Chapter VIII: Part 8

When the revolution broke out in Poland it was generally believed in Russia that it would take a democratic, republican turn; and that the liberation of the serfs on a broad democratic basis would be the first thing which a revolutionary government, fighting for the independence of the country, would accomplish.

The Emancipation Law, as it had been enacted at St. Petersburg in 1861, provided ample opportunity for such a course of action. The personal obligations of the serfs towards their owners only came to an end on February 19, 1863. Then a very slow process had to be gone through in order to obtain a sort of agreement between the landlords and the serfs as to the size and the locality of the land allotments which were to be given to the liberated serfs. The yearly payments for these allotments (disproportionately high) were fixed by law at so much per acre; but the peasants had also to pay an additional sum for their homesteads, and of this sum the maximum only had been fixed by the statute--it having been thought that the landlords might be induced to forgo that additional payment, or to be satisfied with only a part of it. As to the so-called ‘redemption’ of the land--in which case the Government undertook to pay the landlord its full value in State bonds and the peasants receiving the land had to pay in return, for forty-nine years, six per cent. on that sum as interest and annuities--not only were these payments extravagant and ruinous for the peasants, but no term was even fixed for the redemption: it was left to the will of the landlord; and in an immense number of cases the redemption arrangements had not been entered upon twenty years after the emancipation.

Under such conditions a revolutionary government had ample opportunity for immensely improving upon the Russian law. It was bound to accomplish an act of justice towards the serfs--whose condition in Poland was as bad as, and often worse than, in Russia itself--by granting them better and more definite conditions of emancipation. But nothing of the sort was done. The purely nationalist party and the aristocratic one having obtained the upper hand in the movement, this all-absorbing matter was left out of sight. It was thus easy for the Russian Government to win the peasants to its side.

Full advantage was taken of this fault when Nicholas Milútin was sent to Poland by Alexander II. with the mission to liberate the peasants in the way he intended doing it in Russia. ‘Go to Poland; apply there your Red programme against the Polish landlords,’ said Alexander II. to him; and Milútin, together with Prince Cherkássky and many others, really did their best to take the land from the landlords and give full-sized allotments to the peasants.

* * * * *

I once met one of the Russian functionaries who went to Poland under Milútin and Prince Cherkássky. ‘We had full liberty,’ he said to me, ‘to hold out the hand to the peasants. My usual plan was to go to a village and convoke the peasants’ assembly. “Tell me first,” I would say, “what land do you hold at this moment?” They would point it out to me. “Is this all the land you ever held?” I would then ask. “Surely not,” they would reply with one voice; “years ago these meadows were ours; this wood was once in our possession; and these fields belonged to us.” I would let them go on talking it all over, and then would ask: “Now, which of you can certify under oath that this land or that land has ever been held by you?” Of course there would be nobody forthcoming--it was all too long ago. At last, some old man would be thrust out from the crowd, the rest saying: “He knows all about it, he can swear to it.” The old man would begin a long story about what he knew in his youth, or had heard from his father, but I would cut the story short.... “State on oath what you know to have been held by the _gmina_ (the village community)--and the land is yours.” And as soon as he took the oath--one could trust that oath implicitly--I wrote out the papers and declared to the assembly: “Now, this land is yours. You stand no longer under any obligations whatever to your late masters: you are simply their neighbours; all you will have to do is to pay the redemption tax, so much every year, to the Government. Your homesteads go with the land: you get them free.”’

One can imagine the effect which such a policy produced upon the peasants. A cousin of mine, Petr Nikoláevich, a brother of the aide-de-camp whom I have mentioned, was in Poland or in Lithuania with his regiment of uhlans of the Guard. The revolution was so serious that even the regiments of the Guard had been sent against it from St. Petersburg; and it is now known that when Mikhael Muravióff was ordered to Lithuania, and came to take leave of the Empress Marie, she said to him: ‘Save at least Lithuania for Russia.’ Poland was regarded as lost.

