“The site now occupied by wide quays extending several miles in length was then entirely covered with water when the sea rose a few inches above ordinary level, and that even in a perfect calm; the banks of the river near the mouth were only indicated by clusters of wretched hovels built on piles and by narrow patches of sand skirted by tall reeds, the only vegetable product of the vast swamps beyond.
“For some years before the improvements, an average of two thousand vessels of an aggregate capacity of 400,000 tons visited the Danube, and of this number more than three-fourths landed either the whole or part of their cargoes from lighters in the Sulina roadstead, where, lying off a lee shore, they were frequently exposed to the greatest danger. Shipwrecks were of common occurrence, and occasionally the number of disasters was appalling. One dark winter night in 1855, during a terrific gale, twenty-four sailing ships and sixty lighters went ashore off the mouth and upwards of three hundred persons perished.”
That indicates something of the old-time dangers of navigating the channels of the Danube delta. By the making of Sulina a safe port, the building of lighthouses, and the constant dredging and building up of the banks of the Sulina arm of the river, a wonderful change has been wrought, there being now a continuous channel at the entrance “twenty-four feet in depth, 5200 feet in length, and three hundred feet in width between the piers.” The change, even within the first few years of the Commission’s starting work, was remarkable; for while in 1855 out of 2928 vessels navigating the lower Danube thirty-six were wrecked, out of nearly the same number ten years later only seven were wrecked. Other changes may best be indicated in the words of Sir Henry Trotter, the present British representative on the Danube Commission:
“Freights from Galatz and Braila to North Sea ports have fallen from fifty shillings to about twelve shillings or even ten shillings per ton. Sailing ships of 200 tons register have given way to steamers up to 4000 tons register carrying a dead-weight of nearly 8000 tons; and good order has succeeded chaos. From 1847 to 1860 an average of 203 British ships entered the Danube, averaging 193 tons each; from 1861 to 1889, 486 ships averaging 796 tons; in 1893, 905 vessels of 1,287,765 tons, or 68 per cent. of the total traffic, and rather more than two and a half times the total amount of British tonnage visiting the Danube in the fourteen years between 1847 and 1860. The average amount of cereals (principally wheat) annually exported from the Danube during the period 1901-1905 was 13,000,000 quarters, i.e. about five times the average annual exportation during the period 1861-1867. It has been calculated that between 1861 and 1902 the total tonnage of ships frequenting the Danube increased fivefold, while the mean size of individual ships increased tenfold.”[19]
Sir Henry Trotter’s authoritative account of the varying navigation of the Danube may conveniently be given here as, though this book is addressed to those who are likely to visit the river as travellers and pleasure-seekers, there may be some who are interested in such details. “The result of all the combined works for the rectification of the Danube is that from Sulina up to Braila the river is navigable for sea-going vessels up to 4000 tons register, from Braila to Turnu Severin it is open for sea-going vessels up to 600 tons, and for flat barges of from 1500 to 2000 tons capacity. From Turnu Severin to Orsova navigation is confined to river steamers, tugs and barges drawing six feet of water. Thence to Vienna the draught is limited to five feet, and from Vienna to Regensburg to a somewhat lower figure. Barges of 600 tons register can be towed from the lower Danube to Regensburg.”
The international body known as the European Commission of the Danube, which has so splendidly justified itself, was called into existence by the Treaty of Paris of 1856, and may thus be regarded as one of the beneficent results of the Crimean War. The Commission was to consist of delegates, one from each country, representing Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, Sardinia and Turkey, their task being “to designate and cause to be executed the works necessary below Isaccea to clear the mouths of the Danube as well as the neighbouring parts of the sea, from the sands and other impediments which obstructed them, in order to put that part of the river and the said parts of the sea in the best possible state for navigation.” Since the formation of the Commission its sphere of influence has been extended up stream to Braila, and a Rumanian representative has been added to the body. The Commission was at first financed by loans, but by 1887 had cleared off all debts, and has now an average annual income of about £80,000 for carrying on its work.
Sulina is the termination of the Danube Steamship Company’s service, which starts, as we saw, from distant Passau on the Austro-Bavarian frontier. Thanks in no small measure to the Danube Commission, which has its palatial offices and works here, the town has developed into a first-class port. The great delta on which it is situated (about a thousand square miles in extent) “mainly consists of one large marsh covered with reeds, and intersected by channels, relieved in places by isolated elevations covered with oak, beech and willows, many of them marking the ancient coastline.”
Captain Spratt, R.N., in the course of a report on the mouths of the Danube more than half a century ago, drew attention to a curious periodical phenomenon, to which I have seen no reference by later writers, possibly the clearing of the channels by dredging has made it cease: “The river does not appear to be subject to very sudden or frequent floods; but about every five or seven years the whole delta becomes overflowed for a foot or more, generally in the month of May or June, by a progressive rising of the waters on the melting of the snow (called by the natives the Plimera), which obliges the inhabitants of Yuzlin and the lower hamlets to quit their cottages for a time, and retire to Besh-Tepeh and Tulcha; but the Russian guard-houses are never deserted, the houses being more substantially built of wood, and raised about two feet above the ground.”
So great is the deposit carried hither by the many mouths through which the great river discharges itself into the Black Sea, that one authority states that in thirty years the delta was extended in one part by as much as two miles. Only about nine per cent. of the water is discharged by that which has now been made the main navigable channel, by far the greater portion—as much as sixty-seven per cent.—going by way of the Kilia mouths, where in ordinary flood times as much as three thousand cubic feet of mud and sand are poured into the sea per minute. Such is the volume and force of the water poured by the Danube into the Black Sea, that it is said to be “perceptible at the distance of fifty miles from its mouths.” Dr. Edward Daniel Clarke, in the voluminous account of his travels (1798-1802) recorded that “having passed the Isle of Serpents, we fell in with the current of the Danube. So great is the extent over which the waters diffuse themselves, from the shallowness of the sea, that, although the discharge is scarcely adequate to our notions of so considerable a river, the effect is visible for several leagues by the white colour communicated. Dipping buckets in the waves, we observed that the water was almost sweet at the distance of three leagues from the mouth of the river, and within one league it was perfectly fit for use on board. The shore is very flat all the way from Odessa to the Danube, and so low near the river’s mouth, that no other object appears to those who approach the shore than tall reeds rising out of the water, or the masts of vessels lying in the river.”
Dr. Clarke’s disappointment as to the “inadequate” mouth of the Danube suggests that he did not realize that the sea coast—“nowhere two feet above the sea”—of the delta between the Kilia and St. George’s mouths is over fifty miles in length. His reference to the Isle of Serpents suggests that, though more than twenty miles to the east of Sulina, the story of that island, the shores of which are reached by its waters, may fittingly form a termination to the story of the Danube.