THE REAL SIBERIA
John Foster Fraser
A Franco-Russian Rejoicing - To Khabarovsk on the De Witte - Agriculture in the Amur Region - The Siberian Pig - The Fur Trade - My American Companion - His Tall Tales - Khabarovsk
AT Blagovestchensk I stayed five days, and made the acquaintance of many Russians. They were hospitality itself. Everything was done to make the visitor have what is called "a good time."
But I could not fail noticing an absence of those cosy comforts which go so much towards making an English home pleasant. There was little taste shown anywhere. If a man was wealthy he let it be known by gold and blue ornamentations and by his wife wearing a gown of blue plush.
A boat from down river brought to the town two French officers among its passengers. They wore on their way from Pekin to Paris - a couple of typical Gauls, young, with pointed black boards, quite "à la Français. They wore uniforms, and uniformed French officers had never been in Blagovestchensk before. The town is full of military, and therefore the appearance of these gentlemen in baggy red pantaloons created as much sensation as though the entire French army had honoured the town with a visit.
On the day I left the Russian officers gave the two French officers a luncheon.
A boat had also come down river from Streitinsk, and at the hotel table I spied a bright-eyed, alert little fellow. He spied me also.
"Hello," he cried, "guess you're a Britisher. I'm an American from San Francisco. I'm in the commission line, and been working hard for nine years and never gave way. Had to take a holiday; so thought I'd just run over to Europe and through Siberia and home. No, I didn't go to London or Paris; went straight to Hamburg, then two days in Berlin, two in Petersburg, and half a day in Moscow. Wonderful country Siberia! Only know one word of Russian; but I've done business - yes, enough to pay cost of my trip. Now, what's your line?"
We fraternised. America and Great Britain had a bond in common, for just then Russia and France were in each other's arms. Russian hospitality ran riot in honour of those two young French officers. It filled them with vodki, caviare, silted roes, onions, and tomatoes - just to raise an appetite. Then they fed. There were fifteen courses.
The American and I had a dispute whether there were twenty-three or only eighteen separate toasts. Russian officers sprang to their feet, were voluble in bad French, every wine-glass was overspilt with champagne, "Vive la France !" was yelled, and a regimental band stationed outside struck up the "Marseillaise."
Somebody produced a tricolour flag and the shouting was glorious.
They started eating again. Once again up bounced a big and burly Russian, with orders all over him, holding a glass of champagne and trickling it down his tunic as he splashed a speech of convivial French and Russian, all mixed. More yells of "Vive la France!" more banging of the "Marseillaise," more waving of the tricolour, more champagne - a great deal more.
"Say," remarked the American to me, "I'd give ten dollars to have the Stars and Stripes waving here just now. How do you feel?"
"Well, I think I'd prefer the Union Jack."
"Now, if I could only speak Russian I'd go out and buy that band, and make it play 'Yankee Doodle.' How do you feel?"
"Well, were I man of wealth I think I'd choose 'God save the King' or perhaps 'Rule Britannia.' I feel very Rule Britannia-ish listening to all that talk about Russia and France licking the world."
"Here's to old England!" said the American, raising his glass.
"And here's to the bald-headed eagle!" said I, raising mine.
After more speeches and more champagne, and more vivas, and more band playing, and then more champagne again, our warriors got sentimental. They put their arms round one another's necks and kissed each other.
That made me laugh and my now friend swear. He swore what he would do if any drunken Russian attempted to kiss him.
Then the Russians took the Frenchmen's hats and donned them, and put the Russian caps on French heads, which was rather ridiculous, for the caps were big and the French heads small. But two French caps would not go round a company of fifty officers. The next move was to swap epaulettes. Still there were many unsatisfied. "Leave us a button, anyway!" was next the cry, and instantly those Frenchmen wore attacked with knives, and buttons were hacked from them.
The Frenchmen were as lambs. They looked with glassy eyes at their entertainers, and we came away, for we shuddered at their ultimate sartorial fate.
On the steamer De Witte, called after the Russian Minister of Finance, I journeyed down the Amur from Blagovestchensk to Khabarovsk.
Besides the usual crowd of officers and ordinary Russians, there was my American friend, another American, an engineer looking for openings for American machinery, a German engaged in starting stores for a Hamburg firm, a young Austrian sent out by the Vienna Chamber of Commerce to report on trade possibilities, two Frenchmen and their wives, and myself, the solitary Britisher.
Broad and majestic swept the Amur southwards. At first great plains stretched on either side, while tufts of distant trees on the right marked where wore a few huddled huts constituting a Manchurian village.
At dusk, that first evening out of Blagovestchensk, Thursday, September 26th, we halted for an hour at Aigun, or rather all that remains of Aigun. Fifteen months ago it was a thriving Chinese city, the largest in Manchuria. But at the Boxer rising it poured its soldiers along the bank to the big Russian town. Terrible was the Russian revenge. The Chinese fled to the interior; the few that remained were put to the sword, and the city was reduced to a mass of ashes and gaunt charred walls.
