Which with your conquerors is a common prank:
It stands some eighty versts from the high sea,
And measures round of toises thousand three.”
Thus Byron described the place when narrating Don Juan’s experiences at the time that Ismail “was beleagured both by land and water, by Souvarov,”
“the greatest chief
That ever peopled hell with heroes slain,
Or plunged a province or a realm in grief.”
The whole story of the siege—with many “asides”—is told in the seventh and eighth cantos of “Don Juan,” which tell of the hero’s exploits between his strange adventures on the Bosphorus and those in “the chief city of the immortal Peter’s polished boors.”
Kilia, the other Russian river-port, much nearer the mouths of this northern arm of the Danube, is a growing place; but the depth of water in the channel is not sufficient to make the Kilia branch of the river of great importance, although it is that by which the greatest volume of Danube water reaches the sea. Returning to the head of the delta, and following the main or southern branch, we have near its commencement the Rumanian town of Tulcea, another town of growing importance as a commercial and shipping centre, where the works of the European Danube Commission (the headquarters of which are at Sulina) are established. That Commission has made the Sulina channel, which branches to the left from the St. George’s arm, the chief navigation stream. Sulina, a widespread low-lying town about the middle of the eastern side of the great delta, has grown from being a village of a few mud huts to a town of five thousand inhabitants since the improvements of the navigation under an International Commission were begun over half a century ago. The extent of those improvements may be gathered from a couple of passages written by British representatives on that Commission. Sir Charles Hartley, who was chief engineer to the Commission from 1856 to 1907, wrote some years later a description of the scene as it was when he began his labours in 1856:
“The entrance to the Sulina branch was a wild, open seaboard, strewn with wrecks, the hulls and masts of which, sticking out of the submerged sandbanks, gave to mariners the only guide where the deepest channel was to be found. The depth of the channel varied from seven to eleven feet, and was rarely more than nine, feet.