CHAPTER XVI.
From Cape Soya to the Ishikari River.
From Soya the coast forms a large bay, which opens due north, and which ends in Cape Soya on the eastern side and in Cape Nossyap on the western. Almost in the middle is the small village of Coittoe, and from this place, towering beyond the flat Nossyap peninsula, one can see Rishiri Island. Near the western part of the bay are some small hills, covered mainly with fir-trees. Wakkanai, a Japanese village, is on the west coast of the bay, and north of it is Cape Nossyap. From this cape is a lovely view of Rishiri and Repunshiri Islands. Rishiri is a volcanic cone 6,400 feet above the level of the sea. It has the identical shape of the famous Fujiama in Southern Japan, and rising as it does in graceful slopes directly from the sea, has the appearance of being higher than it really is. Repunshiri is hilly and partly of volcanic formation, but none of its peaks rise to a higher altitude than five hundred feet.
Rishiri is almost circular at sea-level, and it has no well-sheltered nor safe anchorages; but Repunshiri has one good anchorage on its north coast. Rishiri is about six and a half miles in diameter and twenty-five miles distant, directly west of Cape Nossyap; Repunshiri is eleven miles long, about four and a-half wide, and eleven miles distant to Ikaru, its nearest point east on the Yezo coast. As the Kuriles are a continuation east of the volcanic zone of Yezo, there is no doubt that Rishiri and Repunshiri are the terminus of the same volcanic zone at its north-west end.
From Wakkanai a new horse-track has been opened to Bakkai, on the north-west coast. The ride for the first eleven miles was uncomfortable, as my pony, a worn-out brute, sank up to its belly in the mud; but in due course I came to the hilly part, and after having gone up one steep pitch and down another for a considerable distance, I rapidly descended a precipitous bank, and followed the soft sandy beach till I reached Bakkai. Here there is a large and peculiar stone, which the Ainu say resembles an old woman carrying a child on her back. It stands perpendicularly out of the ground at a great height, and it is of a rich dark-brown colour. If the north-east coast was barren and deserted, the western shore of Yezo was even yet more desolate. For thirty or forty miles, as far as the Teshio River, the beach was strewn with wrecks and wreckage. Here you saw a boat smashed to pieces; there a mast cast on the shore; further on a wheel-house washed away by the waves; then the helm of a disabled ship. It was a sight sad enough to break one's heart, with all the tragic circumstances it suggested.
Between Bakkai and Wadamanai especially, I do not think that one can go more than a few yards at a time without being reminded by the wreckage which is strewn thick on the coast of some calamity. A white life-boat, with her stern smashed, lay on the sand helpless to save, and as a kind of satire on her name; and at Wadamanai, a large Russian cruiser, the "Crisorok," dismasted and broken in two, lay flat on the beach half covered with sand. Her bridge had been washed away and her deck had sunk in. Some of the bodies of her gallant officers and crew had been washed on shore by the sea. No one knows in what circumstances the ship was lost, but it is probable that during last winter, when she came to her ill-fated end, her rigging and sails got top-heavy with ice, and that she capsized. Some of the wreckage one finds on that coast has been drifted there from the Chinese Sea by the Kuroshiwo current; and then, owing to the La Perouse Strait turning so sharply to the east, has been left on this last portion of the coast. Here and there a rough tent made with a torn sail, or a deserted shed knocked up out of pieces of wreckage, is a suggestive reminder that some unfortunate derelict seafarer had suffered and striven for life on these forlorn sands. An enormous quantity of drift-logs, and here and there some bones of whales, are strewn all along the beach.
At Wadamanai there is a mere rough shed under the shelter of the sand-hills. When I left this place, moving south, a strong gale blew, which made the travelling most unpleasant. It was getting fearfully cold, and now that I needed clothes so badly mine were falling altogether to pieces. My "unmentionables," which reached down to my feet when I left Hakodate at the beginning of my journey, had long since been trimmed and reduced to a kind of knickerbockers. Then the knees got worn out, and they became more like bathing-breeches; and finally I dispensed with them altogether, and made use of them to protect my sketch-book and diary, round which I wrapped what remained of the ex-garment. My boots, of course, were a dream of the past, and little by little I was getting accustomed to walking barefooted. Thus, dressed in a coat, a belt ... and nothing else, I moved along this inhospitable coast, half frozen, but not discomfited.
The mouths of some of the small rivulets were extremely nasty to cross, as my pony sank in the quicksands. I had to help him out, and that meant a cold bath each time. From Wadamanai I kept a little more inland, still steering for the south, and every now and then I again struck the beach. Still the old sad story of wreckages strewn all over the shore, sailing boats smashed to pieces, junks disabled and half buried in sand, met me at every turn, creating in my mind a very monotony of melancholy.
Late in the evening I reached the mouth of the Teshio River, a broad deep watercourse, one of the three largest rivers in Hokkaido, the other two being the Ishikari and the Tokachi. It has a long course in a general north-westerly direction, and then sharply turns southward, running parallel with the coast for about four miles, and forming a kind of lagoon at its outlet, which seems now to be working towards the northward again. All the other rivers on the west coast tend northward owing to the drift-sand which the current brings north. It is strange that the Teshio should partly be an exception to this rule, though we have ample evidence, even in this watercourse, of the movement of the sand, for the bar at its mouth almost entirely blocks its entrance, and rapidly works in a northerly direction. Thus there is no doubt that the sand travels towards the north all along the west coast.
Sea-trout is abundant in the Teshio River, but salmon, with which this stream formerly abounded, are now less plentiful owing to the sand-bar which blocks the entrance.
A gale was blowing fiercely when I crossed the lagoon in a small Ainu "dug-out," and my pony was made to swim across. Two or three times we nearly capsized, and we shipped a lot of water. It was just like sitting in a bath with water up to my waist; but the Ainu, who had as much as he could do to paddle me across and tow the pony as well, comforted me by saying, "Now that his 'dug-out' was full, we could not ship any more water, and that his skiff, being made of wood, could not sink!"