A few Cossack soldiers wore moving about the banks with lamps, but others were standing on the shore front with fixed bayonets to drive back any of us who might show an exploring inquisitiveness.
Later on we came to mountains. The frosty nights that were now setting in had nipped the leaves from the trees. So no longer were the hills garmented in gorgeous hues. They were stern and solemn. The river Hingan joined the main stream, and then the pace between the jaws of lofty rocks was that of a torrent.
Beautifully blue was the Amur. At one place there was no indication we were on a river. For a day we seemed to be sailing over a gigantic still-faced inland sea, dotted with a thousand isles.
All down the Russian side we were constantly passing settlements of Cossacks, the semi-barbarous, fearless bandits of the Don regions, that Russia has turned into capital soldiers.
Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the Cossacks were first sent over the Urals, these men have set their mark on this territory. Yet after the first thirst for empire extension Russia left the Amur region alone, and it is only comparatively recently that the spirit has broken forth again. As Russia has advanced, China his retired. Every fresh treaty has widened the frontiers of Russia. I am a young man, and yet it has been within my lifetime that the Muscovites have set about the colonisation of the Amur region. It was in 1869 that a body of two hundred Russians first squatted on the banks of the river intent on farming.
Excellent and picturesque as the country looks, the Amur region is not likely to ever do much in agriculture. The winter lasts eight months, and it soaked in salt water. The cows are small and lean, have udders covered with hair, and the nipples are quite undeveloped, so that the milk obtained is infinitesimal. This is the result of the settlers having crossed the cows first sent out to them from Russia with the Manchurian cows, which are never milked.
The proportion of pigs to the population is at least three to one. If the pig doesn't exactly pay the rent in Siberia, he provides practically the only fresh food the people have. But he is a disreputable rascal compared with the fat, wallowing, clear-skinned, panting old porker at home - as thin as a rail, mouse-coloured, all bristles, and goes grubbing for his food in the most offensive quarters.
Away in the interior are little settlements of gold diggers, winning quantities of the metal, leading riotous lives and making for the town when the winter sets in and digging becomes impossible.
The thing, however, out of which the inhabitants - immigrant Russians and the Mongolian tribes, with squat noses and high cheekbones and slender wrists and ankles - scratch an existence is hunting. Several of the big Moscow fur firms have travellers continuously going about this district, buying the skins of sable, fox, squirrel, wolf, and indeed all fur-providing animals. With the money so earned the folks of the Amur are able to purchase a little wheat and tea, and so with the aid of the hardy swine they exist - a life which the Western European cannot understand.
We were quite a friendly party on the steamer carrying us to Khabarovsk. There was singing and card-playing and general steamboat agreeableness.
There was an iron-haired, smart-set old Russian officer, who was full of good stories of the expeditions in which he had taken part for the conquest of the Amur when he was a young man. He chuckled with glee narrating how the needy officers got the best of the poor natives by using labels of champagne bottles, or the pictures off boxes of chocolates, as "All the same as ten-rouble notes."
The weather was delicious, the sky wonderfully blue, the air genial in the middle of the day, but at night with a bite of frost in it. Then the moon, seeming larger than we sight it in old England, hung like a great silver lantern in the high south, and the steamer followed its quivering reflection down river as though it were the appointed trail.
Remarked my San Francisco acquaintance one day: "Say, I guess you're laying it down pretty thick in the newspaper articles you're writing about adventures in Siberia ?"
"No," I answered, "I can't say I am. Im telling the approximate truth - just one's impressions in going through Siberia."
"Why, h-l" If an American newspaper man didn't send home some good stories about fights with Cossacks and shooting boars, and being arrested as a spy, and about nearly dying in the snow, he'd be thought nothing of. See here!"
He showed me a great sheepskin-lined coat, unwrapped a bashlik to wrap about the head, produced great wool feet coverings and general Arctic gear.
"That's my Siberian outfit!" said he. "I'll have to dirty them a bit just to make them look real, for I've never worn them. Why, if I went back to San Francisco and told them how I just wore my ordinary summer clothes, and that the cars in Siberia were as good as those of the Southern Pacific, and that these boats are just first-rate, where you can get champagne and all the delicacies, do you think they'd believe me? No; they would put me down as a gor-darned liar. They think I'm in the country where snow and ice are made, and they'll want me to tell 'em things. And I'll tell 'em! Oh, h-l, but I've got some good stories. You see, there's that ride my mate and I and you had on the prairie when we had to cat our candles for food! You know the driver was so cold that we had to hit him to prevent him closing his eyelids, which would freeze together! Then there's the raft journey; how we were sweeping down the great Amur river when the Chinese opened fire on us from the Manchurian side, and how we had to get under the raft with just our mouths above the water and so float down till we got out of reach! Here's my revolver! The time I used that was when I was arrested because the Russians thought I wanted to steal a bit of their Siberia, and I kept off sixteen Cossacks when they wanted to put me in chains."
