Category Archives: travel

by | 21 June 2025 · 4:49 pm

Ryukyu Seacraft

From Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650, by Gregory Smits (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 288-291:

During period two [1450-1520s], Ryukyu continued to obtain vessels from China. However, instead of receiving used military vessels for free, Ryukyu bore the costs of vessel construction and subsequent repairs. Ship size did not change, an indirect indication of the continuing vigor of the tribute trade. During this period and the previous one, each ship received a single-character name such as “vigor,” “wisdom,” “courage,” or “longevity” at the shipyard when built. After arriving in Ryukyu, the ship received a Japanese name ending in -maru. Probably from around the late fifteenth century onward, ships also received a Ryukyuan name ending in -tomi. These names of ships are found in the Omoro, and vessels appearing in the songs would usually have had alternative Chinese and Japanese names.

…

During this period [1520s-ca. 1570], the Ryukyuan fleet continued to consist of relatively small ships, possibly even smaller than before. The question is whether Ryukyu continued to purchase ships from China or whether it built its own. The first ship of the designation “small ships of [our?] country” (honkoku shōsen) appears in documents in 1541, and ships with this description, as well as other terms with “small” in them, were common from 1549 onward. Okamoto and Tomiyama Kazuyuki regard these ships as having been made in China. However, it is likely that they were civilian merchant ships. Tomiyama points out that in 1555 Shō Sei asked to purchase such a ship from the Ming court with the express proviso that “it need not be large.” By contrast, Mamoru Akamine states that during Shō Sei’s reign (1527–1555), “the shipbuilding industry shifted to Ryukyu itself and Ryukyuan-built hulls came to be used in the tribute trade.” Recall from chapter 3 that Ikuta Shigeru also regarded the smaller ships built after 1548 as Ryukyuan-made vessels.

We cannot be absolutely certain where ships were made during this period or precisely when the first Okinawan-made ship (other than vessels of a relatively simple dugout design) was built. Nevertheless, Okamoto and Tomiyama present good evidence that the 1540s or 1550s marked a transition from smaller military ships to somewhat smaller Chinese-made merchant ships as the mainstay of Ryukyu’s fleet. It is likely that the first Okinawan-made ships used in trade and diplomacy were built in the 1570s, during the reign of Shō Ei (r. 1573–1586). In documents, these ships are called “local ships” (tsuchibune), “small ships,” and possibly by other terms.

…

As we have seen, Omoro songs often mention ships. One describes the ship of an elite lord (aji) as having a cloth sail and the ship of a low official as having a sail made from matting. The details of local boat and ship manufacturing in the Ryukyu islands are unclear in most cases. However, extrapolating backward from the early modern era and piecing together other information such as the omoro mentioned here, it is almost certain that early Ryukyuans manufactured boats and small ships (known by sabani and other terms). These were dug out from large trees to form canoe-like hulls that could be rowed or sailed. Tying four of these hulls together and placing boards across the top created a henzabune, which during the early modern era were sometimes used to transport liquor (awamori) to Amami-Ōshima and return with as many as eight head of cattle. It is almost certain that Ryukyuans manufactured a variety of dugout vessels for use in local and island-to-island transport between Okinawa, Amami-Ōshima, and other northern Ryukyu islands.

Did Ryukyuans manufacture ships more complex than dugout vessels before the 1570s? A shipbuilding tradition in Uruka in Miyako began in approximately the early fifteenth century and continued into the early modern era. These Uruka ships (Uruka-miuni) were built mainly in the Japanese manner by attaching two layers of planks to a keel, with the mast located in the middle of the ship and capable of being lowered during severe weather. Uruka ships conducted trade and transported tribute shipments across the Kerama gap to Okinawa, and Inamura Kenpu regards them as part of the wakō legacy in Sakishima. There is some evidence that mariners from Miyako were able to sail as far as Southeast Asia during the fourteenth century.

