Abstract
The seeds of an Allied defeat at Petropavlovsk took root on the afternoon of September 1, 1854, and this timing was especially sudden. Allied warships led by the frigate Forte had bombarded two Russian batteries at Shakov and Koshka into temporary silence and had taken a third, Krasny Yar, by landing sailors and marines. Even one of the largest Russian emplacements, the five guns entrenched on Point Shakov at the base of a rocky hill, simply could not match the broadsides of the Forte and its English peers, the President and Pique. These warships were able to hurl hundreds of rounds against the battery. Allied shots rained rocky fragments from a cliff behind the Russian battery down on its gun crews, wounding their commander and eventually rendering the cannon impossible to man.1
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Notes
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The boy survived, however, after a Russian officer reportedly instructed him (in English) to “put up your sword, my boy; this is no place of you. Run back to your boat as fast as you can.” Francis Marx, The Pacific and the Amoor: Naval, Military and Diplomatic Operations from Fraser’s Magazine (London, UK: Robert Hardwicke, 1861), 7–8.
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See Meron Medzini, French Policy in Japan during the Closing Years of the Tokugawa Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) for a discussion of Baron Gros’ later efforts.
Edgar Franz, Philipp Franz von Siebold and Russian Policy and Action on Opening Japan to the West in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century (Munich, Germany: Iudicium Verlag, 2005), 59.
For an English language version, see Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, trans. Klaus Goetze, Frigate Pallada (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).
Donald Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages: the Japanese as Revealed through 1,000 Years of Diaries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 390.
Bernard Whittingham, Notes on the Late Expedition against the Russian Settlements in Eastern Siberia (London, UK: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856), 202.
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© 2015 Andrew C. Rath
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Rath, A.C. (2015). Petropavlovsk, Japan, and After. In: The Crimean War in Imperial Context, 1854–1856. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137544537_8
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