Through Siberia

My arrival.—Visit to prisons and hospitals.—Health statistics.—Siberian hospitals in general.—A Sunday service arranged.—Visits to inhabitants.—Russian customs, superstitions, and amusements.—Dancing.—Nikolaefsk town, arsenal, and commerce.—Mr. Emery.—Russian bribery.—Cost of provisions and labour.

Nikolaefsk, founded in 1853, rapidly grew into importance, but gradually waned after the removal of the “port”; and as our steamer approached on a cloudy evening, I seemed to have arrived at a very dismal and out-of-the-way part of the world. My spirits, however, had risen appreciably during the day. The perplexity in which I left Khabarofka, and my uncertainty as to how to reach San Francisco, have been alluded to; but on boarding the Onon I met Mr. Enoch Emery, an American merchant of Nikolaefsk. After almost disusing my native tongue for three weeks, I was able to speak again in English, and I now learnt that for £90 a first-class ticket might be taken from Yokohama in Japan to Euston Square in London, including food whilst traversing the two oceans, an allowance of 250 lbs. of luggage, and railway tickets for America and England. It was not so clear, however, how Japan was to be reached. The Dragon was not expected at Nikolaefsk, I heard, nor was there any regular means of getting away other than by retracing my steps to the Ussuri and Vladivostock. A Russian gunboat had been lying at the mouth of the Amur, the previous day, with provisions for Dui in Sakhalin, by which it was suggested that I might get a passage to the island, and perhaps be trans-shipped to Japan or China on some chance vessel calling for coal. But when we reached Nikolaefsk this gunboat had started a few hours before; and thus I landed—with regard to my future movements—as full of uncertainty as ever.

I had fallen, nevertheless, into good hands; for, in talking to Mr. Emery, it transpired that we had common friends in Petersburg, one of whom had spoken to me of the Amur, and would gladly have given me introductions, had I not persisted in saying that I did not intend to go so far. Mr. Emery invited me to be his guest—an invitation doubly welcome in a place where was no better hotel than a beershop, and because with him I should have the advantage of conversing in English.

Baron Stackelberg was lodged near me, and in the morning we went to the chief civil authority, M. Andreyeff, to whom I was introduced as a person desirous of information about the prisons of Sakhalin, and of a passage, if possible, to the island. To my surprise M. Andreyeff also was acquainted with some of my friends in Petersburg, and he at once promised the information; but it was uncertain, he said, when a ship would leave again with provisions.

The police-master was sent for to take me to see the prisons of the town. The police-station was the first building we entered; it contained a few rooms for temporary accommodation. In one of them were flogging instruments I had heard of at Kara and elsewhere, and had vainly inquired for more than once. I have no reason to suppose, however, they were hidden from me in other places, a lawyer having told me that the troichatka, or plète, was used only at Kara, Nikolaefsk, and Dui. What they were like shall be told hereafter. I will only say for the present they were the most terrible things of the kind I had ever seen. There was a guard-room in the station where Cossacks were sitting on the floor, eating with wooden spoons from a common saucepan, and other rooms occupied by clerks and officials. I was then taken to the town prison, containing 68 prisoners in half-a-dozen rooms. Some of the men had just come from the bath, the advantages of which were patent. But I do not recollect seeing accommodation in any of the Siberian prisons for washing the hands and face except at Tomsk, where was a sort of caldron mounted on a tripod, and from which, through four tiny pipes, water was forced, in Russian fashion, to trickle on the hands. I fancy, however, that not only with prisoners, but among the lower classes generally, minor ablutions between the weekly or fortnightly steaming of the bath are regarded more or less as supererogatory.

In the western suburb of the town was the étape, a prison in which 150 persons could be lodged on their way to Sakhalin. Detached, but not far distant, was the kitchen, in which were convicts of good behaviour, allowed the run of the town by day, though compelled to sleep in the building at night. They could thus earn money if they chose.⁠[1] Both prisons in the town were reported to the Emperor as “old, and built of bad material, wanting proper sanitary arrangements, and inconvenient for their purpose.”