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by | 9 June 2025 · 8:32 am

Ryukyu Currents, Gaps, & Winds

From Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650, by Gregory Smits (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 34-35:

Stressing the interconnectedness of exchange networks within the East Asian region during approximately the fourteenth century, historian Angela Schottenhammer points out: “The centers of this exchange doubtlessly lay in China, Japan, and Korea. But also smaller countries and regions in the north and south of the China Sea, such as the Ryūkyūs or even traders from an island as small as Tsushima, participated and were integrated into this supra-regional system. Its initiators were often private organizations and merchants who sought to maintain and cherish their contacts even under politically unfavorable conditions.” Maritime routes connected the nodes within the network. Several factors influenced movement around the East China Sea, including currents, winds, and landforms.

The Kuroshio is a strong current flowing northward between Taiwan and Yonaguni and continuing northward to the west of the Ryukyu islands. Northwest of Amami-Ōshima, the Kuroshio turns eastward and flows through the sea between the Tokara islands and Amami-Ōshima, an area known as the Shichitō-nada [‘seven-island rough-sea’]. In other words, the Kuroshio forms a natural barrier between the Tokara and the northern Ryukyu islands. Its flow created dangerous conditions for shipping, and it defines a biological barrier with substantially different flora and fauna on either side of it. The Shichitō-nada also marks a cultural boundary, albeit a permeable one that people could and did cross. This boundary divides Ryukyuan languages and the Kyushu dialects of Japanese. In 1893, when Sasamori Gisuke sailed from Kagoshima to visit the Ryukyu islands, he was struck by the terrifying power of the current in the Shichitō-nada. A sailor explained to Sasamori that if a typical Japanese-style sailing vessel encountered the current, it might be swept far off course into the Pacific. The Kuroshio surging through the seas around the southern Tokara islands is one reason mariners from that area became especially prized as pilots throughout the network. Likewise, the Kuroshio serves as a marine barrier between Yonaguni and both Taiwan and the southeast coast of China.

Between Okinawa and Miyako, the expanse of sea known as the Kerama gap functioned as a barrier to travel because crossing it required navigation without reference to visible landforms. Despite the significance of these natural obstacles, properly equipped and piloted vessels regularly overcame them. Sailing from Kikai to the port of Naha in Okinawa could be done entirely within sight of land on clear days. Therefore, relatively small ships could travel this route without advanced navigational skills. To sail from Amami-Ōshima to Tokara, or from Okinawa to Sakishima, or to the China coast, on the other hand, required superior ships, knowledge, and skill. The wind was the main driving force for vessels plying routes around the East China Sea. Storms, of course, could be disruptive, but generally wind patterns were predictable. The winds in the region changed during approximately the third and ninth lunar months.

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by | 17 May 2025 · 8:16 am

Viet Minh Logistics, 1954

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 530-534:

THERE FOLLOWED TEN DAYS OF RELENTLESS PREPARATION, AS ferocious as any in the history of warfare. The general mobilization of labor initiated a month earlier now took on a breathtaking pace. For on this day, January 14, nothing was yet ready. The artillery was not in place on the crests above Dien Bien Phu, and the trails to get it there had not been made ready nor even fully marked out. Farther away, huge tasks remained to get materials to the highlands, from the Chinese border at Mu Nam Quam over Provincial Route 13 to the Red River and thence via Provincial Route 41 to the area of Dien Bien Phu—a total distance of almost five hundred miles. All along this route, engineering crews and soldiers, assisted by porters, worked day and night to clear and widen and repair the roads and to keep convoys moving. The route was divided into eight sections, their endpoints marked by major obstacles such as ravines or waterways where checkpoints were set up. The Russian-made Molotova two-and-a-half-ton trucks, now numbering about six hundred, as well as a smaller number of American Dodge trucks captured by the Chinese in Korea or the Viet Minh in Vietnam, traveled only one section each; at the checkpoints, their contents were taken off by porters and reloaded on the vehicles assigned to the next stretch.

