The Cable Game - The Adventures of an American Press-Boat in Turkish Waters

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Title: The Cable Game - The Adventures of an American Press-Boat in Turkish Waters - During the Russian Revolution
Author: Washburn, Stanley
Language: English
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Transcriber’s Notes:

Underscores “_” before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_
in the original text.
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[Illustration: THE DISPATCH BOAT “FRANCE” LYING AT ANCHOR IN ODESSA
HARBOR]

THE CABLE GAME

THE ADVENTURES OF AN AMERICAN
PRESS-BOAT IN TURKISH WATERS
DURING THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

BY
STANLEY WASHBURN

[Illustration]

BOSTON
SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY
1912

TO
ALICE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The writer gratefully acknowledges
the constant support and unlimited
backing accorded him by THE CHICAGO
DAILY NEWS, the paper for which he
worked, and MR. VICTOR F. LAWSON,
its Publisher, whose never failing
enterprise in the realms of World
News made this narrative of
THE CABLE GAME possible.
S. W.

INTRODUCTION

It has seemed worth while to set down the account of the experiences
reported in the following pages, not because they represent any
important achievement, nor yet because they are conspicuous for any
unusual enterprise, for none realizes better than the writer that they
comprise nothing more than the day’s work, for the dozens of newspaper
men that wander the earth.

As a lover of the Profession these few little adventures are narrated
in the hope that they may serve as an interpretation to the lay reader
of the motives of the men that go forth to gather the news of the
world. Fame, money and reputation are all secondary considerations to
the real journalist and what he does he does for his Paper and for the
pure joy of the game that he plays.

What the writer has tried to portray is the atmosphere and fascination
of THE CABLE GAME—the game that takes a man far from home ’midst alien
races and into strange lands and makes him stake his all in his effort
to win that goal of the journalist’s ambition—A World Beat.

S. W.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
_I From War to Peace in Manchuria—Peking—A New
Assignment, “Russia Direct”—Shanghai_ 1

_II The Race for the Situation—Ceylon—Across
India—Stalled in Bombay—Russia via the Suez Canal_ 20

_III Constantinople at Last! The Threshold of the Russian
Assignment—A Nation in Convulsion_ 35

_IV We Charter a Tug and become Dispatch Bearers of His
Britannic Majesty and Learn of Winter Risks in the
Black Sea too late to Retreat_ 54

_V We sail out into the Black Sea in the Salvage Steamer
“France” and for Sixty-five Hours Shake Dice with
Death_ 73

_VI We Land in Odessa on the Day Set by the
Revolutionists for a General Massacre, but because
of Effective Martial Law Secure only a “General
Situation” Story_ 94

_VII The France does her Best in the Run for the
Uncensored Cable, Sticks in the Mud, but Gets Away and
Arrives at Sulina Mouth with an Hour to Spare_ 113

_VIII We Send our Cable and Find Ourselves with 5 Francs
and Expenses of $200 a Day, but Make a Financial Coup
d’Etat, and Sail for the Crimean Peninsula_ 134

_IX We Reach Sevastopol and Land in Spite of Harbor
Regulations, Get a “Story” and Sail away with it to
the Coast of Asia Minor_ 150

_X We Send our Cable from Sinope and then Sail for the
Caucasus where Rumor States Revolution and Anarchy to
be Reigning Unmolested_ 167

_XI Christmas Morning on the Black Sea_ 180

_XII We Find Turmoil in the Caucasus but Celebrate Xmas in
Spite of Storm and Stress_ 190

_XIII We Sail away from Batuum with a Beat, Official
Dispatches, Foreign Mails and a Boat Load of Refugees
that Keep Us Awake Nights_ 200

_XIV The Return to the Golden Horn and the End of the
Assignment_ 217

TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Dispatch Boat “_France_” lying at anchor
in Odessa harbor _Frontis_

PAGE
From far Mongolia’s borders for 180 miles eastward
stretches the line of the Japanese trenches 20

Regiment after regiment, fresh from Japan, pour along
the newly made highways 20

With clanking chains and creaking limbers, batteries
are going to the front 48

In eighteen months’ association with the army, we have
not seen such activity 48

When the _France_ entered Odessa harbor after the storm
she was pretty well shaken up 92

Sulina—the mouth of the Danube River 92

General Nogi—than whom no finer gentleman ever drew
the breath of life 198

Morris inspecting our Christmas dinner 198

CHAPTER I

_From War to Peace in Manchuria—Peking—A New
Assignment, “Russia Direct”—Shanghai._

For three days we had been congratulating ourselves that we were on
the eve of the greatest battle in history. Around us in silent might,
two armies slept on their arms. From the border of far Mongolia for
a hundred and eighty miles eastward lay the line of the Japanese
trenches, and for forty miles deep every Manchu hut and village
sheltered the soldier or coolie patriot of the Island Emperor. Above
the roads for endless miles hung the heavy powdered dust of Mongol
soil; like a mist unstirred by any wind, it rose from the plodding of
the feet of limitless thousands of men and animals, pushing forward for
the last great struggle of a mighty conflict. Regiment after regiment
fresh from home, poured along the Japanese made arteries, for the blood
of an army corps. Now and again the khaki colored battalions at the
command of an officer halted at the side of the road while a battery
of artillery, with clanking chains and creaking limbers, trotted
through the thickening clouds of dust that settled on one like flour.
Cavalry, red cross, transport, coolies, bridge trains and telegraph
corps gave place the one to the other in rapid succession. In eighteen
months’ association with the Japanese we had not seen such activity.
“The Peace Conference at Portsmouth has failed” we told ourselves, and
leaving the extreme front of the army, where we had been visiting the
cavalry outposts, we turned our horses’ heads for the thirty-mile ride
to the headquarters of General Nogi, to which we had been attached
since May. All our talk was of the coming of the great battle and of
the preparations which we must make for a three weeks’ campaign in the
saddle, and more important still, how we should arrange an open line of
communications from the ever-changing front of the prospective struggle
to the cable office in the rear.

Covered with dust an eighth of an inch deep, we rode into Fakumen, our
headquarters, late on the afternoon of September 4th. At the door of a
Chinese bean mill, where for four weary months we had been awaiting the
call to action, stood a Japanese orderly. As we dismounted, he saluted
and respectfully handed me one of the Japanese charactered envelopes of
the Military field telegraph. Turning my horse over to my Japanese boy
I opened it, and read the word “Return.”

The Russo-Japanese War was over, and even before the armies themselves
knew that the end had come, my chief in his office in far away Chicago
had sent the word over the cable which meant as much as reams of
explanation. The same night the _London Times_ reached half around the
world and ordered home its special correspondent with the Japanese
armies in the field.

That night I handed in at the Chinese mudhouse, where the telegraph
ticked cheerfully over the hundreds of miles of Manchurian plains and
Korean mountains to Fusan, and thence by cable to Nagasaki and the
civilized world, a short dispatch to my office in Chicago, “Leaving the
front immediately. Wire instructions Peking.” Two days later at sunrise
we took our leave. I shall not soon forget our leave-taking from the
army whose fortunes we had followed off and on for nearly eighteen
months. So many of the correspondents left the “front” with such
bitter feelings toward their erstwhile hosts that, in justice to the
Japanese, it is but fair to chronicle that in one Army of the Mikado
at least the relations between the staff and the soldiers of the press
were anything but unpleasant, and that we, who left the Third Army
that September morning, left with only the tenderest affection toward
the commander under whose shadow we had lived, slept and thought these
many months—that is General Baron Nogi—than whom no finer gentleman,
ardent patriot and gentle friend ever drew the breath of life. The
night before our departure the general entertained us at a farewell
banquet and in a kindly little toast bade us god-speed on our journey.
That night we shook the hands of all the staff whom we had known so
well, and went to our quarters thinking that we had seen them for the
last time, for we were to leave at daybreak for the long ride to the
railroad. The next morning as we were mounting our horses to begin
our journey an orderly from headquarters rode up and said that Major
General Ichinohe (Nogi’s Chief of Staff and right-hand man during the
siege of Port Arthur) had requested that we stop at headquarters on
our way out of town. So it was that accompanied by the small cavalry
escort that had been detailed to see us to the railroad, we rode into
the compound where Nogi and his staff had lived that last long summer
of the war.

Mounted on a coal black horse in full dress uniform, with half a dozen
of his staff about him, sat old Ichinohe, a tall, gaunt man nearing
sixty, whose life typifies the ideal of Japanese chivalry. Spartan in
his simplicity and endurance, fearless as a lion in battle, and gentle
as a woman in time of peace, we had known him almost since the war
started. At Port Arthur he had commanded the Sixth Brigade of the Ninth
Division, which, more than any other, had borne the heat and burden
of the day. We had known him then, when sword in hand he had led in
person his brigade against one of the most impregnable redoubts on the
crest of that all but unconquerable fortress. Twice his column had
been thrown back shattered and bleeding, but on the third assault, and
just as the light of day was breaking in the East, this redoubtable
man covered with blood and powder, and with his broken sword clutched
in his hand, placed the Sun Flag on a position that the Russians
had regarded as beyond possibility of capture. It was impossible to
realize that this kindly old gentleman, who spoke so gently to us that
morning in distant Manchuria, was the desperate commander who had been
decorated by the Mikado for his invincible attack on the famous redoubt
before Port Arthur’s bloody trenches.

He met us with that smile which we had come to know and love, and bade
his interpreter tell us that he and his staff would ride with us out of
the town and see us started on our journey. So, with the staff riding
about us, with clatter of saber and ring of spur, we rode through the
old winding stonewall flanked street of Fakumen to the main gate of the
town. Here the road winds out over a bridge that crosses the little
river that wends its way down from the pass in the mountains three
miles beyond and through which led our way that morning. The sun had
just risen and its first copper-colored rays turned the dew on the
grass to drops of brilliants. Away and away stretched the Oriental
landscape with the hills standing out in the background in the clear,
crisp air of early autumn. Behind us lay the town which had been our
home since May, its strange, fantastic Chinese temples and maze of
jumbled dwellings just catching the early sunlight; the whole scene
might have been a setting snatched from the banks of the Jordan in the
far away Holy Land. As we rode out of the gate and onto the old wooden
bridge with its stone parapets the full strength of the Third Army
Corps Military band blazed out the first notes of Sousa’s “The Stars
and the Stripes,” and with the glorious swing of that martial strain
taken up by drum and trumpet we crossed the river. None who has never
lived for months in an alien land among a people of a different race
can ever realize the throb of the heart that such music inspires. To
us, in far off Mongolia, it sounded like a voice from our very own,
coming across the wide Pacific.

When we reached the open country our old friend stopped his horse
and his interpreter spake his last words to us. “You have been with
us long,” he told us. “With us you have lived through a terrible
period. For many months our paths have lain side by side. We would
not, therefore, say farewell, for the Japanese never says adieu to his
friends.” He had paused with the sweetest, gentlest of smiles before he
uttered his last words, which the interpreter then translated to us. “I
will sit here upon my horse, with my staff gathered about me. When you
reach the bend in the road you will turn in your saddles and wave your
hand at me and I will wave my hand to you and that, my friends, shall
be our last good-by.”

Silently we wrung their hands, these hard-visaged friends on whom a
cruel war had left its scars in gray hairs and furrowed faces, and
rode on our way. Half a mile beyond the ancient Mongol highway turned
a bluff, and wound up toward the Pass in the Hills. When we reached
the bend we turned in our saddles. There below us on the outskirts
of the town we could see the general, motionless in the flooding
sunlight, with the little group of the staff crowded in the background.
As we turned in our saddles we could barely discern the flutter of a
handkerchief from the stern old figure on the black horse. Once again
the faint strains of martial music drifted to us on the still morning
air; we waved our hands and turned once more on our way. Who shall say
that we were oversentimental if there was a little mist in our eyes as
we looked our last upon the men and on the army, whose lives and ours
had been so closely linked?

Forty miles we rode that day over dusty highways that wound their way
through waving fields of the whispering kowliang (or millet) that bent
and swayed in the breeze. A few hours’ sleep at Tieling in a deserted
shell-torn Russian house, then a five hours’ pounding over rough rails
in a box car and we were back once more at the Grand Headquarters of
the army at Moukden.

Here we paid our final respects to the officers of the staff whom we
had known off and on for nearly two years. A few hours passed, and
again we were on the train. This time it is a ten hour stretch in a
third class car to Newchwang, the end of the neutral and uncensored
cable.

In the early hours of the morning, with typewriter on my army trunk,
half a column cable was pounded out, and that afternoon the Chicago
_News_ printed the first cable from the field of what the army thought
of peace. A day’s delay in Newchwang to sell my horse, then two nights
on a B. & S. freight steamer to Chefoo, and thence by boat and rail two
days more to Peking, and a white man’s hotel. No one who has not lived
in a Chinese village, surrounded by the filth and vermin of a Manchu
compound, during the rainy season, with water trickling through the
roof on the inside and mud two feet deep without, can quite realize
what a bed, a bath, clean clothes and good “chow” means. Two hours
after arriving, a blue-clad Chinese boy handed in a cable from Chicago.
It ran: “Await further instructions, Peking.”

For the first time in nearly two years, the editor in his office ten
thousand miles away had no immediate plan of action on his mind. For
the moment the world was quiet, and a brief respite from the constant
call for “stories” granted to the correspondent.

War work for the reading public falls naturally into two distinct
classes, as different as prose and poetry in literature. Editors call
the exponents of these divisions “feature men” and “events” or “cable
men.” The former are the literary artists who write atmosphere and
artistic impressions for the monthly and weekly papers of the world.
At enormous salaries, and with the retinue and camp equipage of a
commanding general, they drift leisurely along with the army. When the
battles are over, they chronicle their impressions and send them by
mail to their home offices. They are accompanied by trained artists
of the camera, to illustrate their stories, and what is still lacking
is filled in by some artist of repute at home. Their names appear in
large letters on the covers of the magazines to which they contribute,
and to the world are they known far and wide. The other type, the
“cable men,” are collectors of what might be called “spot” news. From
them not atmosphere or color is demanded, but “accuracy of fact” and
“quick delivery” is the essence of their work. Known professionally
wherever big papers are printed, the cable man is almost unknown to
the general public. His paper requires of him first to be on the spot
where news is being made, and second to get a clear, concise and
correct report of that news to an uncensored cable, and do it before
anyone else can. Waking or sleeping, the events man has two ideas in
the back of his head, the hour his paper goes to press, and his line
of communication to his cable office. As a diver depends on his air
tube to the face of the water, so the correspondent depends on his
line of communication to the outer world. The moment his retreat is
severed he is useless and for the moment might as well be dead. He may
have a story of world importance, but if he is out of touch with the
cable his news is worthless. His paper, on the other hand, is prepared
to back him to the limit to maintain such a line. Steamers, railroad
trains, courier systems, and any means or methods his imagination or
ingenuity may devise, are his for the asking, if he can only get out
exclusive news, and get it first. His paper will pay fabulous sums,
$2,000, $5,000, even $10,000 for an account of a world event. A single
story of this kind is printed in ten thousand papers in fifty different
languages within twenty-four hours after the correspondent files it
in a cable office. His version of the affair is read first by every
foreign office in the civilized world. On his story the editorials on
the “situation” are based, from London to Buenos Ayres. The “feature
man” chronicles the events as he sees them. The “cable man,” though
in a small way, is a part of the great event. In the boiling vortex
where history is in the making, there is he, struggling against his
colleagues of the press of America and Europe to give to the world the
first facts of an international clash. He moves to the click of the
telegraph, and if he acts at all, he must act on the minute. Even
hours are too slow for the newspaper reading public. His editor at home
watches the ever-changing kaleidoscope of history, moving and reforming
on the stages of the world. Now Japan is in the public’s eye. He has
a man on the spot. Again it is a race war in Georgia—the invasion of
Thibet, a constitutional parliament in Persia, war in the Balkans, or a
revolution in Russia. All of these the restless, lynx-eyed one watches
from his office in Chicago. A hundred cables a day reach his desk from
all quarters of the globe, and in his mind from hour to hour he is
weighing the relative importance of all the interesting situations in
the world. If a parliamentary crisis develops in Europe, he has the
choice of a dozen of his foreign staff to cover it. A few words on the
pad, and in five hours the Berlin correspondent starts for Sweden, or
perhaps the Paris man telephones his wife that he is off for Algeciras
or Madrid. A pause in the career of a war correspondent for such a
paper means to him that for the moment the situation is too indefinite
to warrant any immediate action. From day to day he lives with a vague
wonder on his mind where the next day will see him. Will he be on his
way home, to Europe, Asia, or the Philippines, or perhaps to some
unfamiliar place he has to search in the Atlas to find? Surrounded by
his campaign baggage and war kit, he sits and waits, ready for a quick
call to any quarter of the globe to which the cable may order him.

Peking is too far from the haunts of civilization for one to follow
the news of the world day by day. The telegrams are days old, and the
papers weeks and months. For over a month the correspondent waited in
Peking and played. China is ever the source of interest which ebbs and
flows. Now it is on the point of another Boxer outbreak, and next it
is in the throes of constitutional reforms. An occasional anti-foreign
riot, a Chinese execution, or perhaps even a bomb helps to while away
the lazy days, and gives material for intermittent cables on the trend
of far eastern politics.

We were waiting on the veranda of the hotel across from the American
Legation. At this moment we seem as far from Chicago as from Mars.
The sounds and sights of Peking have weaned us from the confusion of
a world beyond. Rickshaw coolies squatting outside, the low murmur of
their voices, the jingle of a bell on a passing Peking cart, all tend
to widen the gulf that separates the East from the West. We are aroused
by a voice at our side. “Telegram have got.” It is for me. I take the
sheet of paper that in some form or other has found out my quiet in
every quarter of the globe. As you tear open the gray envelope you
wonder almost subconsciously where the next weeks will take you, and
your curiosity hurries your hand as you tear it open and read the curt
message dated Chicago, and marked “Rush.”

“Russia direct. When do you start?” Once more the love and fascination
of the game surge through your veins. You are too far out of the world
to know what is passing for the moment in Russia, but you feel sure
it must be something good and big, with promise of long duration, to
have brought this urgent cable of five words, ordering you half around
the world. You call for a telegraph blank, and as you wait, your mind
works almost unconsciously, something unexpressed and involuntary.
“Russia direct! The Trans-Siberian road is unquestionably the quickest,
providing you can get immediate action, but it is now blocked with
troops and munitions of war. Obviously a permit will be necessary. It
would take ten days at least to make connections through the State
Department and the Petersburg Minister of Railroads to get it. Ten
days is too long to wait, and then there are the uncertainties of
days besides. The _Pacific_ might do, but the _Empress_ sails from
Shanghai to-morrow. You can’t make her, and there is not another fast
boat for a fortnight. There is a French or German mail for the Canal
surely within a week,” and your mind is made up, and on the arm of
your chair you write the reply, “Leaving to-night. Shanghai Monday,
thence first steamer Canal,” and sign your name, mark the message “R.
T. P.,” which means “Receiver to pay,” and walk to your room. Your
Japanese understudy who has been on your staff these many months jumps
up. Another man who has been waiting in the corner of the room gets
out of his chair. He is an American negro, Monroe D. Morris, who for
three weeks has been an anxious candidate for a staff position. Since
it is Russia, the Jap is obviously impossible. You tell him so, and he
shuffles his feet as he hears the ultimatum, for he had hoped for a
trip to Europe. But one man’s meat is another man’s poison, for while
the mournful Ikezwap backed up for the last time, the beaming Ethiopian
grinned from ear to ear as he rushed to his quarters to throw together
his own small belongings.

A few hours sufficed to pack all my effects which, when mobilized,
comprised fourteen pieces of impedimenta. The theory is that a war
correspondent must move from place to place prepared at any moment to
adjust himself to any situation, from a war assignment, revolution or
riot, down to the meeting socially of a foreign ambassador. Hence these
fourteen pieces, which sound excessive, contained everything from a
frock coat and a high hat down to a kitchen camp stove. Saddles, tents,
campaign outfits of various kinds take up much room, but are really
worth the bother, for when one wants them, that want is a demand that
money often cannot meet. One’s own saddle on a hurry call that may mean
days of riding is in itself an asset beyond comparison. It may mean all
the difference between success and failure. One knows just what one can
do with an outfit tried and true, and hence it is worth while lugging
it about the world, even if it is used but once or twice.

A few days later saw me and my grinning Ethiopian disembarked on the
Bund at Shanghai. The place looked familiar enough, for I had spent
weeks there, and this was my fifth visit. Every time I left I felt that
I had made a distinct addition to my information as to the wickedness
of the world, and every time the desire rested heavily on my mind to
write a story about this cosmopolitan mushroom on the China coast, but
each time I held my hand as I realized that fate might well bring me
back to it, but now that Shanghai is some ten thousand miles away, and
the chances of seeing the people who might read such a story remote, I
feel that I cannot pass it over without a few comments.

Geographically, the Chinese city is almost at the end of the earth.
Morally, one could say, without any hesitation, it is at the end.
The only place that can compete with it for demoralization and
unrestriction is Port Said. The two are neck and neck for laurels of
this description. Shanghai is the final bit of dead water to which
the flotsam and jetsam of the stream of life seems to drift and then
stop in utter stagnation. People who have failed to make good in all
other quarters of the world, seem to turn naturally towards the China
coast, and Shanghai lures them as the candle does the moth. There
remittance men are as thick as sparrows in springtime. These creatures
are the black sheep and younger sons, or other undesirable members
of well-to-do families, who are allowed so many pounds a quarter by
their loving friends, on the sole condition that the cash must be paid
anywhere “east of the Canal.” They drift along through India, over to
Burma, down the States of the Malay Peninsula, and with short stops at
Singapore and Hongkong, they start straight for their final collapse
in Shanghai, where they meet shoals of their fellows, consuming bad
whiskey and soda at the bars of the various hotels. These gentlemen
form a strong and populous element in the community. Next we find a
large colony of alleged business men who have failed to accumulate the
fortunes to which their alleged abilities are supposed to have entitled
them, and who have come out to China to sell someone a gold brick.
These two classes form the matrix of the foreign unattached residents.
Then we have the men who are actually attached to some business house
with their home office in the States, or back in Europe. These are for
the most part doing short sentences, and are fairly respectable. Lastly
we have the Shanghai business man, who is one of the most strenuous
gentlemen of his kind to be seen the world over. He speculates in
shares, of which there is an enormous variety in Shanghai. The
operations in the Chicago wheat pit and the New York stock exchange in
days of a panic are mild in comparison to the fluctuations observed on
any ordinary day’s business in Shanghai stocks. The result is, people
are losing and winning fortunes every few hours.

At 11 o’clock everyone who has the entrée begins to drift toward the
Shanghai Club. By noon the bar is packed. At 2 o’clock the rush is
over, and only those that have fallen by the way remain, cast away on
sofas. In race week or holidays, sofas are as few and far between as
snowballs in Hades. At five o’clock the rush begins again, and lasts
until the early hours of the morning.

Everybody in Shanghai drinks, mostly to excess. It is the only place I
know of where young men with incomes of from $50 to $100 a month are
able to spend twice that sum in a week on their establishment, yet this
is unquestionably the case. I knew of one young man making perhaps
$20 a week, who in a year failed for $10,000. At no time, as far as I
could ever learn, did he ever have any assets worth mentioning. This
remarkable means of living is fostered by the so-called “chit” system.
The “chits” are small bits of paper on which one writes an I O U for
any commodity or service conceivable. Any man who has a position can
sign a chit at almost any bar, store or dive in Shanghai. The young
men of the clerk class proceed to do this with great effect, and ready
cash is used for speculative purposes, while their immediate wants are
met by the simple process of signing a “chit.” If they are successful
in their speculation, they pay the “chits,” and all goes well. If
they fail, and are unable to beg, borrow or steal means to meet their
obligations, they either commit suicide or go to Chefoo or Tientsin
until the trouble blows over, which it soon does, as there are so many
other men in the same boat. After a few months of this precarious life
about the China coast, back they come, and if they are unable to get
employment, they fall back into a semi-loafing class and ultimately
a vagrant class, which helps to swell the already large population
of this sort. The wealthy men of the place are mostly young fellows
of the kind described, who have prospered in their investments. They
go in more heavily for all sorts of deals and speculations. Chinese
concessions, promotion schemes and similar enterprises are created, to
be sold at home with great advantage. Every week fortunes are made and
lost, and everybody, nearly, is happy and irresponsible.

The methods of doing business are quaint, and to the westerner somewhat
astonishing. Every man who is connected, in even the most remote way,
with a business deal, comes in for a squeeze of some sort. I knew of
a case where one man had a boat to sell, and another man, who had
learned the description of the boat (for the names of the gentlemen
are withheld by the middle man lest the latter be cut out entirely)
was eager to snap it up for use in running the blockade. Both the
buyer and the seller were eager to meet each other, but the only man
who knew them both declined to disclose their names until he was paid
a commission sum of $5,000. If you meet a man, and he introduces you
to another man, who makes you acquainted with a third party who sells
you a commodity, numbers one and two block all negotiations until the
seller consents to share the spoils with them. The result is that after
a business deal has gone through so many hands, there is not much
left for anyone in particular. The tendency is for the man who has
the commodity and the man who has the price to combine, and exclude
the line of grafters who would stand between, hence the gentlemen who
profit on the legitimate business men veil all their negotiations until
almost the last moment in a business deal. The names of the actual
parties are withheld from each other by the “go betweens” for fear that
the gentlemen will combine and exclude them from profit.

A volume might easily be written in description of the various habits
of the men, women and children who lead the fierce pace of foreign life
in Shanghai, but the requirements of space demand that I pass over such
a tempting analysis of degeneracy and vice with these few comments.

CHAPTER II

_The Race for the Situation—Ceylon—Across
India—Stalled in Bombay—Russia via the
Suez Canal_

After four days of Shanghai, the German Mail Steamer _Princess Alice_,
with passengers, mail and cargo, from Yokohama to Bremen, called at
Woo Sung and put an end to our sufferings. In a driving snow and sleet
storm we boarded the big German liner as she lay at anchor at the mouth
of the Yangtse River, and had our baggage ticketed to the Suez Canal.
It was during the next weeks, while we are plowing through the China
Seas, that I began to learn more of the checkered history of my Chief
of Staff. A more or less entertaining volume might be readily written
on his wanderings and experiences. For hours on end, while I lay in
my bunk kicking my heels and waiting for the time to pass, Monroe D.
would sit on a camp stool and regale me with the story of his life.
Scientists tell us that there is no such thing as perpetual motion, but
when they made this statement, they had never seen my “Black Prince,”
and observed the phenomena of unintermittent speech which flowed
steadily and at the rate of 150 words a minute for as many minutes on
end as he was able to get a hearer. He was born in Mississippi, and had
moved early to Kansas, where in 1898, as he informed me, he was holding
an important position in a local express company. When the call to arms
for the Spanish War went forth, Morris was the first man to enlist
in the 20th Kansas. For active service in Cuba he was mustered out a
year later as Third Sergeant, and immediately re-enlisted in a colored
volunteer regiment for a campaign in the Philippines, and quickly rose
to the rank of First Sergeant in his company. After serving out his
time, he returned to the States, again renewed his associations with
the express business, and gave that up to accept the position of porter
on a Pullman car. This business, however, did not apparently prove
sufficient for the development of his intellectual assets, and he soon
gave that up to go as steward for one of the American army transports.
Thirteen times he had crossed the Pacific, and finally had left the
transport at Tientsin and attached himself to one of the officers in
the United States Marine Barracks at Peking.

[Illustration: FROM FAR MONGOLIA’S BORDER FOR 180 MILES EASTWARD
STRETCHES THE LINE OF THE JAPANESE TRENCHES]

[Illustration: REGIMENT AFTER REGIMENT, FRESH FROM JAPAN, POUR ALONG
THE NEWLY MADE HIGHWAYS]

My arrival and departure had opened a new career to him, and from the
day we left Peking until his return to Kansas City, both night and day
were devoted to disproving the scientific phenomena referred to above.

“Morris,” I would say, when I felt particularly bored, “please talk to
me.”

“Yes, sir,” he would say, and he would begin on the moment and continue
for hours until I would say:

“All right, Morris. Can do. Go to bed,” when he would cut it off in the
middle of a sentence with a “Yes, sir. Good Night, sir!” and be off.

The trip from Japan to the Canal is interesting enough the first time,
but thereafter it becomes a bit monotonous. Hongkong, Singapore,
Penang and the ports were all old stories to me. The _Princess Alice_
sighted the palm-skirted coast of Ceylon twenty-two days later. I
was desperately bored with the German boat. I was bound for Russia.
Everybody went by the Canal. I had been that way myself less than a
year before. I had a new idea.

“Morris,” I said, as we slipped behind the breakwater at Colombo one
glorious November afternoon, “I have a scheme. Pack up chop-chop. We
are going to abandon this boat to-day. From Colombo we will cross over
to India, take the train to Bombay, go up the Persian Gulf to Bunder
Abbas, or one of those places, get some horses, camels, or whatever
they use there, and cross Persia to Teheran. From there we can hit the
Caucasus from the Caspian Sea.”

Morris was delighted and turned on the conversation and began packing
on the spot. He was filled with delight at the idea of an 800-mile ride
across the mountains of Persia.

“It may be bad there,” I told him. “They say the mountains are filled
with bandits.” I paused to watch the effect, and then asked Morris,
“Are you a good shot?” He stopped packing, and his eyes snapped as he
drew himself up with pride and said:

“You just give me a ‘Martini’ or a ‘Kraig,’ and I can wing a man at 200
yards just as fast as they can get up,” and he grinned from ear to ear.

