Chapter XVIII
At daylight on the morning after leaving Igoon, we were passing the mouth of the Zeya, a river half a mile wide, flowing with a strong current. It was along this river that the first white men who saw the Amoor found their way. It is said to be practicable for steam navigation three or four hundred miles from its mouth. At present four or five thousand peasants are settled along the Zeya, with excellent agricultural prospects. As I came on deck rubbing my half-opened eyes, I saw a well-built town on the Russian shore.
“Blagoveshchensk,” said the steward, as he waved his arm in that direction.
I well knew that the capital of the Province of the Amoor was just above the mouth of the Zeya. It stands on a prairie fifteen or twenty feet above the river, and when approached from the south its appearance is pleasing. The houses are large and well built, and each has plenty of space around it. Some of them have flower gardens in front, and a public park was well advanced toward completion at the time of my arrival.
A wharf extended into the river at an angle of forty degrees with the shore. The steamer Korsackoff was moored at this wharf, with a barge nearly her own size. The Ingodah tied to the bank just below the wharf, and was welcomed by the usual crowd of soldiers and citizens, with a fair number of Manjours from the other bank.
On landing, I called upon Colonel Pedeshenk, the governor of the Province, and delivered my letters of introduction. The Colonel invited me to dine with him that day, and stated that several officers of his command would be present. After this visit and a few others, I went with Captain Borasdine to attend the funeral of the late Major General Bussy. This gentleman was five years governor of the Province of the Amoor, and resigned in 1866 on account of ill-health. He died on his way to St. Petersburg, and the news of his death reached Blagoveshchensk three days before my arrival. I happened to reach the town on the morning appointed for the funeral service.
The church was crowded, everybody standing, according to the custom prevailing in Russia. Colonel Pedeshenk and his officers were in full uniform, and almost all present held lighted candles. Five or six priests, with an Archbishop, conducted the ceremonies. The services consisted of a ritual, read and intoned by the priests, with chanting by the choir of male voices. The Archbishop was in full robes belonging to his position, and his long gray beard and reverend face gave him a patriarchal appearance. When the ceremony was finished the congregation opened to the right and left to permit the governor and officers to pass out first. From beginning to end the service lasted about an hour.
Colonel Pedeshenk had been governor but a few months, and awaited confirmation in his position. Having served long on the staff of General Bussy, he was disposed to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor and carry out his plans for developing the resources of his district.
At the appointed hour I went to dine at the governor’s, where I found eight or ten officers and the young wife of Colonel Pedeshenk. We spent a half-hour on the balcony, where there was a charming view of the river and the Chinese shore with its background of mountains. The governor’s house was more like a mansion in a venerable town than in a settlement less than ten years old. The reception hall would have made a good ball-room anywhere out of the large cities.
The charming young madame did not speak English but was fluent in French. She was from Irkutsk, and had spent several years in the schools and society of St. Petersburg. She had many reminiscences of the capital, and declared herself delighted with her home on the Amoor. After dinner we retired to the balcony for prosaic tea drinking and a poetical study of the glories of an autumn sunset behind the hills of Manjouria.
There was no hotel in the town, and I had wondered where I should lodge. Before I had been half an hour on shore, I was invited by Dr. Snider, the surgeon in chief of the province, to make my home at his house. The doctor spoke English fluently, and told me he learned it from a young American at Ayan several years before. He was ten years in government service at Ayan, and met there many of my countrymen. Once he contemplated emigrating to New Bedford at the urgent solicitation of a whaling captain who frequently came to the Ohotsk sea.
Dr. Snider was from the German provinces of Russia, and his wife, a sister of Admiral Fulyelm, was born in Sweden. They usually conversed in German but addressed their children in Russian. They had a Swedish housemaid who spoke her own language in the family and only used Russian when she could not do otherwise. Madame Snider told me her children spoke Swedish and Russian with ease, and understood German very well. They intended having a French or English governess in course of time.
“I speak,” said the doctor, “German with my wife, Swedish to the housemaid, Russian to my other servants, French with some of the officers, English with occasional travelers, and a little Chinese and Manjour with the natives over the river.”
