That afternoon I paid Pandermaly his due and went aboard the France for what was to prove the most strenuous two weeks in my experience.
CHAPTER V
We Sail Out into the Black Sea in the Salvage Steamer France and for Sixty-five Hours Shake Dice with Death
My ideas of the Black Sea prior to my arrival in Constantinople were based on childhood recollections of maps of Asia and Europe in the geography. On these, that all but land-locked bit of water appeared about an inch long and half an inch across, and wholly unworthy of serious consideration. I had always remembered it as a kind of overgrown lake. The day I chartered the France my ideas began to undergo a revolution, which increased in intensity with each succeeding day. I have now totally revised my ideas. To fully appreciate this gentle expanse, it is necessary to survive a fortnight in December spent on a tugboat. If some universal power, bent on manufacturing the world, should ask for a receipt for making a duplicate, I should suggest the following: One hole 900 miles long by 700 in breadth. Make it from 600 to 1000 feet deep, sow the bottom promiscuously with rocks, scatter a few submerged islands in the most unexpected places, and fill this in with the coldest water obtainable. Surround the shores with a coast like that of Maine, and wherever there seems, by any oversight, to be a chance of shelter, insert a line of reefs and ledges of sharp rocks. Add a tide which varies every day in the year. Now import a typhoon from the South seas, mix judiciously with a blizzard from North Dakota and turn it loose. Add a frosting of snow and sleet, garnish with white-caps, and serve the whole from a tugboat, and you have a fair conception of the ordinary December weather in the Black Sea.
Subsequent inquiry on this subject has brought me to the belated realization of the fact that I am not the first, by a long way, to have reached the same sad conclusions. Some thousands of years ago a “Seeing Asia” trireme from Greece discovered these hospitable waters. The people who were then living at the Hellespont, having had personal experiences along this line, tried to head off the enterprise. The Greeks, however, were strenuous people, and were not to be persuaded. They listened carefully to the descriptions that were presented to their notice of what they might expect in the Black Sea, and then held a council of war, and decided that they would square matters in advance with the gods of the place, so they rounded up a few bullocks and unearthed some wine which they had with them, and proceeded to make sacrifices and libations to the Deity, who was supposed to be so hostile to intruders. To clinch matters they winked at each other, and decided to call the new waters on which they were about to embark, the “Euxine” or kindly seas. They were all delighted with themselves and thought they had the matter settled and a pleasure trip insured, so one fine day they sailed out of the Bosphorus where the Deity (who hadn’t been a bit impressed) was licking his chops and waiting to give them a warm reception. Sad to relate, they never came back. If they had, they would certainly have called in the name which they have sent down through the centuries for this wicked caldron, where wind and wave mingle to the confusion of man.
From Constantinople for forty miles each way there is a rock-bound coast. The cliffs rise sheer above the sea, that breaks in clouds of angry spray against those bleak and unresisting walls. Eastward from the Bosphorus for a score of miles, government life-saving stations every two thousand meters bespeak the menace of this deadly coast, louder than any description. In January, 1903, on this single strip of shore, eighty ships were broken in a single night, and I know not how many men lay down their lives as they strove in vain to make headway against the turbulence of hurricane and tide that swept them to their doom. Northward lies another belt of coast; bleak and forlorn for forty miles it stands against the sky. At the very corner of the sea, the Bosphorus winds like a serpent through a confusion of rugged fort-clad hills. The entrance is a mere defile. A few thousand yards back it bends sharply to the south, thus from a few miles at sea, there seems to the eye of the mariner searching for a haven of refuge nothing but an unbroken line of cliffs. Two light-houses on outlying islands mark the entrance to the channel. When the weather is clear and his engines still can breast the wind and seas, the captain may enter safely enough between this very Scylla and Charybdis, but woe to him who, while beating towards this refuge, is overtaken by one of those clouds of driving snow and sleet that shut down about the waters of the Black Sea thicker than a London fog. These then are a few of the conditions which have made it a paying investment for three salvage companies to locate their headquarters in the Bosphorus. Yes, three companies, each with a fleet of a dozen or more boats do a booming business while the storms of winter last. The profit from the reaping of these few months is so great that the expenses of these entire fleets are paid for the entire year, and money for dividends besides, yielded from the misfortunes of sailing ships and steamers that end their careers on the inhospitable shores that girt the Euxine, or are swamped and sunk while seeking some port of safety. Some of these things I learned from my crew as I sat on the France that December evening waiting for steam to turn the engines. The boilers had been cleaned and the fires lighted early that afternoon, and the soft humming forward told of the pressure mounting steadily in the gauges. I had a more careful look at my crew.
Was there ever a sadder lot to the eyes of an American embarking on an enterprise, where quick action and loyal support were the bone and sinew of the expedition? They were all pretty poor, but the skipper (old man Gileti) was the worst. Stupid, slow and heavy, he made one’s heart sick to look at him. His staff were all Greeks, dirty, shiftless and dismal. The only redeeming feature was in the engine room, for both engineers were bright and alert, and their department as neat and clean as a new pin. The stokers were all Turks, and distinguished for being several degrees blacker with dirt than the Greeks. Then there was a sad little cabin boy, who, as far as I could observe, did about three-fourths of the work on the ship, which nobody else wanted to do. He was running about from dawn till late at night, serving everybody from the skipper to the stokers. Another youth lived on a bench in the galley and was supposed to exercise some useful function, but I was never able to learn just what it was. Whenever I saw him he was eating scraps or licking the dishes, and so we called him the Scavenger. Whenever he was called on for action, he always flew for the galley and sent the cabin boy or else Spero, who was the only other hard worker on deck. Angelo Spero! Like the cabin boy, his was a life of toil. From the chain locker in the bows to the hold, where all the rubbish lived aftside, there was not an hour in the day when there were not loud calls for Spero. As Morris said:
“Old Spero is one of them sad guys that does everybody else’s work, and then is thankful that he don’t get booted besides.”
Last, but not least, was my faithful cook. He was the treasure that Morris had dug up in Constantinople. Stomati was a Greek—a sea cook, he. The roar of the wind and lurch of the ship were as the blood in his veins. For twenty-five years he had lived the life of the galley. The China seas, the Great Australian Bight, the sweeps of the South American coast were as familiar to him as the native waters of the Piræus and the Ægean Sea, beside which he played as a child. He had sailed under every flag in Europe and had pursued the culinary art in all quarters of the globe. He spoke seven languages, all equally unintelligently. While we waited for steam that first night, he expatiated in a composite language, which embodied a judicious mingling of English, French, German and Roumanian, all the terrors of the Black Sea. If there was any unfortunate event which had transpired in that dismal zone during his lifetime, Stomati knew it. He could tell the names of all the ships that had been wrecked, how many people had been drowned on each. He could not only tell you the past, but was eager to make estimates of the number he expected would be drowned in the coming winter. He, himself, had been wrecked three times already, and he had stories about frozen bodies, the details of which have never been exceeded, even in the columns of the yellow journals. Old Man Gileti, the skipper, had come to grief five times, while Spero, he didn’t know how many times, but should guess it must be at least a dozen. That was why Spero looked so sad. Morris listened with mouth open to all these dismal forebodings, but smiled sickly every time I caught his eye.