Memoirs of a Revolutionist · Part III · Chapter 3 4 (1/2)

IV

Seeing that there was nothing more to be done at Chitá in the way of reforms, I gladly accepted the offer to visit the Amúr that same summer of 1863.

The immense domain on the left (northern) bank of the Amúr, and along the Pacific coast as far south as the bay of Peter the Great (Vladivostók), had been annexed to Russia by Count Muravyov, almost against the will of the St. Petersburg authorities and certainly without much help from them. When he conceived the bold plan of taking possession of the great river whose southern position and fertile lands had for the last two hundred years always attracted the Siberians; and when, on the eve of the opening of Japan to Europe, he decided to take for Russia a strong position on the Pacific coast, and to join hands with the United States, he had almost everybody against him at St. Petersburg: the ministry of war, which had no men to dispose of; the ministry of finance, which had no money for annexations; and especially the ministry of foreign affairs, always guided by its preoccupation of avoiding “diplomatic complications.” Muravyov had thus to act on his own responsibility, and to rely upon the scanty means which thinly populated Eastern Siberia could afford for this grand enterprise. Moreover, everything had to be done in a hurry, in order to oppose the “accomplished fact” to the protests of the West European diplomatists, which would certainly be raised.

A nominal occupation would have been of no avail, and the idea was to have on the whole length of the great river and of its southern tributary, the Usurí⁠—full 2,500 miles⁠—a chain of self-supporting settlements, and thus to establish a regular communication between Siberia and the Pacific coast. Men were wanted for these settlements, and as the scanty population of East Siberia could not supply them, Muravyov was forced to unusual measures. Released convicts who, after having served their time, had become serfs to the imperial mines, were freed and organized as Transbaikálian Cossacks, part of whom were settled along the Amúr and the Usurí, forming two new Cossack communities. Then Muravyov obtained the release of a thousand hard-labor convicts (mostly robbers and murderers), who were to be settled as free men on the lower Amúr. He came himself to see them off; and as they were going to leave, addressed them on the beach: “Go, my children, be free there, cultivate the land, make it Russian soil, start a new life,” and so on. The Russian peasant women nearly always, of their own free will, follow their husbands, if the latter happen to be sent to hard labor in Siberia, and many of the would-be colonists had thus their families with them. But those who had none ventured to remark to Muravyov: “What is agriculture without a wife! We ought to be married.” Whereupon Muravyov ordered the release of all the hard-labor convict women of the place⁠—about a hundred⁠—and offered them their choice of the men. But there was little time to lose; the high water in the river was rapidly going down, the rafts had to start, and Muravyov, asking the people to stand in pairs on the beach, blessed them, saying: “I marry you, children. Be kind to each other; you men, don’t ill-treat your wives⁠—and be happy.”

I saw these settlers some six years after that scene. Their villages were poor, the land they had been settled on having had to be cleared from under virgin forests; but, all things considered, their settlements were not a failure and the Muravyov marriages were not less happy than marriages are on the average. That excellent, intelligent man, Innocentus, bishop of the Amúr, afterward recognized these marriages, as well as the children that were born, as quite legal, and had them inscribed on the church registers.

Muravyov was less successful, however, with another batch of men that he added to the population of East Siberia. In his penury of men, he had accepted a couple of thousand soldiers from the punishment battalions. They were incorporated as “adopted sons” in the families of the Cossacks, or were settled in joint households in the villages of the Siberians. But ten or twenty years of barrack life under the horrid discipline of Nicholas I’s time surely were not a preparation for an agricultural life. The sons deserted their adopted fathers, and constituted the floating population of the towns, living from hand to mouth on occasional jobs, spending chiefly in drink what they earned, and then waiting as carefree as birds for new jobs to turn up.

The motley crowd of Transbaikálian Cossacks, of ex-convicts, and “sons”⁠—all settled in a hurry, and often in a haphazard way, along the banks of the Amúr⁠—certainly did not attain prosperity, especially in the lower parts of the river and on the Usurí, where almost every square yard of land had to be won from a virgin subtropical forest, and where deluges of rain brought by the monsoons in July, inundations on a gigantic scale, millions of migrating birds, and the like, continually destroyed the crops, finally reducing whole populations to sheer despair and apathy.