‘The armed bands of the revolutionists held the country,’ my cousin said to me, ‘and we were powerless to defeat them, or even to find them. Small bands over and over again attacked our small detachments, and as they fought admirably, and knew the country and found support in the population, they often had the best of the skirmishes. We were thus compelled to march in large columns only. We would cross a region, marching through the woods without finding any trace of the bands; but when we marched back again we learned that bands had appeared in our rear, that they had levied the patriotic tax in the country, and if some peasant had rendered himself useful in any way to our troops we found him hanged on a tree by the revolutionary bands. So it went on for months, with no chance of improvement, until Milútin came and freed the peasants, giving them the land. Then--all was over. The peasants sided with us; they helped us to lay hold of the bands, and the insurrection came to an end.’

I often spoke with the Polish exiles in Siberia upon this subject, and some of them understood the fault that had been committed. A revolution, from its very outset, must be an act of justice towards the ‘down-trodden and the oppressed’--not a promise of making such reparation later on--otherwise it is sure to fail. Unfortunately, it often happens that the leaders are so much absorbed with mere questions of military tactics that they forget the main thing. To be revolutionists, and fail to prove to the masses that a new era has really begun for them, is to ensure the certain ruin of the attempt.

The disastrous consequences for Poland of this revolution are known; they belong to the domain of history. How many thousand men perished in battle, how many hundreds were hanged, and how many scores of thousands were transported to various provinces of Russia and Siberia, is not yet fully known. But even the official figures which were printed in Russia a few years ago show that in the Lithuanian provinces alone--not to speak of Poland proper--that terrible man Mikhael Muravióff, to whom the Russian Government has just erected a monument at Wílno, hanged by his own authority 128 Poles, and transported to Russia and Siberia 9,423 men and women. Officials lists, also published in Russia, give 18,672 men and women exiled to Siberia from Poland, of whom 10,407 were sent to East Siberia. I remember that the Governor-General of East Siberia mentioned to me the same number, about 11,000 persons, sent to hard labour or exile in his domains. I saw them there, and witnessed their sufferings. Altogether, something like 60,000 or 70,000 persons, if not more, were torn out of Poland and transported to different provinces of Russia, to the Urals, to Caucasus, and to Siberia.

For Russia the consequences were equally disastrous. The Polish insurrection was the definitive close of the reform period. True, the law of provincial self-government (_Zémstvos_) and the reform of the law courts were promulgated in 1864 and 1866; but both were ready in 1862, and, moreover, at the last moment Alexander II. gave preference to the scheme of self-government which had been prepared by the reactionary party of Valúeff, as against the scheme which had been prepared by Nicholas Milútin; and immediately after the promulgation of both reforms their importance was reduced, and in some cases destroyed, by the enactment of a number of by-laws.

Worst of all, public opinion itself took a further step backward. The hero of the hour was Katkóff, the leader of the serfdom party, who appeared now as a Russian ‘patriot,’ and carried with him most of the St. Petersburg and Moscow society. After that time, those who dared to speak of reforms were at once classed by Katkóff as ‘traitors to Russia.’

* * * * *

The wave of reaction soon reached our remote province. One day in March a paper was brought by a special messenger from Irkútsk. It intimated to General Kúkel that he was at once to leave the post of Governor of Transbaikália and go to Irkútsk, waiting there for further orders, but without reassuming there the post of commander of the general staff.

Why? What did that mean? There was not a word of explanation. Even the Governor-General, a personal friend of Kúkel, had not run the risk of adding a single word to the mysterious order. Did it mean that Kúkel was going to be taken between two gendarmes to St. Petersburg, and immured in that huge stone coffin, the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul? All was possible. Later on we learned that such was indeed the intention; and so it would and have been done but for the energetic intervention of Count Nicholas Muravióff, ‘the conqueror of the Amúr,’ who personally implored the Tsar that Kúkel should be spared that fate.

Our parting with Kúkel and his charming family was like a funeral. My heart was very heavy. I not only lost in him a dear personal friend, but I felt also that this parting was the burial of a whole epoch, full of long-cherished hopes--‘full of illusions,’ as it became the fashion to say.

So it was. A new Governor came--a good-natured, ‘leave-me-in-peace’ man. With renewed energy, seeing that there was no time to lose, I completed our plans of reform of the system of exile and municipal self-government. The Governor made a few objections here and there for formality’s sake, but finally signed the schemes, and they were sent to headquarters. But at St. Petersburg reforms were no longer wanted. There our projects lie buried still, with hundreds of similar ones from all parts of Russia. A few ‘improved’ prisons, even more terrible than the old unimproved ones, have been built in the capitals, to be shown during prison congresses to distinguished foreigners; but the remainder, and the whole system of exile, were found by George Kennan in 1886 in exactly the same state in which I left them in 1862. Only now, after thirty-six years have passed away, the authorities are introducing the reformed tribunals and a parody of self-government in Siberia, and committees have been nominated again to inquire into the system of exile.

