actically no opposition to his highest
ambitions. These ambitions he deliberately 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 possessions 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. Moreover,
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 Californians, 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. But although the royal order had insured him
immediate hospitality and saved him many wearisome formalities, he had
already discovered that the Spanish on the far rim of their empire had
lost nothing of their connate suspicion. Rather, their isolation made
them the more wary. Although they little appreciated the richness and
variousness of California's soil, and not at all this wonderful bay
that would accommodate the combined navies of the world, pocketing
several, the pious zeal of the clergy in behalf of the Indians, and the
general policy of Spain to hold all of the western hemisphere that
disintegrating forces would permit, made her as tenacious of this vast
territory she had so sparsely populated as had she been aware that its
foundations were of gold, conceived that its climate and soil were a
more enduring source of wealth than ever she would command again. If
Rezanov was not gifted with the prospector's sense for ores--although
he had taken note of Arguello's casual reference to a vein of silver
and lead in the Monterey hills--no man ev