ARCHANGEL.
On passing up the Dvina from the Polar Sea, your first experience
shows that you are sailing from the West into the East.
When scraping the bar, you notice that the pilot refuses to drop his
lead. "Never mind," he says, "it is deep enough; we shall take no
harm; unless it be the will of God." A pilot rarely throws out his
line. The regulation height of water on the bar is so and so; and
dropping a rope into the sea will not, he urges, increase the depth.
When climbing through the delta, you observe that every peasant on the
shore, both man and woman, wears a sheepskin wrap--the garment of
nomadic tribes; not worn as a rule by any of the settled races on the
earth.
In catching a first glimpse of the city, you are struck by the forest
of domes and spires; the domes all color and the spires all gold; a
cluster of sacred buildings, you are apt to fancy, out of all
proportion to the number of people dwelling in the town.
On feeling for the river-side, a captain finds no quay, no dock, no
landing-pier, no stair. He brings-to as he can; and drags his boat
into position with a pole, as he would have to do in the Turkish ports
of Vidin and Rustchuk. No help is given him from the shore. Except in
some ports of Palestine, you will nowhere find a wealthy trade
conducted by such simple means.
When driving up that strand of English marl, towards the city of which
you see the golden lights, you hear that in Archangel, as in Aleppo,
there is no hotel; not even, as in Aleppo, a public khan.
Full of these signs, you turn to your maps, and notice that Archangel
lies a little to the east of Mecca and Trebizond.
Yet these highways of the Dvina are not those of the genuine East.
Baksheesh is hardly known. Your pilot may sidle up, and give your hand
a squeeze (all Russians of the lower ranks are fond of squeezing!) on
your safe arrival in the port; and if you fail to take his hint, as
probably you will, he whispers meekly in your ear, as though he were
telling you an important secret, that very few strangers come into the
Dvina, but those few never fail to reward with na-chai (tea-money) the
man who has brought them in from the sea of storms. But from the port
officials nothing can be got by giving vails in the bad old way. Among
the many wise things which have been done in the present reign, is
that of reducing the number of men employed in the customs, and of
largely increasing the salaries paid to them by the crown. No man is
now underpaid for the service he has to do, and no one in the Customs
is allowed to accept a bribe. Prince Obolenski, chief of this great
department, is a man of high courage as well as high principles, and
under his eye the service has been purged of those old abuses which
caused it to be branded with black and red in so many books. One case
came under my notice, in which a foreign skipper had given to an
officer in the port a dozen oranges; not as a bribe, but as a treat;
oranges being rarely seen in this northern clime. Yet, when the fact
was found out by his local superior, the man was reduced from a high
post in the service to a low one. "If he will take an orange, he will
take a ruble," said his chief; and a year elapsed before the offender
was restored to his former grade.
The new method is not so Asiatic as the old; but in time it will lead
the humblest officer in Russia to feel that he is a man.
Archangel is not a port and city in the sense in which Hamburg and
Hull are ports and cities; clusters of docks and sheds, with shops,
and wagons, and a busy private trade. Archangel is a camp of shanties,
heaped around groups of belfries, cupolas and domes. Imagine a vast
green marsh along the bank of a broad brown river, with mounds of clay
cropping here and there out of the peat and bog; put buildings on
these mounds of clay; adorn the buildings with frescoes, crown them
with cupolas and crosses; fill in the space between church and
convent, convent and church, with piles and planks, so as to make
ground for gardens, streets, and yards; cut two wide lanes, from the
church called Smith's Wife to the monastery of St. Michael, three or
four miles in length; connect these lanes and the stream by a dozen
clearings; paint the walls of church and convent white, the domes
green and blue; surround the log houses with open gardens; stick a
geranium, a fuschia, an oleander into every window; leave the grass
growing everywhere in street and clearing--and you have Archangel.
Half-way from Smith's Wife's quarter to the Monastery, stand, in
picturesque groups, the sites determined by the mounds of clay, the
public buildings; fire-tower, cathedral, town-hall, court of justice,
governor's house, museum; new and rough, with a glow of bright new
paint upon them all. The collection in the museum is poor; the gilt on
the cathedral rich. When seen from a distance, the domes and turrets
of Archangel give it the appearance of some sacred Eastern city rather
than a place of trade.
This sea-port on the Dvina is the only port in Russia proper.
Astrachan is a Tartar port; Odessa an Italian port; Riga a Livonian
port; Helsingfors a Finnish port. None of these outlets to the sea are
in Russia proper, nor is the language spoken in any of them Russ. Won
by the sword, they may be lost by the sword. As foreign conquests,
they must follow the fate of war; and in Russia proper their loss
might not be deeply felt; Great Russia being vast enough for
independence and rich enough for happiness, even if she had to live
without that belt of lesser Russias in which for her pride and
punishment she has lately been clasped and strained. Archangel, on the
other side, is her one highway to the sea; the outlet of her northern
waters; her old and free communication with the world; an outlet given
to her by God, and not to be taken away from her by man.