When Kennan came back to London from his journey to Siberia he managed, on the very next day after his arrival in London, to hunt up Stepniák, Tchaykóvsky, myself, and another Russian refugee. In the evening we all met at Kennan’s room in a small hotel near Charing Cross. We saw him for the first time, and having no excess of confidence in enterprising Englishmen who had previously undertaken to learn all about the Siberian prisons without even learning a word of Russian, we began to cross-examine Kennan. To our astonishment, he not only spoke excellent Russian, but he knew everything worth knowing about Siberia. One or another of us had been acquainted with the greater proportion of all political exiles in Siberia, and we besieged Kennan with questions: ‘Where is So-and-So? Is he married? Is he happy in his marriage? Does he still keep fresh in spirit?’ We were soon satisfied that Kennan knew all about every one of them.

When this questioning was over, and we were preparing to leave, I asked, ‘Do you know, Mr. Kennan, if they have built a watchtower for the fire brigade at Chitá?’ Stepniák looked at me, as if to reproach me for abusing Kennan’s good-will. Kennan, however, began to laugh, and I soon joined him. And with much laughter we tossed each other questions and answers: ‘Why, do you know about that?’ ‘And you too?’ ‘Built?’ ‘Yes, double estimates!’ and so on, till at last Stepniák interfered, and in his most severely good-natured way objected: ‘Tell us at least what you are laughing about.’ Whereupon Kennan told the story of that watchtower which his readers must remember. In 1859 the Chitá people wanted to build a watchtower, and collected the money for it; but their estimates had to be sent to the Ministry of the Interior. So they went to St. Petersburg; but when they came back, two years later, duly approved, all the prices for timber and work had gone up in that rising young town. This was in 1862, while I was at Chitá. New estimates were made and sent to St. Petersburg, and the story was repeated for full twenty-five years, till at last the Chitá people, losing patience, put in their estimates prices nearly double the real ones. These fantastic estimates were solemnly considered at St. Petersburg, and approved. This is how Chitá got its watchtower.

It has often been said that Alexander II. committed a great fault, and brought about his own ruin, by raising so many hopes which later on he did not satisfy. It is seen from what I have just said--and the story of little Chitá was the story of all Russia--that he did worse than that. It was not merely that he raised hopes. Yielding for a moment to the current of public opinion around him, he induced men all over Russia to set to work, to issue from the domain of mere hopes and dreams, and to touch with the finger the reforms that were required. He made them realize what could be done immediately, and how easy it was to do it; he induced them to sacrifice whatever of their ideals could not be immediately realized, and to demand only what was practically possible at the time. And when they had framed their ideas, and had shaped them into laws which merely required his signature to become realities, then he refused that signature. No reactionist could raise, or ever has raised, his voice to assert that what was left--the unreformed tribunals, the absence of municipal government, or the system of exile--was good and was worth maintaining: no one has dared to say that. And yet, owing to the fear of doing anything, all was left as it was; for thirty-five years those who ventured to mention the necessity of a change were treated as ‘suspects;’ and institutions unanimously recognized as bad were permitted to continue in existence only that nothing more might be heard of that abhorred word ‘reform.’

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 Muravióff, 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 pre-occupation of avoiding ‘diplomatic complications.’ Muravióff 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, Muravióff did not recoil before any kind of means of getting men. 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 Muravióff obtained the release of a thousand hard-labour convicts (mostly robbers and murderers), who had 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 follow, of their own free will, their husbands if the latter happen to be sent to hard labour to Siberia, and many of the would-be colonists had their families with them. But those who had none ventured to remark to Muravióff: ‘What is agriculture without a wife? We ought to be married.’ Whereupon Muravióff ordered to release all the hard-labour convict women of the place--about a hundred--and offered them the choice of the man each of them would like to marry and to follow. However, there was little time to lose; the high water in the river was rapidly going down, the rafts had to start, and Muravióff, 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 taken, their settlements were not a failure, and ‘the Muravióff marriages’ were not less happy than marriages are on the average. That excellent, intelligent man, Innocentus, bishop of the Amúr, recognized, later on, these marriages, as well as the children which were born, as quite legal, and had them inscribed on the Church registers.

