The enthusiasm for the war was still at a white heat. Gifts in money and kind fell in a continual shower on the Nagasaki authorities, nothing was talked of but military successes, and a theatre holding 3,000 was giving the profits of two daily performances to crowded audiences in aid of the War Fund. The fact that ships were only allowed to enter the port by daylight, and were then piloted by a Government steam-launch in charge of a “torpedo pilot,” was the only indication in the harbor of an exceptional state of things.
It was warm autumn weather at Nagasaki, but when I reached Wladivostok the hills which surround its superb harbor were powdered with the first snows of winter, and a snowstorm two days later covered the country to a depth of 18 inches. Wooded islands, wooded bays, wooded hills, deep sheltered channels and inlets, wooded to the water’s edge, bewilder a stranger, then comes Fort Godobin, and by a sharp turn the harbor is entered, one of the finest in the world, two and a half miles long by nearly one wide, with deep water everywhere, so deep that ships drawing 25 feet lie within a stone’s throw of the wharves, and moor at the Government pier.
The first view of Wladivostok (“Possession of the East”) is very striking, although the vandalism of its builders has deprived it of its naturally artistic background of wood. Otherwise the purple tone of the land and the blue crystal of the water reminded me of some of our Nova Scotian harbors. There is nothing Asiatic about the aspect of this Pacific capital, and indeed it is rather Transatlantic than European. Seated on a deeply embayed and apparently landlocked harbor, along the shores of which it straggles for more than 3 miles, climbing audaciously up the barren sides of denuded hills, irregular, treeless-lofty buildings with bold fronts, Government House, “Kuntz and Albers,” the glittering domes of a Greek cathedral, a Lutheran church, Government Administrative Offices, the Admiralty, the Arsenal, the Cadet School, the Naval Club, an Emigrant Home, and the grand and solid terminus and offices of the Siberian Railway, rising out of an irregularity which is not picturesque, attract and hold the voyager’s attention.
WLADIVOSTOK.
Requesting to be taken at once to the Customs, the bewildered air of astonishment with which my request was met informed me that Wladivostok had up to that time been a free port, and that I was at liberty to land unquestioned. After thumping about for some time among a number of stout sampans in the midst of an unspeakable Babel, I was hauled on shore by a number of laughing, shouting, dirty Korean youths, who, after exchanging pretty hard blows with each other for my coveted possessions, shouldered them and ran off with them in different directions, leaving me stranded with the tripod of my camera, to which I had clung desperately in the mêlée. There were droskies not far off, and four or five Koreans got hold of me, one dragging me towards one vehicle, others to another, yelling Korean into my ears, till a Cossack policeman came and thumped them into order. There were hundreds of them on the wharf, and except that they were noisier and more aggressive, it was like landing at Chemulpo. Getting into a drosky, I said, “Golden Horn Hotel,” in my most distinct English, then “Hôtel Corne d’or,” in my most distinct French. The moujik nodded and grinned out of his fur hood, and started at a gallop in the opposite direction! I clutched him, and made emphatic signs, speech being useless, and he turned and galloped in a right direction, but stopped at the disreputable doorway of one of the lowest of the many drinking saloons with which Wladivostok is infested.
There all my Koreans reappeared, vociferating and excited. I started the moujik off again at a gallop, the drosky jumping ruts and bounding out of holes with an energy of elasticity which took my breath away, the Koreans racing. More gallops, more stoppages at pothouses, and in this fashion I reached at last the Golded Horn Hotel—a long, rambling, “disjaskit” building, with a shady air of disreputableness hanging about it,—the escort of Koreans still good-natured and vociferous. The landlady emerged. I tried her in English and French, but she knew neither. The moujik shouted at us both in Russian, a little crowd assembled, each man trying to put matters straight, and when every moment made them more entangled, and the moujik was gathering up his reins to gallop off on a further quest, a Russian officer came up, and in excellent English asked if he could help me, interpreted my needs to the lady, lent me some kopecks with which to appease the Koreans and the moujik, and gave me the enjoyment of listening to my own blessed tongue, which I had not heard for five days.
By a long flight of stairs, past a great bar and dining-room, where vodka was much en evidence, even in the forenoon, past a billiard-room, occupied even at that early hour, and through a large, dark, and dusty theatre, I attained my rooms, a “parlor” and bedroom en suite, opening on and looking out upon a yard with pigsties. There were five doors, not one of which would lock. The rooms were furnished in Louis Quatorze style, much gilding and velvet, all ancient and dusty. They looked as if they had known tragedies, and might know them again. The barrier of language was impassable, and I must be unskilled in the use of signs, for I quite failed to make any one understand that I wanted food.
I went out, cashed a circular note at the great German house of Kuntz and Albers, the “Whiteleys” of Eastern Siberia, where all the information that I then needed was given in the most polite way, found it impossible anywhere else to make myself understood in English or French, failed in an attempt to buy postage stamps or to get food, delivered the single letter of introduction which I had somewhat ungraciously accepted, and returned to my melodramatic domicile to consider the possibilities of travel, which at that moment were not encouraging.
Before long Mr. Charles Smith, the oldest foreign resident in Wladivostok, to whom my letter was addressed, called, a kindly and genial presence, and, as I afterwards found, full of good deeds and benevolence. He took me at once to call on General Unterberger, the Governor of the Maritime Province. I think I never saw so gigantic a man—military, too, from his spurs to his coat collar. As he rose to receive me he looked as if his head might eventually touch the lofty ceiling.