Humanities: History

HUMANITIES 431 in the eighteenth century. Though the Church made concessions to popular taste during the Regency, with the general reaction against Boucher it Rung off its worldly disguise. Even less pious artists than jean Restout II and Gabriel Franc;ois Doyen continued to draw their subjects from the Christian tradition, so that, as Dr. Leith concedes, even in the salon of 1793 there were more religious than political paintings . It is difficult to accept Dr. Leith's suggestion that eighteenthcentury Churchmen succumbed totally to the secular spirit of the age. Apart from a few misprints (p. 51, "Neufchatel" for "Neuchatd"; p. 140, "Rastadtt for Rastatt"), inconsistencies of style and curious transliterations (for example, "privelige" for privilege and "titled mistress" for ma1tresse en titre), Dr. Leith's scholarship, wherever I have been able to check it, is very sound. His work is graced with eleven black and white illustrations, a bibliographical essay on sources and a comprehensive index. Within its self-imposed limitations this work, which is the first to be concerned wholly with theories of didactic art in eighteenthcentury France, can be said to have lived up to its title and to have shed some new light on an increasingly popular aspect of French cultural history. (D. W. SMITH) The episode documented in Richard A. Pierce's Russia's Hawaiian Adventure, 1815- 1817 (Berkeley: Univers,ity of California Press, pp. xviii, 245. $5.50) is a little known but interesting footnote to history. Because I happen to be from the Hawaiian Islands myself, I was aware that the white, blue, and red stripes of the Hawaiian H ag were designed to appease the Russians, and that the Russians once had a fort on the island of Kauai. None of this is new. What is new are the details of the two years (1815-1817) during which the Russian-American Company attempted to establish a foothold in Hawaii. Mr. Pierce has made the principal sources of that adventure available. He has also provided an excellent thirty-three page introduction in which the episode is narrated in a highly readable manner.· The hero of the Russian Hawaiian adventure was Georg Anton Schaffer , a colourful figure who would make an excellent character in a novel. A Bavarian physician whose fascination with the exotic led him to sign on as ship's surgeon on the Alaska ·bound Suvarov, Schaffer was abandoned in Sitka. Subsequently, he was sent to Hawaii disguised as a naturalist but actually on a secret mission on behalf of the Russian- 432 LETTERS IN CANADA: 1965 American Company. Failing to allay the suspicions of Kamehameha, Schaffer went to Kauai in May, 1816 where he persuaded _King Kaumualii to pledge allegiance to the czar and to give the Russian-American Company a monopoly of the island's sandalwood. All of this followed from his attempts to recover the cargo of the shipwrecked Bering for the company. Kaumualii was worried about Kamehameha, who had conquered all of the Hawaiian Islands but Kauai and Niihau, and preferred Russian protection to subjugation. For a few months it looked as though Kauai might become a Russian colony. Schaffer acquired Hanalei Valley where he built Fort Elizabeth, renamed the Hanapepe River the Don, and received generous tracts of land from members of the Kauai royal family. But Alexander Baranoff, the manager of the Russian-American Company, repudiated Schaffer's arrangements; Kaumualii made his submission to Kamehameha, and the whole scheme came to nothing by 1817. Schaffer took ship for Macao, then returned to St. Petersburg, and eventually ended his days on an estate in Brazil. The letters, treaties, journals, and reports which make up most of the book were copied in St. Petersburg by Alphonse Pinart in 1874. The latter was a young French ethnologist who was assisting the American historian Hubert Howe Bancroft gather material for his histories of Alaska and the Pacific States. Subsequently, Professor R. J. Kerner directed the translation of two thirds of these documents in 1939, but the project was shelved because of the war. After Kerner's death in 1956 the translation was deposited in the Bancroft Library of the University of California. Pierce's collection consists of the entire...