Today in 1962, the US designated a spot in Hawaii as a National Historic Landmark.
The site is known as Fort Elizabeth, or Russian Fort.
Which means, yes, there was once an effort to put a Russian fort in Hawaii.
That effort started in the early 1800s, back when Russia still controlled Alaska.
The Russian American Company, based in Sitka, wanted a base of operations in the Pacific, a place where ships from “Russian America” could trade, refuel and resupply.
So, in 1815, the company’s director sent an envoy, a German doctor called Georg Schäffer.
He was officially in Hawaii to meet with King Kamehameha I about the cargo of a Russian ship, cargo that Hawaiians had salvaged after the ship ran aground off the coast of Kauai,.
But Schäffer decided that the royal talks were taking too long and went in, shall we say, another direction.
He decided to hold talks instead with the governor of Kauai, Kaumualiʻi.
He’d been the king of Kauai before Kamehameha united the islands into one kingdom, and Schäffer figured he could exploit the tension between the two and get a good deal for the Russians.
Schäffer convinced the governor to sign a deal that would more or less make Kauai and several other islands Russian protectorates, in exchange for compensation for that ship cargo and preferential treatment on trade.
That led to the construction of an eight-sided fort in 1817 that flew the Russian flag on Kauai.
But it’s important to note that the only one who seemed to like this arrangement was Schäffer.
Kaumualiʻi, Kauai’s governor, had only signed the deal to further his own agenda of controlling more Hawaiian territory.
The Americans and the British didn’t want a Russian outpost on the islands; they successfully pressed King Kamehameha to expel the settlers at the fort.
The king, like many other Hawaiians, was already suspicious of Schäffer, and for good reason: the doctor secretly planned to take over all of Hawaii and had started renaming places on the islands, including some after himself.
Even the Russians weren’t happy; they wanted a trading post, not a new military commitment.
The government disavowed Schäffer, saying he’d gone into business for himself.
The doctor had to flee Hawaii, and he lost his job with the Russian-American Company.
Later, he tried to start a German colony in Brazil.
There he was officially known as Count von Frankenthal but also earned himself a less complimentary nickname: the “soul-buyer.”
A scientist in Hungary has spent the last five years teaching rats how to play the 90s video game Doom II.
At first the rat gamers got rewards for just basic movements, but now he’s been able to get them to shoot down the game’s demons.
According to the website RatsPlayDoom.com, the training “took approximately two weeks per rat.”
Russian Fort/ Fort Elizabeth (National Park Service)
Rats Successfully Trained to Shoot Demons in “Doom” (Futurism)
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Image by Dr Alexander Molodin and Dr Peter R Mills via Wikicommons/Creative Commons