Muravióff was less successful, though, 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. But ten or twenty years of barrack life under the horrid discipline of Nicholas I.’s time surely was 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 again living as birds in the sky in the expectation of another job turning up.

The motley crowd of Transbaikálian Cossacks, of ex-convicts, and ‘sons,’ who were 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 every square yard had often to be won upon a virgin sub-tropical forest, and 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 bringing whole populations to sheer despair and apathy.

Considerable supplies of salt, flour, cured meat, and so on had thus 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 used to be built and loaded at Chitá, and floated with the early spring floods down the Ingodá, the Shílka, 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 them 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 all but 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 exactly from among those ‘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 had 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 our huge heavily laden fifty-ton barges had to be brought to the shore and fastened to it for the night, one of the barges, which was far ahead of the one upon which I was, was stopped only when it was fast upon a rock, at the foot of a tremendously high inaccessible 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. So I rowed down to the next village to ask assistance from the Cossacks, and at the same time despatched a messenger to a friend--a Cossack officer who stayed some twenty miles away and who 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 to connect 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 water freely entered it, sweeping away the flour and the salt of the cargo. To my great horror, I perceived lots of small fish entering through the hole and freely swimming about in the barge--and I stood there helpless, not knowing what to do next. There is a very simple and effective remedy for such emergencies. A sack of flour is thrust into the hole, and it soon takes its shape, while the outer crust of paste which is formed in the sack prevents water from penetrating through the flour; but none of us knew anything about it. Happily enough, a few minutes later a barge was signalled coming down the river towards us. The appearance of the swan who 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 Shílka 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 taking an empty barge which by chance was at hand, came with it to place upon it the cargo of my doomed craft. Now the hole was filled up, the water was pumped out, and the cargo was transferred to the new barge, which was fastened alongside mine; 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 out some stretch of steep but relatively low shore where to stop with the barges for the night, and our fires were soon lighted on the bank of the swift and clear river, amidst most beautiful mountain scenery. In daytime, one could hardly imagine a more pleasant journey than on board a barge which leisurely floats down, without any of the noises of a steamer--one or two strokes being occasionally given with its immense stern rudder to keep it in the main current. For the lover of nature, the lower part of the Shílka 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, offers one of the most delightful scenes in the world. But on that very account communication along the shore, on horseback, along a narrow trail, is extremely difficult. I learned this that same autumn at my own expense. In East Siberia the seven last stations along the Shílka (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 boat is covered with a light shed in its back part, and has on its stem a box filled with earth upon which a fire is 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 midst of the river and to prevent it from being dragged into some side branch. 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 same ‘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 bank-notes, 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 Blagovéschensk 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 made some theft and was 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-tse-kiang, can imagine what an immense river the Amúr becomes after it has joined the Sungarí and can realize what tremendous waves roll up 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 torn away, and the width of the river attains in places two, three, and even five miles; water rushes into hundreds of branches and lakes which spread in the lowlands along the main channel; and when a fresh wind blows from an eastern quarter, against the current, tremendous waves, higher than those which one sees in the estuary of the St. Lawrence, roll up the main channel as well as up its branches. 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 had joined at Blagovéschensk. He had well provided his boat with sails, which permitted us to sail close to the wind, and when the storm began we managed, nevertheless, to bring our boat on the sheltered side of the river and to find refuge in some 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 round me. We began to feel very uneasy for our barges. It was evident that if they had been afloat this 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 they must have been destroyed. A disaster was almost certain.

We sailed out as soon as the main fury of the storm had abated. We knew that we must soon overtake two detachments of barges; but we sailed one day, two days, and there was 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 rare in this part of the Amúr, and nobody could give us any information. A new storm came on, and when we reached at last a village, we learned that no barges had passed by it, and that quantities of wreck 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 2,000 tons, must have perished. It meant a certain famine next spring on the lower Amúr if no supplies were brought in time. We were late in the season, navigation would soon be closed, and there was no telegraph yet along the river.

