Chapter 10

VILKOFF

This official was the most astonished man ever seen; his eyes fairly started out of their orbits; he looked first at us, then at the canoes, and then at the Stars and Stripes and Union-jack flying from the masts, but seemed too much dazed to utter a word. At last he opened his mouth and asked, with a tremor in his speech:

“Why are you landing here?”

“The wind is so heavy we can’t go on,” we replied.

“What’s your business?”

We explained to the best of our ability, not forgetting tomention the profession of civil engineer we had adopted up the river.

“But you had better not land here!” he urged.

“We must land; we can’t go on until the wind drops.”

“You certainly can’t stay here, for there is no hotel, and you won’t be able to get anything to eat.”

“We don’t want a hotel and we have food in our boats.”

“What did you come here for?”

We explained again that we were travelling to see the country.

“There is nothing to see here, and you had better not stop.”

“But,” we insisted, becoming a little weary of his obstinate and stupid repetitions, “we can’t possibly go on until the wind moderates, and, furthermore, we don’t propose to try. Here are our passports,viséedby the representative of his Imperial Majesty, the Czar.”

The sight of two large documents, quite unlike anything called passports he had ever before seen, only added to his distress, and he looked at them with much the expression of a man who sees the warrant for his arrest in the hands of a sheriff. At this juncture two young men came up, introduced themselves to us as fish merchants of the place, interceded in our behalf, and succeeded in calming the old man’s excitement so that he looked at theviséson our passports and told us to come ashore. After further discussion he consented to register and stamp our papers, but refused to give them back to us, saying we could have them again when we went away. All the arguments we could invent were eloquently used in the hope of persuading him to permit us to land our sketching materials, and our two young allies, who had been educated in Odessa and understood our position, joined their voices to ours, but all in vain. Not an article must be removed from the canoes—not even

FISHING STATION ON THE BLACK SEA

a sketch-book—and, furthermore, we must promise not to sketch anything before we would be allowed to go into the village. Seeing the place even with this restriction was better than dangling our heels from the edge of the quay all the afternoon, and we accepted the invitation of one of the fish merchants to drink tea with him, and strolled off into the village.

The houses are low and solidly built, and most of them have one peculiar feature—a row of columns in front, supporting a projection of the roof. They stand closely together along straight thoroughfares which are little better than canals of mud, being only a few inches above the level of the river. The foundations of the houses are raised a foot or two above these sloughs, and roughly-hewn plank sidewalks, supported by piles, extend everywhere in front of the buildings, even into the narrow side alleys where fishermen’s huts are huddled together in the marsh among reeds and willows. Two great white churches, enclosed by neat palings, occupy the middle of wide, neglected squares, and look bleak and bare and uninviting. The house we visited was of one story, but long and deep, and was comfortably, even luxuriously, furnished. The drawing-room, where we took unlimited tea and sweets, after the Russian custom, might have been in Vienna or Bucharest, with its parquet floor and ornate furniture.

The young merchants, who frankly told us they were Hebrews, although their type of face did not betray this fact, gave us detailed information about the village, the life there, the character of the people, and the extent of the fish business. From them we learned that Vilkoff counts about 4000 inhabitants, of whom at least 1500 follow the hazardous occupation of fishing for sturgeon in the Black Sea. Five merchants, all of them Jews, divide the trade in fish and caviar between them, and practically own the place andalso the people, body and soul. Each trader has his contingent of 300 or more fishermen, whom he supplies with their outfit, all the necessities of life and unlimited vodki, all on the credit system, and takes as payment the entire product of their toil. The natural consequence of this system is that the poor wretches of fishermen are always deeply in debt to the merchants, and pass their whole lives in as degrading a state of slavery as ever was endured by man. The only relief they have from the tyranny of their masters and the hardships of the occupation they follow is all too frequent indulgence in the oblivion of inebriety. Our hosts did not think there was anything extraordinary in our experience with the Custom-house officials, and seemed to think that, considering the fact that no stranger had ever landed at Vilkoff within their memory, we had got on very well there. One of them related an incident which perfectly illustrates the unreasonable severity of the customs regulations as they are carried out in this part of the Danube. On one occasion he came down from Kilia with a lotka loaded with fishermen’s supplies and was detained by head-winds, so he did not arrive until after the Custom-house officials had gone home for the night. The guard on the quay, who had known him from childhood, not only prohibited him from landing his cargo, but would not allow him to go ashore himself. He was therefore obliged to sit in the boat fighting mosquitoes all night long, and wait until nine o’clock in the morning before he could get his passport stamped, so that he could land and go home. This, he assured us, was no unusual adventure, and it is a recognized fact that when the head officer of the Custom-house is at his meals or is taking a nap, the whole business of the port is temporarily suspended. Of course this would hardly be the case if Vilkoff were on any route of travel. But this far-off settlement is not within two days’ drive of a