French aircraft were a constant menace, and the casualties among the porters, though never published or perhaps tallied, were undoubtedly high. (A particular menace: the new American antipersonnel bombs that spread lethal showers of small steel splinters.) But the work continued, as thousands of porters stood ready to fill in the craters or build bypasses; French crews reported with dismay that the cuts they succeeded in making in roads were often repaired within hours. To complicate the pilots’ task, elaborate efforts were made to camouflage the route wherever possible. Log bridges were constructed just under the surface of a stream to hide them, and treetops were pulled together with ropes and cables to screen the roads. Vehicles were covered with leafy branches, and tire tracks were rubbed out as soon as the trucks had passed. A primitive but effective air-warning system was fashioned, whereby spotters in treetops clanged alarm triangles or blew whistles to warn of approaching planes (none of which were jets and thus could be heard well in advance of arrival). Pilots would report seeing long lines of truck headlights suddenly go dark, long before they reached the target.

When bomb damage or natural obstacles proved too great to overcome quickly, porters were called in to carry loads themselves, often over considerable distances. They would don makeshift shoulder pads and bamboo carrying rigs, and frequently they would team up. Photographs exist of four-man teams using shoulder poles to carry the barrels and the breechblocks of 75mm Japanese mountain guns up steep wooded hillsides.

Bicycles, for years a favored mode of transport for the Viet Minh, were again called into service. Most were French-made, manufactured at Saint-Étienne or in the Peugeot factories. A specially equipped bicycle—with wooden struts to strengthen the frame and bamboo poles to extend the handlebars and the brake levers—could take more than an elephant could carry. “We mobilized all available supply bicycles,” Vo Nguyen Giap would recall, “reaching a total of 20,000.”

Every supply bicycle was initially capable of transporting 100 kilograms, and this was later increased to 200 or even 300 kilograms. One civilian coolie laborer from Phu Tho named Ma Van Thang was able to transport a total of 352 kilograms on his bicycle. The carrying capacity of transport bicycles was more than ten times greater than that of porters carrying loads on “ganh” [bamboo or wooden] poles, and the amount of rice consumed by the people transporting the supplies was reduced by a similar amount. The superiority of the transport bicycles also lay in the fact that they could operate along roads and trails that trucks could not use. This method of transportation greatly surprised the enemy’s army and completely upset his original calculations.

But the most dramatic feats were accomplished at the end, after the trucks had snaked their way to the endpoint, at Na Nham on Route 41. From here, in order to avoid detection by the French, the artillery pieces had somehow to be dragged to their emplacements, on a trail that ten days before the attack date had still to be blazed. Unloaded from the trucks, the cannons were to be transported through a chain of mountains without going through a valley, in order to cut through the foothills of the 1,100-meter-high Pu Pha Song mountain; then they were to descend again in the direction of the Pavie Piste, which linked Dien Bien Phu to Lai Chau, which they would cross near Ban To; then they were to scale another new height in order to position the battery at Ban Nghiu, from where they would fire on the French garrison at point-blank range.

…

It took seven days and nights of nonstop labor to get the heavy guns in place, with the use of block and tackle, drag ropes, and braking chocks to keep them from careening back down the slopes. The half-ton 75mm mountain guns were not the problem; they could be broken down into eleven loads that, while heavy and cumbersome, were manageable. The 105mm howitzers, however, represented an almost absurd challenge on inclines that reached as steep as sixty degrees. Commander Tran Do of the 312th Division was among the infantry pressed into this “silent battle” of “cannon-pulling” of the 105s. “Every evening when the white fog … began to descend over the plains, columns of human beings set out on the road,” he later wrote. “The [six-mile] track was so narrow that if a slight deviation of the wheels took place the artillery piece would have fallen into the deep ravine. The newly-opened track was soon an ankle-deep bog. With our own sweat and muscles, we replaced the trucks to haul artillery pieces into position.”

Fatigue and lack of supplies were a constant concern, Tran continued. Meals consisted only of rice, often undercooked, as the kitchens had to be smokeless by day and sparkless by night. And yet the work went on: “To climb a slope, hundreds of men crept before the gun, tugging on long ropes, pulling the piece up inch by inch. On the crest, the winch was creaking, helping to prevent the piece from slipping.” Then it got worse: “It was much harder descending a slope. The sight was just the reverse: Hundreds of men held onto long ropes behind the piece, their bodies leaning backwards, and the windlass released the ropes inch by inch.” In this way, whole nights were spent toiling by torchlight to gain five hundred or a thousand meters.