An hour later we landed in Ceylon.

There are many beautiful places in the world, and there are a great
many places that are strange and quaint to the foreigner who sees
them for the first time, but the beautiful island that has Colombo
for its capital has the rest of the spots in the position of feeble
competitors, at least, that was the way it looked to me. Apparently
Ceylon has long been ranked as A-1 on its personal charm, for even
the person who wrote that old familiar hymn, which treats briefly
of various places, “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains to India’s Coral
Strands,” gave the palm to Ceylon, where even he admitted “Every
prospect pleases and only man is vile.” That is Ceylon all right as
far as the pleasing prospect is concerned, but the citizens of the
place impressed me in a very hospitable and kindly light, despite
the disparaging comment of the hymn writer. It is true that they are
somewhat active in the pursuit of business, and are chronic beggars,
but otherwise it is hard to see how they are any worse than anybody
else. However, they may have changed since his day. The harbor of
Colombo isn’t a very good harbor, and were it not for the protection
of the breakwater, it would be absolutely untenable in the spring and
summer, when the hot monsoon blows up from the sun-scorched African
coast, and piles up the great breakers in clouds of foam and spray
against the stone masonry. This breakwater is thrown across the
harbor neck to guard the ships at anchor from the stormy seas that
lash without. The harbor itself is so small that the ships scarcely
have room to swing at anchor with the changing of the tide, so that
they are tied up by their noses and sterns, or, to be more nautical,
fore and aft, to great buoys, which keep them absolutely steady. The
moment one lands on the jetty, one is besieged by droves of extremely
black gentlemen, dressed in a white effect, which seems to be a cross
between a pair of pajamas and a nightgown. Everyone of these gentlemen
endeavors to get your ear, and to tell you in most deplorable English
that he recognizes in you a man of exceptionally genial qualities,
to whom he would like to attach himself during your stay. If left
unmolested, he will hustle you into a carriage and take you off to see
the town, irrespective of your baggage or other impending business.
If you evade him on the moment of landing, and fight your way through
the streets, you will meet dozens more of the same pattern. Your first
impression is one of pleasure to think that you have found so many new
friends, for everyone you meet has to be restrained from embracing
you on the spot, and wants to do something for you—remuneration to be
discussed later. Incidentally everybody expects something. It seems
that all the native inhabitants of this place have an idea that the
foreigner is perpetually in their debt for something or other. If you
look at a man hard on the street, he at once stops, steps forward with
a winning smile and outstretched hand, seemingly under the impression
that you owe him at least 50 annas for the privilege of seeing him. At
the hotels it is even worse. You get nothing free, not even a pleasant
look. In fact, one gets into the habit of distinctly discouraging
pleasant looks, for, though they are pretty to look at, they come high,
averaging about a rupee per look. The men are extremely black, with
wonderfully perfect features, and for the most part superbly handsome.
There seems to have been some mistake, however, in the women, for they
absolutely fail to make good when it comes to personal charms. Most of
them one sees are extremely depressing spectacles, and the few that are
at all presentable have been corralled by enterprising speculators, and
are on exhibition, but, like everything else in Ceylon, they are not
free—one has to pay to look at them.

The natural beauties of Ceylon and Colombo are beyond description. It
is almost the only place in the world, save perhaps Japan and Venice,
that is just as good as advertised. The wonderful groves of cocoanut
palms, banana trees, and I know not what other tropical wonders in
every direction, are outlined against the soft blue of the eastern
sky. All along the sea-front of Colombo the palms stretch in great
avenues and groves from the Galle-Face Hotel to Mount Lavinia, a bluff
by the sea, some four or five miles down the coast. If it is beautiful
at the seashore, it is even more wonderful in the interior, where
luxuriant tropic hills rise sharply above jungle-clad valleys, and tea
plantations abound. In the interior one finds wild elephants in great
droves, and the catching and taming of these for domestic use is not
one of the least important occupations on the island. Other places
in the tropics are so fiercely hot that one fails to appreciate the
glories that are on every hand, but here the breezes from the sea, that
spring up at night, cool the air so that one can enjoy the advantages
of the tropics, and yet sleep as comfortably as in a more northern
climate. One might spend weeks in this glorious country, but as has
been the case on my previous visits, I was pressed for time. A little
wretched B. I. boat was just starting for the tip of India, and we
transferred to her.

The reader in search of accuracy and facts may as well know at the
start that the writer passed but five days in the Indian Empire, and,
therefore, what follows is not to be regarded as an authoritative
discussion of conditions there. My impressions began on first boarding
the steamer at Colombo for the nearest Indian port, which rejoices in
the name of Teutocorin. Behind a table on the deck of the steamer sat
a large and forbidding party in a brilliant uniform, before whom I was
dragged by the first deck-hand who discovered me wandering about the
boat with the Black Prince at my heels, trying to find an unoccupied
cabin in which to deposit my impedimenta. The man in uniform, it
appeared, was an officer of the Indian customs, and he at once pointed
out his importance in the social scheme, and, standing me up before him
like a prisoner at the bar, started on an intimate investigation of my
personal history. Large pads of paper in forms of printed matter were
piled about, and while he was busy asking questions, you are equally
busy signing papers to the effect that you are not a pirate, and not
afflicted with the plague, and so forth and so on. At last the supreme
moment arrives. Backed by all the majesty of the law and the dignity
of his brilliant uniform, he asks you in an impressive whisper if you
have any fire-arms. Here was where he landed heavily on my expedition.
I did have fire-arms of all kinds and varieties. For a moment it
looked as though I was in for a life sentence. Even Morris turned pale
in the confusion which followed. The theory seems to be that every
foreigner who happens to have a revolver or shotgun in his baggage is
the fore-runner of a revolutionary junta, and is about to inaugurate
a second Indian Mutiny, or something of that sort. After the first
outburst of excitement, and things had calmed down a little, and the
gentleman in uniform talked slow enough, so that I could understand, I
discovered that all might yet be well, providing I paid the price. I
never understood exactly what it was for, but my impression was that it
was something in the nature of a customs duty. By tending strictly to
business and writing fast, the necessary forms were finally filled out,
and, weak and exhausted, I was allowed to withdraw to recuperate in my
cabin.

The next disappointment occurred in the morning, when I found that the
boat which starts for Teutocorin does not really get there at all, but
anchors miles away on the horizon, while the despairing passengers are
taken into the alleged port on a small smelly tender, where they sit
in determined rows, trying to keep the spray off with their umbrellas.
At the pier which is finally reached, a swarm of piratical coolies and
customs officials rush down like an avalanche upon the baggage and
carry it off to the station a quarter of a mile away, where the train
for the north is waiting. The Indian trains really are not as bad as
one would expect, considering the condition of the country and the
people. There are no sleeping cars, as the term is used in America.
They have something, however, under that name, which is a compartment
on wheels, with two sofas, that remind one of slabs in a morgue
running lengthwise. At night another slab unexpectedly lets down from
the roof. This is technically known as the upper berth. The whole is
called a sleeping car because if one remains in it long enough, one
finally falls asleep from sheer exhaustion. The wise traveler brings
a pillow and some bedding. The unwise sleeps in his overcoat. The
railroad provides nothing whatever except jolts and some dismal looking
railroad men, who appear to be chronic recipients of bad news from home.

The country from Teutocorin to Madras is not particularly noteworthy,
and looks like any other semi-tropic country, with much cactus growth
scattered about. New Mexico and Oklahoma are the nearest things in
America which resemble it. The only new thing that really impresses
the stranger is the native, and for a short time he is interesting to
look at. His dress is distinctly simple. As far as one can observe,
there is nothing more than a long strip of red cotton cloth, perhaps
four feet wide by twenty feet long. He begins his dressing process at
his head and winds himself up in this sheet effect, until when the job
is finished, he appears extremely well dressed and quite gracefully
draped. The women have a similar arrangement, only there is more of
it. The country in the south is fairly well cultivated, and here and
there in the fields one sees the natives stripped for action, patiently
following the bullock and a wooden plow through the field. The thing
that impresses one most of all is the limitless number of brown-faced
red clad men and women that swarm around the stations and villages with
apparently nothing on their minds or any business in hand. There are no
dining cars on the train that I traveled on, and one has to put up with
eating houses, one of which occurs every five hours. The fare is not
bad, and the time allowed is certainly adequate to eat all there is in
sight. The style of drink in this country is whiskey and soda with ice,
served in glasses eight inches deep. There must be something curious
about Indian conditions which enable the residents to soak up such
enormous quantities of alcohol. There are thousands of them in India
who can drink a quart of whiskey a day and get up and walk off with it
without turning a hair.

Madras is the first truly large city on our line, and is called the
third largest in India. I have met people since I was there who assert
strongly that Madras has attractions. Personally I was unable to find
them in my sojourn of a single day. Nobody seems to know anything or
to be interested in anything, and it seems to offend a man frightfully
if you want to do business with him. Everybody I met was unutterably
bored. Statistics say that there is much business done in Madras,
and the figures seem to prove it, but when or how it is done is a
mystery to the writer, who was unable to detect a single individual
doing anything useful or interesting. The hotels apparently are run in
the interest of the servants. There are literally millions of them,
everyone doing something different. They are strong advocates of the
minute division of labor. The halls and corridors of the hotels swarm
with them, and the compound and dining rooms are crowded with them,
standing about, getting under foot, and annoying one. At every turn
there is a black man handing you something you don’t want, calling for
a carriage when you prefer walking, getting you coffee and cigars when
you told him distinctly three times that you don’t want anything. When
you come to go away, they appear en masse in front of your room. It is
a literal fact that just before my departure from one of these hotels
I went to my room to look for a book. The corridor in front of it was
crowded with men, so that I thought there must be either a fire or a
raid by the police. Not at all! It was only the local staff waiting for
tips. When you get in your carriage to go away there is a course of
wails,—

“I am the man who blacked your boots!”

“I passed the sahib his paper at breakfast.”

“I carried water for his bath,” and so forth, until you are on the
verge of nervous prostration listening to the uproar. The old travelers
in India aren’t bothered so much, for they slap a few people, kick
the porters, and insult the proprietor of the hotel, and by so doing
prosper.

From Madras to Bombay is something over a thousand miles, which an
express train makes in about thirty-six hours. The trains on this
line are more comfortable than in the south of India. The gauge is
wider, being five feet, six inches, which makes very smooth riding.
The railroad bed itself is admirable, being well ballasted and with
heavy steel, and the bridges throughout are the latest steel and
masonry construction. Bombay, which was our destination, is the second
largest city in India. Calcutta is the biggest and most filthy. Bombay
is really a beautiful place, but was hot and sticky, and when we were
there, steaming like a Turkish bath. The streets are broad and well
kept, the buildings many stories and modern, while the general plan of
the town affords many parks, squares and driveways. The people over
there seem to be doing more business than in Madras, but even in Bombay
it is very difficult to actually discover anyone in the act of doing
anything in particular. After he has once gotten used to it, they say
the foreigner gets to thinking there is no place like it, and though
he may make an occasional break for home, in nine cases out of ten he
comes back to the luxurious life and tropical heat of India.

Owing to mis-information, which was pleasantly given me by one of
Cook’s officials, we missed the boat up the Persian Gulf by two
hours. My personal experience with Cook’s representatives in the
far east was that what they don’t know about the country in which
they are stationed would fill a series of large volumes. There was
not another boat for five days, so, cursing our luck and the genial
young man, who had so glibly misdirected us, we took our baggage up
to the Taji-Mahal Hotel, which is certainly one of the finest in the
world. The Bombay papers were filled with telegrams of the situation
in Russia. Inasmuch as I was stalled for a number of days, I sent my
office a brief wire to keep them posted of my address in case a change
of plan might seem advisable, and then settled down for my week’s wait.
I was aroused the next morning about 5 o’clock by a yellow envelope
shoved under the mosquito-bar of my bed by a docile Indian servant,—the
never-to-be-avoided cable again. “Situation urgent,” it read. “Proceed
quickest possible route Russia.” That settled it. I shouted for Morris,
and by noon was steaming out of Bombay Harbor on a P. & O. liner headed
not for the Persian Gulf, but for the Suez Canal. At Aden the Reuters
dispatches that the agent brought on board told of the confusion and
disaster in Russia. “Wires cut. Railroads in the hands of strikers
and mutiny of sailors at Sebastopol,” ran the headings. I gave the
steamship agent, who brought them on, a cable for my office in Chicago.
“Port Said in three days. Wire more funds.” I had a few thousand in my
money belt, but “Railroads and wires cut” suggested the need of money
and lots of it to keep the pot boiling.

At Port Said the Imperial Ottoman Bank paid me a substantial remittance
one hour after I landed. In the meantime Morris had gotten into a fight
with one of those dirty heathen negroes who infest the Canal zone.
It was a detail, however, at least for Morris, and in two hours we
were on an express train speeding for Cairo. A night at Shepherd’s
and then an express train for Alexandria, where I caught by minutes a
dilapidated old barge called the _Ismalia_ for Constantinople. My plan
was Constantinople and then by boat to Odessa, and thence where the
news was originating.

The _Ismalia_ was the limit. She called everywhere there was a landing
place. Her chow was vile, and the company worse, and every place we
stopped the cable dispatches told of renewed disorders in Russia and
the Balkans. Every hour that we lay killing time in the dirty ports at
which we called I begrudged most bitterly.

The Piræus and Smyrna slipped past. At Mitylene the Powers were playing
a puerile game on the Sultan, or, as the papers said, “Conducting
naval demonstrations against the Porte.” The wily old monarch having
been there many times before, no doubt recognized in it one of those
oft repeated and inefficient bluffs which so delight the heart of the
European diplomats. Anyway, he stood pat, and after the Powers had had
their play and saw that there was nothing doing, they pulled up their
anchors and sailed away, while the Turks smiled broadly. At dawn of
the fifth day from Egypt we passed the Dardanelles, crossed the Sea
of Marmora, and at six in the evening dropped anchor a mile outside
the Golden Horn. Constantinople at last, and the threshold of our
situation!

CHAPTER III

_Constantinople at last!—The Threshold of the Russian
Assignment—A Nation in Convulsion_

I always supposed that the Japanese were the most suspicious people
in the world until I went to Russia, where I discovered a brand of
officials that was so much worse than the Japanese that there was no
comparison. In fact, for years I had them marked in my mind as the
criterion for entertaining doubts as to other people’s business, but
the Turks can give the Russians cards and spades when it comes to
having an evil mind for the intents of all strangers. As far as I
can make out, every officer in Turkey, from the general down to the
policemen, is firmly convinced that every foreigner who comes to their
dismal country does so with the intention of “stalking” the Sultan,
bombing the Premier, or starting a revolution. The unfortunate monarch
is no doubt the ring-leader in this quaint idea. Anyway, he sits inside
a fortified palace, surrounded by troops, and chatters his teeth from
sunrise to sunset. The days he comes out of his hole, the reserve is
called out and the foreigners have to have permits from the embassies
to stand on a hill and watch him through a telescope as he scuttles
from his palace to his carriage. Nobody can get into Turkey without a
pass-port, nor can he get out of it without having it elaborately viséd.

The _Ismalia_ anchored at sundown, but as it was two minutes after six,
there was nothing doing! Allow us to land that night! The police who
had boarded us to watch for a conspiracy before morning shivered at the
idea, and at once viewed us as dangerous and suspicious characters,
therefore it was nearly eight in the morning when, the sun being fairly
under way, we pulled up our anchor and started for the mouth of the
Bosphorus.

Constantinople is really three cities in one, and is perhaps the only
town in the world that has the distinction of being in two continents.
The whole is situated at the junction of the Sea of Marmora and the
Bosphorus, that narrow defile which leads into the Black Sea. The
three cities are separated the one from the other by arms of the
sea. In Europe are Stamboul and Pera Galata, divided by the inlet of
the Golden Horn, a half mile wide, where it joins the Bosphorus and
gradually narrowing as it curves upward towards the Sweet Waters, some
six miles distant. On the eastern side of the Strait is the Asiatic
town, Scutari. One may travel well the regions of the world and find no
more picturesque scene than that which greets him as he approaches the
Turkish capital from the Sea of Marmora. The gorgeous architecture and
rich color make a picture unique throughout the globe. On the European
side are the historic battlements of the old Byzantine city which
Constantine made the capital of the Roman Empire in the fourth century,
and the picturesque confusion of domes, terraced roofs and minarets
of Stamboul, the cypress groves and white marble mansions of Scutari
skirt the Asiatic shore as far as one can see. In the center is the
mouth of the Bosphorus itself, bending toward the Euxine between rugged
hills not unlike a Norwegian Fjord. The inbound steamer passing around
Seraglio Point enters the Golden Horn which old Procopius described as
“always calm and never crested into waves, as though a barrier were
placed there to the billows, and all storms were shut out from thence
through reverence for the city.” Above the crowded building of old
Galata are the heights of Pera, on which the new and more modern part
of the town is located. Looking northward, one sees the winding course
of the Bosphorus, the shores lined with palaces, villas and terraced
gardens. No port in the world presents such a cosmopolitan aspect as
does the Golden Horn. Old pre-historic Turkish iron-clads lie at anchor
near the shore. Passenger and mail steamers from every large nation
in Europe and beyond Europe swing at their moorings or lie along the
quays. Wheat laden ships from Odessa and others deep with the golden
harvest of the Danube country lie side by side with the graceful Greek
and Turkish coasting vessels, while hundreds of tugs, launches and
ferry-boats pass to and fro in the harbor.

There are nearly a million inhabitants in Constantinople, and a more
disreuptable and miscellaneous combination has never been herded
together in one spot since history began. At least, that is my opinion.
Moslems, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgars, and assorted Asiatics mingle
with a meager handful of foreigners. The great bulk are ignorant and
fanatical, easily aroused by their priests to any form of atrocity, and
are generally useless. Most of the population are poor, and all are
lazy. The official figures do not include the dogs, which are roughly
estimated at about a million. They are a sad lot, and the most dismal
creatures in the world. As far as I could make out, their diet consists
of a guttural abuse and ashes. The billy-goat of the comic weekly fame,
with his menu of tin cans and old rags, is an epicure compared with
the Constantinople dog. The home of this animal is everywhere, and in
the winter one sees fifteen and twenty sleeping, piled the one on top
of another in a heap three feet deep to keep warm. The day is devoted
to slumber, and the consumption of rubbish, while the night is given
over exclusively to vocal activities. As soon as night comes and people
are just going to sleep, the dogs wake up and in sad, disconsolate
tones, sitting on their haunches, with eyes closed and noses pointed
heavenwards, they proceed to unburden themselves of all their troubles.
The hours of performance are from 11 P. M. until daylight. They all
suffer from the mange and acute melancholia. The guide book says that
their numbers have materially diminished, but I was unable to trace any
symptom of race suicide during my brief sojourn in town.

The Turkish Christians, Greeks, Armenians, and Bulgarians have nothing
whatever in common. They hate one another as much as all loathe the
Turks, which, it may be added, is in the superlative degree. There
are a few cultivated and wealthy people of these races, but the bulk
of them are as poverty stricken and illiterate as are the Moslems
themselves. From eight to a dozen languages are spoken in the streets,
and five or six appear in the advertisements and on the shop fronts.
These races have nothing to bring them together, no relations except
trade with one another. Everybody lives in perpetual horror and
dread of all the other elements in the community; there is no common
patriotism or civic feeling. However, as I am not writing a guide to
ethnological conditions in Constantinople, I will return to my own
immediate troubles, and give over the discussion of those of the people
who compose the population, for my purpose is to write one book, and
not a dozen.

Leaving the baggage in the hands of the faithful Morris, I hurried
ashore. Rows of cadaverous and dirty officials and understrappers
lined the pier. Between the wharf and the street were innumerable
badly soiled sentinels, clothed in what appeared to be second hand
ready made garments. Armed with my pass-port I slipped through this
phalanx, giving it out that Morris would attend to the customs and the
balance of my affairs. The Turk is slow, and if you talk fast, wave
your pass-port, crowd a bit and look fierce, you have him bluffed.
Incidentally, this is not a bad receipt in other quarters of the
globe. Anyway it worked here. Upon Morris fell the heat and burden of
the day, as I learned afterwards. It would seem that there is a law
against guns and big knives coming into the sacred precincts of the
Golden Horn. I had moved so fast, that if anyone had asked me if I
had anything, I didn’t hear him. I had, of course, a modest little 38
caliber revolver stowed away unostentatiously. Morris had my big army
Colt in his hip pocket, where it bulged out like a mountain gun. A
dozen eagle eyes saw the bulge and a dozen voices asked if he had any
fire-arms. With injured dignity Morris drew himself up and proceeded to
defend himself. “Certainly not!” Why should he, a peaceful colored man,
traveling with an American gentleman, carry such things? He, Morris,
would have it known that he regarded such allegations as little better
than an insult, and no doubt his master would take the matter up with
the American Embassy. He could not tell exactly what would happen to
the perpetrators of this outrage, but from past experience he had no
doubt that everybody present would be dismissed and disgraced from
the Turkish service, etc., etc. Morris was never short of words, and
once started he launched out and was really working himself up into a
bona fide rage when one of the officers drew back his coat, exposing
the committal black butt of the revolver. Not even for a moment was
Morris non-plussed. “Yes! Certainly it is a revolver. Why not? No,
he had not understood. Was it fire-arms they had asked about? Oh! He
thought it was dynamite they were looking for, and he was sorry, but he
misunderstood—there were so many people talking at once, and, besides,
he was not entirely conversant with the Turkish language. He would like
to speak Turkish, and thought if he remained any time he would soon
pick it up. Yes, he spoke many languages already, but he knew of none
which was more euphonic than that of the Moslems. But to return to the
subject, why yes, certainly he had a revolver. As a matter of fact,
he usually carried two. Yes! Everybody did in America. No gentleman
would dress without one. Why, my friends,” he continued, “do you know
that in America,” and here he sat down on a trunk and started in on a
story about President Roosevelt. At this point a man from the hotel,
whom I had met outside, arrived to his aid, and by a judicious use
of piastres, Morris and the fourteen pieces of baggage got through,
though unfortunately the revolver stuck in the hands of the law and
remained there, too, until I paid $25.00 to some man who arranges
those delicate matters, and got it back. Everything, I find, can be
arranged in Turkey. The secret of it is to arrange first. After you
have been denied anything, or held up, it takes three times as much to
have things adjusted. In the first place, there is the diplomat, who
enters into negotiations for remuneration; then the injured dignity
involved for the change of the official heart is much more of an item
to be considered. The safe rule in Turkey, if you are in a hurry, is
to pass out a five piastre piece to any official who raises an outcry.
If he has much gold lace, make it ten. This is enough to soothe the
conscience up to Majors. No doubt Colonels and Generals get more, but
they are all really very reasonable, if one is only thoughtful of them.
I learned all these things later. After I had gotten rooms and had a
bath at the hotel, I went down to the office, where a superb creature
in gorgeous uniform, with a sword and two revolvers, was talking with
Morris. In the center of the hall were my fourteen much-labeled pieces
of baggage. As I came down Morris came to attention, saluted with great
respect, and then asked for a few words. When we were alone he grinned,
winked, and remarked:

“No, he ain’t no general. His name is Leo, and he is the head guy here.
I got the tip from the runner who got our baggage through. He don’t
run the hotel, but he is the works all right! I was just giving him a
‘stall’ on the situation. He thinks we are ‘it.’ In another interview
the hotel will be ours,” and he rubbed his hands, grinned and clicked
his heels.

Morris as a “staller” was certainly a daisy. By a “stall” he referred
to a knack he had of creating an impression within an hour that we
were entitled to everything within reach the moment we landed. He was
never ostentatious, usually truthful. If we entered a train where there
were no places left, Morris would be off to see the station master,
conductor, anyone, in fact, who was handy. In a moment he would have
the station aroused and come back with half a dozen officers at his
heels, saluting and bowing, and in a few minutes some unfortunate
would be turned out, and I would have the best place on the train. If
we boarded a steamer, Morris would be busy for an hour and everything
on the boat was at my disposal, while even the Captain would stop and
inquire, with the utmost solicitude, as to the state of my health. I
first observed this interesting course of procedure applied on the
P. & O. _Egypt_ on the way from Bombay to the Suez Canal. The rates
from India to the Canal are something exorbitant. I found that to take
Morris second cabin would cost me the equivalent of a first cabin trip
on an Atlantic greyhound. The only accommodations below the second
were called “native passage” and was intended for East Indians, who
are quite contented to sleep on the deck and eat slops and rice. I
regretted the extortionate sum demanded for the second cabin, but
did not want to see my chief of staff in such a wretched plight, so
told him I would stand for the second cabin ticket. He had heard my
negotiations with the agent, and insisted on the deck passage.

“Just you watch me, sir,” he confided, when I closed the deal. “Give
me a few pounds and watch Monroe D. Morris make a great ‘stall.’”
So I gave him two pounds and I went aboard. He objected a little at
being fumigated by the health authorities, but it lasted only a few
minutes, and he swallowed his pride. No sooner were we under way than
he directed his attention to the second steward, who had charge of
the second class passengers. In great confidence he unfolded to this
haughty dignitary, from whom I had been unable to get a pleasant
look, that he, Morris, wasn’t really a valet or servant at all, but
my private secretary. That he was making a secret and most exhaustive
study of the native races of the east, and that he, Morris, had taken a
third class ticket that he might mingle with the lowly steerage, gain
their confidence and draw them out on the ideas current in the lower
walks of Indian life. Yes, he had done this all over the world, and had
had great success in passing himself off as a lowly fellow. The first
steward might not believe it, but it was true. Of course, if he had a
second cabin passage, his fellow deck passengers would view him as an
intruder.

Then followed a brief sketch of his career, altered and amended to
suit the case in hand. Little by little the stony steward thawed, and
at just the psychological moment, Morris slipped two golden sovereigns
into his lordship’s hands and begged that his true character might be
concealed, and that the steward would see to it that while openly he
was allotted to the deck passage, that privately he should receive
accommodations suited to his true position in life. He further
intimated that such a co-operation on the steward’s part would not pass
unnoticed, and even hinted that perhaps his chief (meaning me) might be
as much impressed with the character and intelligence of the steward
as was Morris himself, in which case it was more than probable that
the steward might be appointed to the staff of his master’s new yacht,
which was now building in America. Yes, this would be an exceptionally
fine position, and he, Morris, felt that of all the candidates who were
eager for this position, that there was none so suitable as the steward
himself. To make a long story short, by night he had the best cabin in
the second class, while his friend, the steward, detailed a special
man to attend to his wants at a private table. By the time we reached
Aden the entire staff of the boat were greeting him deferentially as
“Mr. Morris” and urging his intercession on their behalf for positions
of all sorts on the new yacht. When we finally embarked at the Canal,
half the crew were at the gangway to shake hands and give a cheer for
my “Black Prince.” As an accessory to one’s credit Morris was certainly
worth his weight in gold bullion.

After I had listened to his account of Leo I told him to get the
interpreter of the hotel and go out and find the first boat sailing
for Odessa. Also to look up the latest arrivals from there, and see
what the captain and crew had to relate on the situation in Russia.
In the meantime I made the usual rounds where one is apt to pick up
information,—the American and other legations and consulates. I did not
get beyond the first, however. Mr. Leishman, to whom I presented my
letters of introduction from the state department, shook his head.

“My boy,” he said, “I am sorry to disappoint you, but I really can’t
advise your going to Russia just now. Honestly, I don’t think it is
safe.”

This was rather amusing, and I told him I was obliged to go, whatever
the situation might be. He smiled and said that he “guessed not. The
boats had stopped, the trains weren’t operating and the cables were
cut.” For half an hour we chatted, and he told me all that he knew
about affairs Russian, and then very kindly gave me letters to the
various members of the diplomatic and consular service whom he thought
could help me.

In a few hours I found that nobody in Constantinople knew anything
definitely. This, however, as I soon learned, was the chronic state of
affairs in the Turkish capital. The papers are so vigorously censored
that nothing of local importance ever by any chance filters through.
The natives themselves know nothing about outside politics, and care
less, while the foreign residents must rely for all their news on
the papers that come from the outside. Books pertaining to Levantine
politics or history are almost as hard to get over the frontier as are
fire-arms, but even here in suppressed Turkey rumors of everything were
rife. From the talk, I was more than ever convinced that Russia was
the place for me, and at once. For two weeks refugees had been pouring
in from Odessa and Crimea and the Caucasus. The Russian consul-general
thought at least 50,000 people had left Odessa. Conditions in the
agrarian districts, it was reported, were at a crisis. There had been
a fearful spasm at Moscow, a free-for-all fight in the streets, and
anywhere from five to twenty-five thousand people were said to be
killed, the reports differing according to the ideas of the narrator
as to the number of dead required to make a good story. The fleet in
Sebastopol had mutinied and there had been a fight, and the town, so
it was said, had been bombarded and destroyed, and heaven only knew
how many people were killed. As to the Caucasus, well, no one could
ever guess at the dreadful state of affairs there. As a matter of fact,
no one knew anything. Everyone suspected everything. The last steamer
from Odessa had come in ten days before, and the captain painted a
lurid picture of what he expected to happen. No, he was jolly well
sure he wasn’t going back to Odessa. Any man who went there was an
ass. He thought that by this time the place was in ashes and every
ship in the harbor burned, and those of the foreigners who were still
alive weren’t worth reckoning. Being the last one in, he had the field
all to himself, and his story had grown more lurid day by day, so I
took little stock in his report. In a word, Constantinople was stiff
with the most promising rumors that ever gladdened the ear of a war
correspondent.

At two o’clock that afternoon I returned to the Pera-Palace Hotel and
went to my room, where I found Morris disconsolately gazing out over
the terraced expanse of the Bosphorus.

