John Stephens - Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland, Vol. 2 (of 2)

Vosnezeuski lies on the river Bog, and is the chief town of the Cossacks of the Bog. This river is navigable for large vessels one hundred and fifty versts; beyond this for three or four hundred versts it is full of cataracts. The Cossacks of the Bog are a warlike tribe, numbering from six to seven thousand, and living under the same military system with the Cossacks of the Don. But we fell into worse hands than the Cossacks. The postmaster was a Jew, and at first told us that he had no horses; then that he had no postillion, but would hire one if we would pay him a certain sum, about four times the amount fixed by law. We had been obliged before to pay a few extra rubles, but this was our first serious difficulty with the postmasters; and, in pursuance of the advice received at Odessa, we talked loud, demanded the book which is nailed to the table in every posthouse for travellers to enter complaints in, and threatened the vengeance of Count Woronzow and every one else, up to the emperor; but the Jew laughed in our faces; looked in our podoroshni, where we were described as simple travellers, without any of the formidable array of titles which procure respect in Russia; told us we were no grand seigneurs, and that we must either pay the price or wait, as our betters had done before us. We found too soon, as we had been advised at Odessa, that these fellows do not know such a character in society as a private gentleman; and if a man is not described in his podoroshni as a count, duke, or lord of some kind, or by some high-sounding military title, they think he is a merchant or manufacturer, or some other common fellow, and pay no regard to him. I relied somewhat upon my companion's having been made "noble," but now found that his consul had been rather chary of his honours, and, by the Russian word used, had not put him up high enough to be of any use. We had a long wrangle with the Jew, the result of which was, that we told him, probably in no very gentle phrase, that we would wait a month rather than submit to his extortion; and, drawing up the window of our carriage, prepared to pass the night at the door of the posthouse.

One of our party was evidently well satisfied with this arrangement, and he was Monsieur Henri. We had hired him by the day to Moscow, and, if we wanted him, to St. Petersburgh, and very soon saw that he was perfectly content with the terms, and in no hurry to bring our journey to a close. From the moment of our arrival we suspected him of encouraging the postmaster in his efforts to detain us, and were so much fortified in this opinion by after circumstances, that, when he was about moving toward the house to pass the night within, we peremptorily ordered him to mount the box and sleep there; he refused, we insisted; and as this was the first day out and the first moment of actual collision, and it was all important to decide who should be master, we told him that, if he did not obey, we would discharge him on the spot, at the risk of being obliged to work our way back to Odessa alone. And as he felt that, in that case, his debts would have been paid to no purpose, with a string of suppressed sacrés he took his place on the box. Our carriage was very comfortable, well lined and stuffed, furnished with pockets and everything necessary for the road, and we expected to sleep in it; but, to tell the truth, we felt rather cheap as we woke during the night, and looked at the shut door of the posthouse, and thought of the Jew sleeping away in utter contempt of us, and our only satisfaction was in hearing an occasional groan from Henri.

That worthy individual did not oversleep himself, nor did he suffer the Jew to do so either. Early in the morning, without a word on our part, the horses were brought out and harnessed to our vehicle, and the same man whom he professed to have hired expressly for us, and who, no doubt, was the regular postillion, mounted the box. The Jew maintained his impudence to the last, coming round to my window, and then asking a few rubles as a douceur. Good English would have been thrown away upon him, so I resented it by drawing up the window of the carriage and scowling at him through the glass.

Many of the postmasters along this road were Jews; and I am compelled to say that they were always the greatest scoundrels we had to deal with; and this is placing them on very high ground, for their inferiors in rascality would be accounted masters in any other country. No men can bear a worse character than the Russian Jews, and I can truly say that I found them all they were represented to be. They are not allowed to come within the territory of old Russia. Peter the Great refused their application to be permitted to approach nearer, smoothing his refusal by telling them that his Russian subjects were greater Jews than they were themselves. The sagacious old monarch, however, was wrong; for all the money business along the road is in their hands. They keep little taverns, where they sell vodka, a species of brandy, and wring from the peasant all his earnings, lending the money again to the seigneurs at exorbitant interest. Many of them are rich, and though alike despised by rich and poor, by the seigneur and the serf, they are proud of exhibiting their wealth, particularly in the jewels and ornaments of their women. At Savonka, a little village on the confines of old Poland, where we were detained waiting for horses, I saw a young girl about sixteen, a Polonese, sitting on the steps of a miserable little tavern, sewing together some ribands, with a headdress of brown cloth, ornamented with gold chains and pearls worth six hundred rubles, diamond earrings worth a hundred, and a necklace of ducats and other Dutch gold pieces worth four hundred rubles; altogether, in our currency, worth perhaps two hundred and fifty dollars.

Here, too, while sitting with Henri on the steps of the posthouse, I asked him in a friendly way how he could be such a rascal as to league with the postmaster to detain us at Vosnezeuski, whereupon he went at once into French heroics, exclaiming, "Monsieur, je suis vieux militaire—j'etais chasseur de Napoleon—mon honneur," &c.; that he had never travelled before except with grand seigneurs, and then in the carriage, more as compagnon de voyage than as a servant, and intimated that it was a great condescension to travel with us at all.

We passed through several villages, so much alike and so uninteresting in appearance that I did not note even their names. As night approached we had great apprehensions that Henri would contrive to make us stop again; but the recollection of his bed on the box served as a lesson, and we rolled on without interruption. At daylight we awoke, and found ourselves upon the wild steppes of Russia, forming part of the immense plain which, beginning in northern Germany, extends for hundreds of miles, having its surface occasionally diversified by ancient tumuli, and terminates at the long chain of the Urals, which, rising like a wall, separates them from the equally vast plains of Siberia. The whole of this immense plain was covered with a luxuriant pasture, but bare of trees like our prairie lands, mostly uncultivated, yet everywhere capable of producing the same wheat which now draws to the Black Sea the vessels of Turkey, Egypt, and Italy, making Russia the granary of the Levant; and which, within the last year, we have seen brought six thousand miles to our own doors. Our road over these steppes was in its natural state; that is to say, a mere track worn by caravans of wagons; there were no fences, and sometimes the route was marked at intervals by heaps of stones, intended as guides when the ground should be covered with snow. I had some anxiety about our carriage; the spokes of the wheels were all strengthened and secured by cords wound tightly around them, and interlaced so as to make a network; but the postillions were so perfectly reckless as to the fate of the carriage, that every crack went through me like a shot. The breaking of a wheel would have left us perfectly helpless in a desolate country, perhaps more than a hundred miles from any place where we could get it repaired. Indeed, on the whole road to Chioff there was not a single place where we could have any material injury repaired; and the remark of the old traveller is yet emphatically true, that "there be small succour in these parts."