A similar description would have been not far wrong of the Nikolaefsk hospitals, of which there were three—two military and one civil. In the civil hospital, partly supported by voluntary contributions, they were sadly cramped for room—so much so that, in one chamber, alongside of other patients was a boy suffering from small-pox. The chief doctor had, on his own account, opened an extra room for the blind and the infirm.⁠[2] In the hospital of the 6th East Siberian battalion were 24 beds only, whereas by law there should have been 48. Happily only five beds were occupied at the time of my visit, and the list of diseases treated in the hospital during the preceding 18 months appeared to show that the medical staff were doing their work successfully. The chief physician was a German, as are many of the doctors in Russia, and he took great pains to acquaint me with all I wished to know.⁠[3] I found some large hospitals for the navy at Vladivostock, with 108 patients at the time of my visit; but the hospital that pleased me most in the province, not to say in all Siberia, was that at Khabarofka, built on the newest principles, and leaving nothing to be desired.⁠[4]

They have in the Sea-coast province no madhouses, properly so called; but lunatics are treated in a ward of the Nikolaefsk hospital. Of eight cases during 1878, four recovered, two remained, and two died. Besides these hospitals I have named, there is in the province one each at Petropavlovsk, Ghijiga, and Okhotsk. Looking at the Siberian hospitals with an unprofessional eye, I may say that they struck me as fairly good. I have twice met Englishmen in Russian hospitals,—one at Archangel, and the other in the Urals,—and they both said they had every attention. The hospitals of the country are supported by the Government, by the army, navy, and civil departments respectively. None are supported entirely by voluntary contributions. Government servants, being poor, pay nothing. Civilians pay, and one of the good features of the Russian hospitals is that persons of the middle classes may enter, and by a small extra payment receive medical attendance and superior accommodation.⁠[5] The Siberian towns seemed fairly well supplied with medical men; but it was rather appalling on the Ussuri to hear from a telegraph official that he had no medical man within 200 miles to the south, and 300 to the north.⁠[6]

My coming to Nikolaefsk did not long remain unknown, for it was suggested that on the Sunday I should conduct a service, there being no resident Protestant minister, though they had a Roman chapel in the town. The pro-Governor, Mr. Andreyeff, readily gave his sanction, offered his house for a place of meeting, and sent round by the police a notice requesting all to sign who purposed to attend. More than 30 signed, and before Sunday several called on me. I was invited to a dinner on my first Friday in Nikolaefsk. It happened to be the birthday of Mr. Schenk, the worthy manager of the principal store. The shop was closed, and his friends called in the morning to felicitate him, and to drink and eat nick-nacks from a sideboard. In the evening a capital dinner was served with asparagus and preserved fruits, which it was hard to realize we were eating in one of the most dreary parts of Siberia, where they have seven months’ winter, and where the navigation does not open till the end of May. Several at table spoke English, and near me sat a merchant who had lived in the Sandwich Islands and in Kamchatka. Mr. Emery the same week had a party to lunch; and Mr. Andreyeff gave a dinner in his garden to some of my fellow-passengers, myself, and the military commandant. The dinner began with “schnapps,” and among the dishes was a salmon pie, with rice on the top, the dinner ending with cream and wild raspberries, of which last there were bushels growing outside the town.

I made the acquaintance also of some of the naval officers, such as the captain of the Ermak, to whom I gave books for his men, and Lieutenant Wechman, the captain of the port. The latter was a Protestant, who invited me on the second Sunday to hold the service in his house, which I did, and sent books for the barracks of the men under his command. These social occasions gave me opportunities to see something of Russians at home, their customs, superstitions, and amusements. Tea was usually offered whenever a call was made; and as lemons were not to be had so far away in summer, a spoonful of jam was often put in the glass instead. They have a custom in Russia of addressing friends, or those to whom they wish to be polite, by their Christian name plus their patronymic, or Christian name of their father, which in the case of Mr. Emery sounded odd to me to hear a lady ask, “Enoch, son of Simeon, may I give you a glass of tea?”⁠[7]

Among the superstitions of the Russians may be mentioned the not liking to begin a journey on a Monday. The Governor-General of Western Siberia told me he usually chose that day expressly, in order to avoid the crowd of fellow-passengers. Nor do they like to take edge-tools from another person’s hand, nor to pass the salt, or, if it be done, the person who receives must smile blandly to break the spell. Again, when a man is starting upon some special business, he thinks it very unlucky if the first person he meets in the street should be a priest; and if the eyes of one dying are not closed by a friend, it is imagined that there will soon be another death in the family.