“Well,” I said, “what do you know?”

“Nothing doing,” he replied, and then told of his trip up and down the
water front and his talk with various captains. He was heart-broken at
the discovery that steamers were no longer running to Odessa, or any
other point of interest.

“Why, sir,” he said, “I regard this, sir, as one of the most promising
situations in the world, sir, for people in our line of business, sir.
Here is Russia all going to the devil, sir. Odessa, sir, is, no doubt,
razed to the ground. Yes, sir, I believe it, reduced to ashes. Why,
a day in Odessa, and what a story. I repeat, sir, what a story! And
what is our position? Not a boat going there, not a train to Russia,
not a cable available. I am discouraged, sir; yes, sir, I admit it,
discouraged!” And he turned back to gaze again over the strip of water
that lay below. Morris regarded my business as his always. It was never
what I was going to do, but always what “we” were doing.

[Illustration: WITH CLANKING CHAINS AND CREAKING LIMBERS BATTERIES ARE
GOING TO THE FRONT]

[Illustration: IN EIGHTEEN MONTHS’ ASSOCIATION WITH THE ARMY WE HAVE
NOT SEEN SUCH ACTIVITY]

“It does look bad,” I admitted. On the table stood my typewriter and
beside it, two piles of stationery, the one of cable blanks and the
other for letter use. The moment we landed these were the first things
Morris unpacked. As soon as we entered a room in a new hotel, he would
ring for the bell boy and freeze him with a look, as he called for
cable blanks. I considered the situation for a moment. Obviously there
was nothing definite to be learned here. The rail to Russia was no
longer to be figured on. The wires were not working. No news was coming
out. The first thing to do was to get on the spot, and the second to
provide myself with the means of getting my stories out. The boats had
stopped running. Clearly enough there was but one thing to do. These
thoughts ran through my mind, and I sat down and wrote a cable to
Chicago—“Nothing definite obtainable here. Rumors indicate excellently.
If you consider situation warrants, propose charter steamer and cover
all points interest Black Sea, answer.” I handed it to Morris. From
the depths of gloom to the radiancy of bliss his spirits leaped in an
instant. He grinned from ear to ear.

“Fine business! Yes, sir, I call that fine business,” and he was off
down the hall like a shot out of a gun. I looked out the window, and
a moment later saw him dash off in a two-horse carriage for the cable
office. Heaven only knows what he told Leo, the performer of everything
in that hotel. Anyway Leo had mounted on the box with the driver, some
A D C to his own august person, and with a gallop the horses plunged
through the narrow streets, while the assistant on the box called out
to clear the way.

While Morris was sending my first dispatch, I was embodying in a
three-hundred-word news cable the estimate of the general situation in
the Black Sea, as seen from the haze of Constantinople ignorance and
aloofness from the outer world. This message was the boiling down of my
interviews with the various consuls and ambassadors and the information
which Morris had gotten from his tours along the water front among the
captains and officers of incoming steamers.

As soon as the first message was out of the way I sent my Ethiopian
Mercury with No. 2, and he paid down 243 francs for charges to London,
where my paper maintained an office, as a sort of clearing house for
European news. As there were some seventy-five men in the various
European cities corresponding for the paper, all messages were sent
through the English office where news that had already been printed
and duplications were “killed,” and the valuable stuff “relayed” to
America, thus saving cable tolls on unusable copy.

If the Turkish customs officials were annoying the cable authorities
were beyond the pale. Their theory was that every sender of a cable
was a suspicious character and must be watched until he has proven his
innocence of evil intents towards the Sultan. The very act of sending a
dispatch was ground for grave doubt as to his true business in Turkey.

For two days I supposed that my “situation” cable had gone. On
the third, in reply to a personal cable, I sent a code message to
Minnesota. An hour later it was returned, and with it, to my disgust,
my first newspaper story, unsent. The cable office had been unable to
read English in the first instance, and thought it best to be on the
safe side, and had calmly held the message until it should develop
whether or not I really was a safe person to be trusted with such an
important privilege as sending a dispatch. My code message of two
words had convinced them that something was wrong, with the result
that neither story went, and my 243 francs were refunded. I afterwards
learned that the operators were not required to know much English,
but were carefully drilled in a few important words, such as “riot,”
“revolution,” “disorders,” “bomb,” “anarchist,” etc. The instructions
were that any message containing any such dreadful words should be
held pending an investigation. The fact that the allusions in my cable
were to Russia, and not Turkey, had no bearing on the case whatever.
The operator did not know anything about that, but did know that no
peaceable man should be sending any such inflammable words. Anyway it
was against the rules, so for the moment I was blocked on my cables,
but it was only for the hour which it took me to arrange by wire for
an agent in Sansum (which is just across the frontier in Bulgaria) to
whom I might mail my cables, thus creating a delay of but a few hours.
I reinforced this arrangement by closing a deal with a sad-looking
German, whose first name was Lewis, and whose last name I never knew,
who stood ready to start at a moment’s notice for the frontier, to
carry my dispatches in case the mailing system failed. A wire from
London the next day told me that my mail wire had been telegraphed from
the frontier and had come through safely, with only a few hours’ delay,
so I held Lewis as a reserve, but as a matter of fact, I only used
him once during activities in Turkey. On that occasion I did not dare
trust a world beat of 2000 words to the mail, and so it was that the
melancholy Lewis went for a trip over the frontier.

But to return to my first morning in Turkey, it was obvious that at
least a day must elapse before I could receive the necessary authority
to charter a boat (for even the Turks had passed that telegram) could
be expected, so that afternoon I spent in a pouring rainstorm on a tiny
launch among the shipping interests of the Bosphorus, looking for a
boat that might answer my purposes.

CHAPTER IV

_We Charter a Tug and Become Dispatch Bearer of His
Britannic Majesty and Learn of Winter Risks in the
Black Sea Too Late to Retreat_

Chartering a dispatch boat is more bother, and offers as much chance of
being fleeced as the purchase of a horse. However, four months in the
graft-infested waters of the China coast, with a tug during the war,
and another month later spread out from Hong-Kong to the Suez Canal
in a vain search for a boat with which to cover the movements of the
Baltic fleet en route to its destination in the Straits of Tschurma,
had taught me at least one thing, namely, I knew what I wanted. So
I spent the afternoon in a launch in the pouring sleet and rain of
that bleak winter day on the Bosphorus in looking over the available
shipping. Nobody wanted to charter a boat for such a short time as I
contemplated needing one. Although there were dozens to choose from on
long contracts, when I talked charter by the week, the owners either
withdrew entirely, or put up the price so high that my hair stood on
end. There was the _Warren Hastings_, the finest salvage boat in the
world, to be had at the Dardanelles. She was 260 feet long with two
funnels, twin screws, that would drive her nineteen knots, and fitted
throughout like a yacht. I was sick to get her, but her owners were in
England. A small fortune in “rush” cables disclosed that nothing could
be done under a month’s charter. Next I learned of a British gunboat
whose name I forget, that had been sold to a salvage company in the Sea
of Marmora. She had left England for delivery to her new owners, and
was expected daily. She, too, was speedy, and had accommodations that
would delight the heart of an admiral. But again my hopes were blasted.
A cable stated that heavy weather in the Bay of Biscay had rendered
imperative a week’s delay at “Gib” for the overhauling of her engines,
and I saw my man-of-war dream fade away. A Russian coasting vessel next
appeared on the horizon. I could get her cheap for any length of time,
from a week up. She was a sweet little boat with clipper bows and the
grace of a fairy, but an investigation showed old compound engines that
could only do seven and a half knots in fine weather, and she passed
out of the reckoning. A German salvage boat met my requirements, but
her owners vetoed the deal at the eleventh hour. Next in line came a
twin-screw tugboat called the _Rhone_. I all but seized on her, but
her engines did not show Black Sea qualifications, and I stood off her
owners, pending further investigation. Frantic wires failed to locate
a yacht within reach which could be had for quick delivery. There was
a neat little craft reported obtainable at the Piræus, but the owners
could not be reached quickly enough, and she, too, passed into the
list of rejected possibilities. Perhaps a dozen others, whose merits
failed even to enlist consideration, were presented to my notice by
the various shipping men in town. As soon as it became known that I
was in the market for a boat and had the “spot” with which to close
the deal, I had all the steamship brokers of the Levant at my heels to
unload their old tubs on my innocence. When I went out they would get
into the carriage and go, too. At lunch, two or three would be waiting,
and when I came home to dinner an eager row would be sitting outside
my room. It looked as though I should have to take the little _Rhone_
in spite of her sewing-machine engines, but finally I ran across a
Greek, who rejoiced in the name of M. Pandermaly. He was the head of
a fleet of salvage tugs and tow boats that lived in the waters of the
Bosphorus and the Black Sea. We spent an hour together, weighing the
respective units of his fleet. He showed me the picture of a boat then
out of port. She had two funnels and lines that indicated both speed
and sea-going qualities.

“Where is she?” I asked, delighted with her appearance. He referred to
five telegrams. At last he found the latest record.

“Zungeldak, coaling,” he replied.

I told him I knew as much about Zungeldak as I did about the contour
of the North Pole, whereat he unearthed a great map of the Black Sea
and showed a spot some hundred miles from Constantinople, on the
coast of Asia Minor. A pier, a breakwater and about a score of houses
constituted the town of really important coal deposits a few miles
inland.

“When can she be here?” I asked.

“Two days if I wire,” and forthwith he sent the message.

I figured that at least two days must elapse before I could get started
anyway, even if the paper sanctioned my scheme, and I felt sure enough
it would, to justify myself in taking the first steps.

The next day, as I had anticipated, the reply came from Chicago giving
me free hand. The die was cast. I called Morris and turned him loose to
get a cook and provision the boat the moment she arrived in port, if on
examination she proved fit. Beaming from ear to ear, he disappeared.
Ten minutes later there was a tap at my door, and the magnificent Leo
entered with the greatest deference and humility.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, “for my intrusion, but your
secretary, Mr. Morris, tells me that you expect your private yacht to
arrive in the course of a few days. I beg of you, sir, command me if I
can be of service in facilitating your plans.” And saluting with great
respect, he withdrew. I called Morris off on the yacht story as soon as
he came in, but it was too late. My credit in Constantinople was fixed,
and as affairs transpired, it was well for me that it was so.

While I waited for my tug to arrive there were other things to do, and
as time was the essence of my business, I had not a moment to waste.
In the first place, there was the matter of funds to be arranged,
and funds, needless to say, are the bone and sinew of any enterprise
requiring quick action in Turkey. In China it had been much simpler,
for there I had a boat under four months’ contract, and my paper
arranged a long credit in the Hong-Kong Shanghai bank, on which I drew
checks when needed. A dispatch boat (even a small one) costs five or
six thousand a month to operate. First there is the charter, and then
the fuel bill to meet, and when one is burning from fifteen to twenty
tons in the twenty-four hours, at anywhere from $5.00 to $15.00 gold a
ton, the cash goes fast. My friend, Pandermaly, insisted on two weeks’
cash in advance for charter money, and the balance of the operating
expenses to be met by me. Besides this, I needed cable money, for down
in this suspicious zone it was all cash in advance at the telegraph
offices. I was only paying as far as London, to be sure, but even that
was fifteen cents a word. One has to figure on the possibility of at
least 5000 words a week, which counts up into big money. The worst
of it all was that what I needed was currency, for conditions were
so unsettled where I was going, that I figured I would be laughed
at if I asked for sight-drafts or checks to be honored, much less
such an impossible thing as credit. Cash here means gold coin of some
sort, for the notes that float about in Levantine banking circles are
subject to big discounts outside the vicinity of their origin. One
cannot conveniently carry more than a thousand dollars in gold, but
on this occasion I proposed to stow all I could get in my money belt
and pockets, and trust to my revolver and Morris to keep anyone from
separating me from it. So I figured on the maximum amount needed and
cabled my office to arrange so that I could get it quickly.

Next came the question of how I was to gain access to the ports of
interest in Russia, and when in, how I was to get out. I had operated
a boat outside of Port Arthur for four months under somewhat delicate
circumstances. The Russian admirals were anxious to sink us, and the
Japs were equally anxious to be rid of us, although they did not
admit it. I learned at that time the somewhat crude way that wars are
conducted. The spectacle of a British merchant steamer sunk by the
Russians, off the Liotung peninsula one dark night, with the idea that
they were destroying my boat, had given me a graphic idea of what press
boats must expect when operating in belligerent waters. Since then it
has been my policy to avoid getting into trouble without preparing
myself in advance for the means of getting out. Down here in the Black
Sea, as I sized it up, there would be no one backing us, and as far
as I could see, any irresponsible Russian warship on a strike might
sink us with never a murmur or protest from any quarter. But I turned
up what I hoped would be a solution to this difficulty. My paper
maintained in Europe, besides some sixty local correspondents, four
staff representatives, sent out from Chicago, and occupying palatial
offices in the four most important capitals of Europe,—one in Trafalgar
Square, London; one on the Place de l’Opera, in Paris; one in Friedrich
Strasse in Berlin; and one on the famous Nevsky Prospekt in Petersburg.
All these men were picked for their tact and social qualifications,
and each was supposed to know, and be known, to all the prominent
diplomats and statesmen within his territory. At the moment, as I
well knew, there was not a foreign office in Europe that had not been
frantically trying for two weeks to get word both to and from their
consular representatives in South Russia—for all the news that came out
of Odessa, Sebastopol, and the Caucasus, these diplomatic gentlemen
residing in these places might as well have been at the bottom of
the sea. So I sent to our news bureaus in the capitals, the message
that the _News_ had chartered a dispatch boat to cover all points of
interest in the Black Sea, and that I would be glad to carry dispatches
from the respective foreign offices to their isolated consuls in the
zone of silence, and furthermore, requested an immediate reply. In
addition, I cabled Chicago a similar message, asking them to offer our
services to the State Department in Washington for a like purpose. A
package of dispatches had gotten me out of the clutches of a Japanese
fleet in Korean waters the previous year, and I had great faith in the
persuasive power of anything with an official seal in getting one out
of a tight fix. The next day our London man wired that he had seen
the foreign office and that my offer was accepted with thanks, and
that the British Ambassador at Constantinople had been instructed to
communicate with me. Berlin and Paris declined, but I did not care.
I had all that was necessary, for one bunch of official dispatches
would answer my purpose as well as a dozen. Besides, I had a wire from
Chicago that the State Department was also going to send me cables for
delivery in the Black Sea. So far so good. I had a strong card, and I
thought I knew how to play it so as to keep myself out of the hands of
any irresponsible meddlers. The next day Sir Nicolas O’Conor presented
me with two bottles of old Irish whiskey, and asked if I would carry
dispatches and official documents to the British consul in Odessa.
Without undue enthusiasm, I replied that I would be pleased to be of
service to him, and he promised to send them around that night.

At three in the afternoon, the _France_ slipped into the Golden Horn,
after a terrible trip from Zungeldak. I went aboard with Pandermaly,
and an hour’s investigation settled my mind. She was the boat for me.
I knew enough about ships to know that if any steamer her size could
do my business, it was she. Built in Falmouth, England, five years
before, she was 125 feet long and 22 feet in the beam, with nice
lines and a maximum draft, bunkers full, of 12 feet. Seven bulkheads
and steel-plated construction steadied my mind on her toughness. The
engines interested me next, for a tug in any angry sea is like a child
in the lap of Niagara, but when I stepped down in the engine room my
mind was made up. Triple expansion engines good for 1000 H.P., with
two big Bellville boilers and a bunker capacity of 140 tons, enough
to keep her at sea for ten days at a fair speed, looked good to me. I
didn’t care much what the accommodations were, after I had seen the
vitals of her, and was pleased when I found them fairly comfortable.
Some cabin space forward had been converted into a hold for salvage
pumps and wrecking apparatus and bunks for the crew. The rest of the
accommodations was directly aft the engines. One entered a small saloon
by a ladder through a hatch. Two tiny staterooms flanked a dining-room
table, while a nice open fireplace opposite the stairs gave a homelike
look that was most acceptable. An oil lamp hung above the table, while
two others swung on pivots over the fireplace. Superficially, then, she
would do.

“How about her boilers?” I asked. After a little debate the engineer
admitted two months without cleaning. Pandermaly agreed to draw the
fires and open up the boilers as soon as they cooled, and to turn in
with chisels all his available staff, to chip the salt out of the
tubes. We closed on the spot, and I went to get a charter drawn.
Pandermaly seemed all right, but after all, a Greek is a Greek, and
I was playing the safe game, so I got an English attorney to draw
my papers. He said he would call in some shipping friends and talk
matters over, and would have the charter ready the next morning. What
I feared most was my inability to control the crew, for I had agreed
to take those on the boat as it stood. They were all Greeks but the
stokers, who were Turks. What would I do if they refused to go on at
some critical moment? A friend of mine told me that the Greeks had no
sporting blood anyway, and would insist on flying to the nearest port
at the first cloud that appeared on the horizon. However, there is an
element in the Greek character stronger than fear. It is cupidity. At
least, that is what my friend told me, and he had lived in Greece and
Turkey, so I finally decided to enter a clause in the charter, which,
after many wailings, I persuaded Pandermaly to accept, that I thought
would cover the situation. It was mutually agreed that if the Captain,
with his superior and nautical experience, thought the sea risks too
great to venture forth, I should abide by his decision, but that every
time he insisted on going to port against my wishes, he should pay a
fine of twice his salary. Every day he remained at sea he got a bonus.

That night a messenger from the British Embassy delivered the
dispatches into my hands. I signed the receipt for them and took them
to my room. On the top of the envelope in large letters was printed,
“On his Britannic Majesty’s Service,” and on the back in red sealing
wax as big as a dollar were the arms of Great Britain. The package was
worth its weight in gold to me!

In the meantime my money did not arrive, and I wanted to sail at once.
Any inquiry at the cable office brought back the dismal news that there
was a blizzard of fearful proportions in western New York, and that the
telegraph wires were down. When I had laid in provisions, filled my
bunkers with 120 tons of coal and paid two weeks down on the charter in
advance and settled my hotel bill, I had only $25 to operate on, and I
must say this looked pretty small. I was to sign the charter the next
morning, and planned to sail as soon as I could get up enough steam to
start the engines. My plans were to go first to Odessa, then to run to
Sulina at the mouth of the Danube in Roumania, which, I learned, was
the nearest uncensored cable. I hoped that my 25 would get me that far,
and I could not wait longer in Constantinople for the remittance, and
decided to chance it on getting financial reinforcement when I sent my
first cable.

The next day at ten o’clock in the morning I went to my lawyer’s
office. He had the charter drawn in due form and had brought in three
of his shipping friends to talk matters over with me. They were a sad
lot. Stiffly they sat against the wall, hands on knees, and regarded me
much as an undertaker does a prospective customer.

“Here is your charter,” my friend said, “but before you sign it,
I would like to have you talk the situation over with my friends.
They are shipping men of a great deal of experience in this part of
the world, and what they will say ought to carry a great deal of
weight with you. As a matter of fact, they think it unwise and very
hazardous for you to attempt to get to Odessa in the month of December,
especially in that small boat.”

One of them came forward and delivered a most violent harangue in
French with many gestures and grimaces, the sum total of which, roughly
translated was, that the Black Sea in winter was Hell. This annoyed me
a little and depressed me also.

“No doubt it is disagreeable,” I said. “Probably I shall be as sick as
a dog, but still, people don’t die of seasickness.”

Another long discussion from the second gentleman. He had a cheerful
tale of two steel steamers, one of 1500 tons, the other of 2500 tons,
wrecked while trying to make the entrance to the Bosphorus within the
past ten days. Seven men had escaped from one boat, while everybody
had been drowned on the other. This account was not particularly
encouraging, but I replied that I had no idea the Black Sea was so bad;
however, as I had taken dispatches from the British government and had
wired my office that I was sailing that day, I couldn’t see my way
clear to back down. The fact of the case was, my keenness was a bit
chilled. If a 2500-ton steamer had been swamped by the seas, I couldn’t
see just where my little 250-ton tug boat was going to end up. The last
man said little, but what he said was more depressing than the combined
testimony of all the rest. He looked at me for a full minute with a
pitying and incredulous expression on his face. He did not address me
at all, but turned to my attorney and said in broken French:

“Is it possible that this young gentleman will take this small
boat—what you call the _France_, and essay to go to Odessa? He will do
this in December? He will do this on the Black Sea?” My friend said:

“Yes, he says he can’t back out now.” (Only he said it in French.)

The man looked at me, smiled faintly, turned up the palms of his hands,
shrugged his shoulders and said:

“C’est impossible. Ze unfortunate young man. He will never come back.”
He took his hat and went out.

One comes to figure risks pretty carefully in the newspaper business.
The idea of the editor at home is that he wants the maximum amount of
news, with the minimum amount of risk. When a man is taking chances
week in and week out, he must have some basis on which to act, for it
is an axiom that a live correspondent, with a small story, is better
than a dead one, with a world beat in his pocket. There is no use in
a man trying for the best story in the world, if the chances are that
he is going to be killed in getting it out. A man is, therefore, not
expected to go after a story which he has not a fighting chance of
getting away with. Once he has it, however, he is supposed to take any
chances in getting it on the cable.

The editors like the men who figure these things closely, and don’t
get killed or shot up. Nothing is more annoying to the publisher than
to send a man to the ends of the earth and fit him out for a campaign
at an enormous expense, only to have him killed in the first action
through excess of zeal. When this happens, the editor must write
off the money spent on the man as a total loss. What is even worse,
from his standpoint, is that he has probably lost his chances for
covering the situation, unless indeed, he is fortunate enough to have
a substitute on the field of action. It is obviously impossible to
figure accurately what risks lie ahead, but it is possible to make
much closer estimates than one would imagine. As a matter of fact,
war risks, even for soldiers, are far less than one might imagine.
But a correspondent, if he be careful, need never face a more than 4%
risk, or say one chance in twenty-five. In the Russo-Japanese war, for
instance, it was shown that the great bulk of killing of soldiers was
from rifle and machine gun-fire, at a range of 200 yards and under. At
800 yards, which is near enough for the most enthusiastic journalist,
the risk is much smaller, say one in ten or fifteen. At a mile there is
not one chance in a hundred of his being killed by a rifle ball, and
the shells are the only thing that need bother him. Now, in the Far
Eastern war, only 6% of the entire casualties were from shell-fire, and
of that 6% about nine-tenths were from shells bursting where men were
bunched together or advancing to the attack in close formation. A man
who joins large masses of troops runs a 6% risk, but if he keeps to
himself and does not get near batteries in action, his chance of injury
at a mile fades to only one in perhaps a hundred and fifty. A man often
thinks he has narrowly escaped, but if he comes to estimate the matter
carefully, he will find that what he thought was a close call was in
matter of fact not one chance in ten. A bullet may pass within a foot
of a man’s head with a most insidious hum and he assumes that he has
had a close call, but if he comes to calculate that there was room
between the course of this bullet and his head for forty similar ones
to be placed side by side, and then the forty-first would make only a
scalp wound, he must realize that he has not had such a narrow escape
after all. The standard which has always seemed justifiable to me is
one in five, or a 20% risk, and that only under stress, when there is a
prize of a world story in sight. This has seemed to me as the maximum
risk a man should knowingly accept. Often he faces greater, but it
should not be of his own seeking, for the pitcher that goes to the well
too often gets broken at last, and the thoughtful journalist should
keep this then in his mind.

When the men had gone, I asked my lawyer what in his judgment the risks
really were. Was I exceeding my 20% limit?

“My boy,” he said, “I have been on the Pacific and on the Atlantic,
on Baffins Bay and in the Behring Sea, in the Gulf of Korea and the
Bay of Biscay, but I must say that all these at their worst are not a
circumstance to the Black Sea. I can’t estimate the percentage of risk,
but will say I shall consider you playing in great luck if you get
back.”

What could I do? My hand was forced, and I had told my paper that I
was going, and I had the British dispatches, so I signed the charter.
When I returned to the hotel I found Morris with a Greek he had hired
to cook for us. The Greek’s name was Stomati; but more of him anon. I
sent him down to the _France_ with the provisions that he and Morris
had been gleefully buying all the morning. When he had gone I sat down
and looked at my faithful chief of staff. From my Secretary, he was
now the Chief Steward of my private yacht. In the servant’s dining
room he had risen to be the leading social light. Even the chattering
French maids held their tongues while Morris, with great dignity, held
forth on European and Far Eastern politics. Now it happened that at
this time there was in Constantinople a delegation of negroes from
Abyssinia that had come up from their torrid country to get some loan
out of the sultan. The valet of the head of this delegation heard
Morris discourse and was amazed at his glib utterances, and reported
the same to his master, with the result that Morris was soon hobnobbing
with the Abyssinian princelings, who finally invited him to come down
to their country and engage in building, railroads and other minor
enterprises. Morris, never abashed, said he thought he could raise
$2,000,000 from the colored people of America, who wished to carry out
these little enterprises, but stated that for the moment he was pressed
for time, but as soon as he had a little more leisure would give the
matter his attention. The servants were greatly impressed by all this,
and whenever he passed they would stand reverently aside, salute,
and speak in awed whispers of this Ethiopian capitalist, who shed
the radiance of his presence upon them. Morris certainly worked his
position for all there was in it.

After I had listened to all the evidence of the shipping men that
morning, I really felt very apprehensive about our chances on the Black
Sea trip, and it seemed to me that the least I could do was to tell
Morris what I had been told, and give him the option of avoiding the
risk if the adventure was not to his liking. So I told him that I had
been talking over the Black Sea proposition with some shipping people.

“It seems it is a pretty bad place,” I said, “and these fellows here
are willing to lay bets that we won’t get back to Constantinople. What
do you think about it?”

“All right! Fine business,” he replied with a grin, not in the least
perturbed. I thought I would put it in plain words, so I said:

“The fact is, Morris, two large steamers have been sunk within ten
days, trying to get into the Bosphorus, and they do say here that
the _France_ is too small for December seas, and in a word, that
we will never get to Odessa anyway, much less ever come back to
Constantinople.” This sobered Morris a little, and he stopped grinning.
“I don’t want to urge you to go,” I continued. “I have told you all I
know about the situation. Personally, I don’t think it is as bad as
they say, but, as a matter of fact, I do think we take a pretty big
risk, and if you have any particular reasons for wanting to get home,
you want to think about it now. I can give you your wages to date and
your fare to Kansas City. Now it’s up to you. What do you want to do?”
He walked to the window and looked out for perhaps a minute. Then he
came back.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“My hand is forced,” I replied. “I have wired my paper that I leave
to-night. I am going anyway.”

“All right,” said Morris. “If you go, I go.”

“That settles it,” I replied. “Pack up and have everything aboard by
six o’clock to-night.”

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.

There are rules for everything in Constantinople and Turkey, and the
list of provisions which cover operations in Turkish harbors are as
long as your arm. Among other things, there is a standing law which
forbids the departure of any ship after the sun has set. An exception
was made, however, on behalf of the _France_ as she was registered as
a salvage tug, and was licensed to come and go at her own free will,
for even the Turks admitted that a sinking ship might well refuse to
wait till morning before taking the final plunge. So it transpired that
about one o’clock in the morning of the 16th of December, we pulled up
our anchor, swung clear of the shipping in the Golden Horn, and with
smoke pouring in clouds from our two red funnels, we turned her bows
down the Bosphorus, towards the Euxine. The skipper had promised Odessa
in thirty hours, and I was pleased enough as I turned in with the
dispatches of his Britannic Majesty Edward the VII under my pillow.

I did not sleep long.

The moment we emerged from the Bosphorus into the Black Sea I knew it,
and everyone else on the _France_ knew it. The creak of timbers and the
swish of clothes describing parabolas on their hooks, with the crash of
glass inside the saloon, told me that we were at sea. A look through
the small six inch port above my bunk revealed the intermittent light
of the moon now and again breaking through fleecy clouds that were
scudding across the sky. To the thud of the engines just forward of my
bunk, I could hear the seas swishing past. The little port-hole was
buried every other minute in seething froth as we rolled in the swell.
We were doing a good fourteen knots an hour. I comforted my inward
apprehensions with the cheering thought that this speed maintained
would land us in Odessa even earlier than the captain had promised. I
slept until daylight, when I was awakened by the increased rolling of
the ship. The prospect of good weather, which the moon of the previous
night had seemed to hold forth, was dissipated as I took a glance out
of the port. The dull leaden sky had turned loose a very demon of
a raw and piercing wind that was beating the sea into a passion of
discontent. The _France_, straining and groaning in every joint, was
valiantly driving her little nose into each sullen sea that rose before
her as though to block her course and drive her back. In other seas
that I had traveled, the sweep is long between the waves. Even on the
Pacific a small boat can crest the waves, slip downward in the hollow
and raise to meet the next. It was different here. Before a ship can
recover from the first wave another sweeps her deck. In great black
ridges of spray-flanked water, the seas crash upon the decks. Now they
are dead ahead, now from the starboard quarter and now from the port.
It seemed to me that it must be rougher than usual, but I said nothing.
My instinct was to go on deck at once, but internal premonitions of
disaster urged me to remain in my bunk for the moment. Morris, on the
couch in the saloon, was groaning out his anguish in spite of his
thirteen trips across the Pacific. I smiled as I listened to him.

“Morris,” I called.

“Standing by like steel, sir,” he answered in a weak voice as he
staggered to the door of my tiny cabin. He was the palest colored man I
ever saw. I was somewhat to the bad myself, but he looked so much worse
than I felt that it cheered me up.

“Sick?” I queried.