ROUMANIAN SAILORS AT THE “CORDON”

railway, and no steamer ever comes through the Kilia arm, because the numerous channels into which it divides at Vilkoff are all of them shallow, and only navigable by small fishing-boats.

The sturgeon is chiefly valuable for the roe or caviar which is found in it, but the meat finds ready sale, fresh or pickled. In sturgeon fishing the men employ long strings of large hooks without barbs, suspended by stout cords a yard long from a rope strung with cork floats. These hooks are not baited, but are hung very closely together, so that when the fish is swimming near the surface, as he usually does, he runs against them, and entangling himself by the violence of his struggles is easily captured. We saw a medium-sized fish brought to the warehouse at Vilkoff, where the caviar was extracted. There was just about enough to fill an ordinary bucket, and the trader told us it was worth on the spot about 160 francs. The roe is held together by a net-work of delicate fibres and a gelatinous substance not unlike thin starch in appearance. The eggs are separated from this envelope by carefully rubbing them through a coarse sieve, and the caviar is then ready for the table. The extremely delicate nature of caviar will not permit of its transportation unless it is preserved in some way, and it is usually put on the market in small quantities salted, or in bulk salted and pressed. There is as much difference between the flavor of the fresh and the salted caviar as there is between ripe and dried figs, or between grapes and raisins. The amateur of this delicacy really enjoys it only within twenty-four hours after it is taken from the fish.

The afternoon was fast passing and we were getting impatient to be off when, luckily, at about four o’clock the violence of the gale diminished somewhat, and we at once prepared to start. A ludicrous expression of relief came over the old man’s face when we asked for our passportsand told him we were going away. He became cheerful and amiable, and confided in us, as we bade him good-bye, that he was a Pole, and had been in the service of the Government for over forty years, and was very much afraid he would have lost his place if he had permitted us to pass the night in the village. We had a paddle of ten miles before us, and about two hours of daylight to do it in, and we set off in good spirits, looking forward with agreeable anticipations to our camp on the sea-shore. Soon after leaving Vilkoff we entered a maze of channels among low islands, where our horizon was limited by the rank of tall reeds along the shores. We met several lotkas with fishermen paddling up to the village from their summer huts near the sea-coast, and a large patrol-boat full of Roumanian soldiers near a large picket station, and, judging from these indications that we were in the right passage, we paddled steadily on.

In an hour and a half the stream curved round to the south east, and we were enabled to take advantage of the wind and hoisted sail at once. Just as the sun was setting we came into a short reach, scarcely wider than the Danube at Donaueschingen, and there, in front of us, was the straight line of the sea-horizon stretching across between two low, reed-covered points. In a few moments more we sailed out gayly into the Black Sea. The broad open expanse of the sea was before us, all yellow and glowing with the reflection of the gorgeous sunset sky, and the light on the jetty at Sulina glimmered brightly in the distance. But we could see neither beach nor sand-dunes, and for a long distance in front of us and on either side, as far as we could distinguish in the dim light, stumps of trees, ugly snags, and bunches of reeds were sticking up out of the water. No possible camp-ground was visible anywhere, and for a moment we scarcely knew what to do or which way to turn

