied medicine at Würzburg and had ended up as a ship’s surgeon for the Imperial Russian Navy and the RAC. Although many of the men working for the RAC and the navy were Baltic Germans, Georg Schäffer had been been born in Münnerstadt, Bavaria. He had a talent for learning languages, which helped him advance his career, which took him to St. Petersburg, Russia, where he and his German-born wife, Barbara, later lived and had a family. His wife wrote him letters (in German and Russian) from St. Petersburg while he was sailing across the Pacific, and later during his time in Hawaii.

Most historical accounts of the events related to the three forts on Kauai, and particularly the largest one at Waimea (Fort Elizabeth), were written with a predominantly European, non-Hawaiian point of view. In that version of history the Hawaiian role takes a back seat to the Russian foreigners, who were portrayed as the primary actors in the story. The Native Hawaiians played only a secondary, passive role. But as Mills points out, the Native Hawaiians never referred to the fort as “Russian” and the Russians were only in Kauai from 1815 to 1817, at which time the RAC’s representative (Schäffer) was expelled by the king for failing to live up to agreements he had made. At that point “Russian” history on the island ended, but Hawaiian history continued. The fort was still in use by the Hawaiians long after 1817, and Pā‘ula‘ula – as it was called by the Hawaiians – was not abandoned until after 1850, several decades after the Russians and the Russian flag were long gone.

You can zoom in or out in this map. Note that Google has now replaced the old name of the fort with the new Hawaiian name.

Mills also makes the case that the fort site was a heiau, the Hawaiian term for a ritual temple located on hallowed ground that is higher than the surrounding land, and is kapu (taboo) for commoners. Located on the east bank of the Weimea River, this sacred location dates back to written accounts from Captain Cook’s first arrival in Waimea in 1778. The west side was a normal part of the Weimea settlement, separated from the heiau by the river and characterized by the heiau’s higher elevation above the river.

The New Statue of King Kaumuali‘i
As part of the fort’s name-change campaign, the King of Kaua‘i finally received his due. On 20 March 2021, as part of an effort to better reflect a more authentic history of Pā‘ula‘ula/Fort Elizabeth, an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of King Kaumuali‘i was dedicated. The non-profit organization Friends of King Kaumuali‘i, together with other supporters came together to have the statue erected close to the site where the king supervised the fort’s construction and had to deal with Georg Anton Schäffer. Standing near the fort and close to the adjacent Hawaii Route 50 (the Kaumuali‘i Highway), the statue helps tell the long-overlooked Hawaiian history of the fort. A descendant of the king, Keao NeSmith, served as a model for the the statue. Kauai painter and sculptor Saim Caglayan first created a bronze maquette, a three-foot scale model, to help with fundraising in 2017. Later Caglayan created the full-size bronze statue that now stands at Pā‘ula‘ula.

The 2022 Renaming
In June 2022 the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR) voted unanimously to rename Russian Fort Elizabeth State Historical Park. Henceforth the fort complex in Waimea will be known as Pā‘ula‘ula State Historic Site. Prior to the name change, the fort had been the only state park on Kauai that did not reflect its Hawaiian place name. The BLNR was also advised to consider renaming one of the last parks in the state without a Hawaiian name: Diamond Head State Monument on Oahu. The Hawaiian name for that site’s volcanic crater is Lē‘ahi (“brow of the tuna”). The Kauai fort’s new official name, Pā‘ula‘ula, translates as “red enclosure,” as it was known in the native culture – a name reflecting the red stones and red earth at the site. The color red is also associated with Hawaiian royalty.

How Russian Was the Russian-American Company?
The Hawaiian history argument is persuasive, but there is another, even more persuasive argument for the name change that Mills does not emphasize: Most of the so-called Russians in Hawaii from 1815 to 1817 were not even Russian. While Mills does correctly point out how the RAC, based in Alaska, was very much a multi-ethnic operation, not even mostly Russian, and he also identifies Schäffer as a Bavarian working for the RAC, he fails to identify the many other Germans and Baltic Germans who were serving the Russian Empire and the RAC, both in Hawaii and in Alaska. The term “Baltic Germans” is not even found in the book’s index, and the author almost always refers to the Baltic Germans he does identify with their transliterated Russian names, rarely using their German names.

The Russian Fort’s German-Born Namesake
This is yet another irony that Mills never mentions. In his entire 295-page book, he barely touches on a key fact about Fort Elizabeth: the source of its name. That reference only comes on p. 41, in a brief quoted passage from a book by Richard A. Pierce, which mentions that the Weimea stronghold was “…called Fort Elizabeth, after the consort of the Emperor Alexander I.” Mills’ quotation is related to his legitimate criticism of Pierce’s focus on Schäffer as the primary agent of the fort’s creation. But as far as I know, that is the only mention of Fort Elizabeth’s namesake in the entire book. True, the author’s focus is on the Hawaiian name and history, but by virtually ignoring the German princess for whom the fort was named, Mills misses a key irony: Like the fort, Tsar Alexander’s wife was not Russian either.

A 1795 portrait of the German-born Tsarina Elisabeth Alexeievna of Russia by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842). Louise of Baden married the future tsar in 1792. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

The consort of Russian Tsar Alexander I was in fact the former German princess Louise Maria Auguste of Baden (1779-1826), who became Elisabeth (Елизавета) Alexeievna in 1792, when she married the future tsar, Aleksandr Pavlovich (1777-1825). At the time she was only 14 and he was 15. This “spouse shopping” among foreign nobility for royal marriages was of course quite common in Europe, especially among the Romanovs. In fact Tsar Alexander’s own mother, Maria Feodorovna (Paul I’s second wife), also came from German nobility. She was the former Duchess Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg (1759-1828).