“Not seasick, sir,” he replied, his pride and his thirteen
trans-Pacific journeys holding him up, “but suffering from a touch of
indigestion, sir. Indeed, it is nothing more. The fact is, I attribute
it to the potted ham of last night, sir,” and he withdrew hastily.

A moment later the hatch was thrown open and Stomati floundered down
the ladder in a cloud of spray. He shook the salt water out of his hair
and grinned a little as he delivered a message from the skipper.

“Bad sea. No headway. Wanted my permission to slow down.” I was
disgusted and told myself that the old man was flinching at the first
sign of heavy weather.

“Tell him no,” I advised Stomati, who immediately disappeared. Ten
minutes later Nicholas appeared as a second ambassador from the
captain. He spoke excellent English, if he was a Greek. He explained
that our 120 tons of coal brought us so low in the water that the
ship was pounding badly. I looked at him and realized that he knew
his business better than I did, so I told him to cut the speed down
to 7 knots. Instead of improving, things seemed to grow worse with
each succeeding minute. Even Morris, who was more than half dead to
the world, did not need to be told that she was pounding fearfully.
We could feel her lift her bows above the water, poise for a moment,
and then, like the downward blow of a sledge-hammer, fall into the sea
with a crash that shook her from stem to stern, like a rat in the teeth
of a terrier. Every time she surged down the rush of water over her
decks told us that she was shipping seas at every lurch. The crash of
timbers and boards over my head seemed to indicate that we were really
making a pretty heavy job of it. The noise and uproar of tons of water
crashing against the steel deck-house overhead continued. Every now and
again we would hear a piece of woodwork ripped off from some hatch or
companion-way with a scream of nails loosening their rusty hold, and
the snapping of breaking wood. By and by little drops of water began
to leak down through the ceiling. I watched this drip mechanically, as
it came faster and faster through the skylight and seams of the deck
above my head, until at last the drip became a trickle, and the trickle
a stream. Puddles began to appear on the floor, first on one side and
then on the other, as the ship rolled heavily in the seaway. About ten
the hatch opened and again the engineer appeared. He was wet to the
skin.

“We can’t keep this seven knots and our heads above water,” he said.
“We’ll have to slow her down some more.” So I said “All right.” The
look on his face told me it was time for me to get up, so I staggered
out into the saloon and got into my clothes. Lamps were swinging to the
ceiling, and the howl and roar of water on the outside and the drip
of it on the inside did not make me feel any too happy. Throwing on
my heaviest campaign coat, I went up the ladder. The hatch swung out
heavily against the wind. For a moment I stood clinging to the railing
of the skylight. Like a wounded duck the _France_ was beating her wings
and laboring to make headway against the tumult, which strove to force
her back. Great mountains of sea rose before us in successive chains as
far as the eye could reach. Like assaults of infantry in close columns
they stretched for miles, and bore down upon us. Each time the staunch
little tug would put her nose into the angry front, she plowed forward.
For a moment she would smother in the crash of waters, then she would
shake herself clear of spray and foam and lift to meet the next sea.
As I stood there, a great black silent roller struck her on the bow.
She bent beneath the impact and then before she could stagger to her
feet, another hit her, and three feet deep the seas swept across her
decks. A coop of chickens torn from its position near the galley came
sailing down on the crest of the water and struck a stanchion, breaking
it open with a crash, and as the sea flowed out of the scuppers, some
dozen wet and melancholy fowls came fluttering and squawking out of the
wreck. They were wet and seasick, but their impact with the cold salt
water had put some spirit into their souls. The rooster, who seemed to
be in command of the expedition, spread himself on the rolling deck,
closed his eyes, stretched his neck and uttered one long triumphant
crow, whereat his followers began to cackle. At that moment another
wave struck us, and as it went roaring over the stem it took that sad
company of birds with it. There they sat on the crest of the wave;
surprise, indignation and distress were pictured on their silly faces
as I saw them disappear in the wake.

Drenched and cold, I fought my way forward and crawled up over the back
of the deck-house to the bridge deck, where the two gallant little red
funnels were belching smoke into the spray and mist, undaunted by any
adverse seas, while the engines beat out with steady rhythm the tune of
their determination to fight on until the last. On the bridge old man
Gileti, covered with oil-skins, made dismal grimaces and deprecating
gestures when he saw me. With Stomati to interpret I soon learned the
meaning of his shrugs and murmurings. These big seas were getting
to the _France_ and we could not afford to take any more chances.
Already the two forward hatches had been beaten in. The chain locker,
the forecastle and the salvage hold were filled with water flush to
the deck. So low had we sunk forward that each sea swept us from end
to end. We slowed down to five, to three, and at length to one knot
to keep her from pounding into those relentless seas that surged and
beat at us from every side. In the meantime all available hands were
working at the pumps and bailing water for dear life. I saw at a glance
that we were in a bad way. Two out of seven bulkheads were flooded.
If the water forced the next, where the boilers were, we would sink
like a stone. We were making no headway, and our efforts to reclaim the
flooded parts were of small avail. The skipper renewed his plea for a
refuge on the Bulgarian coast. It was now past noon, and the men were
wet and cold, and even the dispatches must wait, so I gave assent and
we turned her nose for the shore.

Some miles south of Konstanza a great headland peninsula juts into
the sea and swings a little south. This is called Kavarna Head. In
the elbow of this bend is a semi-bay where even the north wind fails
to wreak its vengeance, and to this shelter it was that we slid in
about six that night, wet and cold, decks sea-swept and the cables
twisted into snarls of halyards and guys. Fragments of wreckage stuck
in the scuppers and the salt encrusted funnels told of the storm we
had braved. Once in the still water we let go the starboard anchor,
which slipped into it with a splash and cheerful rattling of cables
as the steel links came clanking over the rollers out of the chain
locker. From six to ten that night the work of ousting the water was
carried on, and when four bells struck, we were as fit and sea-worthy
as when we slid out of the Bosphorus and ran into the jaws of what I
subsequently learned was one of the worst storms of the year.

The wind howled outside our haven, and the wet and weary men appealed
strongly, so we lay to for the night, the steam simmering in the
boilers, and the crew, exhausted by their hard day’s fight against wind
and weather, slept on the grating over the boilers, for the forecastle
was still too cold and wet for comfort.

In the dawn of as dismal a day as ever brought light we pulled up our
anchor and turned our nose seaward again. The wind had subsided, but
the waves still snapped at us, licking us now and anon with an angry
slap. But the strength of it had oozed with the dying of the wind.
Clouds hurried across the sky as we dipped and plunged northward,
parting the seas to right and left as the sturdy little ship responded
to the steady throb of the loyal heart down in the engines, that beat
out its 110 revolutions to the minute. By noon the sun was breaking
through, and the sea had subsided enough so that we could keep plates
on the table, and the first meal at sea of the trip was served. When I
came on deck after _tiffin_ the sun was shining and the air as fresh
and invigorating as a fall morning on the prairies in North Dakota. To
the west stretched the broken coast of Roumania. An hour’s run or more
northward, one could discern with a glass the site of that prosperous
little nation’s greatest port, Konstanza. Two dreary nights had made me
feel the need of rest. My saloon was cold and damp. The only place of
refuge, where warmth was sure, was the engine room, and there I went,
throwing myself on the rude bench in one corner where the engineer
spent the idle moments of his watch, and fell fast asleep. About three
I was aroused by being vigorously shaken. It was the engineer. As I sat
up I noticed, to my surprise, that we were again rolling heavily.

“Well, what’s the trouble now?” I asked sleepily. He never smiled, but
looked at me grimly.

“Bad. Very bad,” he said.

“What’s bad?” I asked. I was too tired to be even apprehensive. I
wished he had let me sleep instead of bothering me with his fears.

“Come on deck,” he said, without any further explanation, and led me
up the steel ladder to the top of the gratings and out on the deck.
I could scarcely believe my eyes. The darkness of dusk had settled
down upon us, and cloud upon cloud of snow were driving past us. I
could barely see across the deck where the captain and the bulk of the
crew were wringing their hands. As they all spoke at the same time,
either in Greek or some other unknown tongue, and as each seemed to
have a distinct and separate idea in mind as to what the exigencies
of the situation required, it was difficult to gather what all the
excitement was about. Everybody was presenting at one and the same
moment a different course of action, each of which it would appear
was the only road to safety. The captain urged in Greek that turning
about and going somewhere astern was the only thing to do. One engineer
advised Sulina in broken English, while the other had some ideas in
Greek which have not yet come through. The Turkish fireman and others
of our crew all wanted to do something or other, and each was howling
the merits of his policy at the top of his lungs in his own peculiar
dialect. Stomati was there with his seven different languages, which
he was using all at once. Someone had dug him out of the galley and
brought him forward to use his influence on the situation. Speaking
a word in each of the seven languages to one of English, he started
out into a detailed account of the storms of the Black Sea, their
origin and cause, and their inevitably fatal termination. He had all
the others faded for noise, and he soon had them in the background.
Already the sea was lashing itself into a vortex of fury. The engineer
had eased her down to half speed. I could scarcely believe my eyes. An
hour before I had not seen a cloud in the sky, and yet we now appeared
to be in the heart of a very enterprising blizzard. However, I could
not see the overpowering danger, and personally I favored Odessa as
being as safe as any other course and most convenient to the ends I had
in view. Stomati finally got my ear, and, backed by old man Gileti,
Spero and the mate, explained that these storms were the peril of the
Black Sea; that at any moment it might turn up a cyclone and bring up
seas that would swamp us in five minutes. I could not see how this
could be possible myself, and neither did Morris, who had recovered
his equilibrium, and we told them so. Stomati at once reached into
the past and told of the wreck of the Roumanian mail, a 4000-ton boat
of 21 knots, that had gone down only 20 miles from where we were, in
just such a storm. Everyone knew of a dozen similar cases, and when
word went aboard of what Stomati was saying, they all began at once to
tell of the disasters that they knew of personally. I was beginning
to be impressed, when, without warning, just as it had come, the snow
ceased, and in two minutes the sun was out and shining brightly, with
only a choppy sea and a black cloud sweeping astern to show the passing
of the storm. Everyone, but Morris and I, seemed to be disappointed
about it. However, they accepted the inevitable and returned gloomily
to their posts, and I went back to the engine room bench. By eight
o’clock that night we were off the mouth of the Danube at a place
called Sulina Mouth. I had dined and reinforced myself with a cigar,
when the captain, with his deprecating gestures and up-turned palms,
came down and asked for permission to put in for the night. This would
mean a delay of twenty-four hours at least, so I declined flatly. We
were already nearly forty-eight hours out of the Bosphorus, and Odessa
still a night’s run away, besides the night in port and one day lost.
I considered it a very bad precedent. Stomati, who was clearing the
dinner table, began to reminisce about a series of wrecks that had
occurred between Sulina and Odessa, but after the false alarm snowstorm
in the afternoon, I was determined to try the sea, even if it should be
rough.

“Old Gileti has got cold feet sure,” volunteered Morris, who stood at
my elbow as we watched the harbor lights of Sulina fade away beyond our
bubbling wake. I was inclined to believe that he was right.

The moon was making frantic efforts to break through the clouds, and,
though there was a brisk wind blowing, I believed we would have an easy
night, and so I turned in, but I never made a worse mistake. About
one o’clock I awoke with a realization of that fact. What we had been
through before was child’s play. I threw on my coat and got into the
dimly lighted saloon. The place looked as though a ten-inch shell had
burst. Broken glass, trunks turned upside down, clothes thrown from
their hooks, and confusion everywhere. Outside the wind and waves
roared like a thousand freight trains. It took me two minutes to get
the hatch open against the wind which seemed to be blowing everywhere
at once. I could not see my hand before my face, but felt my way
along the rail to the engine room skylight, then to the deck-house,
pausing to cling tight for the lurches that followed every succeeding
dip. It had come off cold, and ice was forming everywhere. I felt
the thin coating on bar and brace as I climbed to the bridge deck,
and, watching my opportunity, crawled toward the wheel-house, half
blinded by the spray which swept the ship from end to end. The noise
was too great for conversation, but the grim faces of the men at the
wheel bespoke their views of the situation louder than words. They
were two strong men, but flung this way and that they were, as they
wrestled with the wheel, which spun and jerked under their hands like
a live thing, as it answered the writhings of the rudder beaten by
the seas that lashed astern. I tried to stand on the bridge, but snow
and sleet-like darts of fiery steel bit my face and drove me back for
shelter to the wheel-house. Every time we struck a sea the spray rose
in solid sheets, beating against the thick glass windows until we had
to raise the wooden storm sashes to keep them from breaking. The spume
of the waves, whipped from their crest by the wind, blew across our
decks in torrents, and high above the funnels. Every time she rose
to take the sea in her teeth I drew my breath for the dip and surge
of water that followed. Every time she plunged downward it seemed as
though it must be her last. Again and again she buried her nose in the
seething vortex, and then, trembling in every fiber, she would shake
herself clear and rise to clinch the next sea that swept upon her. I
stood there for hours watching the struggle. Puny man and the fragile
creation of his hand against the forces of nature. Alone and in the
blackness of night, we fought it out to the tune of the howling wind
and the crash of water dashing itself to spray against our decks. Hour
after hour passed and still she responded to the gallant little engines
that never faltered. Half the time the screw would be beating air,
the engines racing and shaking the boat as in an ague. The engineers
clung desperately to the iron frame of the engine as they dropped in
the oil on the working bearings. The firemen in the stoke hole braced
themselves against the bulk-head as they heaved the coal.

[Illustration: WHEN THE FRANCE ENTERED ODESSA HARBOR AFTER THE STORM
SHE WAS PRETTY WELL SHAKEN UP]

[Illustration: SULINA—THE MOUTH OF THE DANUBE RIVER]

The struggle lay in steam and the endurance of the engines, and they
knew it, and each man shut his teeth and did his part.

Two o’clock came, three o’clock, four o’clock, and still we struggled
on. Suddenly the wind stopped, the sea began to subside and the moon
came out. All was lovely, only cold, so cold that one’s marrow seemed
to freeze. Three hours more and the sun rose red in the east, flanked
by two sun-dogs that justified the cold we felt. It was a perfect
winter’s day. Way off on the port bow a great bluff began to loom up,
and little by little the towers of a great city were discernible.

An hour later, cased in ice, with icicles hanging from every part, the
_France_ crept into port. We were wreathed in ice from stem to stern.
The thermometer marked ten degrees below zero. I did not speak Greek,
but the grip old man Gileti gave my hand, spoke his relief louder than
words as we rounded to behind the breakwater in the haven, for which we
had struggled for sixty-five hours—Odessa!

CHAPTER VI

_We Land in Odessa on the Day Set by the Revolutionists
for a General Massacre, but Because of Effective
Martial Law, Secure Only a “General Situation” Story_

Odessa, as we viewed it from our ice encrusted bridge that freezing
December morning, was a distinct disappointment. Behind the breakwater
that stands between the pounding seas of the Euxine and the anchorage
and wharves, the city lay, gray, cold, gloomy and forbidding. From the
dirty streets of the shipping district the town scrambles up steeply
and spreads itself out over the bleak landscape that lies beyond. Long
lines of what the Europeans call “goods wagons,” and what we term
freight cars, were strung along both pier and water front. A half
dozen or more stranded cargo steamers chained up to the wharves, and
a few dreary looking tugboats combined to make the setting of one of
the most desolate scenes that I recall. An occasional figure slinking
about among the cars, and a single miserable Russian sentinel that
stood near one of the gray stone warehouses served only to intensify
the utter loneliness of the place. Over a year before I had been in
Dalny, pressing close on the heels of the invading army of Japan.
Big ten-inch shells from naval turrets miles away at sea, reinforced
by brigades of bristling infantry that closed in from the north, had
forced the Muscovites to evacuate. The retreating columns had straggled
out by the light of blazing warehouses tuned to the crash of falling
timber—this destruction their own handiwork to keep Dalny out of the
Japanese hands. But even that far finger of the Russian reach, obtained
in crazy frenzy of expansion and abandoned in smoke and confusion, was
cheerful compared to Odessa. There at least one saw the new life of the
Oriental armies that poured in by brigades, divisions and army corps in
the place of the retreating Russians, but here in the great commercial
city of southern Russia there was a gloom, silence and abandon that
spelled revolution, disorder and economic disaster, more loudly than
the smoking embers of deserted Dalny. Morris, who did not indulge much
in sad reflections, brought me back to the business in hand by the
true, if somewhat ungrammatical observation—

“There sure ain’t nothing doing ashore or afloat in these diggings, and
that’s a cinch.”

I agreed with the spirit if not with the construction of this comment.
A careful survey of the situation, as visible through my binoculars,
from the bridge of the _France_ suggested the possibility that the
irresponsible population had all gone into the interior to have an
agrarian riot or celebrate in some other simple way dear to the
Russian heart. Nevertheless, we had not come all this distance and
spent three cheerless soaking nights at sea to give up the game at
the first sign of discouragement. Here was where the dispatches of
his Britannic Majesty came to the rescue. After an elaborate search
through the International Signal Code I found a combination of flags
which exactly filled our needs, and promptly hoisted to our single
halyard the colored bunting of the code which stood for the letters “J.
& S.” This means “I am carrying government dispatches,” and implies
that everything in sight should co-operate at once. The effect was
even better than I had anticipated. A few minutes after our flags
had been snapping in the icy wind that blew in from the Black Sea I
saw the launch of the quarantine doctor come puffing out from behind
some tugboats, where it had been lying in ambush. The doctor himself
was standing in the bow. He was a portly man, and willing hands were
necessary to assist him up the side of the _France_. He was one of
those foreigners who cherish that most regrettable of ideas, namely,
that he could speak English. The result was that he flatly declined
to be addressed in any other language. This made it embarrassing and
occasioned no end of delay as his English was of the purely school book
brand. It contained such pertinent phrases as “How is your wife’s
brother? Will you go for a walk in the park to-day? Has your sister’s
husband a good pen?” and so on. This was all right, as far as it went,
but did not assist me much in the business in hand. He seemed to be
wholly unprepared in his vocabulary to take care of such a commonplace
and uninteresting subject as a health examination. He held me on deck
in the cold while he ran through his available list of sentences, which
really gave him an excellent insight into the status of my family,
the number of my brothers and sisters and their respective ages. He
followed this with a few irrelevant questions about the weather, and
ended up with “Do you find Russia a pleasant country?” This seemed
to be the last sentence which had stuck in his head. After that he
paused for breath, and before he could commence again I got him down
into my saloon where we had just been having breakfast. When he saw
the table he forgot all about his English aspirations and burst into
French, and, with tears in his eyes and a wealth of exclamation, told
us how hungry he was. We offered the remnants of the breakfast and he
fell on the food with an avidity which was appalling. The remnants
went fast and we had to send a rush order to Stomati in the galley for
reinforcements. He ate fast and well. Between gulps he told us that
in spite of his fine uniform and steam launch, he only drew $40.00 a
month for his services. I endeavored to be politely interested, until
I found that he had troubles which would fill a book, and so gently
but firmly cut him off. When he had finished the last scrap he turned
to business with evident regret. It isn’t really business, of course,
but it is what passes under that name in Russia. First he took off
his coat, then he undid his sword and took off his belt and placed
it on the table. He then looked all around the room and asked for a
cigar. He got out his penknife and carefully cut off the end, and
then lighted it. Great folios of paper were then produced, and sheet
upon sheet of printed forms were piled upon the table, and the real
work begun. Detailed information as to my lineage, aye, even unto the
second generation previous, were called for, until I was ashamed to
confess that I did not know my grandmother’s maiden name. Then I had
to give all the names of the crew, and these had to be copied in three
different blank forms to comply with Russian law. As my staff were
Greeks and Turks, with impossible names, we spent perhaps half an hour
in making these entries, discussing the correct spelling of each as it
was entered in the forms. Hoping to facilitate business, I gave the
inspector three fingers of good old Irish whiskey, but I never made a
worse mistake. He at once became genial and wanted to take a recess
and tell me the story of his life in his school book English. Finally,
with the co-operation of the entire staff and the testimony of most
of them, under cross-examination, we convinced him and saw him duly
enter in triplicate first, that we had no sickness aboard, second,
that we had no mysterious corpse packed away below the deck. (Just why
anyone wanted to smuggle a corpse into Odessa when the supply there was
greatly in excess of the demand, has never been clear to me.) Third,
that we were not bringing in any large quantity of fresh water (which
might be full of Turkish germs), and a lot of other equally immaterial
and ridiculous information. When all was said and done he politely
informed me that I could not land until he had made his report and some
other official had made some other sort of examination. This seemed to
me to be about the limit. With all the dignity at my command I ordered
Morris to bring out the dispatches. This he did with a great show
of importance. I showed the wretched official the red seals and the
official stamps and then said:

“These are the dispatches of his Britannic Majesty, Edward VII. If you
choose to take the responsibility of detaining here a moment longer
the bearer of such important papers, of course you can do so. I have
no means of forcing you. For your own information, however, I will
tell you that such action on your part will be reported to the British
foreign office and your case will be most vigorously investigated. But
you must do as you think best.”

He wilted on the spot, and took us ashore in his launch, where he
led us before some dignified gentlemen in gorgeous uniforms who all
talked at once in Russian. I waited and tried to look important. My
“red sealing waxed” dispatches were again laid out for inspection, and
my friend, the medical examiner, evidently repeated my remarks to him,
for an orderly was sent on the run for another launch, and I was rushed
across the harbor before another and higher official, who was covered
with gold lace, where there was another interminable discussion,
which finally ended in our being turned over to a burly ruffian in
uniform, whom I learned was assigned to act as my chief of staff while
I remained in town. Fortunately he spoke a little German, and two
minutes after I had him alone I convinced him that his services were
unnecessary. His conscience troubled him for disobeying his superior
officer, but five roubles fixed that, so, four hours after we dropped
anchor, I found myself free to pursue my way unhampered.

The situation in Odessa at this time was intolerable, as I found within
an hour after I had delivered the dispatches to the British consul,
and had an opportunity of getting down to work. That day, as I then
learned, was the Czar’s birthday. For weeks previous there had been
talk of another grand demonstration on the part of the revolutionists.
It had been pleasantly rumored that there was to be a promiscuous
killing to be conducted under the auspices of the revolutionary
committee. These prearranged events rarely materialize in Russia,
as the gentlemen supposed to be in charge of such proceedings are
generally dug out of their cellars and are well on their way to Siberia
on the date set for their entertainments. My experience in five
visits to Russia during the period of convulsion was that the average
Muscovite revolutionist has no equal (off the stage) for simplicity
and ineffective activity. The moment you set eyes on him you know he
is a revolutionist. His hair stands on end, his eyes are wild and his
dress is in disorder. In fact, nothing is lacking to complete the
make-up of the part. Every time he has an opportunity he climbs on a
barrel or some other conspicuous spot in a public place and proceeds
to air his ideas. He will point out at the top of his lungs the
advantages of bombs and miscellaneous assassinations. He has a well
developed programme as to what ought to be done with the Czar, and as
for the grand dukes, he simply tears out his hair in handfuls when he
talks about them. When he isn’t engaged in talking he goes off and
buries himself in a garret and writes inflammatory and compromising
letters and articles, which he leaves about just as a stage hero does
important family papers. The police (whom you know to be police, just
as quickly as you recognize a revolutionist to be a revolutionist)
stand around and look wise and make notes. The moment any trouble is
brewing they go out and make a big bag of assorted anarchists, bombists
and inoffensive but loquacious students, who have been airing their
undigested views on sociology and politics. When people get together
for the glorious riot which has been planned for months in advance,
lo and behold! All of the leading spirits are kicking their heels in
the nearest fortress or packing up their belongings for a trip into
Siberia. So it was at this time in Odessa. The revolutionists had
been talking so long about what they were going to do on the Czar’s
birthday that everybody in town knew of their plans, which, among other
variations, included a massacre of all foreigners. I never learned just
why the foreigners were to be massacred, but it seemed to be admitted
in revolutionary circles that this was the proper thing to be done.
General Kaulbars of Manchurian war fame had been made military governor
of South Russia. He had rushed in two regiments of barbarous looking
Cossacks, who had been instructed to “fire with ball” at the first sign
of trouble, and they certainly looked as though they were prepared to
do it. The order was published and everybody knew what to expect.

In spite of these precautions nearly everybody in Odessa was living
in a state of nerves as to what might happen. The erratic behavior
of the mutinous fleet the summer before, headed by the battleship
_Knias Potempkin_, had aroused general apprehension as to what extent
irresponsibility might carry the situation. The people distrusted
the army and the army the people. The soldiers hated their officers
and the officers feared their own soldiers, and both officers and
soldiers distrusted the population of the town, while the foreigners
had no confidence in anybody. The so-called Jewish massacre a few
months before did not tend to quiet the minds of the peaceful residents.
At that time the town had been given over for three days into a
free-for-all fight and general riot, where everybody killed anybody
they had it in for, and a few Jews thrown in for luck. All of the
foreign consulates had made detailed preparations for trouble.
Rendezvous had been agreed upon for the mustering of the various
flocks. A company of soldiers was to be allotted to each consulate to
act as an escort to the water front, where ships were held in readiness
for immediate departure to places of safety. The residents had been
out of touch with the outer world for weeks, owing to the postal and
telegraph strike and railroad tie-up. All seemed to think that their
respective governments were trying to do something to relieve them and
that the international fleet that at last accounts had been making its
silly demonstration off the Dardanelles, was going to be allowed to
pass through into the Black Sea. No one thought that the Sultan would
make any objection to allowing a few cruisers to pass the Bosphorus
to protect the trembling subjects of the European governments at the
various ports, but while the foreigners at every port where Russian
supremacy still held were sitting up nights waiting to be murdered,
and praying for the protection of the blue jackets, six inch rifles
and machine gun batteries, those very warships were sitting peacefully
outside Macedonia, conducting their childish and ineffective bluff.

The economic conditions could scarcely reach a worse stage than those
existing at that time in all South Russia. Business was absolutely
at a standstill, credit had collapsed and thousands of men had been
thrown out of employment. The demand for most of the products of
local manufacture had fallen off to almost nothing. The directors
of enterprise dared not accumulate a surplus of their product for
fear their warehouses would be destroyed at the next spasm of riot,
so factories had closed up and the employés were in the streets,
destitute and in the middle of winter. Most of the better class had
left town, closed their residences, and dismissed their servants, who
were also out of town. The railroad, telegraph and postal men were all
on a strike, the end of which was not in sight. Most of them had no
funds, and were begging on the streets. Everybody who had any money
was sitting on it with a gun in each hand. With ten thousand beggars
on the streets and the coldest weather of the winter biting through
bone and marrow, and a ravenous hunger turning the ordinary docile
man into little better than a brute, and with thousands of such at
large, there is small wonder that people felt apprehensive. The bakers
dared not bake for a day ahead for fear their shops would be broken
open and looted, which indeed was happening every day. The Jews, who
comprise nearly a quarter of the population, were “squeezing” everybody
that came into their clutches and constantly fomenting trouble on the
outside. It was probable that any day a mere street brawl might in
a moment turn into a massacre, and these Russian massacres mean the
unleashing of every element of evil which the town contains. The news
that came in from the agrarian districts was increasingly serious, and
everyone was guessing as to what the outcome would be. The reports
that came in indicated that all over Russia, sometimes peaceably
and sometimes with violence, the peasants were taking the land into
their own hands. Stories of burning estates and fleeing land owners
circulated in every quarter. The question that everyone was asking was
if the peasants ever take the land, who will ever take it away from
them. Surely the army, that was manifestly sullen and discontented
and trusted by no one, could not be looked to for performing such a
task. As a matter of fact, people generally felt that the soldiers in
time of trouble are more to be feared than any other element in the
community. The Czar had just issued his latest manifesto increasing the
pay and the standard of living of his army, but the effect was about
the same as that of turning up the wick of a lamp when the oil is
gone. There was a momentary flare and then less light than ever before.
The soldiers and everyone else viewed it at best as a confession
of weakness wrung from the sovereign by his realization of his own
desperate plight. Anyway, not even the most optimistic soldier believed
that he would ever get the promised raise of pay. Patrols of the
forbidding looking Cossacks were riding about the streets from morning
until night. The plodding of their horses’ hoofs in the snow and the
metallic jingle of sabers, were almost the only sound one heard in the
streets. All else was quiet as the grave, and save for the shivering
and destitute begging from house to house, there was almost no one else
abroad in this bitter cold.

Considering our high hopes for a general uprising the day passed
quietly enough. Only a bomb episode along in the afternoon testified
that the spirit of anarchy and revolution still smoldered beneath
the surface. Not much of an event it was, even at that. Only an
unsuccessful attempt to assassinate one of the local tyrants of the
detective force. It would make a scare head for a local police story
perhaps, but out here for the man who had the only access to the
world’s cable, it was only a “significant incident.” The immediate
scene is dramatic, terrible. A cold gray court-yard rises beyond a
gate, at which stood a half frozen sentinel, gloomy, imperturbable,
silent. Across the court was the office of the victim sought. Within
the compound a half dozen bodies, now torn and mangled, masses of
clothing and human flesh, lie steaming in the cold, while pools of
blood freeze in little lakes of red stained snow. The frost-bitten
earth crunches dryly under the feet of the clumsy officers, who,
note-books in hand, are compiling their reports of the incident. One
of them turns over with his heavy boot the stiffening carcass of the
perpetrator of the outrage, himself torn to shreds by the explosion of
his own bomb. With white teeth clinched, and glassy eyes glaring up to
the gloomy December sky, he lies, soaked in his own blood, amidst the
wreckage he has created, a grim evidence that no tyrant is safe in a
country where there are dozens willing and eager to sacrifice their own
lives to remove even one of the cogs of the vast engine of despotism,
the machine that has been grinding them smaller and smaller during
these many centuries. No wonder the prefect of police turns his heavy
visage from the scene in which he was cast to play such an important
role. He is putty colored beneath his beard as he passes to his
carriage, saber dragging in the snow and spurs ringing sharply on the
threshold of the great gate. The dull sentry hears the sound and comes
to a present. The police officers salute. The prefect climbs into his
sleigh, weighted down with rich furs, the driver cracks his whip, and
they are off up the street at a gallop. He has escaped this bomb, but
how about the next, and yet again the one to follow that? Perhaps he is
thinking what will be the ultimate end, as he is driven away through
the softly falling snow.