We held a council and decided that Maróvsky should sail as quickly as possible to the mouth of the Amúr. Some purchases of grain might perhaps be made in Japan before the close of the navigation. Meanwhile I was to go with all possible speed up the river, to determine the losses, and do my best to cover the two thousand miles of the Amúr and the Shílka--in boats, on horseback, or on board steamer if I met one. The sooner I could warn the Chitá authorities, and despatch any amount of provisions available, the better it would be. Perhaps part of them would reach this same autumn the upper Amúr, whence it would be easier to ship them in the early spring to the lowlands. Even if a few weeks or only days could be won, it might make an immense difference in case of a famine.

I began my two thousand miles’ journey in a rowing boat, changing rowers each twenty miles or so, at each village. It was very slow progress, but there might be no steamer coming up the river for a fortnight, and in the meantime I could reach the spots where the barges were wrecked, and see if any of the provisions had been saved. Then, at the mouth of the Usurí (Khabaróvsk) I might find a steamer. The boats which I took in the villages were miserable, and the weather very stormy. We kept evidently along the shore, but we had to cross some branches of the Amúr of great width, and the waves, driven by the high wind, threatened continually to swamp our little craft. One day we had to cross a branch of the Amúr nearly half a mile wide. Chopped waves rose like mountains as they rolled up that branch. My rowers, two peasants, were seized with terror; their faces were white as paper; their blue lips trembled, they murmured prayers. Only a boy of fifteen, who held the rudder, calmly kept a watchful eye upon the waves. He glided between them as they seemed to sink around us for a moment; but when he saw them rising to a menacing height in front of us he gave a slight turn to the boat and steadied it across the waves. The boat shipped water from each wave, and I threw it out with an old ladle, noting at times that it accumulated more rapidly than I could get rid of it. There was a moment when the boat shipped two such big waves that, on a sign given to me by one of the trembling rowers, I unfastened the heavy sackful of copper and silver that I carried across my shoulder.... For several days in succession we had such crossings. I never forced the men to cross, but they themselves, knowing why I had to hurry, would decide at a given moment that an attempt must be made. ‘There are not seven deaths in one’s life, and one cannot be avoided,’ they would say, and, signing themselves with the cross, would seize the oars and pull over.

I soon reached the places where the main destruction of our barges took place. Forty-four barges had been destroyed by the storm. Unloading had been impossible, and very little of the cargo had been saved. Two thousand tons of flour had perished in the waves. With this message I continued my journey.

A few days later a steamer slowly creeping up the river overtook me, and when I boarded her the passengers told me that the captain had drunk so much that he was seized with delirium and jumped overboard. He was saved, though, and was now lying ill in his cabin. They asked me to take the command of the steamer, and I had to accept it; but soon I realized, to my great astonishment, that everything went on by itself in such an excellent routine way that, though I paraded all day on the bridge, I had almost nothing to do. Apart from a few minutes of real responsibility when the steamer had to be brought to the landing-places, where we took wood for fuel, and saying a few words now and then for encouraging the stokers to start as soon as dawn permitted us faintly to distinguish the outlines of the shores, everything went on by itself, requiring but little interference of mine. A pilot who would have been able to interpret the map would have managed as well.

Travelling by steamer and a great deal on horseback I reached at last Transbaikália. The idea of a famine that might break out next spring on the lower Amúr oppressed me all the time. I found that the small steamer on board of which I was did not progress up the swift Shílka rapidly enough, and in order to gain some twenty hours, or even less, I abandoned it and rode with a Cossack a couple of hundred miles up the Argúñ, along one of the wildest mountain tracks in Siberia, stopping to light our camp fire only after midnight would have overtaken us in the woods. Even the ten or twenty hours that I might gain by this exertion had not to be despised, because every day brought us nearer to the close of navigation: at nights, ice was already forming on the river. At last I met the Governor of Transbaikdália, and my friend, Colonel Pedashénko, on the Shílka, at the convict settlement of Kará, and the latter took in hand the care of shipping immediately all available provisions. As to me, I left immediately to report all about the matter at Irkútsk.

People at Irkútsk wondered that I had managed to make this long journey so rapidly, but I was quite worn out. However, youth quickly recovers its strength, and I recovered mine by sleeping for some time such a number of hours every day that I should be ashamed to say how many.

