The skipper, who was really much depressed, held a council of war, and things began to move. The boat was swung clear of the davits, while Spero and another got away the port anchor. This was lowered gingerly into the life-boat, and then, with four men straining at the oars, it was pulled with the cable paying slowly out, 80 fathoms astern. I stood aftside the France shivering in the moonlight, and watched them gently pry the seven-hundred pound anchor out of the swaying life-boat and heard the splash of it as it went into the water. Then the donkey engine with Nicholas at the valve began to take in the cable, and link by link it came out of the water, until at last it stretched taut from the forward hawser hole to the anchor that bit the mud 500 feet astern.
“Full speed astern,” rang the order in the engine room, and the propeller churned the mud. Nicholas threw the donkey valve wide, and with desperate pantings and gaspings the windlass tugged at the cable. Inch by inch almost imperceptibly it came in. For a minute or two the struggle of steam vs. mud continued, and then suddenly the donkey, choking with delight, began to gather in the cable with metallic rattlings, and the crew cheered lustily as the France slid back into the arms of her native element.
In five minutes we had the boat on the davits again and the anchor on deck, and were beating down the coast. At five, a bend in the coast showed the white glimmer of the Sulina beacon, and we cut her speed down to a few knots, for our haven was in sight. Two hours later we crossed the bar and steamed into the Danube, and I went below for the hour that remained before daylight.
CHAPTER VIII
We Send Our Cable and Find Ourselves with Five Francs and Expenses of $200 a Day, but Make a Financial Coup d’Etat and Sail for the Crimean Peninsula
The Danube, some twenty miles before it reaches the sea, spreads out in an enormous delta and empties into the Euxine through three mouths, St. George’s to the south, Sulina mouth in the middle and Rilia to the north. The Sulina being the main artery of navigation was the one that interested us. Its channel has been cut in a straight line for perhaps eight miles from the sea, so that it looks more like a great canal than a river. Two breakwaters jut out for half a mile beyond the mouth to keep the silt brought down by the great volume of water from spreading out in a bar at the entrance of the channel. Two enormous steam dredges live between these breakwaters and spend their entire time in keeping the channel deep. The country all around the mouth is flat and swampy, and the little town is built on made ground, and, like Port Said and Suez, lives off the shipping that passes to and fro in the river. Until I saw Sulina on the map as the nearest cable station to Odessa, I had never heard of it, and was amazed to find it one of the big grain shipping centers of Europe. Many of the large steamers tie up there and load from elevators and barges. Roumania, it appears, is one of the most Utopian little states in Europe. The people are the left-overs of the high tide of the Roman Empire. When the centuries were countable on the fingers of one hand, the Romans settled the country. When the Vandals swept down on Rome, the arms of her prestige curled in like the tentacles of an anemone, leaving this little isolated community to struggle down through the storms of history. Though a thousand miles separates this little lake of Romans from the spring that poured them at its flood, the community grew and waxed strong and held itself intact in the furnace of turmoil and clash of medieval history. Roumania to-day is about the size of New York State. The Danube, her great artery, waters a plain as fertile as any in the world. Each year from seventy-five to a hundred million bushels of grain come down that river for shipment to the outer world.
Sulina town is a handful of houses stretching along the river. Dozens of steamers lie alongside the stone embankment receiving their cargoes. Floating elevators, shrouded in the mist of their own dust, shoot the torrents of golden grain into the hatches that gape expectantly in the decks of the great sea-tramps.
Though it was December and the weather freezing, the embankment for a mile was lined with great freight-carriers, while tugboats towing long lines of wheat barges that had come from Hungary snorted down the aisle of dignified ocean carriers, whose funnels towered fifty feet above the waters.
The France, with the “stars and stripes” snapping in the crisp morning breeze, steamed up the busy lane, and after passing the quarantine officer, was assigned to a berth on the outskirts of the town. A cup of coffee in the galley served for breakfast, and then with Spero, Stomati and Morris in the boat, I was pulled across the river to the side where the cable office was reported to be.