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by | 15 March 2025 · 8:17 am

Inspecting Ust Kara Mines, 1885

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 166-169:

Greek mining engineers advised Peter the Great in the late seventeenth century that mineral wealth lay underground in the regions east of Lake Baikal. Hard labor convicts were soon digging down to the silver veins in the vicinity of Nerchinsk. Gold mining began later near the Kara River, a name derived from a Tatar word meaning “black.” The Nerchinsk Mining Region, as it became known, eventually stretched over thousands of square miles from the eastern shore of Lake Baikal to the Chinese border.

In late October 1885 Kennan and Frost rode their horses through the valley of the Kara River to the prison complex at Ust Kara, or Kara mouth, the first of the prisons, convict settlements, and open placer gold mines stretching twenty miles up the valley. In addition to Ust Kara, there were the Lower Prison, the Political Prison, the Lower Diggings, Middle Kara and Upper Kara convict settlements, and the Upper Prison. Their total exile population was around twenty-five hundred, of whom two-thirds were hard-labor convicts and the rest women and children who had accompanied their husbands and fathers to the mines. Many of the political convicts in Eastern Siberia were held at Kara.

…

Kennan and Frost went directly to the prison commandant’s residence where they were greeted by Maj. Potuloff, who was in charge of Kara’s common-law convict prisons. Potuloff, a tall, cordial man in his fifties with a bushy beard and soldierly bearing, explained that he had been alerted by telegram to expect Kennan and Frost, but he never thought that the two would make it through from Stretinsk at this time of the year. He laughed when Kennan inquired where they could find a place to stay for the night. Other than the accommodations for criminals, he explained, the only place to stay was in his home, which they were welcome to do. Kennan and Frost had no alternative than to accept his offer “and in minutes [we] were comfortably quartered in a large, well-furnished house, where our eyes were gladdened by the sight of such unfamiliar luxuries as long mirrors, big soft rugs, easy-chairs, and a piano.”

They found themselves effectively under twenty-four-hour surveillance in Maj. Potuloff’s home. He never left them alone, in fact, he seemed to have relinquished his official duties during Kennan and Frost’s stay in order to keep an eye on them. Once, when Kennan moved in the direction of his overcoat, Maj. Potuloff asked, “Where are you going?”

“Out for exercise.”

“Wait a minute and I will go with you.” Kennan’s bedroom, which was on the ground floor across the front hall from the sitting room, had no door but only a thin curtain. The sentries posted night and day outside the house could even look in his bedroom through its curtainless windows.

Under Maj. Potuloff’s watchful eye, Kennan inspected prisons that were the now-familiar “perfect hell[s] of misery,” from the impossible overcrowding to the filth and vermin to the lack of any bedding for the inmates. “Civilized human beings put straw even into the kennels of their dogs.” But no matter how many Siberian prisons Kennan inspected, he always marveled at the unendurable smell. His descriptions of prison odors steadily grew more vivid and literary the farther east he went. Of the air in the Ust Kara prison, which Maj. Potuloff readily acknowledged was repulsive, Kennan later wrote, “I can ask you to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has been half a dozen times through human lungs and is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine that air still further vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies; to imagine that it has a suggestion of damp, decaying wood and more than a suggestion of human excrement—and still you will have no adequate idea of it.”

During Kennan’s prison inspections, convicts complained to Maj. Potuloff and even approached Kennan on the assumption that “I must be an inspector sent to Kara to investigate the prison management.” Several convicts pleaded with Maj. Potuloff that they had been imprisoned for months but still did not know what they were charged with. Another insisted that he had already finished his sentence. One man explained that he had gotten drunk on the exile march and exchanged names with another convict and ended up at Kara serving a hard labor sentence when, had he kept his name, he only would have been sent to a settlement as a forced colonist.

Bartering names for food, drink, or clothing was a common practice among the exiled convicts and not easily detected since the convoy and prison guards could hardly familiarize themselves with the faces of hundreds of convicts. The exchange, which the artels ruthlessly enforced, invariably improved one barterer’s position to the distinct disadvantage of some hapless exile who had spent his money or gambled away his clothing, and thereby gotten himself, as Kennan explained, “into such a condition that for five or ten rubles and a bottle of vodka he will sell his very soul.” Maj. Potuloff ignored the convicts and their complaints.