‘Have you taken some rest?’ the Governor-General asked me a week or so after my arrival. ‘Could you start to-morrow for St. Petersburg, as a courier, to report there yourself upon the loss of the barges?’

It meant to cover in twenty days--not one day more--another distance of 3,200 miles between Irkútsk and Níjni-Nóvgorod, where I could take the railway to St. Petersburg; to gallop day and night in post-carts which had to be changed at every station, because no carriage would stand such a journey full speed over the ruts of the roads frozen at the end of the autumn. But to see my brother Alexander was too great an attraction for me not to accept the offer, and I started the next night. When I reached the lowlands of West Siberia and the Urals the journey really became a torture. There were days when the wheels of the carts would be broken over the frozen ruts at every successive station. The rivers were freezing, and I had to cross the Ob in a boat amidst the floating ice, which menaced at every moment to crush our small craft. When I reached the Tom river, on which the ice had only stopped floating during the preceding night, the peasants refused for some time to take me over, asking me to give them ‘a receipt.’

‘What sort of receipt do you want?’

‘Well, you write on a paper: “I, undersigned, hereby testify that I was drowned by the will of God and by no fault of the peasants,” and you give us that paper.’

‘With pleasure, on the other shore.’

At last they took me over. A boy--a brave, bright boy whom I had selected in the crowd--opened the procession, testing the strength of the ice with a pole; I followed him, carrying my despatch-box on my shoulders, and we two were attached to long reins which five peasants held, following us at a distance--one of them carrying a bundle of straw, to be thrown on the ice if it should not seem strong enough.

At last I reached Moscow, where my brother met me at the station, and we proceeded at once to St. Petersburg.

Youth is a grand thing. After such a journey, which lasted twenty-four days and nights, when I came, early in the morning, to St. Petersburg, I went the same day to deliver my despatches, and did not fail also to call upon an aunt--or, rather, upon a cousin--who resided at St. Petersburg. She was radiant. ‘We have a dancing party to-night. Will you come?’ she said. Of course I would! And not only come, but dance until an early hour of the morning.

* * * * *

When I came to St. Petersburg and saw the authorities, I understood why I had been sent to make the report. Nobody would believe the possibility of such a destruction of the barges. ‘Have you been on the spot? Did you see the destruction with your own eyes? Are you perfectly sure that “they” have not simply stolen the provisions and shown you the wreck of some barges?’ Such were the questions I had to answer.

The high functionaries who stood at the head of Siberian affairs at St. Petersburg were simply charming in their innocent ignorance of Siberia. ‘_Mais, mon cher_,’ one of them said to me--he always spoke French---‘how _is_ it possible that forty barges should be destroyed on the Nevá without anyone rushing to help save them?’ ‘The Nevá,’ I exclaimed; ‘put three, four Nevás side by side, and you will have the lower Amúr!’

‘Is it really as big as that?’ And two minutes later he was chatting, in excellent French, about all sorts of things. ‘When did you last see Schwartz, the painter? Is not his “John the Terrible” a wonderful picture? Do you know for what reason Kúkel was going to be arrested? Do you know that Chernyshévsky is arrested? He is now in the fortress.’

‘What for? What has he done?’ I asked.

‘Nothing particular; nothing! But, _mon cher_, you know, State considerations! Such a clever man, awfully clever! And such an influence he has upon the youth. You understand that a Government cannot tolerate that: that’s impossible! _intolérable, mon cher, dans un État bien ordonné!_’

Count Ignátieff made no such questions; he knew the Amúr very well, and he knew St. Petersburg too. Amidst all sorts of jokes, and witty remarks about Siberia which he made with an astounding vivacity, he dropped to me: ‘It is a very lucky thing that you were there on the spot, and saw the wrecks. And “they” were clever to send you with the report! Well done! At first, nobody wanted to believe about the barges. Some new swindling, it was thought. But now people say that you were well known as a page, and you have only been a few months in Siberia; so you would not shelter the people there if it were swindling. They trust in you.’