Such as they are, the port and city of Archangel owe their birth to
English adventure, their prosperity to English trade.
In the last year of King Edward the Sixth, an English ship, in
pressing her prow against the sand-banks of the Frozen Sea, hoping to
light on a passage to Cathay, met with a broad sheet of water, flowing
steadily and swiftly from the south. That ship was the "Bonaventure;"
her master was Richard Challoner; who had parted from his chief, Sir
Hugh Willoughby, in a storm. The water coming down from the south was
fresh. A low green isle lay on his port, which he laid down in his
chart as Rose Island; afterwards to be famous as the cradle of our
northern trade. Pushing up the stream in search of a town, he came
upon a small cloister, from the monks of which he learned that he was
not in Cathay, but in Great Russia.
Great was a name given by old Russians, not only to the capital of
their country, but to the country itself. Their capital was Great
Novgorod; their country was Great Russia.
Sir Hugh Willoughby was driven by storms into "the harbor of death,"
in which he and his crews all perished in the ice; while his luckier
lieutenant pushed up the Dvina to Vologda, whence he forced his way to
Moscow, and saw the Grand Duke, Ivan the Fourth. In that age Russia
was known to Europe as Moscovia, from the city of Moscow; a city which
had ravaged her old pre-eminence from Novgorod, and made herself
mistress of Great Russia.
Challoner was wrecked and drowned on his second voyage; but those who
followed him built an English factory for trade on Rose Island, near
the cloister; while the Russians, on their side, built a fort and town
on the Dvina, some thirty miles from its mouth; in which position they
could watch the strangers in their country, and exchange with them
their wax and skins for cotton shirts and pewter pans. The builder of
this fort and town was Ivan Vassilivitch, known to us as Ivan the
Terrible--Ivan the Fourth.
Ivan called his town the New Castle of St. Michael the Archangel; an
unwieldy name, which his raftmen and sailors soon cut down--as raftmen
and sailors will--into the final word. On English lips the name would
have been St. Michael; but a Russian shrinks from using the name of
that prince of heaven. To him Michael is not a saint, as Nicolas and
George are saints; but a power, a virtue, and a sanctity, before whose
lance the mightiest of rebel angels fell. No Russian speaks of this
celestial warrior as a saint. He is the archangel; greatest of the
host; selected champion of the living God. Convents and churches are
inscribed to him by his celestial rank; but never by his personal
name. The great cathedral of Moscow is only known as the Archangel's
church. Michael is understood; for who but Michael could be meant?
Ivan Vassilivitch had such a liking for this fighting power, that on
his death-bed he gave orders for his body to be laid, not in that
splendid pile of St. Vassili, which he had spent so much time and
money in building near the Holy Gate, but in a chapel of the
Archangel's church; and there the grim old tyrant lies, in a plain
stone coffin, covered with a velvet pall.
Peter the Great rebuilt Archangel on a larger scale with more enduring
brick. Peter was fond of the Frozen Sea, and twice, at least, he
sailed over it to pray in the Convent of Solovetsk; a place which he
valued, not only as a holy shrine, but as a frontier fortress, held by
his brave old Russ against the Lapps and Swedes. Archangel was made by
Peter his peculiar care; and masons were fetched from Holland to erect
his lines of bastions, magazines, and quays. A castle rose from the
ground on the river bank; an island was reclaimed from the river and
trimmed with trees; a summer palace was designed and built for the
Tsar. A fleet of ships was sent to command the Dvina mouth. In fact,
Archangel was one of the three sites--St. Petersburg and Taganrog
being the other two--on which the Emperor designed to build cities
that, unlike Novgorod and Moscow, should be at once fortresses and
ports.
The city of Ivan and the city of Peter have each in turn gone by. Not
a stone of Ivan's town remains; for his new castle and monastery,
being built of logs, were duly rotted by rain and consumed by fire. A
fort and a monastery still protect and adorn the place; but these have
both been raised in more recent years. Of Peter's city, though it
seemed to be solid as the earth itself, hardly a house is standing to
show the style. A heap of arches, riven by frost and blackened by
smoke, is seen on the Dvina bank; a pretty kiosk peeps out from
between the birches on Moses Isle; and these are all!
In our western eyes Archangel may seem to be over-rich in domes, as
the delta may appear to be over-rich in crosses; but then, in our
western eyes, the city is a magazine of oats and tar, of planks and
skins; while in native eyes it is the archangel's house, the port of
Solovetsk, and the gate of God.