For the next two hours we paddled steadily between banks covered with
tall reeds, waving and rustling in the wind, occasionally startling
broods of young ducks out of their hiding-places, but seeing no other
living thing. About noon we came out into a stream at right angles with
the one we had followed, and seeing the familiar figure of a Russian
soldier among the willows, knew we were on the right road. In a few
minutes more we saw a row of white sand-dunes glistening in the sun
beyond grassy meadows, and to the right and below the green domes of two
churches. Rounding a low point we were shortly off the village of
Vilkoff, the last settlement on the Kilia arm. Very little of the place
was visible from the river as we came down, for it extends some distance
back, and only the roofs of two large fish warehouses and a few
fishermen’s huts are seen among the trees near the river. There was no
landing-place, and not even a boat along the shore, so we pushed on
against the wind, now blowing a gale, and shortly came to the mouth of a
narrow inlet, forming the tiny harbor of the place. Along both sides of
this passage we saw, jumbled together in confusion, many rambling wooden
structures, quite like those at any remote fishing village in New
England, and a fleet of boats, large and small, moored to rotting,
neglected landing-stages. We grounded once or twice on a mud-bank on our
way into the harbor, but presently were in sheltered waters, and,
following the directions of some fishermen, came alongside the steps in
front of a low white building which we found was the Custom-house. With
the exception of the lotkas, or native boats, all our surroundings, from
the unpainted shanties and the shaky wharves to the rough boots and
tarpaulins of the fishermen, suggested Cape Ann or Cape Cod; but the
appearance on the quay of a very short and stout official with an
extraordinary bottle nose and wearing the Russian uniform, located the
place instantly.
[Illustration: 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 to mention 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, _viséed_
by 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 the _visés_ on 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
[Illustration: 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 and also 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
[Illustration: 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 passports and
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
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: 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.