"And your friends will like that sort of talk?" I ventured.
"Like it? Why, it's the only thing they'll believe. You know, they thought I was going to certain death in coming to Siberia. When I get back to 'Frisco I'll not go up to my house. I'll register at the Palace Hotel. The clerks'll ring up the newspapers and say,' - has just come back from Siberia.' Then the newspaper men will come along. H-l! do you think they'd put a line down if I told them I'd never seen a bit of snow, never saw a prisoner, that it's a wonderful country for cattle rearing and wheat-growing, that it's just like stretches of our own country? No; a man who has been to Siberia is a great traveller in America, and if don't play the part he's pretty slow or else he's a liar. And you're just telling exactly what Siberia is like - and you a newspaper man!"
"Yes, as well as I can."
"Well, you're a wonder. You may be all right for England, but American newspapers don't pay men for that. They want a good story."
Now, none of us on the steamer developed much admiration for our captain. He was the greatest sluggard that ever sat on deck, for he was usually in a chair smoking cigarettes - when he was not in his cabin sleeping. When he slept the boat was hitched to the bank, and Chinese coolies were leisurely trotting on board with logs of wood for fuel.
We went ashore, walked among the long withered grass, startled wild fowl, came back, found the wood all on board, and the captain still asleep.
Some of us were anxious to get on, but when we mildly remonstrated he gave us a "Nitchevo!" - what did it matter when or how we arrived at Khabarovsk, he would be there within the broad- margined time allowed for the delivery of the mails.
He evidently planned to land us a couple of hours before he reached the limit of his post time. But as luck would have it, just when we were within thirty miles of our destination, and had packed our baggage and were ready to go ashore, clouds of smoke came rolling up the river. The adjoining forests were on fire, billowing the heavens with dun smoke.
So, in late afternoon, we tied up to the Manchurian side, and stayed there till eight next morning, when the wind veered, and we could go on. We arrived nearly a day late, and all of us, Russians and foreigners alike, much disposed to lynch the captain. He drew up a long protocol stating that the delay was due to no fault of his, so he might escape the fine for late delivery of the mails. He wanted us to sign it. We said we would see him hanged first.
Khabarovsk is magnificently situated. Look at the map, and you will see how it is just where the Ussuri river joins the Amur, which stretches off to the north and tumbles into the Pacific. The town, divided by deep ravines, is connected with long rows of stairs, whilst on each ridge runs a main street, with the branch streets tumbling down the mounds, so that the place almost looks like three towns tacked together.
Its importance, however, is purely administrative. There are huge public buildings of red brick, and overlooking the river are barracks. The Russian population is but a handful, and every Russian man is an official of some sort, and uniformed.
Most of the stores are kept by Chinamen, and five out of six people I met in the broad, wind-swept streets were Chinamen - not fine, broad-faced men, as I have seen in the interior of China itself, but crowds of weak, withered-faced, slouching men, who slunk on one side when a Russian came along.
Also there were many Koreans, slim, gentle-looking, sallow-skinned, slit-eyed, with scraggy tufts of thin hair on the chins for beard, but all having a certain picturesqueness in their white bunched-up garb, and singular hats, black, and in shape not unlike those you see worn by countrymen in out-of-the-way corners of Wales. There are hardly any women in Khabarovsk; indeed, the official census of last year put down the proportion as eleven men to every woman.
High over the river is the residence of the governor-general, a first-rate museum, chiefly filled with loot as the result of the Chinese disturbances - robes and cannon, carts and coffins, and also a library with some forty thousand books. Public gardens, with nothing in the way of flowers, but pleasant paths, nicely shaded, adorn the slope overlooking the Amur.
There was the broad, steel-breasted river below, with slim Chinese dug-outs floating on the current. A little to the left clustered half a dozen white-painted steamers, lying silent. Ahead and to the right curved the Amur, down which I had journeyed a thousand miles, and in the far distance the purple hills of Manchuria.
On the topmost height of Khabarovsk, standing on a granite pedestal and surrounded by cannon, is the bronze statue of Count Muravieff, the man who won Eastern Siberia for Russia. He completed the work begun centuries back by Yermak, the Volga pirate. The march of empire had been eastwards for Russia.
It was Muravieff who saw the dream of the Muscovite turned into a reality. He founded Vladivostok and gave Russia a port on the Pacific. His statue now overlooks the great region of the Amur and Russians as they pass take off their hats.
Chapter XIV: The Land's End of Siberia
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