“Ah, you have been in Siberia!” said the official, and he and the others pricked up their ears.
“Nous verrons,” he continued, and he picked up one of the big books and turned to the initial of my name. “Possibly I may have to report your arrival at once,” he remarked, as he scanned page after page of the volume.
When he had finished that, he went for another, and altogether he looked through four or five books.
“There is nothing against you,” he said, as he finished the examination, and, with a smile worthy of a diplomate of the highest rank, he signed my passport and handed it over, with the wish that I might enjoy my trip to the Crimea, and have bon voyage partout, and he was kind enough to attend next to the passports of my companions, as we had no time to spare in getting to the Crimean steamer.
“The Russian Company of Navigation and Commerce,” to which I entrusted myself for the journey to Sevastopol—they call it Sev-as-to-pol there—is a big concern. It has eighty-four steamers, varying all the way from one hundred to thirty-six hundred tons each; nine of them are of the largest class of ocean steamers, and two-thirds of the rest are none of them less than nine hundred tuns. The large steamers run from Odessa to London, to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, to the Red Sea, and the ports of the Indian Ocean. The other steamers navigate the Black Sea and the adjacent waters, including several rivers that flow into that sea and the sea of Azof. I expected to find their boats dirty and badly managed; on the contrary, I found them clean and comfortable, with good service in the cabin and good management on deck.
The advertised time of the Crimea boat to leave Odessa is two o’clock in the afternoon, and it was not more than five minutes past two when our lines were cast off. I am told that the time table of the company is strictly kept, except of course, in case of unforseen accident.
The company was organized after the Crimean war, and has developed a great business. The repair-shops are at Sevastopol, but very little building is done there. All or nearly all the large steamers were built in England. The officers are generally appointed from the navy, and their pay is higher than in the regular service. On one of the steamers I encountered an officer, whose acquaintance I had made in the Okhotsk Sea several years before. “I am out of the government employ,” he said, “having served my full term. I am commanding one of this company’s largest steamers now; the service is harder, but I get much better pay than my rank in the navy would bring me.”
The steamer carried us along toward Eupatoria, and I was up when we steamed into the bay, where the English made their first descent upon the Crimea. There are no docks or piers; nothing but a semi-circular beach, like a bit of yellow lace on the end of a sleeve to a lady’s dress, and an irregular double fringe of houses beyond it. Ships anchor in the bay, and are unloaded by lighters. Our passengers were taken ashore in boats, and the freight and baggage were unceremoniously dumped into a huge launch. Heavy boxes and barrels were placed atop of trunks and valises, and there was a general mess of things.
It was at Eupatoria, on Thursday, September 14th, 1854, that the allied army landed in the Crimea. The place, the day, and the occasion will remain for ever memorable in French, English, and Russian history. Fifty thousand soldiers of the allied army were that day landed on Russian soil; of that fifty thousand nearly all are now in their last sleep. They perished in the battles of the Alma, the Tchernaya, and Inkermann; they fell in the trenches during the siege of Sevastopol; or worn out with privation and exposure, or suffering from wounds and disease, crept on board the transports at Balaklava and were borne away to die in the hospitals of Scutari or in their own native lands. In one year from that memorable landing at Eupatoria the fifty thousand had become ten thousand; and when the bugles sang truce and the flag of peace fluttered over the shattered walls and smoking ruins of Sevastopol, there was scarce a vestige remaining of the Grand Army of the Orient, that had sailed so proudly from the shores of France and England and assembled on Turkish soil to prepare for the descent into the Crimea. Death spared neither rank nor condition. Of all the officers and soldiers whose hearts beat high on that day as they saw the tri-color and the red cross waving over the gravelly beach at Eupatoria, very few are now alive.
There had been a fog in the morning, and occasional spittings and spatterings of rain, but it cleared up soon after we left Eupatoria, and the coast of the Crimea, with serrated mountains cutting the sky, and with steppes of sand and white rock here and there, came out clear and distinct beyond the dark waters of the Euxine Sea. Gloriously bright was the sun when a Russian officer pointed to a distant promontory and told me that there was Sevastopol; and deep blue was the sky, with not a patch of cloud to mar it, when we headed our prow toward Fort Constantine, and pushed steadily and fearlessly into the port which so long resisted the assaults of the allied armies of England and France. Away to the left lay the valley of the Alma, and also on our left, but nearer to us, the Inkermann pyramid was visible to mark the field of Inkermann’s battle. White specks of marble near the pyramid marked the resting-place of England’s gallant dead, and not far distant was the cemetery where lay the soldiers who fell there for the glory of France. In front, beyond the harbor, was the tawny mound of the Malakoff, with ugly seams and ridges over all its surface; beyond it were the Redan and the Mamelon Vert, and away to the right was the famous Bastion du Mat. The white walls of the marine barracks and arsenal filled much of the centre of the picture, far too much for Russian eyes, when it is remembered that they were the walls of ruins.