Considerable supplies of salt, flour, cured meat, and so on had therefore to be shipped every year, to support both the regular troops and the settlements on the lower Amúr, and for that purpose some hundred and fifty barges were yearly built at Chitá and floated with the early spring high water down the Ingodá, the Shilka, and the Amúr. The whole flotilla was divided into detachments of from twenty to thirty barges, which were placed under the orders of a number of Cossack and civil-service officers. Most of these did not know much about navigation, but they could be trusted, at least, not to steal the provisions and then report them as lost. I was nominated assistant to the chief of all that flotilla⁠—let me name him⁠—Major Maróvsky.

My first experiences in my new capacity of navigator were not entirely successful. It so happened that I had to proceed with a few barges as rapidly as possible to a certain point on the Amúr, and there to hand over my vessels. For that purpose I had to hire men from among those very “sons” whom I have already mentioned. None of them had ever had any experience in river navigation; nor had I. On the morning of our start my crew had to be collected from the public houses of the place, most of them being so drunk at that early hour that they had to be bathed in the river to bring them back to their senses. When we were afloat, I had to teach them everything that was to be done. Still, things went pretty well during the day; the barges, carried along by a swift current, floated down the river, and my crew, inexperienced though they were, had no interest in throwing their vessels upon the shore: that would have required special exertion. But when dusk came, and it was time to bring our huge, heavily laden barges to the shore and fasten them for the night, one of them, which was far ahead of the one that carried me, was stopped only when it was fast upon a rock, at the foot of a tremendously high, insurmountable cliff. There it stood immovable, while the level of the river, temporarily swollen by rains, was rapidly going down. My ten men evidently could not move it. I rowed down to the next village to ask assistance from the Cossacks, and at the same time dispatched a messenger to a friend, a Cossack officer who was staying some twenty miles away, and who had had experience in such things.

The morning came; a hundred Cossacks⁠—men and women⁠—had come to my aid, but there was no means whatever of connecting the barge with the shore, in order to unload it, so deep was the water under the cliff. And, as soon as we attempted to push it off the rock, its bottom was broken in, and the water freely entered, sweeping away the flour and salt which formed the cargo. To my great horror I perceived numbers of small fish entering through the hole and swimming about in the barge, and I stood there helpless, without knowing what to do next. There is a very simple and effective remedy for such emergencies. A sack of flour is forced into the hole, to the shape of which it soon adapts itself, while the outer crust of paste which is formed in the sack prevents water from penetrating through the flour; but none of us knew this at the time.

Happily for me, a few minutes later a barge was sighted coming down the river towards us. The appearance of the swan which carried Lohengrin was not greeted with more enthusiasm by the despairing Elsa than that clumsy vessel was greeted by me. The haze which covered the beautiful Shilka at that early hour in the morning added even more to the poetry of the vision. It was my friend, the Cossack officer, who had realized by my description that no human force could drag my barge off the rock⁠—that it was lost⁠—and was bringing an empty barge which by chance was at hand, to take away the cargo of my doomed craft.

Now the hole was stopped, the water was pumped out, the cargo was transferred to the new barge, and next morning I could continue my journey. This little experience was of great profit to me, and I soon reached my destination on the Amúr without further adventures worth mentioning. Every night we found some stretch of steep but relatively low shore where to stop with the barges, and our fires were soon lighted on the bank of the swift and clear river, amidst the most beautiful mountain scenery. In daytime, one could hardly imagine a more pleasant journey than on board a barge, which floats leisurely down, without any of the noise of the steamer; one or two strokes being occasionally given with its immense stern sweep to keep it in the main current. For the lover of nature, the lower part of the Shilka and the upper part of the Amúr, where one sees a most beautiful, wide, and swift river flowing amidst mountains rising in steep, wooded cliffs a couple of thousand feet above the water, offer some of the most delightful scenes in the world. But these same cliffs make communication along the shore on horseback, by way of a narrow trail, extremely difficult. I learned this that very autumn at my own expense. In East Siberia the seven last stations along the Shilka (about 120 miles) were known as the Seven Mortal Sins. This stretch of the Trans-Siberian railway⁠—if it is ever built⁠—will cost unimaginable sums of money; much more than the stretch of the Canadian Pacific line in the Rocky Mountains, in the canyon of the Fraser River, has cost.