The uninitiated, no doubt, view with skepticism the accuracy of quickly
gathered news, and perhaps think that a few days on the situation
is a ridiculously short time in which a man can gather any definite
information. This is in a measure true. There are times where weeks
of study are essential, but these are not the stories a special war
correspondent is after. Where he is in demand is on the spot where
there is a “visible” situation. When things quiet down he usually
withdraws, and the political and economic correspondents send the more
analytical and perhaps profounder stuff. But these men in a riot,
disaster or “emergency” are often lost in the shuffle, and here it is
where the war correspondent can often cut in and beat by days the men
who have been on the spot gathering routine political news for years.
Unimpeded by long association the special man sees at a glance the most
picturesque and prominent features. Trained as he must be to quick
action, and methods of getting out his copy, his reports are often days
ahead of the resident correspondent.

The first thing for a “story” is a general view of the situation. Two
hours divided among the consulates and embassies of America, Great
Britain, France and Germany give the general official idea, which is
always conservative. Next a round of the newspaper offices and one
gets the (sensational) radical impressions. If there is anything big
one can always find a half dozen war correspondents in the bar of the
biggest and best hotel in town. From them one gets the sensational and
spectacular elements and an unlimited amount of exaggeration. Three
hours’ driving about town with an interpreter interviewing and talking
with everybody available, from the man loafing on the corner to the
prefect of police, gives the local color and atmosphere for your cable.
Late in the afternoon a man has in his head a mass of material ranging
from the most lurid stories of the correspondents to the “official
protests” that “all is well and no further trouble anticipated.” The
rest is merely a matter of perspective. As he writes, the correspondent
must weigh the sources of his information and estimate their probable
accuracy. Experience and many previous failures, and a sort of sixth
sense, acquired perhaps in work on a local paper, render quick and
almost subconscious judgments on news values more accurate than the
uninitiated might imagine. It is at this point that a man’s work ruins
him with his office, or he makes good. The editor is not asking for
literature, but for a quick survey of the situation. So it is that the
man who can talk with the most people in the shortest time, and from
such evidence make a connected and truthful story, is the man that is
wanted. From the combined conversations of perhaps forty informants,
ranging through all classes in the community, he must pick and choose
the salient features and the most reliable evidence on which to base
his story. In ten hours a good newspaper man can get the material for a
column cable on almost any “visible situation.” This in the main will
be accurate and correct. The moment he has gotten his message off, he
begins to sketch out his campaign for the coming days or weeks which he
expects the trouble to last. He picks out a half dozen reliable agents
and sends them all over town, interviewing, observing, collecting data
and local color in all quarters. If he knows his business he has a
small but efficient staff in forty-eight hours, which keep him posted
as to the general trend of affairs all over the city. If the wires
are working, he can probably pick up local informants in neighboring
towns to reinforce his story with ideas and viewpoints. If there is
fighting going on he tries to see it without too much risk, so as to
get the “local color,” which only presence on the scene can give. The
dull days are filled in by interviews with as many prominent people as
can be induced to talk. Thus, what seems to an outsider as a difficult
proposition and one involving guesswork and inaccuracy, becomes a very
simple matter.

It was in much this way that I gathered material for my Odessa
cable. I had not time to collect a local staff, for I only remained
thirty-six hours, but I made out fairly well on the collection of
local information by turning Morris and three or four members of my
crew loose for the day to talk with everyone possible. My dispatches to
the consulate gave me quick and easy access to the official view, while
a number of stranded war correspondents at the hotel regaled me with
information, which they could not get out themselves on account of the
telegraph and postal tie-up all over Russia. One rarely drops on a good
situation without meeting a handful of old friends on similar business
bent. In Odessa almost the first man I met ashore was Lionel James of
the London _Times_, in my opinion the best of all the English cable
correspondents. He had been in command of the _Times_ dispatch boat
_Haimun_ in the Russo-Japanese war, and for months had been competing
in the news zone against the dispatch boat I was operating for the
Chicago _Daily News_. I first met him in Chefoo Harbor and again in
Ping Yang Inlet in Korea. He joined the second army and scored a beat
on the cable from Lioa Yang, which broke the Japanese securities in
the London money market. I lost track of him and did not see him again
until Red Sunday days in Petersburg. I was hurried up from a little
investigation of a war scare in the Balkans and almost the first man I
met in the hotel in Petersburg was James. For a few weeks I saw him
daily, and again we parted. He had been on half a dozen assignments
and I around the world when we met on the street in Odessa that cold
December day.

By six that night I had my evidence all in and was aboard the _France_
ready for the run to the uncensored cable in Roumania.

CHAPTER VII

_The France Does Her Best in the Run for the Uncensored
Cable, Sticks in the Mud, but Gets Away and Arrives
at Sulina Mouth with an Hour to Spare_

Every line of enterprise is subject to disappointment and the newspaper
business is no exception. I arrived on board the _France_ with my mind
picturing an eight-hour drive for the Roumanian cable, and my story in
print in the afternoon edition of my paper the next day.

“All right,” I called from the rowboat as soon as I was in hearing
distance of the _France_. “Get up the anchor—let her go,” but the only
reply I had as I climbed over the side of my ocean-going greyhound of
a tug was the sad face of old man Gileti and a series of deprecating
shrugs and gestures accompanied by a line of guttural explanations in
Greek. Nothing is more exasperating than delays on a cable story, and
the language that floated over the expanse of Odessa harbor when I
finally learned what my skipper had to say was certainly a disgrace,
even for a journalist. In a word, the old Greek had failed to get the
_France_ port clearance, which meant that we could not get away until
the next day, and that my precious “beat” must be delayed at least 24
hours.

The whys and the wherefores were transmitted later by Morris, who spent
an hour in getting the facts from the slow-witted old Greek. My chief
of staff, secretary and steward was filled with disgust and had spent a
half hour outlining through an interpreter to the wretched captain the
enormity of his crimes.

“Yes, sir,” he told me, “I have surely made old man Gileti sit up.
I have put him wise to the fact that for a sure-enough dub and
promiscuous fat-head, he has the rest of the world beat, yes sir, beat,
backed into a siding with the switch locked. In fact, I regard that
man, sir, as dead slow; yes, sir, slow, paralyzed in fact,” etc.

Just how all these things had been translated I did not ask, but I did
ask why the man had failed to get the shipping papers, without which
we could not go to sea. When a skipper enters a port, he takes his
papers ashore and leaves them with the authorities until sailing time,
when an official brings them off and gives clearance of the harbor. If
a ship sails without its papers, it loses all caste and is liable to
confiscation by any warship that might get wind of the fact. Hence the
necessity of the delay.

“The old man, sir,” Morris continued, “was stalled. How? Yes sir, by
some old Roosian! These dogs (meaning Greeks) are easy bluffed. Old
man Gileti goes ashore this morning as directed. He sits for some
hours on a bench. Along comes a guy in rich uniform and sees the old
man with our papers in his mit. Gileti hands over and then sits some
more. Finally another general or something comes along and gives him
a bum steer that the stuff’s off and its back to the ship with him,
bein’ as it’s a holiday and too much trouble to do business. The old
man hollers a little, but bein’ a fool and using Greek when it ain’t
getting through none, he fails to score, and next he knows he is showed
out of the office by one of those Cossack fellers that has a bayonet on
his gun. Quick as he’s out they locks up and goes home, and there ain’t
nothing doing for Gileti, so he comes aboard.”

The next morning early I had a kindly interview with the Greek, and
sent him off again for his papers, with two men to interpret and my
Black Prince to see that the goods were delivered. But even this
formidable array found Russian officialdom a hard proposition to get
quick action out of. Eight hours of red tape, bluffs and counter
bluffs, persuasion, threats and pleadings, it took before the business
was completed, and it was five in the afternoon when I saw the official
launch with Morris and the Greeks sitting in the stern, coming out to
us.

“Have got. Can do,” yelled the steward when he was in ear-shot. This
time there was no delay, and as soon as the skipper was on deck the
forward donkey engine was spitting the water out of the valves, and a
moment later dragging in the anchor, and a delightful sound it was to
hear it coming in over the windlass, link after link. Clang! Clang!
Clang! rang the telegraph and the dial registered, “Stand by” in the
engine room.

Old man Gileti was slow usually, but with an anxious correspondent
at his elbow to “jack him up,” he moved fast this time. No sooner
did the rusty anchor head come dripping out of the water than “slow
ahead” rang in the engine room. Black smoke pouring out of the two
red funnels and the rattle of coal from the stoke-hold testified that
the Turkish firemen were working for once in their lazy lives. “Hard
aport” went the wheel, and the _France_ swung her nose toward the open
sea. “Steady,” and she straightened out for her course. “Half speed”
and then “Full speed ahead,” read the dial down where the engines were
picking up their sea-pace at every stroke. Two minutes later we were
outside the breakwater, dipping our sturdy little nose into the chop
of that wretched Euxine. “South by west a quarter west,” the skipper
called in Greek, and the man at the wheel spun the helm until the
compass checked the course, and the _France_ stiffened down for the 90
mile run to Sulina, where the Roumanian cable to the outside world lay
awaiting us.

Once on our course I went below and had my dinner served royally in
the saloon with Stomati presiding over the cuts in the galley and
Monroe D. talking like a windmill and “standing by” with the service.

“Yes, sir. Fine business, sir. We are making 12 knots, sir, and we are
about to pull off an immense cup (no doubt intended for coup) on the
situation. Yes, sir, I regard this trip as one of the great events in
the history of journalism. I assure you I do, sir, yes, sir. I have
just told Stomati that I regard this as one of the great achievements
of our career and Stomati, sir, he was impressed. I could see it, sir,
Stomati was dead to rights. I told that man, sir, that we had all the
rest of the men in our profession looking like two-spots,” a pause for
wind, and then—“In my opinion, sir, old man O’Conor (referring to the
British Ambassador) will be delighted. His important dispatches have
been delivered. Yes, sir, delivered; in fact, placed in the hands of
his Britannic majesty’s consul at Odessa, and, sir, I must say I do say
that I regard this as a most important act. Yes, sir, most important. I
have told Stomati so, and, sir, Stomati agreed, for he told Spero and
Spero, sir, he feels awe, sir, yes, I assure you he does, awe, that he
is a member of this important expedition. Spero, sir, is a slow man and
a heavy thinker, but when Stomati explained, I could see that Spero
understood and appreciated. (Yes, sir, I will pass you another cut.)
But as I was saying, it is my opinion that the British government will
decorate us—yes, sir, handsomely. No doubt the Victoria Cross will—”

But here I cut him off, having finished my dinner and a cigar besides,
and sent him to the galley to get his own meal, and more important,
to give me an opportunity to write my story. During the delay of the
day, I had examined every member of the crew that had been ashore, to
gather any additional data for my cable. This with the mass of material
picked up the day before, gave me enough for a column message, which
I proceeded to rap out on my machine. People generally seem to think
that newspaper stories must be in cipher, for few of the uninitiated
realize that a thousand dollars on cable toll for a single dispatch is
nothing unusual. The writing of a cable differs only from a written
article in that one cuts local color and descriptive matter a bit in
favor of facts. By force of habit, a cable arranges itself in one’s
mind unconsciously and can be written as fast as one can work a
machine. Then there only remains to read over the copy and blue pencil
all superfluous “thes,” “ands,” adjectives, and everything in fact
that the foreign editor in the office can supply by the study of the
context. Thus a 2000 word story will “skeletonize” to perhaps 1200 and
be re-expanded in the office to 2500. The office files contain vast
stores of information. If a name or place is mentioned, it is looked
up and its significance or location incorporated into the cable as
printed. The result is a detailed story and an accurate one as far as
the editorial half is concerned. It took me a half hour to write my
story and another fifteen minutes to “skeletonize” and re-copy it ready
for the telegraph office. It came to 895 words.

When I had finished, I sent for the chief engineer. It was now ten
o’clock in the evening, and I must get my cable off surely by daylight
to insure its getting the edition. We had a heavy head sea and in spite
of Morris’ assertion of 12 knots, we weren’t doing much over 8½. We
needed all we had, and so I wanted to talk with the man who had charge
of the turns of the propeller. I wanted to imbue in him the news idea
and the news spirit which, once aroused, are stronger forces for speed
and quick action than unlimited golden promises. So when he came in, I
gave him a cigar and then for an hour I labored with him, pouring out
all the eloquence which the love of the work must always bring from the
lips of any true newspaper man who works neither for money, reputation
or glory, but for the fascination of “THE CABLE GAME” which knows not
the limitations of conventions, and is bounded only by time and space.
Any man can talk on the one subject that lies nearest his heart, and it
is a poor newspaper man indeed who cannot wax eloquent over the “cable
game.” He lives it every waking hour of the day and dreams of it when
he sleeps. It is for no material gain which he labors, but the pure
love of the work itself. There are dozens of such men who suffer untold
hardships and face any risk simply to get their stories out. They care
little whether their names are signed or not, and their one aim is that
their paper shall be the first to have the news, and that their version
of it may have the front page wherever newspapers are published. It
may be the depths of winter, and miles away from a cable office, but
he will gladly ride hours in a driving snowstorm, even if it takes his
last breath to get his story on the wire. Perhaps it is summer in the
tropics, but he faces the heat as readily as the cold of winter. Hunger
and hardships of all kinds are a part of the day’s work to him if he
can but land that priceless “story,” which is the only object of his
life from day to day. Few people who read the daily papers dream of the
suffering and heart-burn that “special cables” have cost some man in
some far corner of the globe. The story which they read complacently
at their breakfast table has often all but cost the sender his life in
getting it to the telegraph, but the correspondent does it and counts
the cost as nothing if he gets his “beat.” From the world he looks for
no recognition, and if his chief at home is satisfied, the cable man
rejoices and his heart is glad.

All of this I told my nervous little Greek engineer and then pointed
out that now he as well as I was a correspondent, and not only he,
but every man on the boat was one. “I can do nothing alone,” I told
him. “It is only by your co-operation that we can make this expedition
a success, yours and every other member of this crew,” and then I
explained to him the value of time. How that minutes were worth dollars
and days thousands, and that an hour saved might mean the difference
between success and failure.

“You have seen the situation in Odessa,” I pointed out to him. “You
know as well as I do that there are hundreds of foreigners, your
countrymen and mine included, whose lives and property are insecure
every day that this reign of terror lasts. They are praying for relief
from their home governments and there” (I pointed to my typewriter
cable blanks on the table) “is the story of their plight, and their
prayer for help. Ten hours after we reach Sulina, that story will be in
print, and in 24 it will have been read by every foreign office in the
world, and who can tell what will be the result? Next week this time
there may be a fleet of warships plowing these waters at full speed to
bring protection to every port in southern Russia. Have you ever been
in peril and without protection? Have you ever longed and prayed for
the sight of a battleship or cruiser flying a friendly flag? Have you
watched the harbor mouth day in and day out for the smudge of smoke
which may mean the coming of succor? Can you realize what bluejackets,
machine guns and friends mean to the people in Odessa? Realize it and
you know what the value of minutes and, much more, hours may mean.
Perhaps I understand it more than you possibly can, for training on
an American paper makes a man consider time more than anything on
earth. You people aboard don’t know how the newspapers in America and
in England, too, spend thousands to save minutes. Go to a big meeting
in my country, and sit through two hours of speeches. When you leave
the hall, a newsboy will hand you a paper with the ink still wet, with
a complete account of the first hour and a half of what has gone on
within.”

The engineer was visibly impressed.

“I can’t understand,” he said, “how your paper can spend so much money
for a month of news, much less for one story.”

I laughed and told him of a correspondent in the far east who got to
the cable office with a big story. He had barely time to catch the
morning edition of his paper. He threw in his 1000 words of copy, and
while he was waiting to see that it got off, he saw through the window
the correspondent of his paper’s greatest rival at home tearing madly
toward the telegraph office with his story clutched in his hands. He
looked at his watch and saw that his rival might send his cable after
his own, and still get it published the same morning, thus preventing
him from scoring a “beat.” For a moment only he was paralyzed, and
then he drew from his pocket a novel which he had been reading. With
one quick snatch he ripped out twenty pages, stuck his scarf pin
through to hold them together, and in pencil scrawled across the top
of the first page the name of his paper and signed his name on the
last, and as his rival entered the door, he tossed to the operator
what amounted to some 7000 additional words of copy. By the time the
operator had finished sending this stuff it was just an hour too late
for his rival’s cable to get the morning edition. The result was that
his story appeared in New York the next morning and was copied all
over the world as the big “beat” of the year. To be sure, it cost the
management nearly $5000 extra in cable tolls, but they alone got the
story that morning.

“Did the correspondent lose his job?” gasped the chief.

“Not on your life,” I told him. “On the contrary, he got a cable of
congratulations on his quick action and a raise of salary the same day.”

“Well, what do you think of that?” ejaculated the chief.

I saw I had him interested, and so while I was at it I gave him the
story of how a newspaper man saved the Suez Canal to England. “In some
way the correspondent of an English paper found that the Khedive of
Egypt, who held the controlling interest in the stock of the canal,
was going to sell out. In an instant the man realized that he held in
his hand the biggest story of his day. Were it published, every power
in Europe would be bidding, and no doubt the French, who then had the
greatest influence in Egypt, would carry off the plum, which was worth
a dozen wars for any power to possess. So he held his tongue and sent
a rush message, not to his paper, but to the premier of England. Old
Palmerston saw the situation as quickly as had the newspaper man, and
closed the deal by cable for $20,000,000, and then made parliament
raise the cash. The result was that the newspaper account was the first
notice that France had of the loss of the opportunity. So you see,
chief, where hours and minutes were worth not thousands, but millions
on one occasion.”

I had his attention now, and so I threw in the local touch to round it
off with.

“That’s what time means to the outside world, but I have not told you
how the office is crying for it. You see, now we have been out nearly
a week, and my chief at home is getting anxious. I can see the foreign
editor sitting at his desk to-morrow. For three days he has been
expecting a cable from us. He locks up his forms about half past three,
and after that our cable will be too late. He is expecting something
good, and for two days now he has been holding space for us on the
‘front page’ up to the last moment. Every day that three o’clock comes
and no news from us, he is sick with disgust. Now, chief, if we can
get to Sulina by daybreak, we will give him his story, our story, and
the story of what Odessa is suffering. That cable there will come in to
his desk in four or five sheets about five minutes apart. When he sees
the date and first sentence, he will know it is from us, and before the
end has been received, the first pages will be in type, and in fifteen
minutes after he has O. K.’d the last sentence, the great presses in
the basement of the building will be roaring worse than one of your
Black Sea hurricanes, and the neatly folded papers will be coming out
at the rate of 60,000 an hour, and before we are through coaling in
Sulina to-morrow afternoon, every newsboy in Chicago will be crying,
‘Extra, latest news from Russia; all about Odessa,’ and our story will
be speeding east, west, south and north to a hundred different cities.”

I could see that my little Greek friend was getting enthusiastic. I
took my dispatch lovingly in my hands and fingered it for a moment, and
then “I have done all I can do, chief. It is up to you, now, whether we
print this cable to-morrow or two days from now.”

He jumped up from the table and seized his hat.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, filled with the spirit of the
game.

“I want speed, all that you can get down there below the grating.”

Without a word he turned and climbed the companion-way. I heard his
quick step on deck above my head, and he was gone. A few minutes later
I followed him and went down into the engine room. By the throttle
stood my little friend, with one hand on the valve gear and his eye
on the steam gauge. I put my hand on the eccentric arc of the high
pressure engine and, with my watch in hand, counted the heartbeats of
our 1000 horse power triples.

“One hundred and eight revolutions,” I said. “Not bad.”

The chief never took his eye from the gauge.

“You watch. We can do better than that.”

In the stoke-hold just ahead I could hear the Turks heaving in the
coal, and I was glad at heart.

“You’ve got those fellows working for once,” I commented.

“I have that,” he replied. “I’ve woke up the day shift and have two men
working on each boiler, and the gauge there tells the business.”

I followed his eye and watched the hand flicker with each stroke of the
engine. Pound by pound the pressure from the boilers was shoving it up.
When it reached 160, the chief gave the wheel that opens the valve in
the main steam pipe from the boilers a half turn and said:

“Now count her revolutions.”

With my eye on the second hand of my watch, I counted “105, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10, 11, 12,” and snapped the lid with approbation.

“We’ve more coming yet,” grinned the sturdy little Greek.

His interest once aroused, he was doing his best. A moment later I
counted 115.

“She did 117 on her trial trip,” volunteered the engineer, “and she’ll
do it again if she holds together,” and he opened the valve to its full
and screwed in the valve gear until he had the steam cut off to its
minimum stroke to keep pace with the up and down racing of the pistons,
while his second crawled about dropping oil in cupfuls on the working
bearings to keep her from heating. The chief timed her himself. I
watched him.

“What is she doing?” I asked, as he closed his watch.

“You count,” he said.

“I make it 118,” I replied, looking at him with my best smile of
approval.

“Right you are,” he said. “One hundred and eighteen it is, and just one
better than she’s ever done before,” and he winked as he rubbed the oil
off his grimy face with a piece of cotton waste.

“I’d put her up some more,” he said apologetically, “but I’m afraid
she’d prime. Anyhow,” (with a glance at the gauge) “she blows at 180
pounds, and we’re 178 now.”

“Keep her where she is,” I said, “and you’re doing fine.” And I wrung
his hand and went on deck.

Trembling from end to end with the revolution of her engines, the
_France_ was beating her way toward the cable at nearly 11 knots an
hour, and going into a heavy head sea at that. I blessed the sporty
little Greek and went below to try and get a bit of shut-eye before
daylight.

In the saloon I found Morris and the second engineer, who had just
turned out of his bunk preparatory to going on his watch in the
engine room at 1 A. M. With one shoe on and the other in his hand he
sat spell-bound as he listened to the narration of one of Morris’s
hair-raising Philippine experiences. I had intended turning in at once,
but lighted a cigar instead for a chat with the machinist for the few
minutes he had to spare.

Our conversation naturally drifted to the subject which we both had in
common, and before we knew it we were deep in a discussion as to the
respective merits of turbine and reciprocating engines. The engineer
was still nursing his unshod foot, forgetful of all but the question we
were arguing.

“For my part,” he was saying, “give me for all around service triple
expansion—I don’t say but what for high speed like torpedo boats and
such, turbines may not be good, but they do say the blades sheer in
bucketsful at high pressure driving. Now you take a four-cylinder
triple turning her darndest—”

He paused suddenly and looked sharply at me. We had both felt a barely
perceptible tremor run through the ship. A tumult of anger swept
through my veins.

“She touched bottom,” I explained, furious at even the prospect of a
further delay in getting my story to the cable.

“That’s funny,” mused the engineer, slipping on the belated boot in a
hurry. “It surely felt like sliding over a mud bank. We must be ten
miles from shore at least. But it can’t be, for the old man hasn’t even
slowed her down. We must have dreamed it.”

“Nothing of the sort,” I replied, having been there many times before.
“We are too near the shore, and the skipper’s either drunk or asleep. I
am going on deck,” and I got up and put on my coat and started for the
stairs.

I had barely put my foot on the bottom step when we felt the sudden
check to our speed and that subtle velvety sensation of a ship sliding
through mud. I turned and looked at the engineer, who was at my heels.

“The fool,” he muttered, and then a lot of Greek expletives which
sounded good to me. “He’s piled her up on the mud bank.”

And even as he spoke there came the frantic clanging of the telegraph
in the engine room, and almost instantly the dying pulse of the engines
as the chief engineer shut off the steam. The pistons had been slipping
merrily up and down in their guides driving the shaft at its maximum,
and for a few strokes their impetus carried them, but the life was
gone, and after a few half-hearted revolutions they came to a sullen
standstill, the high pressure engine just at the end of its reach
and the low caught in the middle of its stroke. The absolute silence
was broken only by the lap of the waves breaking on our steel sides.
In a moment I was on the bridge with Morris at my heels. A tumult of
Greek voices in the wheel-house told of the endeavors to adjust the
responsibility of the blunder. It is always so with the Greeks. In
an emergency they all begin to quarrel as to who is to blame. So it
was at this juncture, and until I had Stomati translating some strong
Anglo-Saxon language, the idea of how we were going to get afloat
again did not seem to have crossed any one’s mind. They all united in
condemning Spero as the simplest way out of the matter, and let it go
at that.

It was almost full moon. The wind had gone down, and for once the sea
was as calm as a lake. Four or five miles away, dead ahead, a light
glimmered, and with my night glasses I could see the outline of the low
lying shore against the sky. It was way below zero—a dead, cold calm,
the sort of cold that hurts one’s lungs to breathe.

As we stood arguing on the bridge the safety valves on the starboard
boilers lifted and the steam deflected from the engines came roaring
out of the steam pipe aft the funnel, going straight up into the cold
air in great expanding clouds of fleece.

Old man Gileti rang full speed astern and eagerly the three cylinders
breathed again as they took up their triple chorus down in the engine
room. For an hour they worked, first ahead and then astern in a frantic
effort to slip her out of the bank. But it was no use. We had been
driving at nearly fourteen knots and had gone head-first into a wet
and sticky bank of mud, and her nose was buried three feet deep in the
clinging mess.

I got the chief down into my saloon as being the only rational man
aboard, and together we studied out our position on the chart. We were
some 15 miles north of the Danube’s mouth and four miles off shore. The
skipper had mistaken a light in a house for the harbor light, and had
turned in for the shore just an hour too soon. The names we devised to
apply to that skipper would have frozen his marrow could they have been
translated. The little engineer had been moving heaven and earth to
give me speed, and he almost wept at the delay. I told him that I must
be at the cable office by seven in the morning, and to pass the word
forward to the crew that if they did not get her off by three o’clock
I should lower the boat and take four men to pull me to the shore. The
idea of a four-mile sea-pull with the mercury freezing put more life
into the crew than I could have believed possible. I told Morris that
he would have to go, too, and his teeth chattered in anticipation as he
flew forward to Stomati to get him to urge the crew into action.

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.

It was half past seven, and the town was just beginning to stir itself
as my boat came alongside the stone steps of one of the many landing
places. With Stomati as a pilot, I found the cable office where a
sleepy individual in uniform was lounging over a table on which a dozen
instruments were merrily clicking. We looked in through a little grated
window and Stomati (in what I suspect was very inferior Roumanian)
stated that we were not looking through the grating out of curiosity,
but because we had a message to send. The operator stretched and
shuffled forward, and I handed in my three pages of typewritten cable
blanks. He glanced at it and shoved it back with the observation that
the post-office was across the hall, and started back to his desk. When
he finally heard it was a cable for London, he scuttled out of the
room, and in a few minutes came back with two more operators, and a
fierce argument ensued. At last the one who seemed to be the head, came
over with a pitying smile and handed back the cable with the comment
that I better mail it, as it would cost 75 cents a word to cable it,
and he turned to go back to his breakfast. When I insisted he stared
in amazement, but took the message. I produced my five £5 notes, which
were declined as not being legal tender, and my message was handed
back. Stomati argued and swore, and I offered my watch as security, but
no; “pay in Roumanian bills or there shall be no cable sent.” The banks
did not open till ten, which would delay my wire two hours, and perhaps
lose the afternoon edition. Stomati turned his pockets inside out and
unearthed 20 Roumanian gold pieces, which I confiscated and sent a
short wire to London: “Hold space for thousand words Russia. Filing in
hour.” This to prepare the office so that if my wire arrived at the
eleventh hour, there would be a place in the forms all ready to slip it
in. Having got this off, I started out with my five English notes to
get a quick action change to Roumanian coin of the realm.

Now, as stated above, there is nothing at Sulina save its shipping
interests. In a village, any new event creates a great sensation.
So it was with the advent of the _France_ with the American flag
flying at the fore. When we returned to the embankment, little knots
of Roumanians were discussing what her significance was. Every group
we met was bombarded by Stomati in his alleged Roumanian to change
English bank notes to Roumanian francs. We found an individual in the
second group who had a little over a hundred francs. He got one of my
£5 notes, and I all his spare change, which Morris took on a run to
the cable office to send as much of my message as it would pay for.
In the meantime the inhabitants began to get interested in my cable,
and everyone in the little crowd had suggestions to make, and two or
three raced off to wake up possible takers of English notes. I had
tried a half dozen shops all in vain when I heard a hurried step on the
pavement, and the knot of newly made friends exclaimed with joy as a
half dressed individual, flushing with his own importance, pushed his
way through the crowd, and, with a dramatic attitude and heroic tones,
said in fairly good English,

“It is I, so-and-so (I forget his name), the banker. I have heard of
monsieur’s intended arrival—Sulina knows of him. I will change his
money. Come quick to my office.”

The crowd was enormously impressed. I have often wondered what they
supposed my cable to contain. A message from the Czar to the President
certainly could not have made a greater excitement. With Stomati and
that portion of the town that was awake and had nothing else on its
mind, I repaired to the banker’s shop and got my notes into golden
francs. I hate to think of the exchange I paid, but I needed the coin
and gathered it in and started for the cable office, where I found
Morris trying to talk French to the operators, whose entire attention
was now devoted to my 900 word cable. Such a thing had never happened
there before, and they were chattering like magpies, but would not send
a word until it was all paid for. So I counted out my gold and the head
man started on the message. I watched him until the last word was on
the wire, and then took account of stock.