The Russians struck me as a people exceedingly ill-provided with manly amusements. They have nothing to correspond to our cricket, boating, or football. Their young men seem incapable of rising to any greater exertion of mind or body than that demanded for billiards, cards, drinking, and smoking. I saw some soldiers, however, playing with a large, heavy steel pin, like a tenpenny nail with a heavy head.⁠[8] An outdoor game played by girls is called “skaka” (to jump), something like the English game of see-saw, only that the two parties do not sit but stand on the plank, which is only some four feet long, and is jumped upon with sufficient force that when one person reaches the ground the other springs into the air, and so on alternately. Swings, too, are in great demand at fairs and such gatherings. I was treated to one on the Sukhona, suspended from a cross-beam not less, I should judge, than 40 feet high.

Dancing is one of the most popular of indoor amusements, and I had a good opportunity of witnessing the peasants’ performance of it at Mikhailofsky; for on the evening of our enforced stay a soirée was extemporized. The dancers were the young men and girls of the village, dressed in their heavy boots and cotton gowns, but washed and brushed up for the occasion. The manner in which the girls sat in a row at the commencement, and the men hung together in an outer room, struck me very much like a piece of human nature which is seen all the world over. The music consisted of a fiddle, accordion, and tiny bells; and in the first dance, two youths having nodded condescendingly to partners, the four stood up and figured before us, one feature of the dance being that the men from time to time stamped heavily with their feet.⁠[9] At an early stage of the proceedings cigarettes were handed round, and men, girls, and old women all began to smoke—a sure sign that they were not Starovers, or Old Believers, for they turn out their sons if they smoke, and call them “pogani,” or “nasty,”—the practice having been introduced into some parts of Siberia, I was told, within the last quarter of a century.⁠[10] After dance No. 3, which was by four girls only, two plates were handed round—one of sweets, the other of cedar nuts. The latter, from the monotonous gaps they so often fill at parties, are called by a word which means “Siberian conversation.” Other refreshments followed in the shape of black bread and cucumbers, the whole affair looking very formal and solemn; but I am not sure whether this was normal, or whether the peasants were overawed by the strange company. I heard that at Nikolaefsk, in winter, they have frequent balls at the club, but in the summer the evenings are given to the promenade.

At this time of day I usually took my constitutional, and searched about into every hole and corner of the town. Its population stands in the Almanack at 5,350, which probably was right some years ago, but it was estimated to me as having decreased to 3,500. The houses extend a mile and a half along the left bank of the river on a wooded plateau about fifty feet high. The landing-place is available only for small craft. Larger vessels lie in the middle of the river, and there is a wooden pier from which stairs lead to the plateau. The visitor is then opposite the church, built of wood, having one large cupola and four small ones. Behind the church stands what was the “Admiralty,” but is now the police-station, having a flagstaff with semaphore for signalling vessels in the harbour. To the west of the church is the officers’ club, and a few minutes’ walk to the east is situated the admiral’s house, the palace of the town, having around it a few flowers struggling for existence. In 1866 Mr. Knox found at Nikolaefsk machine-shops, foundries, and dockyard, into which last I wandered one evening, and thought of the time when nations are to learn war no more; for whereas there had been 800 men employed in the place a dozen years before, I found it covered with weeds, the workshops closed, and rusty iron lying about in all directions. Here and there were heaps of bombshells and cannon-balls, with a few grape-shot. Except the sentinel at the entrance, I met not a soul in the place, from which the glory had plainly departed. So it was, in fact, with the town generally. The boarded pavements are fast rotting, and allow the unwary foot-passenger to step through into the drains. There is sufficient grass in the streets for cows to graze, and pigs are occasionally seen there looking about for food. The Governor’s house is falling into decay, and its grand rooms are looking and smelling dusty, musty, and old. Again, the buildings erected for the higher Government officials are inhabited by smaller and feebler folk, and some of the shops are closed.

Nikolaefsk, nevertheless, from its position at the mouth of a river which is navigable so far into Asia, will probably continue its present commercial standing.⁠[11]

There was a medical officer at Nikolaefsk, whose duty it was to examine the articles sold for food, and who during my stay lodged a complaint against a merchant for selling damaged flour, although he sold it as such, and at a reduced price. I heard Russia and Siberia spoken of as a country where capital can be placed out to great advantage. One merchant said he could easily get 6 per cent. for his money in Russia, on security which he deemed satisfactory. I have quoted in an earlier chapter the 30 or 40 per cent. given for capital at the gold-mines, and one man I met told me that in Western Siberia he made as much as 100 per cent. on a considerable portion of his capital.