After I had delivered my barges, I made about a thousand miles down the Amúr in one of the post boats which are used on the river. The stern of the boat was covered in, and in the bow was a box filled with earth upon which a fire was kept to cook the food. My crew consisted of three men. We had to make haste, and therefore used to row in turns all day long, while at night the boat was left to float with the current, and I kept the watch for three or four hours to maintain the boat in the middle of the river, and to prevent it from being drawn into some side channel. These watches⁠—the full moon shining above and the dark hills reflected in the river⁠—were beautiful beyond description. My rowers were taken from the aforementioned sons; they were three tramps, who had the reputation of being incorrigible thieves and robbers⁠—and I carried with me a heavy sack full of banknotes, silver, and copper. In Western Europe such a journey, on a lonely river, would have been considered risky; not so in East Siberia. I made it without even having so much as an old pistol, and I found my three tramps excellent company. Only, as we approached Blagoveshchensk, they became restless. “Khánshina” (the Chinese brandy) “is cheap there,” they reasoned, with deep sighs. “We are sure to get into trouble! It’s cheap, and it knocks you over in no time, from want of being used to it!” I offered to leave the money which was due to them with a friend who would see them off with the first steamer. “That would not help us,” they replied mournfully. “Somebody will offer a glass⁠—it’s cheap⁠—and a glass knocks you over!” they persisted in saying. They were really perplexed, and when, a few months later, I returned through the town, I learned that one of “my sons,” as people called them in town, had really got into trouble. When he had sold the last pair of boots to get the poisonous drink, he had committed some theft and had been locked up. My friend finally obtained his release and shipped him back.

Only those who have seen the Amúr, or know the Mississippi or the Yang-tze-kiang, can imagine what an immense river the Amúr becomes after it has joined the Sungarí, and can realize what tremendous waves roll over its bed if the weather is stormy. When the rainy season, due to the monsoons, comes in July, the Sungarí, the Usurí, and the Amúr are swollen by unimaginable quantities of water; thousands of low islands usually covered with willow thickets are inundated or washed away, and the width of the river attains in places two, three, and even five miles; water rushes into the side channels and the lakes which spread in the low lands along the main channel; and when a fresh wind blows from an easterly quarter, against the current, tremendous waves, even higher than those which one sees in the estuary of the St. Lawrence, roll up both the main river and the side channels. Still worse is it when a typhoon blows from the Chinese Sea and spreads over the Amúr region.

We experienced such a typhoon. I was then on board a large decked boat, with Major Maróvsky, whom I joined at Blagoveshchensk. He had rigged his boat so that she would sail close to the wind, and when the storm began we managed to bring our boat to the sheltered side of the river, and to find refuge in a small tributary. There we stayed for two days, while the storm raged with such fury that, when I ventured for a few hundred yards into the surrounding forest, I had to retreat on account of the number of immense trees which the wind was blowing down around me. We began to feel very uneasy for our barges. It was evident that if they had been afloat that morning, they never would have been able to reach the sheltered side of the river, but must have been driven by the storm to the bank exposed to the full rage of the wind, and there destroyed. A disaster was almost certain.

We sailed out as soon as the fury of the storm had abated. We knew that we ought soon to overtake two detachments of barges; but we sailed one day, two days, and found no trace of them. My friend Maróvsky lost both sleep and appetite, and looked as if he had just had a serious illness. He sat whole days on the deck, motionless, murmuring: “All is lost, all is lost.” The villages are few and far between on this part of the Amúr, and nobody could give us any information. A new storm came on, and finally, reaching a village at daybreak, we learned that no barges had passed, but that quantities of wreckage had been seen floating down the river during the previous day. It was evident that at least forty barges, which carried a cargo of about two thousand tons, must have been lost. It meant a certain famine next spring on the lower Amúr if no supplies were brought in time, for it was late in the season, navigation would soon come to a close, and there was then no telegraph along the river.