Read Ebook: The Cable Game The Adventures of an American Press-Boat in Turkish Waters During the Russian Revolution by Washburn Stanley

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 344 lines and 59632 words, and 7 pages

"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.

"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.

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.

"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 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 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.

"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 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 .00 to .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.

"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 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:

"Yes, he says he can't back out now."

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."

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:

"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."

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 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.

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 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."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet