At the height of the Russo-Japanese war, on 15 October 1904, the Second Russian Pacific Squadron weighed anchor at Libau on the Baltic at the start of its 18,000-mile mission to relieve the blockade of Port Arthur. On paper the strength of the Squadron was impressive: 10,000 men in 42 ships, including four new battleships with a complement of 900 men each and a reputed speed of 18 knots, all under the command of the greatest gunnery expert in the Russian Navy, Admiral Zinovi Rozhdestvenski. But in fact many of the Russian ships were auxiliaries and transports which had been included in the Squadron to compensate for the lack of coaling stations and maintenance bases between Libau and Vladivostock, and were manned mainly by peasant conscripts with little mechanical aptidude and often no seafaring experience. Among Rozhdestvenski’s officers were some whose incapacity had previously earned them their discharge from the Navy. Morale was abysmal; the standard of gunnery inferior; wireless communications erratic; serious mechanical breakdowns commonplace. Indeed the command to weigh anchor had been given three days before, only to result in such disarray that the admiral ordered his ships back to their moorings.
As it steamed west towards the channel between Denmark and Sweden, the Squadron was alive with rumors of an impending Japanese ruse de guerre, possibly in the form of a cunningly laid mine field in the Narrows or a torpedo boat foray at night. After the surprise attack on Port Arthur, the Russians were prepared to credit their enemy with all but supernatural powers; so that by the time they stopped to coal off the Skaw—damaging three of the colliers—they were prey to either hypertension or sombre foreboding. A report of four warships proceeding south from Norway, at high speed and without lights, was taken as half- expected confirmation of earlier tidings received from a Russian agent in Copenhagen. Coaling came to an abrupt end and the Russians left the Skaw in six detachments between 4:00 and 10:00 p.m. on Thursday, 20 October, with Rozhdestvenski’s flagship Suvorov and the other three battleships bringing up the rear.
Training their guns on every passing vessel, the various detachments ploughed their way south through intermittent fog on the night of 20/21 October. Apart from the sighting of imaginary Japanese observation ballons, the first indication that anything was seriously amiss came on the evening of Friday, 21 October, when the unescorted and broken-down transport Kamchatka reported that she was being attacked on all sides by torpedo boats, presumably Japanese. This message came between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. from a position 15 miles astern of the battleships. Quick calculations on board the Suvorov suggested 1:00 a.m. as the likeliest hour for the attack which the Japanese would surely mount once they had accounted for their ungainly victim. Signals from the Kamchatka that she had beaten off her attackers by accurate gunfire and frequent alterations of course—an implausible naval feat—were read with scepticism and latterly nervous derision by officers on the bridge of Suvorov. But a request at about 11:00 p.m. for them to signal their position by searchlight revived suspicions. That this had been made in perfect Russian seemed somehow ominous. All exchanges thereupon ceased.
Shortly after midnight a green flare lit the sky ahead of the battleships. At approximately 12:40 a.m. two vessels, with running lights extinguished, were reported to be steaming at full speed towards the Suvorov Rozhdestvenski engaged the enemy and almost at once trawlers were exposed in the glare of his searchlights' The admiral gave the order to spare the fishermen' Suddenly a searchlight scanned the battleships and they directed a furious fire in its general direction, more of less at random as it was difficult to determine range. Anything from ten to twenty minutes later—estimates vary—the firing ceased, after an officer on the bridge of the Suvorov noticed that the other side were using a Russian signals code. At 2:30 a.m. a wireless damage report was received from the cruiser Aurora, which with the Dmitrii Donskoi had apparently offered herself as the target, or one of the targets, on the starboard bow. The Russians pressed on for fear of another attack, and finally put into the Spanish port of Vigo the following Wednesday, 26 October, to coal and carry out the usual repairs. By then Russia and Great Britain were dangerously close to war over two decapitated bodies, several injured fishermen and the steam-trawler Crane at the bottom of the North Sea.
The formidable Anglo-Russian crisis provoked by this "very very sad occurrence,” as one Russian officer described it in a letter to his wife, lasted from the afternoon of 23 October (Trafalgar Sunday), when the trawlers put into Hull with flags at halfmast, until the following Friday, 28 October, when a matter of hours was the measure of difference between war and peace. There were plenty of reasons why the British public greeted the likelihood of war with Russia with unconcern and even relish. Such a war had been repeatedly predicted in the Near, Middle or Far East for a quarter of a century or more; Russia was now at war with Britain’s only ally, whom the Russians accused of mounting the sneak attack on Port Arthur from the British base at Wei-hai-wei; and, because of recent interference with British shipping in the Red Sea by units of the Russian Volunteer Fleet, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, had deplored the bleak outlook for Anglo-Russian relations only four days before the incident. Moreover, the Foreign Office’s press relations were badly handled throughout the week of the crisis, with the result that journalists took their cue from the swift transformation in the public’s mood—Radical, Unionist, Little Englander and Imperialist alike—from incredulity to impatience and finally to truculence, and gave voice to alarmist rumors. Lansdowne, for instance, was generally but wrongly supposed to have presented the Russians with an ultimatum. The wide publicity, too, given the concentration of British naval might at Portland and Gibraltar enraged Russian opinion without assuaging a wave of hysteria at home that quickly showed signs of getting beyond the feeble control of a government clinging to office.
When Prime Minister Arthur J. Balfour left Waterloo on the 4:50 on Friday afternoon to make a speech that evening at Southampton, the Russians had still to make a satisfactory reply to British demands; anything short of this, in Balfour’s own words, "would bring the country perilously close to overt hostilities.”
A telegram from Lansdowne to Southampton notified Balfour of an eleventh hour agreement; and although the almost insulting tone of his speech betrayed the Prime Minister’s earlier belief that agreement would not be reached in time, its delivery marked the end of the acute phase of the crisis. When the Russians left Vigo the following Tuesday, 1 November, without bothering to warn anyone in advance, or to leave behind more than four comparatively junior officers whose status as accused or witnesses was left undefined, there was a harangue on Fleet Street. Yet neither this nor the exchange of provocative signals by Rozhdestvenski and shadowing British cruisers could conceal the fact that although its fuse had been lit, the Anglo-Russian bomb had failed to detonate.
From the point of view of the incident itself and the subsequent elucidation of its details, much of that week’s complicated diplomatic correspondence and jingoistic newspaper abuse, in both London and St. Petersburg, need only be summarized. The French certainly stood to lose most by a conflict between their partners in the Dual Alliance and the Anglo-French Entente then in process of ratification, while the Germans fancied themselves to have most to gain—after- of course, the Japanese. But nothing beyond formal expressions of regret was to be expected from St. Petersburg until Rozhdestvenski had been heard from; and he saw fit to submit his report of the events in the North Sea no sooner than Wednesday, 25 October having decided to take advantage of fair weather to push on beyond a planned stop at Brest. Until Vigo not even the Ministry of Marine had any way of communicating with their admiral, whose belated report was remarkable for its insinuation of complicity in the Japanese attack by the fishermen. Indeed, it appeal to make the pacific intentions of Count Lamsdorff, the cautious and at times ineffectual Russian Foreign Minister, futile, faced as he was with a ruinous tradition of interdepartmental cross purposes in dealing with the Ministry of Marine, the lionizing of Rozhdestvenski by a hitherto indifferent St. Petersburg press, and the vagaries of court life among the wild eyed men of the war party. To all of this might be added the always potentially cumbrous and dilatory functioning of Russian diplomacy. Lamsdorff later told Sir Charles Hardinge, the British ambassador, that a single word of menace from Lansdowne on Thursday or Friday would have forced him to capitulate to the Warmongers, much as he himself hated the idea.
Besides Lamsdorff and Lansdowne, French Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé and his ambassador to London, Paul Cambon, deserve—and indeed took a good deal of the credit for averting a war which would have destroyed years of steady French diplomatic achievement. Since the foundation of this was the Dual Alliance, the French had at least to go through the motions of taking Rozhdestvenski’s report seriously for fear of handing the Germans a gratuitous diplomatic advantage. The Russians must not be given the impression that their interests had been sold out to France’s Entente partner. Heavier French pressure might be brought to bear in London, where Cambon acted as the indispensable intermediary at meetings between a detached and sceptical Lansdowne and Count Benckendorflf, the well disposed but vague Russian ambassador. It was at one of these that the idea of using the machinery of international arbitration or adjudication was hit upon. After receipt of Rozhdestvenski’s report, Lansdowne presented Benckendorff with a note calling for a preliminary inquiry to be followed by a full international one, preferably in accordance with the procedures laid down by the Hague Convention. In persuading Nicholas II to assume a posture of enlightened internationalism, Lamsdorff was careful not to mention that the original idea had come from London. It was the timely news of this agreement that reached Balfour at Southampton. But Lamsdorff’s curious remark to Hardinge that the four officers left behind at Vigo had been selected for their linguistic ability contrasted oddly with British talk of exemplary punishment, giving promise of future misunderstanding.
From the start, however, there was a disposition to gloss over legal technicalities or awkward facts that threatened deadlock. As Rozhdestvenski’s squadron made faltering progress around Africa, arrangements were made roughly along the lines laid down by Articles IX-XIV of the Hague Convention, to correct the mischief it had wrought a good 30 miles west of its true course through the North Sea. The Declaration of St. Petersburg was signed on 25 November, not without some preliminary semantic sparring by Lamsdorff and Hardinge. The British clearly were anxious to establish guilt and specify punishment, whereas the Russians considered their officers to be witnesses before a commission of inquiry charged with the task of elucidation, not adjudication. The resultant hybrid was the despair of international jurists. A commission would investigate the circumstances of the North Sea incident and somehow determine the blameworthiness of Russians, Englishmen or others; the five admirals making up the commission—British, Russian, French, American, with a fifth to be co-opted—were to meet in Paris in December; the Russian and British Governments would each appoint a legal staff to present its case.
For all the high drama of international crisis, farce was never far from the surface of events. Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, the impulsive commander of the Channel Fleet at Gibraltar, set a high standard in this respect by proposing to menace a Russian detachment on its way to Tangier with only half his available battleships. He did so, apparently, out of a sense of chivalry, which in this instance the Admiralty, having made special arrangements to augment his force to allow the Russians to surrender to it, if necessary, without dishonor, found whimsical. Rozhdestvenski was a similarly brave but volatile officer. At Libau he had fired a revolver at a Russian officer boarding the Suvorov from a small boat; and his unconventional methods of enforcing discipline included the firing of blanks, and on at least one occasion of live ammunition, in the direction of a ship slow to answer signals. This spirit of opera bouffe proved in the end to be infectious enough to spread to Paris.
From the start the Russians had personnel problems. The obvious Russian appointee as legal expert was Professor Frederick Martens, outstanding international lawyer, Professor at the University of St. Petersburg and Russian representative at The Hague. Unfortunately for Lamsdorff, Martens dismissed Rozhdestvenski’s report as a misrepresentation and declined to ruin his own career in the thick of an international scandal. Instead Martens persuaded his assistant, Baron M. de Taube, to pinch hit. The initial choice of a Russian admiral to sit on the commission was ill-starred. Admiral Kaznakov was so senile as to be unable to remember the names of his colleagues; unaccountably he attributed his removal (at de Taube’s request) to an ancient naval argument with the Kaiser. His replacement, Dubasov, had sensibly turned down command of the Second Pacific Squadron, but as a member of the commission was remarkable mainly for his dogged defense. Not entirely unexpectedly perhaps, one of the Russian naval witnesses threw himself so heartily into the pleasures of Paris that he ended up being sent home in disgrace.
The principal Russian witness might have stepped from the pages of the great Russian novels. Captain Nicholas Klado was an officer with a surpassing knack for self-advertisement. Hardly a congenial shipmate of Rozhdestvenski’s, he had been left behind at Vigo and passed his time in St. Petersburg until his appearance before the commission writing a series of sensational articles for the reactionary press. These ridiculed blunders by Russian leaders in the early stages of the war, catalogued the inadequacies of the Second Pacific Squadron and recommended defiance of international law by sending the even more decrepit Black Sea Fleet through the Straits. Quite apart from their effect on his former shipmates, Klado’s allegations embroiled him with the Ministry of Marine, with the result that their leading witness at the forthcoming inquiry was put under house arrest on charges of wilful distortion of the truth. Displaying sound professional instinct, newspapermen flocked to Belgium to join Klado’s train on the final stage of its journey to Paris.
Having unintentionally enraged the Kaiser by not co-opting a German admiral, the commission met first in December and reconvened in January to get down to serious business. Its final report, no less singular than its terms of reference, appeared on 25 February. The fall of Port Arthur, revolutionary upheavals in Russia, and a serious war scare in Germany, all of which took place while it was in session, had the effect of crowding the sometimes tedious proceedings in the subdued atmosphere of the Quai d’Orsay off the front page. As it turned out, nothing was more welcome to the Russian delegation than a certain amount of obscurity—particularly to de Taube, whose sojourn in Paris brought him a series of demoralizing revelations. Initially he had felt reasonably confident of the Russian case, relying heavily as it did on reports from a Russian agent in Copenhagen of sinister Japanese activity in Scandinavia and on Rozhdestvenski’s version of the fracas in the North Sea. But soon after his arrival he was informed by the head of the Russian secret police in Paris, Peter Rachkovsky, that the graphic descriptions of Japanese preparations were entirely imaginary. Their author was a former anarchist now bent on justifying a sizeable expense account. Alexander Iswolsky, the Russian ambassador to Denmark, had reported as much to St. Petersburg in October, but to no avail.
There would, then, be no reliable evidence of skulduggery in Scandinavia, despite lavish offers of reward for providing it. Worse was to follow. Rachkovsky summed up Rozhdestvenski’s report as a gigantic piece of bluff. There were, he assured a shocked de Taube, no torpedo boats on the Dogger Bank on the night of the incident; the whole affair could be rendered psychologically intelligible only by taking the Kamchatka episode into consideration. Astonishingly, de Taube knew nothing of the Kamchatka dossier. When the Ministry grudgingly put it at his disposal in Paris, he thought it worthy of Arabian Nights and was horrified to discover details of a sum secretly paid the owners of a Swedish coalboat which had been the target for furious but harmlessly inaccurate shelling by the Kamchatka.
Finally and conclusively, Rozhdestvenski was prevailed upon by the Tsar to send back from Africa the logbooks of units evidently involved in a debauch of self-inflicted damage. De Taube made sure, despite British protests, that these fatally compromising documents were never submitted to scrutiny by the commission. To his concealed embarrassment he was reduced in the end to arguing that Rozhdestvenski’s fire had been directed at two unknown warships that had since disappeared, the cruisers having been hit by ricochets.
None of this prevented the egregious Klado from giving a detailed description of the Japanese ambush in wordy, confident answer to cross-examination. His was indeed a remarkable performance for an officer who was in fact undressing when the firing started, and one of the last on Suvorov’s bridge. But, for the most part, the Russians had to fall back on evasion and contrivance. They tricked the British into summoning their Swedish witnesses well down the list so as to rob their appearance of some of its dreaded éclat. They tried the infuriating tactic of insinuating that they had ample proof of Japanese activity in British ports, though restraining themselves from using it for fear of injecting bitterness into the proceedings. Even this had to be abandoned when Scotland Yard ran to earth two hirelings who had been paid two pounds for persuading a drunken Hull trawlerman to visualize a torpedo boat close to his vessel on the night in question. After such a fashion the Russian delegation muddled their way through the public hearings.