I was at Sulina Mouth without any further instructions from my office.
The _France_ was lying in the river at an expense of about 200 gold
dollars a day. I counted my reserve and found it to come to 45 francs.
I paid Stomati the 20 I had confiscated from him, and put the remaining
25 francs in my pocket with great care. Morris looked at me and grinned.

“Is that your last?” he asked.

“It is,” I replied with great dignity, “but keep it dark. It is
nobody’s business but my own.”

It did look rather blue. Just five dollars and a boat on my hands that
was burning up a hundred a day in coal alone, and we at the end of the
earth and the central object of interest in town. Morris keenly enjoyed
the delicateness of the situation. He was never so happy as when we
were in a tight place.

“What are we going to do?” he queried, cracking the joints in his
knuckles.

I looked at my watch. It was lacking five minutes of nine.

“Morris,” I said, “we are going back to the _France_ and have some
breakfast.” And I smiled serenely, for my cable had gone and we
couldn’t be robbed of that much, even if everything else went to the
bad.

So we walked down to the embankment and I whistled for the ship’s boat,
and was soon in my saloon eating the best breakfast that Stomati could
cook. There is nothing like a full stomach to give one courage and to
make one’s brain work up to the situation of the moment.

There is a good rule in whist (or some game of cards) that says “When
in doubt, lead trumps.” A good axiom for a war correspondent (or anyone
else for that matter) in trouble would be “when in a desperate plight
and all seems lost—eat, and then do your thinking.” It is poor business
worrying at best, and especially on an empty stomach. So I banished
from my mind the delicacy of my situation and ate the most luxurious
breakfast which the _France_ afforded. When this duty was completed, I
lighted a cigar, which I intended to smoke to the bitter end before I
attempted that painful process of putting one’s mind through a wringer
in an endeavor to make something out of nothing.

While the smoke from the first puff was floating out of the skylight,
there came a tap at the companion-way hatch. I sent Morris to
investigate. He returned clicking his heels and grinning from ear to
ear.

“Here’s your chance,” he said. “It’s a banker guy named Rodwaner. He is
doing a stunt in bum English, from which I gather that here is where we
make the grand touch.”

Morris’s English may have been ambiguous, but I translated it as it was
for the benefit of the solving of problems in slang.

“What did you tell him?” I asked.

Morris grinned, cracked his thumb joints.

“Was I eager? Not on your life! I said, ‘My boss is a very busy man;
don’t think he can see you at all to-day.’ Well, the old man was some
impressed. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘yes, I realize your master must be busy—but
this is an important matter about a loan.’ Well, sir, when he says
loan, Monroe D. Morris makes his great stall. ‘Loan! Do you think my
master is borrowing money at every port and from an unknown party like
yourself?’ And then I gives him a line of talk and finally consents to
getting him an interview for just a moment.”

At my direction he produced the banker, who came in with many bowings
and scrapings and apologies for his intrusion. As an introduction he
produced a telegram in German from the Branch Ottoman Bank at Budapest.
I don’t know to this day how the old man ever got it or whom it came
from—it was garbled and parts left out. It seemed that Rodwaner was the
local agent of the Roumanian National Bank and that someone had advised
the Central Bank in Bucharest that I had credit at Constantinople,
and that small drafts might be honored on presentation of proper
credentials. I had no credentials to show my friend, so I side-stepped
that question. He had received the message two days before and had
told everyone in town. When the _France_ arrived and was the center of
observation, old Rodwaner began to swell up with pride and boast of his
importance as being the man whom the Ottoman Bank had advised of my
coming. It appeared later that he had been talking freely in town, and
as his importance grew with the magnitude he gave me, he had not spared
in his praises of the “great personage” to arrive, and whom he was to
finance. He asked how much I wanted, and as a starter I said £100. He
then asked for my credentials, and I was obliged to admit I had none.
He looked at me aghast. What should he do? He could not return ashore
and tell his friends that his long heralded arrival was a “fraud” to
whom he would not advance money, and, on the other hand, the idea of
giving a stranger money without anything but a sight draft as security
nearly threw him into spasms. It was his prestige with his neighbors
ashore vs. risking his shekels, and it was a hard fight. But he was
in the enemy’s country, and the sight of the _France_ and my crew and
Morris standing at my elbow like an ebony statue, saluting every time
I looked his way, made a great impression. I gave him some whiskey and
a cigar, and told him what a genuine pleasure it was to meet a banker
of such importance and business sagacity in a little town like Sulina.
I outlined to him how much I appreciated his trust in me (which was
an anticipation, to be sure), and I pointed out how really great men
depended on their intuitions in business rather than conventional
forms. He swallowed it all and two more drinks of whiskey besides.
Fortunately he had the money on him, for I don’t believe I would have
gotten it so easily had we been obliged to attack him in his own lair.
After the drink he began to loosen and at the third he drew a bag of
gold out of his trousers pocket and counted out 100 gold pieces, being
English sovereigns and German 20 mark gold pieces. I signed a receipt
and filled my money belt on the spot before he could have a change of
heart. I wanted twice as much, but I must be sure of something anyway,
and I did not propose to risk it all by asking too much at the start.
After Rodwaner had parted with his money he became very sad, but I
cheered him up and about noon sent him ashore in the ship’s boat with
Morris to break ground for an event which was to come off during the
afternoon.

While the leaven was working ashore I pounded out a mail story and read
over a batch of English papers which the banker had been thoughtful
enough to bring aboard with him when he came. A glance through the
papers, coupled with the gossip I had picked up ashore, indicated that
the situation was about the same as when I had left Constantinople.
The same crop of alarms and reports of disaster were circulating here
as they had been at every point I had touched. Odessa, Sevastopol and
the Caucasus generally named as being in the most desperate plights. I
knew that Odessa, though in a bad way, might keep for a few weeks, but
did not feel so sure of the other places. An interview with the skipper
and a careful scrutiny of the chart determined me to go first to
Sevastopol, which was only a night’s run from the mouth of the Danube.
From there I figured I could reach the coast of Asia Minor is another
fourteen hours and get the Turkish cable for my story from the Crimean
city, and then be within striking distance of the Caucasus if on closer
view-point the situation looked good.

I called the engineer, and he admitted coal in bunkers to last five
days. Stomati urged a replenishment of the larder, and I gave him some
of my Rodwaner gold to get it, and then sent the skipper out to clear
the ship for Sevastopol so that we might be ready to sail by four in
the afternoon.

In the meantime Morris was standing by the banker, saluting and
exhibiting deference at every step. Rodwaner, with three drinks under
his belt and an Ethiopian attendant, began to swell, and an hour after
he had set foot on shore everyone in town was pointing him out as
the only man in town whom outsiders knew and turned to for financial
matters. The stories my banker circulated about his distinguished
friend on the “yacht” simply made his rivals green with envy.

At three in the afternoon Morris returned and reported on Rodwaner’s
satisfaction and also on his own activity in boosting my credit ashore.
The moment was now ripe for the second attack. So we got up our anchor
and steamed majestically up the river and made directly in front of
Rodwaner’s minute establishment. With all flags flying and steam
blowing off the _France_ certainly made an excellent appearance. Quite
a crowd gathered while we were tying up. With Morris clearing the way,
I came down the gang-plank and entered the banker’s shop. He met me at
the door wreathed in smiles and ignoring absolutely his old friends
that crowded about the door. I sat down and had some tea while the two
clerks in the place gaped at me over their ledgers, and a score or more
of faces peered through the front windows.

“Yes,” old Rodwaner was saying, so loud that a rival money-lender in
the front rank could take it in, “it has been a great pleasure to do
business with you. I hope you will always call on me. I can always give
you up to £1000.”

I saw him trying to gather out of the corner of his eye the impression
that he was making. Everything was working finely, even better than I
had hoped.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “That £100 I drew was indeed a trifle.”

“Nothing at all,” replied the banker. “A mere detail. A drop in the
bucket. I might have done much better by you had you needed it,” and he
fairly hugged himself at the great coup he was making before the rest
of the town.

A dozen had come in and stood listening to our conversation. It was
now about four, and so I delivered my bomb which I had held until the
psychological moment. So I said:

“I hesitated to ask for more, Mr. Rodwaner, as I did not suppose your
institution was such an important one.”

“Important? Yes,” he replied, “though I say it myself, perhaps the most
so in Roumania.”

“That being the case,” I replied easily, “I believe I’ll have a little
more, say £200,” and I lighted a fresh cigar.

It was cruel to do it right before them all, but I needed the money,
and quickly at that.

Rodwaner actually turned pale. One of the clerks, whom I learned was
his son, burst forth in German that, already this strange man had
borrowed £100, with little or no security, and he objected. I could see
that there was a row on, and I must confess that I was mean enough to
enjoy it thoroughly.

The banker wavered for a second. What should he do? At this moment one
of the by-standers, a Greek money-lender, called from the back of the
crowd:

“I have the moneys for Monsieur if Rodwaner cannot do.”

This turned the scale.

“Ha, Ha!” cried my friend. “You would steal my customers, you dirty
pig. Rodwaner can lend—he will. He does so with pride,” and he booted
the protesting son into the corner and then proceeded to clear the
shop. Then he breathed a sigh of relief. His local prestige was safe.
How much did I need?

“Two hundred pounds would do.”

Couldn’t I do with less, perhaps. I thought I might be satisfied with
£150, and he began to dig. It was evident he hadn’t even that, and so I
said we would make it a hundred flat. All his gold came only to £90.

“Will that do?” he asked appealingly.

“I’m afraid not,” I replied, “but if it is going to inconvenience you,
perhaps the Greek banker will.”

He held up his hand more in sorrow than in anger, and asked if I could
use silver. I agreed, and he began to count it out into piles, first
five franc pieces, then two franc and at last ones, and still he was
short a few pounds. But he was thoroughly aroused now, and put on his
hat and in a few minutes returned with sufficient gold to make up my
£100, and I signed a sight draft on the Chicago _News_, shook him
warmly by the hand and walked across the street to the _France_, that
lay almost at his door.

Without any exaggeration, there were three or four hundred people
crowding about the gangway. Morris had hurried ahead, and had Stomati
and two of the crew on deck to salute as I came aboard through a narrow
lane of humanity. In two minutes we had cast off and our engines were
slowly pulling the _France_, stern first, into the stream. As her head
came slowly around, and her nose pointed seaward, Morris dipped the
flag on account of our poor old Rodwaner left with his empty purse.

“What interests me,” I told Morris that night, as I sat smoking after
my dinner, “is where the old man got the balance of that gold.”

“He sure was up against it,” replied my chief of staff. “Yes, sir,
old man Rodwaner had to scratch. It’s my opinion, sir, that old man
Rodwaner is all in.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“You took all he had and then he puts on his hat and goes and pawns
Rachel’s sealskin sacque and diamonds, and that, sir, is where your
last £5 came from. Yes, sir, I believe it. That’s just what old man
Rodwaner done.”

With $1000 gold in my belt, we shaped our course for the Crimea.

CHAPTER IX

_We Reach Sevastopol and Land in Spite of Harbor
Regulations, Get a Story and Sail Away with It to the
Coast of Asia Minor_

The reader of stories of adventure naturally expects to have something
sensational doing every minute. Why else, indeed, has he paid his
money? But there are dull spots in even the most strenuous tales (that
is, in real life), and the narrator of fact must blushingly, or, at
best, hurry over the places where interest flags. Our trip from the
Danube mouth to the Crimean Peninsula was unusual only in the fact that
the sea was quiet, and that it was possible to remain in one’s bunk. No
world diplomat ever felt more perfect satisfaction at a successfully
executed international coup d’état than I did that night as, with money
belts stuffed with gold, the _France_ cut through the waves, turning up
with her steel nose a ridge of ripples that left an ever wider wedge of
silver in our moonlit wake. A square meal and a good cigar combined to
make that evening a picture, which still stands out in my mind as an
oasis in the desert of that Black Sea trip. At ten o’clock I took a
“look-see” around the boat before turning in for the night, and found
that every member of the crew, save the man at the wheel, had crawled
off into some corner and gone to sleep. Even the look-out had squeezed
himself into the chain locker out of the wind, and was making a sound
like the exhaust of a gasoline launch. For a few minutes I was tempted
to wake up the various delinquents, but when I thought of the past
days and nights of cold and overwork, I softened and let them sleep
peacefully on. The only danger on such a smooth sea that I could think
of was collision, and that seemed improbable, as there were almost no
ships navigating those waters just at that time, and, anyway, surely
the other ship would keep watch and see us, even if we failed to see
them. So we would be safe anyway. One comes to realize after a time
that it is foolish to worry about dangers all the time. After months of
being on needles and pins as to what the future has up its sleeve, one
gets so tired that it is simpler to accept the inevitable and be killed
outright (if so it is written on the cards) than to lay awake nights
and think about it. So leaving the situation on “the lap of the gods,”
I went to my cabin and rolled into my bunk without the formality of
undressing, and in two seconds was sleeping with that indifference to
fate and the morrow that only hardship, exposure and utter exhaustion
can make possible.

The situation at Sevastopol, according to the rumors that had been
circulating in the ports at which I had touched, were all that the
most blood-thirsty correspondent could desire. The mutiny of the Black
Sea fleet was but a recent history, and as no word had come from the
Crimea for some weeks, it was generally supposed that further riot and
bloodshed had been added to the long list of upheavals which had marked
that year in the Czar’s dominions. So it was with keen interest that we
stood on the bridge of the _France_ the following morning and watched
the white line of the snow-clad, low lying hills come out of the sea as
we approached the barren bleakness of the historic battlefields of ’55.

We entered the harbor without molestation and anchored a few hundred
yards from half a dozen sullen looking ships of war, which completed
the dismal setting of the whole scene. We waited an hour or more,
as usual in Russian ports, without our presence being noted in the
slightest degree. Finally about nine o’clock a launch with a bevy of
hungry waiting-to-be-fed port officials came aboard. Nothing could be
done until a hot breakfast was placed before them. Then a few drinks
and cigars warmed their hearts sufficiently so that they consented
to commence the endless examination into our past, which forms such
an important part of Russian procedure. About eleven they took their
departure, with the instructions to us that we would not be allowed
to land until our case had been carefully considered by those in
authority ashore. This was most discouraging to one in a hurry to do
business, and who had not the slightest intention of being left over
night in the harbor. We watched the launch steam back to shore, and
when it had finally disappeared behind some docks, and when, with my
glasses, I had observed the portly officials walk off up a near by
street, I ordered out my own long boat. Fortunately this hung on the
side away from the harbor. Taking four of the best rowers and the
faithful Morris, we pulled quietly away from the _France_, and, without
further discussion, rowed around behind a bluff that sloped down to the
water, in a little frequented part of the town, and without once being
hailed, landed, climbed over said bluff, and walked boldly down into
the main street of the town, just as though we lived there.

I made my base at the best hotel in the city and proceeded to pump
everyone in sight as to the news of the hour in the Crimean port. Four
hours of active work convinced me that the situation in Sevastopol had
been vastly exaggerated, as indeed is usually the case with war or riot
stories originating in remote localities. To the excited citizen caught
in the hurly burly uproar and tumult of a mob, with shots ringing out
and Cossacks charging about and riding people down, it no doubt seems
as though the last great spasm of history were being enacted. A dozen
killed and a score wounded look like hundreds to the man who has not
seen corpses and wounded “in bulk.” In fact, there is nothing in the
world so misleading as the importance of riots and the alleged losses.
When one comes to analyze it, half the supposed dead prove to be only
wounded or stunned, while the bulk of the alleged fatally wounded are
only slightly hurt, or so badly frightened that they fall over each
other in their anxiety to get away. All this to the amateur observer
looks like a world sensation, but if one digests it all a day or two
later, when the excitement has subsided, it appears that the police
have merely dispersed a disorderly rabble with a few casualties. In the
meantime, however, the excited witness, who perchance has never heard
a shot fired in anger before, has sent out his story of “atrocious
massacre by the police” with all the lurid details which, in his mind,
are unparalleled. The story does not lose as it travels through the
big centers of news distribution, and when it finally gets into the
daily papers it gives the reader the impression that a world spasm
has been enacted. The “special correspondent” is rushed to the scene
of the occurrence, and when he arrives a week afterwards he finds the
life of the town moving much as before, and a few bullet holes in some
wall the only visible signs of the “horrible riot.” He learns that
the revolutionists are in durance vile, and if he takes the pains
to investigate, he will find a few poor peasants and a handful of
long-haired, wild-eyed Russian students shut up in a dirty room. This,
then, is a type of the great majority of Russian riot or revolution
“stories.”

In the newspaper world it often happens that “no news” is really
important news, though perhaps not sensational. And so it was in
Sevastopol at this time. I was able to draft an accurate cable pricking
the bubble of mystery and horror with which the outside world was then
viewing the Sevastopol situation.

There are newspapers, I believe, that won’t stand for the “no news”
types of communications, but expect and insist on getting their column
a day, more or less, news or no news. This is the policy which has bred
“yellow journalism.” It is no doubt a hard proposition to work for,
and I am sure it is a hard one to work against, for I’ve tried it many
times. The correspondent that represents a conservative paper has a
truly mean time when he is on an assignment with a number of fellows
who are cabling for the other type, for it is not at all uncommon for
them to take rumors, or even fakes, agree on the details, and send
them broadcast. Naturally, the man who is there and does not send such
stories gets the credit of having missed a good thing and of being
asleep on his assignment. But in the long run it does not pay (to put
it on the lowest grounds), for the senders of inaccurate dispatches
soon get discredited, and when they really turn up a good story, no
one believes it, and its value is nil. The Chicago _News_ asked for
news—not space matter. For months at a time I have sent no cables home,
and then suddenly turned loose with a thousand words a day. Their
attitude was, and rightly, that their space was worth money, lots of
it, and unless the news in itself was worth as much as that space, it
was not wanted in the office. It was for this reason that I never had
to pad or press with my stuff, and on this occasion, as on many others,
I sent merely what it was worth, quite irrespective of the money we had
been spending to get it, which is rightly no criterion as to the value
of a bit of news.

From the British Consul, to whom I had letters, I learned some of the
details of the earlier troubles, and of the mutiny of the fleet. At
no time it seemed was the uprising of the sailors generally popular
with those simple hearted folk. It was said that at least 75% of the
men were unwilling participants in the romantic adventure of the then
famous Lieutenant Schmidt, who stole one of the big Russian battleships
and ran off with it, to the confusion of the rest of the fleet. The
laborers at the naval station in Sevastopol whom we had supposed to
be blood-thirsty wretches marching the streets, howling for the blood
of the Czar, a Grand Duke or two, or, in fact, any old tyrant, had,
instead of performing these picturesque acts, gone quietly to work
and organized themselves into a police force to help patrol the city,
and in this role they had shown themselves more effective than the
regular police. Another good story gone wrong! The really obstreperous
characters of the movement had been caught and were shut up on the
ships that we had seen lying in the harbor.

There were some dramatic incidents, without doubt, during the few
days in which the mutiny was at its height, but the capture of the
ring-leaders resulted in its utter collapse.

What I did hear, however, was that there really was a fierce row in
progress down in the Caucasus, at the other end of the Black Sea, and
the details seemed to be sufficiently numerous and accurate to convince
me that I would be better off there than where I was. Anyway, it would
be only a question of a few hours before some “kill-joy” would hold me
up for my pass-port and learn that I was on shore without leave and be
sure to kick up a row that might delay me for days.

So, after getting a good square meal at the hotel and smoking a cigar,
I walked leisurely out to the remote nook among the rocks, where my
ship’s boat lay, and with no more trouble than at landing was rowed
back to the _France_.

As soon as I was aboard the captain raised the Blue Peter, that little
white centered blue flag, which says “I am sailing to-day. Please come
out quick and give me a clearance.” Of course, no one noticed the flag,
but as we had plenty of steam under our decks, we kept the fog horn
groaning dismally until the officials ashore, in sheer distress at our
tumult, came back in their launch. The man in charge was the same as
had come off to us in the morning, and almost his first words were that
it would be impossible for us to go ashore that day. So, looking as
disappointed as I could, and after a few protests at being kept in the
harbor all day without being allowed to go into their most interesting
town, I told him that we had decided not to wait any longer, and would
go away that very night if he would fix up our papers. The complacent
smile of the official who had succeeded in blocking someone in the
pursuit of his business wreathed his face. He was sure it was best for
us to go away, he told us, for it would be quite impossible for him
to permit us to land. If we would wait he would go back to his office
and fix our papers and have them aboard so that we might get away that
night. Strangely enough, he was as good as his word, and a little after
8 P. M. a launch came alongside, and the papers, properly viséd and
countersigned, in a sufficient number of places, which authorized us
to depart, were handed over the rail. Our friend then departed with
self satisfied regrets that we had been able to see nothing of their
beautiful city.

Sevastopol is an interesting town of nearly 60,000, replete in the
history of that ghastly siege of the Crimean war, the marks of which
are still traceable on the bleak hills lying about the town. But as
nothing of very keen interest related to this story transpired on the
occasion of my visit, I will not burden the reader with more than a
bare paragraph on the subject. The roadstead and the harbor and the
extensive establishments connected with them form the most important
features of the place. The great harbor fortifications which existed
at the period of the siege were planned in 1834. The hand defenses,
lines of trenches, and so forth, had not been fairly completed
when the allied armies of England and France commenced their siege
operations. Though compressed into a comparatively small space, the
real strength was enormous, five to six thousand men being engaged on
them daily during the eleven months of the siege. The garrison during
this period was usually about 30,000 men, and the number of guns said
to have been in position at the final assault was placed at 800,
though several times that number were rendered unserviceable during
the siege. The Russian loss in the defense has been placed at 80,000.
The fortifications and naval establishments were after the capture
destroyed by the allies, and by the treaty of Paris, which terminated
the war, Russia was debarred from building arsenals and maintaining a
naval force in the Black Sea above a very limited magnitude, but this
restriction was removed in 1871. The town has been completely rebuilt,
and since 1885 the fortifications have been actively replaced and the
docks reconstructed. Sevastopol has become a pleasant watering place,
and is Russia’s greatest southern Naval Headquarters.

It was a little after eight when a “Stand By” on the engine telegraph
and a “Heave Away” to Spero at the donkey engine brought the crew to
their stations. The gentle throb of the engines ahead and astern to
clear the water out of the valves and the chug chug and “clinkety
clink” of the anchor chain as it came jerking through the hawser hole
in the bow was the only sound on the stillness of the water, save
the occasional far away call of a sentry on one of the battleships.
While the deck crew were hoisting the anchor over the side and lashing
it into place, the _France_ swung gently about, and the steady
strengthening beat of her engines pulsed through the ship as she headed
out to sea.

The moon was all but full, and cast a silvery sheen over the still
waters of the harbor. Every prospect during the early afternoon and
evening had cheered us with a hope of a still night, but the “kill
joy” barometer that hung over our little fireplace had been steadily
falling. We had hoped that, like our weather men at home, it might
be on one of its breaks. But before we had fairly cleared the harbor
our friend, the moon, politely made its apologies, and, with a last
flicker of light, disappeared into a cloud bank. One by one the stars
that twinkled brightly in the cold, crisp air faded from sight, until
at nine o’clock the only light on the horizon was the steady glow of
the beacon on a bit of a peninsula that lay to the south of us. In
half an hour we had cleared this, and the _France_ was riding with
long sweeps over an oily sea that was coming up from the south in long
rippleless swells. An occasional gust of wind foretold what was coming.
With each minute the bursts became more frequent, and in an hour we
were running into a steady gale that by midnight had become a veritable
tempest, driving the waves before it in great sweeping billows, their
crests shrouded in spray that blew across our bridge and decks almost
unintermittently.

By midnight the hope of a night’s sleep had been abandoned, and the
roar and crash of waters flooding us at every dip, mingled with the
melancholy howling of the wind, that seemed to whip and circle around
our little craft like an avenging spirit, created a tumult, which would
have banished rest even had we been able to remain in our bunks. As a
matter of fact, this was a proposition which I abandoned after a few
futile attempts.

Earlier in the day I had weighed carefully our next move, and had
decided to run for the little port of Sinope, almost due south of
Sevastopol on the coast of Asia Minor. I wanted to go there for two
reasons: first, because it was a cable station, from which I could
send my Sevastopol story, and, second, because there I hoped I might
learn more definitely of the situation in the Caucasus, which had
been reported so acute at my last two ports of call. I figured that if
the outlook there was good for a “story,” I would keep right on down
the Black Sea, and if not, I would be within easy run of the Bosphorus
or any other point of interest. Hence it was that we were driving
southward through the storm on this winter night.

A description of the wretched night we passed would merely be a
repetition of those that had gone before, and so the reader can, and,
no doubt, will, gladly pass over the next few hours. Along toward
daylight I snatched a few hours of sleep, wedged in a corner of the
cabin, with pillows stuffed about me to keep me steady in my moorings.
We had reckoned on reaching Sinope by nine or ten in the morning at
the latest, but the gale and head sea had fought our every inch of
progress, and it was past that hour when we first traced through the
mist of spray ahead of us the range of dreary snow-capped hills that
loomed dimly before us, barely discernible with our glasses. By ten the
clouds began to clear and the face of the sun showed itself brightly
over the waters.

The wind died away as suddenly as it had risen, leaving the sea an
undirected tumbling mass of water, which seemed to lash at us from
every direction at once. I ordered breakfast served in my saloon, and
for an hour preparations were in progress, but the first attempt to
set the table resulted in a mass of broken crockery, and breakfast
being deposited in one corner of the saloon. I told Morris that I would
take my breakfast in the galley, where I could be right at the fountain
head of all good breakfasts. I found Stomati there hanging on to one
of the steel columns with one hand and holding a pot of oatmeal in
place with the other. A coffee pot was wired in place on the other end
of his stove, and the contents thereof were slopping out every time
the ship rolled. He announced that the coffee was ready, and while he
was taking off the wire the oatmeal pot, released for a second, leapt
nimbly from its place and landed in the garbage receptacle across the
galley. However, I did get the coffee and a piece of burned toast into
the bargain, which, after all, wasn’t too bad under the circumstances.

The hills along the coast of Asia Minor rise steeply from the sea,
and with the clearing of the heavens they stood out radiantly in the
morning sunlight, and in spite of the discomforts of the sea and
wetness that was blowing across us still, our hearts rejoiced. After
all there is nothing that revives one’s spirits like the good old sun.
Great schools of porpoises were playing along beside the boat, and I
amused myself until noon by practicing on them with my Colt, not so
much to kill them as to increase my prestige, which wasn’t much at
best, with my mongrel crew of Greeks and Turks, who enjoyed the target
practice immensely, and, as Morris said, “Are sure impressed.”

An attempt to serve lunch proved a miserable failure, and as we were
within a few hours of port, we postponed that enterprise until three
o’clock, when we ran in behind the bit of a headland that juts out
around Sinope.

Approaching Sinope from the north one sees little or nothing of the
town until one rounds in behind the peninsula which sticks out from
the mainland like the letter T, with the little port nestled in the
shoulder of the letter. The books which I have since read say that it
is a good harbor, but even after we had gotten around the point and
anchored, the swell was enough to force one to walk gingerly along
the deck to keep from being spilled across the rail. Personally (this
is a true narrative and facts must be allowed) I had never heard of
the place until I spied it on the chart when I was poring over that
useful adjunct to navigation while we lay in the harbor of Sevastopol
awaiting the Russians to give us our clearance papers. It does appear,
however, upon investigation, that it has been on the map for a good
long time. We even learned (to shame our ignorance) that Mithradates
the Great, whose life is no doubt familiar to all our readers, first
saw the light of day here as recently as 134 B. C. It was the capital
also of Pontus, a name equally well known and distinguished. At lot
of interesting people seem to have found this place, at one time or
another. It seems that Mohammed Number II came in here in 1470 and
created quite a sensation with the population at that time by capturing
the place to the confusion of the survivors. A Russian Admiral with
an ingenious name fought a naval battle with the Ottoman fleet here
in 1853, and said fleet suffered its own loss with four thousand of
its crew. This last interesting event decided England and France to
interfere and brought on the Crimean war. Besides being famous for
all these interesting incidents, Sinope exports fruit, fish, skins,
nuts and tobacco. The day I was there all these useful products of its
industries were not in evidence, or much of anything else, for that
matter. But I take the word of the reference book (the refuge of all
writers who travel) that on sunny days the inhabitants do as above
mentioned.

So it was in this city of these remarkable traditions, linked with
ancient history and seemingly with no connection to the modern world,
that the _France_, flying the ensign of the Chicago _Daily News_, let
go her anchor, to the astonishment of the natives, who, no doubt, knew
more of the illustrious Mithradates and his doings than of the city
of Chicago, which, in the form of the _France_, had so unexpectedly
descended on their legend laden harbor.

So much then for the due we owe to the reader who wishes to be
instructed. But in the meantime (even before the dawn of this
knowledge was upon us) I had ordered Stomati to do his worst, and in
fifteen minutes after we anchored we began the first substantial meal
we had touched since leaving Sevastopol.