The Minister of War, Dmítri Milútin, was the only man in the high administration of St. Petersburg who took the matter seriously. He asked me many questions: all to the point. He mastered the subject at once, and all our conversation was in short sentences, without hurry, but without any waste of words. ‘The coast settlements to be supplied from the sea, you mean? The remainder only from Chitá? Quite right. But if a storm happens next year, will there be the same destruction once more?’ ‘No, if there are two small tugs to convoy the barges.’ ‘Will it do?’ ‘Yes, with one tug the loss would not have been half so heavy.’ ‘Very probably. Write to me, please; state all you have said, quite plainly; no formalities.’

V

I did not stay long at St. Petersburg, and returned to Irkútsk the same winter. My brother was going to join me there in a few months; he was accepted as an officer of the Irkútsk Cossacks.

Travelling across Siberia in the winter is supposed to be a terrible experience; but, all things considered, it is on the whole more comfortable than at any other season of the year. The snow-covered roads are excellent, and, although the cold is fearful, one can stand it well enough. Lying full length in the sledge--as everyone does in Siberia--wrapped in fur blankets, fur inside and fur outside, one does not suffer much from the cold, even when the temperature is forty or sixty Fahrenheit degrees below zero. Travelling in courier fashion--that is, rapidly changing horses at each station and stopping only once a day for one hour to take a meal--I reached Irkútsk nineteen days after I had left St. Petersburg. Two hundred miles a day is the normal speed in such cases, and I remember having covered the last 660 miles before Irkútsk in seventy hours. The frost was not severe then, the roads were in an excellent condition, the drivers were kept in good spirits by a free allowance of silver coins, and the team of three small and light horses seemed to enjoy running swiftly across hill and vale, and across rivers frozen as hard as steel, amidst forests glistening in their silver attire in the rays of the sun.

I was now nominated attaché to the Governor-General of East Siberia for Cossack affairs, and had to reside at Irkútsk; but there was nothing particular to do. To let everything go on, according to the established routine, with no more reference to changes, such was the watchword that came now from St. Petersburg. I therefore gladly accepted the proposal to undertake geographical exploration in Manchuria.

If one casts a glance on a map of Asia one sees that the Russian frontier, which runs in Siberia, broadly speaking, along the fiftieth degree of latitude, suddenly bends in Transbaikália to the north. It follows for three hundred miles the Argúñ river; then, on reaching the Amúr, it turns south-eastwards--the town of Blagovéschensk, which was the capital of the Amúr land, being situated again in about the same latitude of fifty degrees. Between the south-eastern corner of Transbaikália (New Tsurukháitu) and Blagovéschensk on the Amúr, the distance west to east is only five hundred miles; but along the Argúñ and the Amúr it is over a thousand miles, and moreover communication along the Argúñ, which is not navigable, is extremely difficult. In its lower parts there is nothing but a most wild mountain track.

Transbaikália is very rich in cattle, and the Cossacks who occupy its south-eastern corner, and are wealthy cattle-breeders, wanted to establish a direct communication with the middle Amúr, which would be a good market for their cattle. They used to trade with the Mongols, and they had heard from them that it would not be difficult to reach the Amúr, travelling eastwards across the Great Khingán. Going straight towards the east, they were told, one would fall in with an old Chinese route which crosses the Khingán and leads to the Manchurian town of Merghén (on the Nónni river, a tributary to the Sungarí), whence an excellent road leads to the middle Amúr.

I was offered the leadership of a trading caravan which the Cossacks intended to organize in order to find that route, and I accepted it with enthusiasm. No European had ever visited that region, and a Russian topographer who went that way a few years before was killed. Only two Jesuits, in the time of the emperor Kan-si, had penetrated from the south as far as Merghén, and had determined its latitude. All the immense region to the north of it, five hundred miles wide and five hundred miles deep, was totally, absolutely unknown. I consulted all the available sources about this region. Nobody, not even the Chinese geographers, knew anything about it. Besides, the very fact of connecting the middle Amúr with Transbaikália had its importance; Tsurukháitu is now going to be the head of the Trans-Manchuria railway. We were thus the pioneers of that great enterprise.