This German-Russian royal marriage connection also went in the opposite direction. Alexander I’s favorite sister, Catherine Pavlovna (1788-1819), married her cousin King Wilhelm I of Württemberg, to become the Queen of Württemberg in 1816. Starvation brought on by the harsh winter of 1816 (“The Year Without a Summer“) and the Napoleonic War prompted Alexander to send grain to his royal brother-in-law to help alleviate the suffering in Württemberg. King Wilhelm’s Russian wife died prematurely in 1819, at only 30 years of age. Her grave (now beside those of her husband and a daughter) is in the hilltop Mausoleum on the Württemberg (Grabkapelle auf dem Württemberg) in the Rotenberg section of Stuttgart.

Baltic Germans
Who were the Baltic Germans? They were ethnic Germans, most of whom had been born in what are now the Baltic nations of Estonia, Finland, and Latvia. They were part of a privileged ethnic group, and in some cases had titles of nobility. Often the original Germans had migrated to the Baltic region several generations (or more) earlier. It can be difficult to determine if those serving the Russian Empire in the mid-1800s were Russians, Germans, or Baltic Germans. Most of them had two or more versions of their full names, usually a Russianized one and a German one. Even Georg Anton Schäffer, who was not a Baltic German, had a Russian version of his name: Egor Antonovich Sheffer.

A typical example is the notable admiral and explorer, whom Mills refers to as Ivan Fedorovich Krusenstern, both in the text and in the index. This Russian name implies that Krusenstern was Russian, not German. In fact his German name, the one he was born with, was Adam Johann von Krusenstern. Krusenstern also had a Swedish version of his name (Krusenstjerna), as his Baltic German family was descended from a Swedish aristocratic line. The future Russian admiral was born at Haggud Manor in the village of Haggud, Governorate of Estonia, Russian Empire (today’s Hagudi, Estonia).

Another Baltic German concerned with Fort Elizabeth was Otto von Kotzebue. In this case, Mills uses Kotzebue’s German name, but never identifies him as Baltic German. Kotzebue was an officer, navigator, and explorer in the Imperial Russian Navy. He was born in Reval, Russian Empire (today’s Tallinn, Estonia), the second son of Weimar-born August von Kotzebue, a German dramatist and writer who also worked as a consul in Russia and Germany. Kotzebue later served as an officer of the Russian-American Company. He sailed to Hawaii when Schäffer was there, but to avoid a conflict with King Kamehameha, he never saw Schäffer or came ashore in Kauai, something that helped lead to Schäffer’s downfall.

The Other Two Forts: Fort Alexander and Fort Barclay de Tolly
In Hawaii’s Russian Adventure Mills devotes very few words to the other two “Russian” forts in Kauai, and rightly so, as these fortifications have a very different history. Constructed mostly by Native Alaskans under Schäffer’s supervision, little remains today of Fort Alexander and Fort Barclay de Tolly, which were nothing like the much larger Pā‘ula‘ula complex far to the south in Weimea. In fact no one can say exactly where Fort Barclay de Tolly was located. It was probably near the mouth of the Hanalei River. All that remains of Fort Alexander, named for the Russian tsar, is a memorial pavilion on a lovely grass-covered field high above Hanalei Bay, offering a spectacular view of the bay and the Pacific Ocean below. The fort was primarily an earthwork construction, which is why very little remains visible today. (See the photo below.)

A small memorial pavilion (on the right) marks the location of the former earthwork Fort Alexander overlooking Hanalei Bay in what is now Princeville. It features informative panels with historical photos related to the fort. The site is right next to the entrance of a luxury hotel. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

Fort Barclay de Tolly may never have been completed, but it was named (by Schäffer) after Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly (1761-1818), another Baltic German who gained honor in military service for the Russian Empire. Barclay de Tolly was born into a German-speaking noble family from Livonia, who were of Scottish and German descent. His father was the first of his family to be accepted into the Russian nobility. Barclay de Tolly joined the Imperial Russian Army at a young age in 1776. The Barclay de Tolly family were German-speaking descendants of the Scottish Clan Barclay. Michael Andreas’s grandfather, Wilhelm Barclay de Tolly, served as the mayor of Riga (now the capital of Latvia).

King Kaumuali‘i gave the RAC land on Kauai’s North Shore for the two forts. Of course Schäffer considered the land his own personal property, and renamed the valley near Hanalei Bay Schäfferthal (Schäffer’s Valley). As mentioned above, the two forts in the north were far less ambitious projects compared to Pā‘ula‘ula/Fort Elizabeth in Waimea. Right next to the former St. Regis Princeville Resort (Marriott) is the site of what’s left of Fort Alexander. The luxury hotel was sold in 2020 and is now being remodeled under a new brand (1 Hotel Hanalei Bay; Starwood). When the St. Regis was built in 1985, there was an agreement that access to the Fort Alexander site would be maintained, and that has remained the case. Even during the new hotel construction the Fort Alexander pavilion is accessible via a path that snakes around the construction site from a tiny parking lot (six spaces) on Ka Haku Road.

After Hawaii, Schäffer went back to Europe, where he tried unsuccessfully to persuade Tsar Alexander that taking Hawaii for Russia was feasible. He and the RAC sued each other for damages, but it all came to nothing. He later left Europe and ended up in South America, where he organized Frankenthal, the first German colony in Brazil, in 1821. Unfortunately, he was no less delusional there than he had been in Hawaii. Although he is credited with bringing 5,000 German immigrants to Brazil over five years, he used fraudulent recruiting practices to attract settlers, and made excessive demands of the Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro I, which were refused. But Schäffer remained in Brazil until his death in Jacarandá in 1836.

– HF