The corporal’s small room was of no particular shape, and was furnished with only a deal chair and small table, and a big earthen jar of water, but it was well-warmed, and had an iron camp-bed in a recess with a wire-wove mattress, much broken and “sagging,” the sharp points of the broken wires sticking up in several places through the one rug with which I attempted to mollify their asperities. This recess, which just contained the bed, was curtained off for me, and the corporal, Mr. Heidemann, and three Korean headmen lay closely packed on the floor. The corporal, glad to have people to talk with, talked more than half the night, and began again before daybreak. We supped on barrack fare—black bread, barley brose, and tea, with the addition of a little kwass, a very slightly fermented drink, made from black bread, raisins, sugar, and a little vodka, schnaps and vodka containing 40 per cent. of alcohol. At 9 P.M. I was surprised and delighted with the noble strains of a Greek Litany, chanted in well-balanced parts from the barrack-room, the evening worship of the Cossacks.
My last sunset view of the Tu-men was of a sheet of ice. The headmen of the Korean villages of Sajorni and Krasnoe, who were in council till near midnight, thought it was impossible to get across, and they said that the ferryboat was drawn ashore and was frozen in for the winter, and that two Russian Commissioners and a General, after waiting for three days, had left the day before, having failed. However, yielding to my urgency, they set all the able-bodied men of Sajorni to work at 2 A.M. to dig the boat out, and by 7 she had moved some yards towards the river, which, however, was still a sheet of ice. Later, the corporal sent 14 of his men to help the Koreans, laughingly saying that I had the “Whole Russian frontier army to get me across.” At 9 word came that the boat was nearly afloat, and we started, on horseback, with two baggage ponies, and rode a mile over the hills and through the prosperous Korean village of Sajorni, down to a dazzling expanse of sand through which the Tu-men flows to the sea, there 10 miles off.
The river ice was breaking up into large masses under the morning sun, and between Russia and Korea there was much open water about 600 feet broad. The experts said if we could get over at all it would be between noon and 2, after which the ice would pack and freeze together again. Koreans and Cossacks worked with a will, breaking the ice, digging under the boat, and moving her with levers, but it was noon before the unwieldy craft, used for the ferriage of oxen, moved into the water, accompanied by a hearty cheer. She leaked badly, two men were required to bale her, and the stern platform, by which animals enter her, was carried away. The baggage was carried in by men wading much over their knees, and then came the turn of the ponies, but not the whole Russian army by force or persuasion could get those wretched animals embarked.
After a whole hour’s work and any amount of kicking, plunging, and injuries, from getting one or two legs over the bulwarks, and struggling back, and rolling backwards into the river, two were apparently safe in the ferryboat, when suddenly they knocked over the man who held them and jumped into the water, one blind animal being rescued with difficulty, and the other cutting his legs considerably. The ice was then fast forming, but the soldiers made one more attempt, which failed, owing to what Americans would not inaptly call the “cussedness” of the Siberian ponies. For the first time on any journey I had to confess myself baffled, for it was impossible to swim the contumacious animals across, owing to the heavy ice floes and the low temperature of the water. I had sat on my pony watching these proceedings for nearly four hours, watching too the grand Korean mountains as they swept down to the icy river in every shade of cobalt blue, varied by indigo shadows of the white cloud masses which sailed slowly across the heavenly sky. At that point from which I most reluctantly turned back, the Tu-men has a large volume of water, but above and below sandbanks render the navigation so difficult that it is only in the rainy season that flat-bottomed boats make the attempt, and not always with success, to reach the Korean town of K’wan, 80 versts, or something over 50 miles, above Krasnoye Celo. The Chinese, in the insane notion that Japan was about to land a large force on the south bank of the Tu-men, had seized all the boats above the Russian post.
RUSSIAN “ARMY,” KRASNOYE CELO.
I photographed the “Russian army” and the barracks as well as the Boundary Stone, and the corporal slouching against the scaly forlorn quarters on the desolate height in an attitude of extreme dejection, as we drove away leaving him to his usual dulness.
The days of the return journey gave me a good opportunity of learning something of the condition of the Koreans under another Government than their own. So long ago as 1863, 13 families from Ham-gyöng Do crossed the frontier and settled on the river Tyzen Ho, a little to the north of Possiet Bay. By 1866 there were 100 families there, very poor, among which the Russian Government distributed cattle and seed for cultivation.
During 1869, a year of very great scarcity in Northern Korea, 4,500 Koreans migrated, hunger-driven, into Primorsk, some 3,800 of them being absolutely destitute. These had to be supported, no easy thing, as the territory, only ceded to Russia a few years before, was but a thinly peopled wilderness, and was also suffering from a bad harvest.
In 1897 there were in Primorsk 32 village districts, i.e. villages with outlying hamlets, divided into 5 administrative districts. Besides these, one village belongs to the city of Khabaroffka on the Amur, and there are large Korean settlements adjacent to Wladivostok and Nikolskoye. The total number of Korean immigrants is estimated at from 16,000 to 18,000. It must be remembered that several thousands of these were literally paupers, and that they subsisted for nearly a year on the charity of the Russian authorities, and after that were indebted to them for seed corn. They settled on the rich lands of the Siberian valleys mostly as squatters, but have been unmolested for many years. Many have purchased the lands they occupy, and in other cases villages have acquired community rights to their adjacent lands. It is the intention of Government that squatting shall gradually be replaced by purchase, the purchasers receiving legal title-deeds.