CHAPTER X

_We Send Our Cable from Sinope and Then Sail for the
Caucasus, Where Rumor States Revolution and Anarchy
to Be Reigning Unmolested_

After the meal mentioned so enthusiastically in the last chapter, we
rowed ashore in the longboat and effected a landing at a decaying old
pier (which in truth gave the appearance of being little used for the
disembarking of the fish, skins, etc., before mentioned) and were
welcomed (?) by a ragged crowd of open-mouthed, very dirty creatures
that inhabit this interesting coast. Accompanied by Morris, the second
engineer and Stomati, who was practicing his seven languages at once
on such victims as seem to promise hope of intellect, we wound our way
up a street of fallen-down dirty houses toward the telegraph station.
Fortunately Stomati knew the word for “Telegraph Office” in the
language of the country. I never felt quite so much like a brass band
or an elephant as during that short journey to the “Imperial Ottoman
Postal and Telegraph Office.” I am sure any circus that had such a
following in its street parade would count the day a successful one
indeed.

It was with a little dubiousness that I filed my wire, for the Turkish
officials are far more strict in their censorship than those of any
other government. But I hoped that a message originating at this out
of the way place might get on one of the through wires and slip past
the central station, where the censors preyed in Constantinople.
For, as a rule, the actual senders care nothing about the contents
of a dispatch, and, as a matter of fact, generally do not know the
language, simply sending the letters as they read them. So I hoped mine
might slip through the back door, as it were, and never be noticed
by the officious uniformed functionary that sits in the front office
of the Constantinople stations and reads other people’s confidential
communications. This operator knew a little English, and at his first
sign of suspicion as he read over my “story” of the revolutionary
situation in Russia, I handed him a cigar and a golden English
sovereign, which cheered him up so much that he stopped reading my
message and went out and got me a dirty cup of Turkish coffee about as
thick as molasses. Experience has taught me that there are two useful
forms of influence; first, the exchange of pleasantries, accompanied
by a coin of appropriate value, and, secondly, a polite but firm
intimation that the “mailed fist” is available in case of obstreperous
conduct. So, while the coffee was coming I wrote a short commercial
message to the head of our London office, as follows:

Am filing an important press dispatch of 287 words. If
it does not reach you simultaneously with this or shows
signs of being tampered with, have the matter vigorously
investigated by the proper authorities.

I knew that the commercial messages usually went promptly and were
censored leniently, if at all. The operator also knew this fact. Also
did a great light loom upon him as to complications which might arise,
if the message were delayed. So without a word he went into the rear
room, where ticked the instruments and my cable was started on its way.
I learned weeks later, when I finally reached London, that the same
messenger boy had brought both telegrams at the same time, the news
dispatch being 287 words exactly.

As the ground felt pretty solid and comfortable, after the _France_,
and as the coffee was not nearly as bad as it looked, we sat in the
office until the last word had gone, and then engaged the Turkish
operator in pleasant converse. He invited us into a more pretentious,
if even dirtier, apartment (which might be termed his lair), and we
signified that we would be glad to pay the price of the drink of
the country, if his influence could procure the same. More cigars
circulated. Kind words passed freely. After the foundation for and that
peculiar atmosphere particularly adapted to confidences had been firmly
established, we began gently to encourage communication on those
subjects which had been passing over the wire between the Caucasus and
Constantinople. Probably outside of this extremely dirty gentleman in
blouse and red trousers, who now seemed so well disposed, there was
not a soul in town who had any information on any subject that would
have been of the slightest interest outside of the port of Sinope. But
our host, in his leisure moments (which I gathered comprised a fair
share of the twenty-four hours), had noted what the wires were saying.
Once he had become aroused in the subjects of interest along his
line, he had made it a point to interview such seamen and others that
touched the little town. He really knew a lot. When he had finished,
we flattered ourselves that we knew as much as he did anyway as to the
situation up in the Caucasus up to the past ten days, when, as our
friend opined, the extension of the cable into the Caucasus had been
suddenly cut. Anyway, communications thence had ceased abruptly. What
we learned in brief was as follows:

That the strikes and riots which had been prevalent all over Russia
had hit the eastern end of the Caucasus, and hit it hard! Batuum, the
main port at the end of the Black Sea, was in a ferment and filled with
refugees. That the ships had all stopped going there, that the town
was full of sweepings of the entire region plus Cossacks sent there to
keep order. No one seemed to know which side the soldiers would take.
It was reported that the Russian officials were besieged in one of the
public buildings. That the troops were disloyal to their officers and
were killing the population promiscuously, and that all of the decent
citizens were shut up in their houses praying for relief. A French ship
had brought out the last word ten days earlier, to the effect that a
railroad strike was on and that towns were burning everywhere, and that
anarchy was blazing in all quarters of the Caucasus. With this boat had
come two hundred refugees, and it was said that there were hundreds
more in Batuum hoping against hope that some ship would come and take
them away. These were just a few of the things that the operator
told us. To be sure, some of the facts conflicted, and a lot of the
statements did seem a bit improbable. But before our interview was half
finished I was convinced that, even though nine-tenths of the tales
might be fabrications, there was enough left in the remaining tenth to
make a cable. When we had pumped our informant dry, my mind was made
up. We would certainly leave that very night for Batuum.

Our trip on the Black Sea thus far had been one of constant hardship,
cold and discomfort, which makes a more unfavorable impression on one
than do active dangers, though these too seemed quite stiff enough.
The news results seemed so far, inadequate to the outlay, in the way
of effort and endurance. One does like to feel in taking chances that
there is to be an equivalent return in some direction. The outlook up
in the Caucasus pleased us all. In the first place, there seemed to
be important news features there, and in the second place, there were
refugees (probably some of them Americans) who were praying for relief.
So it did seem as though we would be justified in taking what risks
presented themselves. After one has been in tight places one’s own self
on various occasions, one has more sympathy for others suffering in a
like manner, and the idea of perhaps getting some refugees as well as
news appealed strongly. So before leaving the telegraph office I sent
a wire home, mentioning briefly the situation and winding up with the
following:

Shall bring off all American refugees would suggest that
our State Department request the Porte (Which signifies
the Sultan’s government) to permit American warships pass
through Bosphorus and protect our interests which appear
to be in danger that place.

I also sent a wire to the American Embassy at Constantinople on the
same lines advising them that if I did not show up within a week to
please make an effort to see what had become of us. After both of these
cables were on the wire I felt that I had taken all precautions for the
future that I could think about, and we returned to the _France_ and
put to sea.

About every day that winter seemed to be the same on those peaceful
waters, as far as storm and stress were concerned. We were running up
the coast of Asia Minor a few miles off shore all of that night and the
next day. It is a bleak and barren shore, with snow-covered mountains
rising abruptly from the ragged rocks, against which the sea beat and
frothed with a boom that came to us at sea, as loud as distant thunder.

It was about noon on the following day that I opened my diary to make
the day’s entry. It was December 24th. Christmas eve! I had even
forgotten that Christmas existed, and for the first time it occurred to
me that we would celebrate rather a dismal day on the little _France_.
It is the season of the year when one’s mind wanders far from wars
and waves and tumult, and my thoughts drifted back across the broad
Atlantic to a certain home, where festivities would be going forward
apace on this day, and little children would be expectantly doing up
bundles and trimming all with green and holly.

I sent Morris forward for the skipper and asked him if there was a
cable station within range of us. Together we pored over the chart
and figured that we might reach Trebizond by four that afternoon, if
all went well, and the course was duly altered. Sure enough, promptly
on the hour we rounded the point and sailed into the mere angle on
the coast they call a harbor at Trebizond. Half a dozen ships lay at
anchor riding the heavy swell that came booming in from the sea, and
then swept on to break with grim fury on the shore a mile or so beyond.
One of these ships was a French mail steamer of 3500 tons, which had
been lying there for ten days waiting for the storm to abate, and the
others had been standing by for varying lengths of time for a similar
purpose.

There was a bit of rotten old stone pier sticking out from the jumble
of houses on the shore. The sea was beating about it with great waves
that hid it intermittently from our view, by the spray and spume
created by their angry lashings. However, there did not seem to be any
other place to land, so we ordered out our biggest boat, and with not a
little difficulty got her into the sea without damage.

Then one by one we piled aboard, each waiting the moment to jump, while
the crew on the _France_ held the dancing shell away with poles. Four
men and Morris formed the escort, and once aboard they gave away with
a will as the close proximity to our tug threatened to upset us any
minute. But once we got her head into the sea, and our four men tugging
in rhythm at the oars, all went well. I had often been in a ship’s boat
in a seaway, but nothing quite like this. Every minute a great sea
would come racing in from the open waters and a mountain black it would
sweep under our stern, lifting us high in the air, and then our little
boat would go sliding back into the valley behind like a cat trying
to climb a steep roof. Down, down we would go into the trough until
our horizon was bounded only by the waves that had swept under us, and
its big black brother following close behind. Each time we would mount
the crest we would see the shore ahead and the _France_ astern of us;
each time we dipped the ridges of spray capped seas would shut them
from sight. But each dip brought us nearer shore. As we approached the
pier I saw that there was a kind of breakwater jutting out from one
side and behind it a still patch of water. Between the pier and the
stone masonry was a channel of perhaps fifty feet. Each moment the seas
would go roaring through this little opening, whose walls were flanked
with clouds of spray breaking on both sides. Then the next second back
would come the wash to meet the next wave. This looked to me to be our
best place to land. In fact, it seemed the only place. Waiting just the
right time and mounted on the crest of a roller we came sweeping down
toward this veritable millrace. Standing up in the stern to steer I
encouraged the crew to pull their hardest. For a moment we hung on the
crest and then like a toboggan we bore down toward the narrow passage,
the sailors pulling their oaken oars till they fairly bent. For an
instant we were in a cloud of spray and ’midst the tumult of the seas
breaking over the masonry at either side, and then we shot into the
quiet waters like a sled gliding over smooth ice.

In a few minutes we pulled up to a flight of stone steps and were
arguing with a stupid Turk about passports. I forget the details now,
but anyway we bluffed him, and ten minutes later I handed in a wire
at the telegraph office to that home across the seas. I was wet, cold
and wondering in the back of my head how in the world we would ever
manage to get back to the _France_ through that surf as I passed in the
two words for home: “Merry Christmas,” and signed my name. Somehow I
felt that the words did not adequately describe my own feelings, but
then no one at home would know the difference, so it would not matter
anyway. I called on the American consul and gathered from him a general
confirmation of the story that I had picked up at Sinope. He was a
nice man and very gossipy. His house was on a bluff overlooking the
harbor. He was surprised to see us at all, and more surprised to learn
that we had come in the _France_, which was plainly visible bobbing up
and down in the harbor like a duck in rough water. His advice was to
remain in port awhile, as we were going to have a big storm, and he
thought the _France_ ridiculously small at best. It was he who pointed
out the French Mail to me and gave her as a precedent for remaining
in port. However, as we had been having storms pretty steadily for a
week, and as we were still intact, I told him that I thought we would
go ahead anyhow. He was very cordial, and so I invited him to dinner
on the _France_, but after verifying his earlier impressions of her by
a careful scrutiny through a spyglass, he politely but firmly declined
the pleasure.

Trebizond stands out in my mind as one of the most wonderfully
picturesque places that I have ever seen. It is the contact point, as
it were, between the East and the West. The setting is Oriental to a
degree, with the streets filled with riff-raff and hodge-podge of a
dozen different races. Here starts that great overland trail, across
mountain plain and desert, that leads far far away into Persia, India,
aye, and it is said even unto Turkestan and China itself. Long trains
of the patient mangy camels, with their trappings of dirty red and
their escorts of strange attendants, come with them from heaven only
knows where, are moving through the streets toward the trail that lies
beyond.

It is with a curious fascination that one watches the slow dignified
movements that carry them over the ground at the rate of but a meager
mile or two an hour. It seems impossible to realize that these
melancholy beasts with their quivering pendulous lips and woebegone
eyes, will keep up that same pace for weeks and months, hour after
hour, until at last they lay them down in their distant terminus in the
far off East that ever stands in our minds as the land of mystery.

Trebizond has a very mongrel population indeed, and it is a constant
wonder to see so many different peoples packed into this one dirty
town. There seems to be many Armenians, and as the reader no doubt
recalls, this little port was freely mentioned in the press a few years
ago as the scene of the ghastly massacres perpetrated on these dismal
people. One always hesitates to criticize with a merely superficial
knowledge, yet the Armenians impress one casually as being about the
most unpleasant people imaginable. They have a genius for conspiracy
and the making of fifty-seven varieties of trouble that is perhaps
unique. The result is that every once in a while some Turk in a genial
mood says, “Come on, fellows, let’s kill-up a few Armenians,” and the
massacre is on. It does seem outrageous to do all these things, but one
who sees the Armenians sometimes wonders if they don’t bring a lot of
trouble on themselves by their own actions and characters.

The good kind missionary whom I met did not think so, and very likely
he knew what he was talking about, while my opinion is merely a shot in
the dark on a subject viewed superficially.

My friend the missionary took me around and introduced me to the
governor, a somewhat besmirched gentleman in a dirty red uniform, who
had eyes like a rat, which wandered over my person until I felt for my
watch. He did not speak English nor I Turkish, so our conversation was
not particularly entertaining. I don’t know what his opinion of me was,
but my opinion of him was that he was about the worst looking specimen
that I had ever seen. He had G-R-A-F-T written all over him in large
letters.

He rather queered his town with me, and I went back to the harbor just
at dusk. The wind had changed and the tide was running out, so that
we managed to get out through the breakwater with nothing worse than
a pretty severe wetting. The barometer (as usual) was falling. So I
decided to have one more square meal before we put to sea. So it was
nine o’clock when the anchor came up and we turned our nose away from
the lights of the town, far more hospitable in appearance, by night
than by day, and headed into the darkness that lay without.

CHAPTER XI

_Christmas Morning on the Black Sea._

It is approximately a ninety-mile run from Trebizond to the harbor of
Batuum, and for this entire distance there is not an anchorage along
the coast. From the time one leaves Trebizond the mountains rise sheer
up from the sea, their bases studded with reefs and ragged rocks or
else rising in cliffs, going straight up for hundreds of feet above
the water. At Batuum there is a bit of a bay with a breakwater across
the narrowest part of it, which justifies its being called a harbor.
Then the coast reaches on in another bleak and barren stretch of forty
miles to another nominal port rejoicing in the name of Poti. And for
this distance the mountains march grandly along, reaching an altitude
which must be at least six or seven thousand feet. The constant storms
of winter had left them mantled deep in the glaring white of winter
snows, save where here and there some great black elbow of rock had
been stripped of its cloak by the whipping winter winds.

The sea was running strong and the wind high when we put out that Xmas
Eve, but in spite of adverse conditions we figured that daylight would
find us off the little town of Batuum. As we did not want to get there
before the light should show to us the uncertain channel ’midst the
rocks and reefs that led to the harbor, we turned the engines down to
a conservative ninety revolutions, which kept her going easily into
the seas, which she was riding with the serenity of a strong swimmer
disporting himself in the surf.

The motion, though a bit too active to permit of continued sleep, was
still not vigorous enough to cause any particular anxiety. A large part
of the night we spent on the bridge. The moon rose late, and by its
intermittent light, as it sailed along behind the ribbon of clouds that
spread o’er the heavens, we could see the grim and ghostly line of the
mountain range that silvered and darkened as the light of the moon came
and went.

The first gray light of Christmas day disclosed a bleakness of coast
far more dismal than we had left behind.

We were running along the rim of the Black Sea basin, so near that we
could plainly see the coming and going of the clouds of spray that
told of the never ceasing struggle of the waves against the relentless
cliffs that for centuries have grimly turned the surging waters into
foam and noisy tumult. Aye, and long before the dawn the roar rose and
fell on our ears as sea after sea dashed upon the sterile sternness
that ever hemmed them in.

In the dim half light of the morning I stood by the skipper on the
spray showered bridge, and with him through the dissolving darkness
tried to pick out the harbor bearings of the port that was to be our
Christmas refuge. The man had evidently been drinking during the night,
as I gathered, and he was dense in mind and stupid beyond conception.
The little engineer, who spoke English, joined us on the bridge,
for all realized the general necessity of reaching port within a
reasonable length of time, as our coal was running short. We had just
about enough, as a matter of fact, to get back to Trebizond, but I had
learned on the previous day that none was obtainable there, and hence
we were relying on Batuum to replenish our bunkers. By eight o’clock
the sky gave promise of a dreary day, and the barometer, with no
uncertain index finger, was pointing to worse. In fact, it was creeping
down perceptibly each hour, and already recorded the lowest figure that
we had read on its ever cynical face since we had come to live in its
sinister shadow.

Breakfast, as usual, was out of the question, and anyway we were all
eagerly searching the coast line for the harbor mouth that had brought
us hence. A new snow during the night had turned the whole landscape
white, and with the snowy mountain wall rising up sharply in the
background, we could not discover a sign of anything that might be
construed into a symptom of a port. Eight-thirty came at last, and the
little engineer discovered a mountain elbow on our port bow which he
emphatically stated that he knew, and knew well. In his opinion, we had
overshot Batuum. The skipper was easily persuaded that this was the
case, and so we put about, and with a redoubled watch crept back along
the coast. An hour or more we cruised with our eager spyings, rewarded
by not a sign which might betoken the longed for haven. In the meantime
in the west the evergrowing cloud of black verified the fact that the
barometer had not been working in the dark. I was eager enough to
reach the harbor in the beginning, but with each minute that I watched
that black mass grow and bulge against the western sky, my anxiety
increased. I called the Chief and asked for an estimate as to how much
coal we had remaining in our bunkers. He was gone fifteen minutes, and
his troubled face confirmed my intuitions of uncertainties ahead.

“Not as much coal as we had hoped,” he replied to my look rather than
to any spoken word. “We have enough to last until this afternoon, and
no doubt we will be in port ere that, unless—” and his bright little
eyes swept the western heavens where the great relentless cloud was
throwing its sable mantle across the sky.

“Yes, unless—” I replied. It was obvious to us both that we must make
that harbor before the storm should shut us in, for once the snow and
mist and sleet was upon us, our only hope of reaching port would be
gone, and we would have to run for the open sea and ride it out. Not a
very hopeful enterprise, this, even with full coal bunkers, but still
less alluring with but six or eight hours steaming ability left, and
these barren rocks leering at us for ninety miles along the coast.

For an hour we ran west, and then one of the crew picked up a familiar
landmark. His statement was verified by others. In our backward run we
had again slipped by the port without seeing it! The landmark was on
the Trebizond side of Batuum!

Once more we put her head about, and once more cruised back along the
coast. We talked it over and all agreed that we must find our refuge
within the scanty hour that the storm would be upon us. The crew, too,
began to realize our plight. Indeed, it did look grave enough. All that
were not on duty in the engine room were peering toward the shore,
their trained eyes trying to develop some tangible sign or landmark out
of the snowy hillside that rose from the sea and swept backward till
its peaks stood dimly outlined against the leaden winter’s sky.

For an hour we cruised along, every man on the boat chattering his
anxiety and apprehension. They are not very strong on danger, these
Black Sea sweepings (at least, that was my impression); only Morris
grinned imperturbably, though in truth his grin became less and less
heartfelt and finally slipped into the grimace type of humor. Yet he
would not show his fear.

And ever did the great storm cloud grow in size and blackness in the
west.

Faint streaks of green, yellow and purple shot its somber masses, until
it grew like an image of Dante’s Inferno in our minds. Though I looked
the other way, a dreadful fascination ever brought my eyes back to the
rising menace, that steadily, surely, even as the mantle of death swept
on toward us.

By nine-thirty the heavens were filled with its suppressed fury, and
the wind awed by the impending presence of a far greater force seemed
to fade to nothing and slink away before this towering passion that
wrapped in silence was sweeping down upon us—a silence that became
oppressive, and was broken only by the slap of the waves against our
steel sides, and the dreary refrain of the sea rolling monotonously on
the rock-bound shore.

“Well, we’re back to our original landmark!” remarked the engineer,
half to himself. I looked and sure enough there was the black elbow
that he had diagnosed hours before as being beyond Batuum.

We held a hurried council on the bridge. We had cruised this coast
now three times, and we knew that three times we had slipped past our
haven of refuge, with its landmarks hidden to us by the whiteness of
the background. Poti lay perhaps thirty-five miles beyond. The storm
was coming up faster, ever faster. Three times we had failed to find
Batuum, and there seemed little chance that the fourth would be more
successful. So we decided on Poti and called for “full speed.” The
_France_ responded promptly to the order from the bridge.

But the decision came too late.

Already the storm was flanking us, and its blackness had swept to
seaward of us and rapidly promised to cut off our advance. Some miles
ahead of us was a great steel steamer evidently in a similar plight.
She too was heading for port, and columns of smoke were issuing from
her big black funnel. Presently as we watched, a white cloud of spray
crossed her bow and even as a curtain, shut out the beyond. Gradually
she came about and started westward down the coast. Her skipper
realized just as we did, that naught but wreck and misery lay within
that churning cloud that had unloosed its fury upon the deep. Already
its steadily rising howl whined and moaned across the waters, not
unlike the melancholy wail of the starving timber wolf penetrates the
stillness of the night and reaches the lonely trapper in his winter
camp and causes him to throw another armful of wood on the fire and
whistle to assuage that subtle foreboding of calamity that the thin
knife-like cry in the night seems vaguely to predict.

It was hopeless for us to drive further into that storm. Five hours
at best would see us out of fuel, and then driven before the wind
and sea we would be dashed upon the rocks. We did not even discuss
the situation. Involuntarily the man at the wheel brought her head
around, and for the fourth time we began our trip down the coast. To
the west of us the storm had shut out the mountains. To the north a
veritable blizzard was lashing the waves into a frenzy; to the east
snow and sleet shut out our progress. Perhaps five miles of shore bare
and forbidding remained to us. If we could but find Batuum’s shrouded
entrance within that five miles, all would be well, yet thrice had we
striven and failed. Somehow my optimistic spirit failed to respond to
the occasion. In the meantime every minute was cutting our five miles
of open coast line—aye, and cutting it down fast, for the storm was
shutting in from both sides and from the sea as well.

The steel steamer was overtaken by the great bank of snow and sleet and
disappeared from our view, and I might add from our thoughts, for we
had troubles of our own.

The crew were running about frantically. Half of them were on the
bridge waving their arms and evidently abusing the skipper. I walked
back in disgust and stood by the companion-way that led down into my
little saloon and, leaning against the towing post, just aft, I looked
across the sea. Morris followed me and for a moment stood silent. He
smiled faintly and then murmured:

“Merry Christmas, sir.” And we both laughed, only it was not such a
hearty laugh as one generally associates with the day.

There was nothing to do but wait. There seemed no alternative.

What a way to end up! We looked at the rocks and then at the sea, and I
wondered what the sensations would be.

Christmas! It seemed almost providential that I had made the effort
the day before and got off my message for home. It would be my last
word! It seemed hard to realize that it actually was Xmas. I looked at
my watch. It was almost the exact hour that they would be having their
Christmas tree, away back across the ocean.

“Morris,” I said, “this looks like the end to me. How does it strike
you?”

He did not look at me as he replied so low as barely to be audible,
“Yes, sir; it looks pretty bad to me, too.”

I looked at him curiously and wondered how he really felt behind that
black face of his.

“Morris,” I said again after a moment, “how do you feel about death,
anyway?”

He looked at me and then he looked at the sea, and smiled faintly as he
answered:

“Well, sir, the water looks cold to me.”

At that moment there was a break in the clouds. Oh, such a little
break! Out of it fell a mere handful of sunlight, as rays fall into a
darkened room when the blinds are thrown open. The clear, transcendent
shafts fell across the waters like a message from heaven, and suddenly
there was a shout on the bridge, echoed by every member of the crew
that was on deck.

From the whiteness of the hillside, just on our beam, there stood out a
golden spot, that seemed no larger than a five dollar gold piece. For
a moment it flashed like fire against the white. Then as quickly as it
had come it dissolved from view.

It was the dome on the Greek church in Batuum.

The sun for just that tiny space had turned its brazen cupola to liquid
light that marked for us the haven of our seeking.

Thirty minutes later we anchored behind the breakwater, and a mountain
slid from off our souls.

CHAPTER XII

_We Find Turmoil in the Caucasus but Celebrate
Christmas in Spite of Storm and Stress_

It was a close shave for us all that Christmas morning, for in another
hour the storm broke in all its fury, and the site of the breakwater
was only discernible by the dashing of the spray above it as the great
waves rushing in from the sea broke against it until it seemed as
though even the masonry must give before the weight of wind and water
and leave us in the open once more. Of the steel steamer we had seen
the last, for she, less fortunate than the _France_, was shut in by the
storm, and that very afternoon was driven on the rocks a total wreck,
though we knew it not until days later when we reached the Golden Horn
and the pigmy _France_, with her two hundred odd tons register, was
ordered back to try and make what she could out of the salvage of her
big 2500-ton steel sister, that had come to such a bitter end within a
few miles of the haven that we had scuttled into that morning.

However, a miss is as good as a mile, and indeed where danger is
concerned far better, for one always has that exhilaration of having
come through a tight hole, which in itself seems worth the price of
admission. Never was there a more enthusiastic crew, and one more
replete in the true Christmas spirit than the little handful that
beamed cheerfully on the Customs Officer as he came aboard that morning.

The tedious examination which always comes in Russia now ensued more
rigorously than ever before. Every locker was pried open in search of
bombs or some evidence of some evil intent. The only high light of the
occasion was a dispute that one of the examining officers fell into
with one of his subordinates. The object of contention was my innocent
typewriter sitting on the saloon table. The man with the gold lace
and sword was insisting that it was a musical instrument, and as such
should be carefully put in bond during our stay in port, as it appears
that there is some strange law involving a heavy tax on a number of
useful articles that might help the inhabitants of the Caucasus to
wile away the time. Next our gorgeously uniformed official tumbled
over a case of champagne in one of the lockers. He at once called
for seals with which to close up the locker until we departed, as it
seemed that drinks too were not to be landed without a tax. I explained
patiently in German that these drinks were not for introduction into
the Caucasus, but were brought along purely for local consumption.
But my explanations were objected to as unworthy of comment and the
seals were promptly produced. I explained to the officer that it was
Christmas, and that we wanted the wine for our dinner. After much
deliberation he admitted that we should have a little refreshment under
the circumstances, but decided that one quart of champagne would be
all that was good for us. Fancy! Four men, and on Christmas day, too!
And the worst of all from a Russian! However, we assented, as Stomati,
the ever faithful cook, had whispered that it mattered not for he
knew a sliding panel in the back of the locker provided for just such
exigencies, so with an easy conscience we watched the red wax and seal
being placed on our supply of cheer.

In the meantime I was told, as usual, that I could not leave the
boat, and on coming on deck found two bayoneted sentinels marching up
and down the decks, just to show that the order meant business. But
while I was arguing my case with the officer in charge, a boat, rowed
by four uniformed sailors, came alongside. It was the American Vice
Consul Stuart, who, seeing the big American ship’s flag flying at the
fore, had started out as soon as we had anchored. We nearly embraced
on the deck. At least, I did, for it was good to see someone from a
civilized land, though I learned that Stuart was an Englishman and only
acting consul. He seemed glad to see us, and stated that it was the
first American flag that he had seen in behind the breakwater during
the eighteen years that he had been in Batuum, an interesting if
somewhat depressing bit of information to an American who likes to feel
that his country’s flag is at least known by sight in all quarters of
the globe.

The consul at Trebizond had given me some grouse to present to Stuart,
and after these had been thoroughly investigated and passed upon by the
examiner, a permit was given for them to be passed. Stuart evidently
had a strong pull with the government, for he quickly arranged with
the officer that the sentries were to be withdrawn, and that I and any
member of my crew might come and go at our own sweet will. After the
dreary inspection was over, my newly acquired friend came down and
took lunch with us, and little by little I drew from him fragments of
that crazy quilt of actions and counter-actions, assassinations and
executions, revolutions and suppressions that in Russia masquerade
under the name of current politics.

From a newspaper point of view, the situation was full of interest.
No correspondent had been here for weeks, and as the cables were long
since out of commission, the cream of it was mine. What I learned in
effect in the hour or two that I talked with my guest was that from
the Black Sea to the Caspian the entire Caucasus was in a state of
convulsion, revolution and anarchy. Street fighting and incendiarism
had been rampant in practically all of the cities, both large and
small. Only a few days before a mob had been dispersed by machine guns
and Cossacks in the streets of Batuum. The latter had become quite
lawless, and it was the custom to kill any suspicious character first
and investigate afterwards. If the aforesaid killed character proved
on investigation to be a reputable citizen—well, then the joke was on
him. Anyway, he ought to have stayed at home where he belonged, instead
of roaming about the streets like a common Armenian. The latter, by
the way, are always the red rag to the government bull, anywhere in
this region, and the motto might be well adopted, “When in doubt, kill
a few Armenians,” just as one takes a dose of quinine when one gets
wet. I gathered that Armenianitis had been having quite a run in Batuum
about this time. Not because they were specially offensive just now,
but just for luck. Street fighting in Russia is as well recognized a
stage of revolution as an increased temperature and a quickened pulse
is in typhoid fever. The cure is usually Cossacks and machine guns in
hourly doses until improvement is noticed. This street fighting rarely
means much except that people are voicing a long repressed sentiment of
resentment and finally march in irresponsible bodies and are promptly
dispersed with heavy losses. The Russian officers get medals, the
dead are buried, and all moves on much as before. This was much what
happened in Batuum the week before my arrival. A lot of poor ignorants
had been killed. The town was in a state of siege, and people were
being murdered in the name of the law every day. Poti (the port we had
aimed at and been turned back) was filled with armed revolutionists,
who were said to be well organized and preparing to move on Batuum,
which was the then center of Russian military strength in the Caucasus.
Tiflis, up the railroad line (which had stopped running), was rent with
strife and was the stage on which the Armenians and the Tartars were
fighting over some involved question among themselves. For a month
before these same two peaceful races had been tearing Elizabethpol
(a town in the interior) into small fragments with their perpetual
fights. Our town was full of refugees, who were stiff with lurid
details. It was generally believed that Russian agents had started
these inter-race troubles, always at fever heat, to prevent both from
combining against Russia. The Armenians and Tartars are always ready
to fly at one another’s throats at two minutes’ notice. It was quiet
for the moment in Baku, but, as my informant advised me, the lull was
merely temporary, as they were gathering energy there for another spasm
of fighting. The railroad strike had crippled business and almost
extinguished the remaining spark of commercial vitality left in the
storm-tossed country. Trains were being run by the revolutionists
simply to help their own plans of mobilization. As I wrote in my cable,
the general situation was complex. Practically every town in the
Caucasus was a situation peculiar only to itself. From Tiflis to the
Black Sea the dominating factor was the attitude of the Georgians, who
were rebels rather than revolutionists. They were divided into many
parties, each of which had aims and ideas that would require a chapter
to describe. Some wanted absolute independence, while other factions
were aiming at reforms only. All had stopped paying taxes, and the
police were absolutely helpless and asked only to be let alone. The
Georgians were openly defying these dejected officers of the law, and
their boasted strength of 8000 organized men within a radius of forty
miles of Batuum made their bluff (if indeed it was one) hold good.
It was reported that the authorities at Tiflis were going to try and
reopen the line of the railroad by force. The revolutionists replied
to this that twenty-four hours after such an attempt should be made
the railroad in the Caucasus would be non-existent; in other words,
that they would blow it into small pieces. The situation was really
depressing to the Russians.