Blagoveshchensk has a pretty situation, and I should greatly prefer it to Nicolayevsk for permanent habitation. In the middle of the Amoor valley and at the mouth of the Zeya, its commercial advantages are good and its importance increases every year. It was founded in 1858 by General Mouravieff, but did not receive any population worthy of mention until after the treaty of Igoon in 1860. The government buildings are large and well constructed, logs being the material in almost universal use for making walls. A large unfinished house for the telegraph was pointed out to me, and several warehouses were in process of erection.
Late one afternoon the captain of the steamer Korsackoff invited me to visit Sakhalin-Oula-Hotun (city of the black river) on the opposite shore. Though called a city it cannot justly claim more than two thousand inhabitants. There was a crowd on the bank similar to the one at Igoon, most of the women and girls standing with their arms folded in their sleeves. Several were seated close to the water and met the same misfortune as those in similar positions at Igoon. The Korsackoff made a much greater swell than the Ingodah, and those who caught its effects were well moistened. We landed from, the steamer’s boat and ascended the bank to the village. Several fat old Manjours eyed us closely and answered with great brevity our various questions.
Sakhalin-Oula stretches more than a mile along the bank, but extends only a few rods back from the river. Practically it consists of a single street, which is quite narrow in several places. The houses are like those of Igoon, with frames of logs and coverings of boards, or with log walls plastered with mud. The windows of stores and dwellings are of lattice work covered with oiled paper, glass being rarely used.
The roofs of the buildings were covered with thatch of wheat straw several inches thick, that must offer excellent facilities for taking fire. Probably the character of this thatch accounts for the chimneys rising ten or fifteen feet from, the buildings. I saw several men arranging one of these roofs. On a foundation of poles they laid bundles of straw, overlapping them as we overlap shingles, and cutting the boards to allow the straw to spread evenly. This kind of covering must be renewed every two or three years. Several thatches were very much decayed, and in one of them there was a fair growth of grass. The village was embowered in trees in contrast to the Russian shore where the only trees were those in the park. I endeavored to ascertain the cause of this difference, but could not. The Russians said there was often a variation of three or four degrees in the temperature of the two banks, the Chinese one being the milder. Timber for both Chinese and Russian use is cut in the forests up the Amoor and rafted down.
Sakhalin-Oula abounded in vegetable gardens, which supplied the market of Blagoveshchensk. The number of shops both there and at Igoon led me to consider the Manjours a population of shop-keepers. Dr. Snider said they brought him everything for ordinary table use, and would contract to furnish at less than the regular price, any article sold by the Russian merchants. In their enterprise and mode of dealing they were much like the Jews of Europe and America, which may account for their being called Manjours. Once a month during the full moon they come to Blagoveshchensk and open a fair, which continues seven days. They sell flour, buckwheat, beans, poultry, eggs, vegetables, and other edible articles. The Russians usually purchase a month’s supply at these times, but when they wish anything out of the fair season the Manjours are ready to furnish it.
We walked along a narrow street, less muddy than the streets of Igoon, and passed several cattle yards enclosed with high fences, like California corrals. In one yard there were cattle and horses, so densely packed that they could not kick freely. Groups of natives stared at us while smoking their little pipes, and doubtless wondered why we came there. Several eyed me closely and asked my companions who and what I could be. The explanation that I was American conveyed no information, as very few of them ever heard of the land of the free and the former home of the slave.
One large building with a yard in front and an inscription over its gate was pointed out as a government office. Several employees of the Emperor of China were standing at the gateway, all smoking and enjoying the evening air. At a hitching post outside the gate there were three saddled horses of a breed not unlike the ‘Canadian.’ The saddles would be uncomfortable to an American, cavalry officer, though not so to a Camanche Indian. According to my recollection of our equestrian savage I think his saddle is not much unlike the Mongolians’.
Beyond this establishment we entered a yard in front of a new and well-built house. Near the door was the traveling carriage of the governor of Igoon, who had arrived only an hour or two before. The carriage was a two-wheeled affair, not long enough to permit one to lie at full length nor high enough to sit bolt upright. It had no springs, the frame resting fairly on the axles. The top was rounded like that of a butcher’s cart and the sides were curtained with blue cloth that had little windows or peep-holes. I looked behind the curtain and saw that the sides and bottom were cushioned to diminish the effect of jolting. Two or three small pillows, round and hard, evidently served to fill vacancies and wedge the occupant in his place.