THE LAST TOILET IN CAMP

our bows. The wind had risen again at sunset, the shallow water grew rougher and rougher every moment, and delay was fatal unless we chose to pass the night moored to a snag, or in the shelter of the reeds on the shore. At first we thought of taking refuge at one of the fishermen’s huts among the reeds at the mouth of the passage, but, discovering a white building far across the bay in the direction of Sulina, we headed our canoes for that, knowing we should find solid earth there, and paddled harder than we had done since we shot the rapids at the Iron Gates. Drenched with spray from the high cross-seas, we finally reached the other shore just as darkness was shutting down, and, pushing through a great bed of reeds, came out into a little muddy pool, with a landing made of logs close by the little whitewashed house we had seen from a distance. A half-dozen sailors of the Roumanian navy welcomed us heartily as we landed, insisted on carrying up our canoes and luggage, and helped us pitch our camp on a dry sandy spot near their quarters. It was the evening of the 9th of September, and the journey from the Black Forest to the Black Sea had occupied us eleven weeks and one day, including twenty-eight days we had spent in excursions away from the river and our delays at Vienna, Hainburg, and Budapest. We had paddled and sailed 1775 miles through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Servia, Bulgaria, Roumania, and Russia.

The following morning we were on our feet at dawn, eager to see what sort of country we had reached in the darkness. We found that we were at the “cordon,” or one of the Roumanian customs picket posts, on a point of land called Cape Masoura, and that we had come out into the Black Sea through that branch of the river called the Zaliv. The bay we had crossed in the twilight was an ancient mouth of the river, not navigable within the memory of man. Our camp was on the edge of a broad, rough meadow,bordered on the north by great shallows where the sea is eating into the land, and extending for miles to the southward, where a range of sand-dunes hides Sulina from view, and to the west towards dark masses of the great forest on a low, sandy elevation which marks the line of the ancient sea-coast. The whole tract as far as we could see was gay with wild-flowers. In Alfred Parsons’ note-book are enumerated among the plants found on this sandy flat, sea-lavender (Stalice latifolia), small Michaelmas daisy, just coming into blossom, large-leaved meconopsis, mauve lactuca, and several yellow composite flowers. In the lakes of the delta among the reeds he found water-lilies, villarsia, frogbit, a floating plant like a yucca, with thorny edges to the leaves, a sort of duck-weed with rough primate leaves, and on the river-banks, loosestrife, hemp, agrimony, flowering rush, and a thick undergrowth of marsh fern.

We cooked a most elaborate breakfast, made our farewell camp toilet before the nickle-plated rudder which served us as a mirror, and then parted with everything but our raiment among the sailors, who had been interested but shy spectators of all these operations. The wind was blowing half a gale, but with plenty of daylight before us we had no hesitation in tempting the dangers of the Black Sea, and about the middle of the forenoon left the cheery company happy in the possession of all our pots and pans, and set out in the direction of Sulina. The sailors assured us that we would not be able for several days to enter the river on account of the breakers running at the bar, but we proposed to skirt the coast as far as we could go, and then see what would turn up.

We worked our way out of the tangle of reeds and across the shallows into the open water and turned our bows to the southward, where a long sand-beach stretched away in a graceful curve. A double line of breakers followed the

BY THE BLACK SEA

shore, and we could see the white water on the bar beyond the light-house. We paddled on for several miles in the trough of the sea, dodging the waves and escaping capsize only by careful steering. We thought it useless to venture out into the roadstead, but kept along near the shore, and when we found the waves were rising to a height which made further advance foolhardy, we ran the canoes ashore through the surf and hauled them up on the beach just under the sand-dunes—the ideal camp-ground of our imaginations. We were not in sight of any house, and as we could not paddle any farther, it looked as if we might enjoy our sea-shore camp after all. However, on reconnoitring from the top of one of the dunes, we saw an ox-cart slowly moving across the meadow a half-mile or more away, and ran and overtook it. The driver was a fine, tall young Roumanian farmer, with an intelligent, handsome face, and he consented to carry the canoes to the Sulina branch for us. He had an excellent cart and two yoke of oxen, and there was an easy road along the hard beach. On the firm white sand, under a brilliant noonday sun, and in full view of the great blue expanse of the Black Sea, we dismantled the canoes and lashed them on the ox-cart, one above the other. After a couple of hours’ walk along the beach in the very wash of the waves, we came to the north bank of the Sulina arm opposite the town. Here we slid the canoes into the stream, took our last paddle across the Danube, and deposited them in the warehouse of a hospitable friend to await shipment to England. We then and there compared notes, and agreed we had only two things to regret in our whole trip: one that we did not launch the canoes at Villingen, fifteen miles above Donaueschingen, and the other that we did not have our camp on the sands of the Black Sea.

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