All of these events have long since ceased to be of vital interest, and
the semblance of peace and tranquillity have been restored, and once
more the volcano which ever lies beneath the surface in that country of
never ending turmoil is smoldering for the moment. It is not my intent
to go into the history of the endless complications which were then
rife further than the brief outline mentioned, as I merely wish to show
the nature of the story which we had to gather.

Stuart advised me not to come ashore except unarmed, as he stated that
during the past few days being armed had been considered sufficient
provocation to administer instant death by the bands of Cossacks that
patrolled the streets. Every morning bodies were found lying about
in the snow—victims who had not given sufficiently good account of
themselves to the half-drunken rowdies that roamed the streets under
the name of Cossack patrols.

The storm was raging without, and so we decided to lie in the harbor
until the sea had abated sufficiently for me to get some coal barges
alongside to replenish our bunkers.

At three that afternoon we went ashore and had a splendid Xmas dinner
with the Consul and absorbed the details and the atmosphere of the
remarkable conditions that were the sole topic of conversation among
the guests, each of whom had personal experiences and ghastly details
to add to what I had already learned.

So interesting was the occasion that I had about made up my mind to
accept my new friend’s invitation to spend the night ashore to meet
some other people, when Morris, with tears in his eyes, begged me to
return to the _France_ for dinner, as he said he had a surprise for
me. So I told him to have the boat at the landing place at seven that
evening, and a few minutes after that hour I was in my little saloon on
board the _France_.

It was a surprise! Morris met me at the foot of the companion-way
wreathed in smiles, clad in my dress-suit, and my only clean white
shirt. The fact that the trousers came up to his ankles, the sleeves
almost to his elbows, and that each breath he took threatened to burst
the back from the shoulders down, and that the collar he had squeezed
into was nearly choking him to death, in no way seemed to diminish
his keen enjoyment of the idea that he was the perfect representation
of the most ideal of butlers. For a moment I was annoyed, for somehow
one’s dress clothes seem to be too sacred for promiscuous distribution.
But his delight was so apparent and his anticipation of my pleasure in
his transformation was so genuine that I had not the heart to spoil his
little surprise.

Our little table was elaborately set for eight, with carefully prepared
menu-cards at each plate. Four sad-looking strangers were seated in a
melancholy row on a sofa and the captain and the two engineers, who had
been obviously scrubbed, grinned sheepishly as I came in.

Morris, fairly knocking his heels together in sheer delight, swept a
profound obeisance and in a ringing voice announced, “Christmas dinner
is served, your honor!”

Well, I was surprised and no mistake!

“Who are these men in the corner, Morris?” I inquired.

[Illustration: GENERAL NOGI—THAN WHOM NO FINER GENTLEMAN EVER DREW THE
BREATH OF LIFE]

[Illustration: MORRIS INSPECTING OUR CHRISTMAS DINNER]

“Well, sir,” he replied, “I don’t just know exactly much about them,
but it did not seem quite the thing to have Xmas dinner with just old
man Gileti and the engineers, so these gentlemen, sir, are some that
I found ashore to fill in, sir. I am sure you will find them quite
satisfactory.”

Perhaps I sighed a little inwardly, but I am sure I showed no outward
emotion as I welcomed the shy and reticent quartette on the sofa.
Morris had literally “stood by like steel” every minute of the voyage
and this was his occasion, and I was bound that my appreciation should
not be lacking.

It really was a wonderful dinner.

The faithful Morris as I then learned had been surreptitiously laying
in the wherewithal for this banquet at every port. A young live pig at
Sulina Mouth, a goose at Sinope, some birds at Trebizond and heaven
only knows what besides. With the back panel of the sealed locker
carefully slid out we tapped our liquid refreshment and in very truth
the dinner proved a great success. Even the imported guests cheered up
and by the end of the banquet were drinking toasts to me, the Chicago
_Daily News_, to Morris, aye, and even unto the fat live pig, alive no
longer, alas.

It was midnight when we wound up and sent our guests ashore and
ourselves turned in for the night after a day perhaps the most varied
in experience that I have ever lived through.

CHAPTER XIII

_We sail Away from Batuum with a Beat, Official
Dispatches, Foreign Mails and a Boatload of Refugees
That Keep Us Awake Nights_

I had hoped to sail away from Batuum the day after Christmas, but
so fierce was the storm that it was impossible to take on coal. All
this day and well into the next the roar of the sea on the breakwater
sounded in our ears like a never-ending bombardment of big guns. Not
in the memory of the oldest inhabitant had such a furious tempest
raged within the harbor. Even the buildings along the shore were in
danger and the beautiful little yacht clubhouse, a fraction of a mile
above the port, was completely carried away by the great waves that
broke beyond their accustomed bounds and crushed the frail structure
as though it had been but a house of cards. But there is an end of all
things and on the morning of the third day the wind abated and only the
heavy swell that surged without in the winter sunshine was left to tell
the tale of wreck and devastation that had swept the coast during the
past days.

By ten o’clock I had two barges of coal alongside and a double crew at
work passing baskets over the side and emptying them into the bunker
holes in the deck. It was vile stuff that we were getting and the
engineer fairly tore his hair as he saw the little better than dust
being poured into his bunkers.

“She will never make steam on that rubbish,” he kept crying again and
again. Yet it was all that there was in Batuum and we had to take it
or leave it. So we took it and at war prices at that. It certainly
was a scandal and it broke my heart to pay out fifteen dollars a ton
for stuff that in any other market would have gone begging at three
dollars. But there was no alternative, so we took it, paid out our
Rodwaner gold and smiled.

By noon we were fairly well stocked and ready to put to sea. Then there
came to my mind the cable that I had sent not only to my paper but also
to the American Embassy at Constantinople. “I propose to bring off
American refugees,” they had read. I had talked the matter over with
Stuart and it appeared that the only Americans there were Armenians
(nationalized in name only) and they for the most part declined to be
deported, not even to help me to live up to my cables. I called Morris
and explained the situation to him. American refugees was what the
contract called for, but lacking the letter of my cable we would have
to fill in with any kind of refugees that the market offered. I told
him to go ashore and make the necessary arrangements and to pass the
word around that we were sailing that very afternoon at four o’clock.
In the meantime I ordered up the “Blue Peter” to the foremast head
that all ashore might know that we proposed to depart that day for
the world that lay without. I went ashore and had lunch with Stuart,
who introduced me to a number of the consuls of the Powers that were
represented in Batuum, all of whom were eager to get word out to
their governments. By three that afternoon I had packages of official
dispatches, inscribed in impressive terms and sealed authoritatively,
consigned to the governments of Austria, Holland, America and Great
Britain, while a fair-sized sack was required to hold the mail that
poured in upon us.

Stuart could not leave his office and I bade him farewell at his desk,
accepting his cheery promise to “look me up” in America at an early
planned visit to my country. Little did either of us think that ere a
month would pass an assassin’s bullet would cut him down in the very
prime of his life. Yet so it was. I read a few weeks later in the
European press my good, kind, cheery friend was shot from ambush by
some unknown man, even as he was entering the door of his house. An
excellent man was Stuart and a public servant true to his trust in time
of trouble; so true, in fact, that in the execution of his official
duties he had encountered the opposition of some discontent in that
seething vortex, who had availed himself of the cure of all evils in
that wild country—assassination. A bare line or two announced his death
and he was forgotten. Yet this man was in his way as much of a martyr
to his duty as any soldier who falls gloriously in battle.

I made my way down to the landing place that afternoon with my
dispatches and the bag of mail. On the pier alongside of which
bobbed the little ship’s boat of the _France_ a great crowd was
gathered. To me there seemed to be at least five hundred. And such a
collection! Every race and nationality that a nightmare might conjure
up. Armenians, Georgians, Turks, Jews, Persians, Russians from the
Caucasus, Tartars and a dozen other races that resembled nothing that
I had ever beheld. Each had his own roll of filthy baggage, mostly
done up in sacks. Never had I in my life seen such an heterogeneous
gathering nor such an assemblage of men that looked so utterly
desperate and woebegone. It took me five minutes to work my way through
the mass to the stairs where my boat lay. Morris was there swearing and
arguing with the mob that was crowding about him yelling and entreating
all at the same time. It sounded like the tumult one hears in the
parrot house at the Zoo.

I jumped into my boat and called to the crew to “give way” for the
_France_. As soon as I could make my voice heard above the din I asked
Morris what in the world it all meant anyway. I nearly fainted when he
told me. They were my refugees! Not less than half a thousand, each
with his heart set on escape from the country. Their plight was pitiful
indeed, for the bulk of them had come from burning villages with only
what they could carry in their hands. Driven from place to place they
had finally landed in Batuum, which they found the worst of all, what
between warring factions and the brutal soldiery, who chased them about
the streets like sheep. Morris had done his work too well. It appeared
that he had been to every shipping agent and had notices posted up that
the _France_ was leaving that very day and would carry refugees out of
the Caucasus free of charge. No wonder the mob was on the pier! Morris
was in high feather and fairly clicking his teeth with sheer delight.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “this is our busy day, sir! There hasn’t been a
minute since I came back from shore this noon that Monroe D. Morris
hasn’t been attending strictly to business. We are sure going to carry
The Mails this trip, sir, and carry them right!” and he took me down
in the little saloon where he had hung up a row of gunny sacks. Above
them was a crudely printed notice: “Mails Close at 3:30 P. M. to-day.”
On each sack was a separate placard which read “Constantinople Mail,”
“Russian Mail,” “Trebizond Mail,” etc., on down the line of bags. Much
to my surprise each of the bags was pretty well filled and more was
coming in every few minutes.

But in the meantime I had to decide about our refugees who were still
roaring in the distance, not clearly understanding whether they were to
be abandoned entirely or not. I called the skipper and asked him how
many we could possibly carry. As a matter of fact there was no room
for any save on the deck and in the chain locker forward, as our own
crew filled the balance of the _France’s_ very small accommodations.
We made an inspection and finally decided that we might stretch our
space to hold thirty. Stomati the cook, armed with his seven languages,
was sent off in the boat to pick out thirty likely-looking refugees. I
instructed him to accept none without passports, which at once cut the
total down about half. When the crowd on shore heard that only thirty
could go there was a rush for the boat that nearly put the entire front
rank into the sea. So after all there was not much of a chance to pick
and choose and the boat brought off the first that came to hand, with
their sacks and miscellaneous dunnage. Morris and Spero stood at the
gangway inspecting passports and hustled the unaccepted passportless
back into the boat to be relanded. For an hour the little boat plied
back and forth until the _France_ was alive with the human wrecks and
their impedimenta.

In the meantime I was entertaining a few friends in my saloon who had
come out to say good-by. By four in the afternoon our refugees were all
aboard and our papers duly received from the port officials. The sun
had gone under a cloud and a stiff wind was blowing in from the sea as
with anchor up, we swung around the end of the breakwater, with long
blasts from our deep-toned foghorn as a farewell to friends ashore. The
flag on the American Consulate was dipped and some enthusiast on the
roof let go both barrels of a shotgun, to which we replied by bending
our own ensign. In fifteen minutes we were at sea and the top of the
Greek Church, the only sign left to us of the little town, to which it
had been the first to welcome us from the storm a few days before.

At nightfall we were pounding into a heavy sea that swept across us at
every dip. Not that it made any difference to us but it did play the
mischief with our refugees quartered out on the deck. The first sea to
come aboard was greeted with yelps and squeals from the poor wretches
we had undertaken to rescue. In a few minutes it became obvious that
the deck would not serve at all and we began to look about us for
shelter somewhere on board. Then I began to curse myself for a fool for
loading myself and the _France_ down with these thirty irresponsible
nondescripts whose only effort to help themselves was to cling to the
rails and scream piteously every time we took a sea. Besides this most
of them were desperately seasick. Finally, however, we disposed of
them in a way. When we had them packed away for the night there was
not a spot on the boat that was not occupied, barring my own quarters,
as I positively refused to introduce fifty-seven varieties of vermin
(which did not have to be imagined) into my little cabin. Anyway I was
afraid some of these disreputable creatures might steal what gold I
had left from my coal deal in Batuum. In the engine room, stoke-hold,
chain locker and on the grating above the boilers were packed refugees,
like sardines in a box. As they began to steam and dry out with the
heat I wished more than ever that I had let them remain to be eaten
alive if need be by the gentle citizens of the Caucasus. About midnight
it became very rough and a great fear seemed to seize one and all of
my dear passengers. Every little while they would break out of their
retreats and rush out on the deck under the impression that we were
sinking. Then the first wave that swept us would soak them to the skin
and with piercing howls they would scuttle back to the place where
they belonged. All night long this kept up until for the first time I
felt that shipwreck might not be such an unmixed evil after all. Any
change would be preferable to this. By one A. M. I had decided that my
refugees should start life anew at Trebizond, and that not one foot
further should they go with me. They might get another boat from there
if they so desired, but not the _France_! At daylight they began to beg
for food and sat around the head of my companion-way like so many apes
watching me eat my breakfast. Above my head were a dozen faces peering
eagerly through the skylight. Finally I sent them all to the galley and
ordered Stomati to give them breakfast.

At nine we anchored in Trebizond and I sighed with relief, for it
seemed to me that my troubles with the refugee problem were over, if
nothing else pleasant ever happened again.

After their rough night at sea mingled with fear and seasickness my
passengers were as eager to disembark as we all were to get rid of
them, and even before we anchored they were crowded at the gangway
waiting to land. But alas! We had reckoned without our host! The
rat-eyed governor saw a chance to display his authority. When I went
ashore to arrange for relieving myself of the refugees he promptly
replied that it could not be done. After an involved argument which
accomplished nothing I appealed to the acting consul who lived on the
bluff and accompanied by him and the missionary who lived in town,
we made another assault on the potentate who was giving himself such
airs. Finally he agreed to go out to the _France_ and look over my
importations. All of these negotiations had taken time and the refugees
had become restless and anxious as to their fate and when they saw the
governor’s boat with armed soldiers coming out toward them a panic
seized them, or at least some of them, which I thought curious at the
time, but saw a possible reason for before the day was over.

With as much dignity as though he had been the Sultan himself our
dirty visitor climbed over the side and demanded that the men from
the Caucasus be placed in line before him and show their passports.
He evidently thought that he had me there, and that none would be
forthcoming, for his face fell visibly when each and every one of the
trembling wretches produced the frayed and filthy rags of paper from
mysterious pockets in their garments. Some underling that belonged to
the governor inspected the first passport and a long debate in Turkish
ensued between the officials. The governor’s countenance brightened
perceptibly and with great dignity he spoke to the consul and then
turned around and glared at me, no doubt feeling my lack of reverence
for his august person.

“What does he say?” I asked the consul impatiently, for I was anxious
to be off.

“He says,” replied the consul, with just the shade of a deprecating
smile, “that inasmuch as these passports have not been properly viséd
in Batuum, it will be quite impossible for him to allow them to land
here. You should have had the Turkish representative there inspect and
countersign all these papers.”

I was certainly indignant.

“Do you mean to say,” I retorted with some heat, “that he insists
on a visé from a port that is in a state of siege with people being
killed in the streets? These men don’t live in Batuum anyway and most
of them have come from towns in the interior and barely escaped with
their lives. Besides some of them actually live here in Trebizond!” My
reply was translated but my expression did not need an interpreter. The
governor distinctly had the upper hand and sneeringly replied that the
situation in Batuum was not due to him and that he did not care a rap
whether the town was in a state of siege or not. “No visé no landing”
was his ultimatum. I asked him what he expected me to do with them, to
which he shrugged his shoulders scornfully and prepared to leave. I was
too angry to engage in further discussion and as I watched him go over
the side an inspiration broke upon me. So I merely remarked politely
that I would think the matter over and would advise him later as to
my decision. This obviously did not please him as he apparently did
not see where I had any particular decision coming my way. So he only
growled a surly reply as he rowed away.

As soon as he was gone I called a council of war in my saloon and
proposed my plan. I figured on sailing from Trebizond to the mouth of
the Danube and thence back to Russia, and it was obvious that there
would be no welcome to my passengers in either of these places. My idea
was that we would say no more about it but make all of our preparations
to depart and just before we weighed anchor put all our refugees in
our two ship’s boats with their equipment of oars and just simply
leave them in the harbor. If the governor wanted to keep them adrift
there with no food—well, then that would be his affair and not mine.
He could drown them if he thought best, once they were off my hands.
No one but Morris sympathized with my project, but I was running the
enterprise, and issued the ultimatum and went ashore to send a cable
before leaving.

But once again my plans were changed for there was an urgent cable
awaiting me from Chicago: “Return Constantinople give up _France_
proceed quickest possible St. Petersburg investigate Witte’s charges
against our correspondent there whom he asserts has misquoted him.”
So here was my whole program upset once more and for the first time
my scheme for marooning my passengers began to seem injudicious. I
could make no excuse for disobeying the governor at Trebizond if my
next call was to be at a Turkish port. I thought a minute and my pet
project evaporated. I would take them to the Golden Horn. But to
forestall difficulties there I cabled Mr. Peter Jay, then chargé at
our Embassy in Constantinople, that I was coming with refugees and to
arrange to have the authorities take delivery of same on my arrival.
Then I went back to the landing. The missionary, who was a lovely man
and sympathized strongly with me, had been pleading with the governor
for the refugees. While that mighty man stood bashfully by playing
coyly with his sword tassels, the missionary delicately intimated to
me that his Excellency on account of his good impression of me and
of his desire to oblige, would waive the formalities of the pass-port
visés and allow the unfortunates to land if I could see my way clear to
defray his trouble in the matter for the sum of five pounds sterling
per refugee. The old swine! I was indignant! I told the missionary
that he could tell his fat friend that I would see him sizzling first
and that I was going straight back to Constantinople, where I knew a
general who was close to the Sultan and I would stay there a month if
necessary but I certainly intended to get him “fired” for a rotten old
grafter. I could not speak his language and the missionary declined
to translate—so I left. I am afraid the Turk never really knew all I
thought of him, but he did know that his generous offer was turned
down, for his face flushed crimson and he spun on his heel and went to
his office. I decided not to wait for him to make another move and so
I jumped into the boat and pulled for the _France_. As soon as I was
within calling distance I shouted to the skipper to get up the anchor,
and as I stepped over the side, her engines were already turning over
and her nose coming around toward the sea. I had sent Morris directly
from the cable office to buy food of the refugee type and we brought
off a boatload of cabbages and green things which should keep them
until we could put them ashore at Constantinople.

It was about nine-thirty that night as we were spinning merrily along
over a fair sea, when the chief engineer came into my saloon. His face
was like putty.

“What is wrong?” I asked with some apprehension, for he was the
pluckiest of the lot.

For reply he threw on the table two large coils of fuses, the type
one uses to set off a bomb or dynamite cartridges. I recognized them
at once, for I had used the identical thing in a little dynamiting
enterprise of my own a few years before.

“Where did these come from?” I asked sharply, looking at his white face.

“One of the stokers found them in the coal bunkers,” he replied
quietly, and then added tensely, “and he nearly put them in the furnace
with the coal.”

“Well, these are only fuses,” I said to reassure him. “They won’t do
any thing but fizzle a bit.”

He smiled a bit sadly.

“Yes, I know that,” he replied, “but has it occurred to you that the
man who carries fuses is apt to have the caps and the charge that
they are meant to explode? And has it occurred to you that whoever
put the fuse in the bunker probably put in the bomb as well? And has
it occurred to you that at any moment they may go into the furnace by
mistake with the coal? And has it occurred to you that when they do we
will all go to Kingdom Come?”

This was certainly a new idea. No, it had not occurred to me at all.
However, it did strike me as being a pertinent thought now that he
spoke of it and I sat on the edge of my berth, with the shoe I had been
removing still in my hand. Finally something else occurred to me as
well and after a moment’s deliberation I replied, “You go right back to
the stoke-hold, Chief, and explain the whole situation to the stokers.
If they put a bomb in the furnace they will all be scalded to death
beyond a shadow of a doubt. The rest of us have a chance to get away.
Not a big one—but still it is a chance anyway. The stokers down there
have not the most remote hope if they should make a blunder like that.
Explain it carefully to them and then you go to bed. For it is my guess
that under the circumstances they won’t put anything in the furnace
to-night that does not bear a very decided resemblance to good black
coal.”

The Chief thought a little and then went and did as I had suggested. In
fifteen minutes he returned with the word that the day shift of stokers
had turned out and, assisted by the balance of the crew not otherwise
occupied, were making a careful personal inspection of every shovelful
that went into the furnace. We both laughed a little and decided that
we could safely turn in and sleep soundly.

But before I did so I called the skipper in for council. We talked
it all over and decided that someone of our refugees had had the
explosives on him and when we got into the row with the governor at
Trebizond and it looked as though there were to be an examination of
passengers, the guilty man had become panic stricken and, prying up
the bunker lid on the deck, had dropped the damaging evidence against
himself into the bunker, never doubting that he would be well ashore at
Trebizond before the _France_ was at sea again. He must also be passing
a restless night knowing what was in the bunkers.

This time I was more than indignant!

It seemed a poor return for all the pains that I had taken in behalf of
these wretched people. I called in Morris and told him that I wanted
him to watch the refugees carefully from this time on, as I suspected
that one of them at least, might be a desperate man, and the Lord only
knew what he might be up to before we landed back in the Golden Horn.

“Now, Morris,” I told him, “I am going to assign you to watch these men
just as carefully as you know how and if you see the slightest sign of
a single one of them making any move which in your judgment is going to
endanger the _France_ and the lives of any of us I want you to shoot
him on the spot!” And I gave him my big army Colt.

The black man’s face shone with excitement and his teeth gleamed, as he
replied:

“Yes, sir; yes, sir. I’ll do just as you say, sir. And if I see
anything suspicious, I’ll shoot him right through the head, sir,” and
he went on deck to look for symptoms.

But it proved unnecessary. Whether anything more was in the bunkers or
not we never knew. Suffice it to say that we did not blow up, but kept
blithely on our way towards the mouth of the Bosphorus, whence we had
steamed nearly two weeks before.

CHAPTER XIV

_The Return to the Golden Horn and the End of the Assignment_

It was just four o’clock three days later on the afternoon of December
30th that the tired little _France_ poked her steel nose into the
waters of the Bosphorus and, running around the first promontory,
dropped her anchor in quiet waters just off the Turkish fort that
stands sentinel at the eastern end of that wonderful cleft in the
mountains that divide the East from the West, Asia and her mediæval
civilization from Europe and all her enlightened progress. Half an
hour served to pass us through the customs and with hearts rejoicing
and care free we steamed on through that picturesque gap. As we sailed
around the bend I stood on the bridge and watched the dull, grim waters
of the Black Sea cut off from view by the rising headlands. It was one
of our typical days. The barometer was falling and the wind was coming
up and the surly sea without was beating itself into one of its chronic
rages that we knew so well, and its white-caps and froth seemed to whip
angrily after us almost as though we were its natural prey and that it
now beheld us eluding its maw.

With each turn of the screw we were getting into smoother water and
in a few minutes were cutting up the still surface as a knife passes
through cheese.

The relief of having it all over was excessive and I dare say we all
behaved like children. I am sure that I did. I ordered up our good old
American flag under which I had sailed for four months in the mine-sown
waters off Port Arthur, the year before, and which during these last
weeks had been snapping almost constantly at our fore, whipped by
the bleak winter winds of the Black Sea. Its ends were frayed and
raveled by the constant gales, yet with all its dirt of travel and
disheveled parts, it looked good enough to me as it floated proudly
at our masthead as we plowed serenely down the Bosphorus. I stationed
Stomati at the stern to stand by the halyards of our big French ensign
which, designating the nationality of our register, spread its ample
bunting from our stern. And not a boat did we pass that did not get a
cordial dip from us, and not a boat did we pass but I saw the men on
the bridge turn and study through their glasses that rarely seen emblem
that we bore at our foremast-head. Just before reaching the Golden
Horn one passes Roberts College, perched high above the Bosphorus on
a great bluff. The college, as all good Americans know, was founded
by Dr. Washburn, one of our own true citizens who has brought greater
glory to our Name and Flag in the Near East than all the ambassadors
and warships that ever penetrated that remote land. With childish glee
I went below to the engineer and bade him turn out all of his stokers
and heap on all the coal he could crowd into the furnaces and speed up
the engines to their topmost notch, for, as I told him, “I want the
_France_ to look and do her prettiest as we pass the American College.”

I returned to the bridge and swelled with pride as I glanced at the
dense columns of smoke pouring majestically from our two chubby
funnels, and the white wake that our screw was turning up astern as
the engines beat out their maximum energy down in the bowels of the
ship. As we were fairly abeam of the College I pulled the whistle lever
and the deep foghorn bayed out its hoarse-throated blast. For a solid
minute it roared and then came the response from the hill. Someone had
heard the tumult and recognized the emblem that we carried, and in a
jiffy windows were thrown open, and handkerchiefs, towels and sheets
were waved frantically toward us. Again and again the _France_ tooted
in response and again and again Stomati dipped our ensign in salute,
while the crew cheered hysterically, just as though they were all
Americans.

“What a childish performance,” thinks the reader. No doubt it was. But
after one has been at sea surrounded by indifference and hostility by
the peoples one encounters and attacked by savage seas for two solid
weeks, isn’t one to be forgiven a slight slip from dignity?

An hour later we were alongside the wharf and friends from the shore
who had been advised that we had entered the Bosphorus came aboard
to welcome us safely back. On the wharf was drawn up a company of
savage-looking Turkish soldiers. They proved to be the Sultan’s welcome
to his prodigals, returning from the storm-tossed Caucasus. I have
never just fathomed the status of a refugee in Turkey, but I gathered
then that it must be against the law to escape slaughter in a foreign
land and come home to your own. Anyway my refugees were promptly
marched off to jail, and they, their past and future faded forever from
my interest.

I found wires urging me make haste for Russia and so turning the
_France_ over to her owners I hurried to the Pera-Palace Hotel and
got into some clean clothes and while Morris was throwing my baggage
together for the Berlin train, I was making my formal calls. First
on Mr. Jay at the American Legation, who welcomed me cordially and
showed me the wire all drawn and addressed to the State Department
at Washington, advising them that the _France_ had been wrecked. For
two days it had lain on his desk and only been held up on receipt of
my wire from Trebizond that I was on my way back to the Golden Horn.
Now for the first time I learned in full of the widespread havoc of
wreck and misery that storm had caused these past ten days. Dozens of
ships had suffered disaster and the hope of the _France’s_ safety, it
appeared, had been well-nigh abandoned. But it was all passed now and
Jay and I laughed at it that night as we sat in our evening clothes
over our wine and cigars at the Club. A few words with the British
Ambassador and the turning over of my mails and dispatches and my
duties in Constantinople were over.

The carefully prepared cable from the Caucasus I had brought with me,
and not daring to trust it to the Turkish wire, I had given it into
the hands of a courier who had caught a train within the hour for the
frontier where he had filed it in an uncensored telegraph office. I
waited in the hotel for the few hours to elapse before a wire came to
me from our London office confirming its safe arrival and then with
my impedimenta I was on the train once more, hurrying for the Russian
capital.

My story is almost done.

The situation was quietly adjusting itself.

Five nights I spent on the train and on the morning of the sixth
day I was on the Nevsky Prospekt once more. Two weeks sufficed to
reorganize our news service in Russia and to turn the situation over
to our correspondent whose duty it was to look after affairs in that
territory.

I had been doing war assignments pretty steadily now for more than two
years and both my mind and body craved repose. My reprieve from further
work came one night as I was chatting over Russian politics in one of
Petersburg’s fashionable restaurants. I read my cable and sighed with
satisfaction.

The assignment that had come to me months before in Peking was at an
end. “Russia direct,” it had read and half around the world and into
strange lands and among stranger peoples, it had carried me.

The next Nord Express that pulled from the Petersburg station bound for
Paris carried me homeward turned and with a mind for the first time in
months free from anxiety.

The situation was over.

My work was done.

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Cable Game - The Adventures of an American Press-Boat in Turkish Waters - During the Russian Revolution" ***

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