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.