My host, Mr. Emery, had come to the Amur as a boy, and began at the bottom of the ladder; but at the age of 20 he was able to count his gains by thousands. He was but 27 when we met, but was looking forward in a year or two to retire.⁠[12]

One of the drawbacks to honest trading in Russia is the bribery which officials expect when purchasing Government supplies. An instance of bribery practised on the rivers was described to me thus: A shipping agent, for example, carries 5,000 poods of freight, for which the sender pays him at a certain rate for Government duty. At the custom-house the agent makes out his bill as having only one-tenth the real freight, and gives ten roubles each to the officers, who make out a false bill to correspond with his own. It is then signed by the head official, who receives no bribe on the spot, but occasionally drives to the agent’s office, says that he is short of money, and asks for the loan of 300 roubles or more. The agent “lends” them, not dreaming, however, to see them again. At the end of the year the agent finds himself several thousands of roubles in pocket, the higher official drives his carriage on a surprisingly small stipend, and the lower officials, having been put into their office by the higher, do not even ask for their salary, and yet manage to live in houses of their own procuring.⁠[13]

Again, gambling and drunkenness are two principal snares besetting foreign traders in Siberia, whose time in winter hangs heavily, and where, in seaport towns, officers and large consumers expect to be frequently fêted and invited to drink. Immorality is the third snare, which leads many astray who are removed from the restraints of home, and who otherwise hold their heads above gambling and insobriety.

The trade customs of Nikolaefsk were, in some respects, superior to those in the interior,—due, no doubt, to the influence of the Germans and Americans. In the bazaars of Petersburg one has to bargain for everything. A shopman asked me, for instance, 10s. for a box, for which he afterwards “touted” to me, and took 7s. At Nikolaefsk business is done at fixed prices, and I was glad to find that, though compelled to close their stores for many hours on the greater Russian festivals, the foreign merchants, for the most part, did not open at all on Sunday.

The weather during my stay on the Lower Amur was chilly and disagreeable, and the season for garden produce was about a fortnight late. On August 19th we ate new potatoes. They cost 2½d. per lb., but eight days later they cost but 1d. per lb. Cucumbers were ready on the 10th of August, and on the 27th they were selling for 3s. per hundred. Eggs cost 5s. per hundred, fresh butter 2s. 3d. per pound, and beef from 7d. to 8½d. On August 27th we had our first spring cabbage made into little pies and eaten with soup. The price of these cabbages, to a “friend,” was 5d. each, but they were expected shortly to fall to 16s. or 20s. per hundred. I do not remember tasting mutton, but was informed that a good sheep weighs about half a cwt., and costs alive, at Nikolaefsk, from 22s. to 30s.

In Western Siberia, about Tomsk, a sheep can be bought for 2s. I am told that Russians in general abhor mutton, and my informant’s housekeeper wonders the English can eat it, for she would as willingly eat cat, dog, or rat as such “garbage.” Game and fish were surprisingly plentiful. I bought in the streets at Nikolaefsk a capercailzie (called glukhar, or deaf bird) for 10d., which was thought by no means cheap; and a blackcock was offered for a similar price. The cost of salmon, however, was most surprising. Up to the 20th August, salmon trout, weighing from 10 to 12 lbs., cost as much as 5d. each, but they were then said to be dear. On the 15th August a large salmon, the first fish of the season, and weighing perhaps 15 lbs., was offered to me for 7½d., but this was considered quite “a fancy price.” From the 1st September to the 17th, during which period the large fish are caught, weighing from 15 lbs. to 25 lbs., they may be bought for 10s. per hundred, or 1d. each!⁠[14]

I was fortunate in finding at Nikolaefsk some English books, and among them the travels of Collins, Knox, and Ravenstein, on the Amur. The reading of these occupied much of my time, and I sometimes wandered down to the river-side—especially in the morning—to the pier, to watch the Gilyaks sell their fish.⁠[15] Moored alongside the pier were some lighters of English build, which were failures for the particular purpose for which they had been constructed, though they made admirable landing-places. There were also several barges converted into floating shops, one of which was the property of a Frenchman, who had been a tutor in England. He dealt largely with the Gilyaks, and offered me a live eagle, obtained from them, for 6s.; a fish-skin coat for 8s., and a tiger’s skin for £3 10s. For bear-skins he asked from 10s. upwards, whereas in Krasnoiarsk they sell from 10s. down to 3s. each.

Thus passed by my enforced stay at Nikolaefsk, and, after trying in vain to get a passage to Japan, I determined to retrace my steps by the post-boat, which I started to do on Saturday, 30th of August. Before proceeding southwards, however, I must give some account, in the next two chapters, of what I have been able to learn concerning Kamchatka and the island of Sakhalin.