Schaffer was neither a military officer nor a diplomat. He was a physician employed by the Russian-American Company, the fur-trading enterprise that operated Russia's interests in Alaska and along the Pacific coast. His original assignment had been to recover a cargo from a wrecked company ship in Hawaii. But Schaffer saw a larger opportunity. Kauai's monarch, Kaumualii, had been forced into a subordinate relationship with Kamehameha I's unified Hawaiian Kingdom in 1810, and he resented the arrangement. Schaffer played on that resentment, promising Kaumualii Russian military support in exchange for trade concessions and land. The alliance was opportunistic on both sides. Kaumualii wanted leverage against Kamehameha. Schaffer wanted to claim an empire. Neither had the authority to deliver what he promised.

Schaffer built three forts on Kauai in 1816 and 1817. Fort Alexander at Hanalei was the first, a modest earthwork with low walls and possibly wooden palisades, mounted with a few cannons. The labor came primarily from the Russian-American Company's workforce, many of them Native Alaskans rather than Russians. A second fort was also constructed in the Hanalei area, and the largest -- Fort Elizabeth, on the island's southwest coast near Waimea -- was built with the help of Native Hawaiians. Fort Elizabeth was a more substantial structure, a star-shaped fortification whose stone walls still stand as a state historic site. Fort Alexander, by contrast, was always the lesser construction, a breastwork that served more as a territorial marker than a serious defensive position. Schaffer formally proclaimed Russian sovereignty over Kauai at its dedication, an act that had no backing from the Russian government and no legal standing whatsoever.

The scheme collapsed quickly. Kamehameha I objected, American traders in Hawaii opposed Russian expansion, and Kaumualii proved an unreliable partner once it became clear that no Russian warships were coming to enforce Schaffer's claims. By mid-1817, Schaffer was expelled from the islands. He fled to Macau, then to Brazil, where he reinvented himself as a landowner and died in 1836. The Russian government officially disavowed his actions, though some historians have debated whether elements within the Russian-American Company tacitly encouraged his ambitions. The forts were abandoned. Fort Elizabeth survived as stonework, eventually becoming a state historic park. Fort Alexander, built of earth rather than stone, was gradually absorbed by the landscape, its outline softened by decades of tropical growth until it became nearly invisible.

Today, Fort Alexander's location near Hanalei Bay is occupied by a hotel. A 1989 mitigation plan documented what remained of the earthwork, noting that a general outline of part of the fort could still be discerned. The episode left no lasting Russian presence in Hawaii, but it illuminates a moment when the Pacific balance of power was genuinely uncertain. In the early nineteenth century, Russia, Britain, France, and the United States all had interests in the Hawaiian Islands, and the kingdom's rulers played them against one another with considerable skill. Schaffer's adventure on Kauai was a footnote, but it was a footnote in a larger story of Pacific colonialism that would eventually cost Hawaii its independence. Fort Ross in California, built by the same Russian-American Company in 1812, is the better-known remnant of Russia's Pacific ambitions. Fort Alexander is the one most people have never heard of, hidden in plain sight on one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world.