There was, however, one difficulty. The treaty with China granted to the Russians free trade with the ‘Empire of China and Mongolia.’ Manchuria was not mentioned in it, and could as well be excluded as included in the treaty. The Chinese frontier authorities interpreted it one way, and the Russians the other way. Moreover, only trade being mentioned, an officer would not be allowed to enter Manchuria. I had thus to go as a trader, and accordingly I bought at Irkútsk various goods, and went disguised as a merchant. The Governor-General delivered me a passport, ‘To the Irkútsk second guild merchant Petr Alexéiev and his companions,’ and he warned me that if the Chinese authorities arrested me and took me to Pekin, and thence across the Góbi to the Russian frontier--in a cage on a camel’s back was their way of conveying prisoners across Mongolia--I must not betray him by naming myself. I accepted, of course, all the conditions, the temptation to visit a country which no European had ever seen being too great for an explorer.

It would not have been easy to conceal my identity while I was in Transbaikália. The Cossacks are an extremely inquisitive sort of people--real Mongols--and as soon as a stranger comes to one of their villages, while treating him with the greatest hospitality, the master of the house submits the new-comer to a formal interrogatory.

‘A tedious journey, I suppose,’ he begins; ‘a long way from Chitá, is it not? And then, perhaps, longer still for one who comes from some place beyond Chitá? Maybe from Irkútsk? Trading there, I believe? Many tradesmen come this way. You are going also to Nerchínsk, I should say?--Yes, people are often married at your age; and you, too, must have left a family, I suppose? Many children? Not all boys, I should say?’ And so on for quite half an hour.

The local commander of the Cossacks, Captain Buxhövden, knew his people, and consequently we had taken our precautions. At Chitá and at Irkútsk we often had had amateur theatricals, playing in preference dramas of Ostróvsky, in which the scene of action is nearly always amongst the merchant classes. I played several times in different dramas, and found such great pleasure in acting that I even wrote on one occasion to my brother an enthusiastic letter confessing to him my passionate desire to abandon my military career and to go on the stage. I played mostly young merchants, and had so well got hold of their ways of talking and gesticulating, and tea drinking from the saucer--I knew these ways since my Nikólskoye experiences--that now I had a good opportunity to act it all out in reality for useful purposes.

‘Take your seat, Petr Alexéievich,’ Captain Buxhövden would say to me, when the boiling tea-urn, throwing out clouds of steam, was placed on the table.

‘Thank you; we may stay here’, I would reply, sitting on the edge of a chair at a distance, and beginning to drink my tea in true Moscow-merchant fashion. Buxhövden meanwhile nearly exploded with laughter as I blew upon my saucer with staring eyes, and bit off in a special way microscopic particles from a small lump of sugar which was to serve for half a dozen cups.

We knew that the Cossacks would soon make out the truth about me, but the important thing was to win a few days only, and to cross the frontier while my identity was not yet discovered. I must have played my part pretty well, as the Cossacks treated me as a small merchant. In one village an old woman beckoned me in the passage and asked me: ‘Are there more people coming behind you on the road, my dear?’ ‘None, grandmother, that we heard of.’ ‘They said a prince, Rapótsky, was going to come. Is he coming?’

‘Oh, I see. You are right, grandmother. His Highness intended to go, too, from Irkútsk. But how can he? Such a journey! Not suitable for them. So they remained where they were.’

‘Of course, how can he?’

In short, we crossed the frontier unmolested. We were eleven Cossacks, one Tungus, and myself, all on horseback. We had with us about forty horses for sale and two carts, one of which, two-wheeled, belonged to me, and contained the cloth, the velveteen, the gold braid, and so on, which I had taken in my capacity of merchant. I attended to it and to my horses entirely myself, while we chose one of the Cossacks to be the ‘elder’ of our caravan. He had to manage all the diplomatic talk with the Chinese authorities. All Cossacks spoke Mongolian, and the Tungus understood Manchurian. The Cossacks of the caravan knew, of course, who I was--one of them knew me at Irkútsk--but they never betrayed that knowledge, understanding that the success of the expedition depended upon it. I wore a long blue cotton dress, like the others, and the Chinese paid no attention to me, so that I could make, unnoticed by them, the compass survey of the route. The first day only, when all sorts of Chinese soldiers hung about us in the hope of getting a glass of whisky, I had often to cast only a furtive glance at my compass and to inscribe the bearings and the distances in my pocket, without taking my paper out. We had with us no arms whatever. Only our Tungus, who was going to marry, had taken his matchlock gun and used it to hunt for fallow deer, bringing us meat for supper, and making a provision of furs with which to pay for his future wife.