It is an understatement to say that, by comparison, de Taube’s British counterpart, Sir Edward Fry, had a watertight case. The Swedish witnesses were none other than the Aldebaran’s captain and mate, neither of them Japanese or in Japanese pay. The full report of Swedish inquiry on 27 October into the Aldebaran’s misadventure had reached the Admiralty immediately. Methodical checking reduced the number of Japanese in Scandinavia on the relevant dates to two fishery students and a troupe of performing acrobats.
The Daily Mail correspondent in Copenhagen collared a member of the Aurora’s crew who had been put ashore at Tangier in a state of nervous collapse. He gladly revealed how the cruisers had slowed down for the Kamchatka’s benefit, only to be overhauled by the battleships, taken for Japanese and fired upon. Iswolsky did his best to represent this former musician as an extortionist and apparently he was inclined "to run wild” once delivered to London, yet his testimony merely confirmed the version of the Incident long since put together by Admiralty investigators. The naval wireless station at Felixstowe, for instance, had intercepted and recorded Russian messages throughout the night of 21/22 October, including the damage reports. Still, only after considerable press comment at Tangier— where the only Russian victim of the incident, the Aurora’s chaplain, was buried—about obvious shell holes in the cruisers’ funnels, and only after the sequestration of the eyewitness to London, was an official Russian admission published that Russian shells had somewhat punctured Russian hulls.
No mention was made in the British Observations and Conclusions on February 13 of what must surely have been the true explanation of Kamchatka’s performance. Informally in Paris it was no secret that Captain Stepanov and most of his crew had got quite hopelessly drunk. The final report on 25 February never faced up to what to do with this particular drunken sailor and was such a rigmarole of self- contradiction as almost to defy comprehension. The commissioners concluded unanimously that the trawlers had committed no hostile act. By a decision of four-to- one they found the admiral responsible for the firing and its results, Dubasov alone maintaining that the presence of torpedo boats justified the bombardment. The same majority agreed that Rozhdestvenski should have immediately reported to the appropriate authorities the state of the fishing fleet. The solitary Russian ship lingering on the scene early on Saturday was the poor, bewildered Kamchatka, looking for the rest of her detachment. The report also mentioned the likelihood that an optical illusion deceived the lookout on the flagship into mistaking the identity of the Russian cruisers. Nevertheless, the admirals concluded unanimously that their findings were not "of such a nature as to cast any discredit upon the military qualities or humanity of Admiral Rozhdestvenski or the personnel of his Squadron.”
In Russia this face-saving formula was hailed as a triumphant achievement, as in a slightly different sense it was. The press made the most of the notion that the Russians had suppressed positive proof of the purchase by Japanese agents of torpedo boats in Hull, purely in the interests of achieving an amicable settlement. Hardinge reported this to Lansdowne "merely as an example of the methods employed here to conceal the truth and to mislead public opinion.” The Tsar believed to the bitter end a tale of 20 Japanese officers at Hull. De Taube received the Cross of St. Vladimir, small consolation for finding his classrooms emptied by the Revolution. The British press echoed the complaints of the British delegation that much relevant documentary evidence had not been produced but accepted the findings as substantially corroborating the British case. Besides, the Russians had readily offered to pay reparations. Both sides commented on the cordiality of the final proceedings. Altogether the conclusion is unavoidable that the final report was a fitting expression of the commission’s improvised rules of evidence and procedure. Above all, it was a document of conciliation rather than censure; a diplomatic adjustment, not a legal verdict.
A graduate of the University of Glasgow, 1955, where he was awarded a Master’s Degree with First Class Honors in History, Professor Campbell was awarded a PhD. in History by Yale University in 1961, the same year he assumed his present position as Associate Professor of History at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.