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by | 13 March 2025 · 5:44 am

Siberian Postal System, 1880s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle p. 121:

The Siberian postal system was well organized. Carriages plied the Siberian roads between cities, villages, and towns carrying leather pouches filled with mail. Each day Irkutsk, the largest city in Siberia, received mail from Moscow, which was twenty-six hundred miles away, and delivered it back three times a week. The system allowed Kennan’s and Frost’s wives and friends to send them letters care of the post offices in larger Siberian cities, based on their expected itinerary, and for them to send letters back to the United States. Kennan mailed a letter to Century publisher Roswell Smith reporting that their success in gaining access to the Tiumen prison was “beyond my expectations” and that Frost had made numerous sketches and taken many photographs despite the balky equipment. Kennan had seen the prison in its “every-day aspect” and was confident that “nothing was fixed for my inspection” because “such a prison as that cannot be temporarily fixed.”

Overall, it was a positive report but for a note of self-doubt. Kennan described the forwarding prison as “the worst” he had ever encountered and, if it turned out to be representative, “I shall have to take back some things that I have said and written about the exile system.”

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by | 11 March 2025 · 6:40 am

Siberian Transit Before Rail

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 54-57:

The first leg, to Yakutsk, took Kennan and his companions through a wilderness of mountains and evergreen forests inhabited by the Tungus, a nomadic tribe. The Russian government paid the Tungus in tea and tobacco to set up camps at intervals between Okhotsk and Yakutsk to supply government mail carriers, and the occasional private traveler, with food and transportation. At their first stop at a camp, where wolfish-looking dogs gnawed on the severed heads of reindeer, the Tungus stocked Kennan’s sleighs with reindeer meat, replaced their dogs with reindeer, and took over as drivers. On November 16, after twenty-three days of nonstop travel, Kennan sighted columns of smoke rising from the chimneys of Yakutsk and slept that night in a Russian merchant’s house. “The sensation of lying without furs and between sheets in a civilized bed was so novel and extraordinary that I lay awake for an hour, trying experiments with that wonderful mattress.”

The Russian government had set up a remarkably well-organized transportation system that operated year-round in Siberia. Ten thousand horses, several thousand drivers, and seven thousand sleighs and horse-drawn carriages were stationed at more than three hundred and fifty post stations. Typically, post stations were the homes of local villagers who earned money by keeping and feeding the horses and furnishing lodging and food to both drivers and travelers. Unlike the American stagecoach network, the sleighs and carriages did not depart and arrive at fixed times. Depending on the season, the traveler simply bought or hired a sleigh or carriage, changed fatigued horses and drivers at the post stations, and went as slowly or rapidly as the condition of the roads and the traveler’s physical endurance allowed. Kennan planned to travel day and night.

In Yakutsk, Kennan purchased two pavoskas, partly enclosed traveling sleighs resembling a “burlap-covered baby carriage on runners.” He and Price put their luggage at the bottom of their sleigh’s passenger compartment, which had no seats, spread on top of the luggage a seven-foot-long, two-person, wolfskin sleeping bag and soft feather pillows, and stowed their food under the driver’s seat. After a farewell toast of vodka and champagne with their merchant host, Kennan, Price, and the two Russians, dressed head to foot in thick furs, climbed into their sleighs. The drivers snapped their whips, and, in clouds of snow kicked up by the three-horse teams each pulling a sleigh, they raced out of Yakutsk to the merry jingle of the large bells hung from the wooden arches suspended over the middle horses in each team. The primary purpose of a sleigh’s bell was not musical but to warn other sleighs at night or in a snowstorm of its oncoming presence. A short distance past Yakutsk, the two sleighs descended a gentle slope and turned onto the frozen Lena River, which would be their road for nearly a thousand miles.

The Lena, one of the world’s longest rivers, flows twenty-seven hundred miles north to the Arctic Ocean from its mountain pond source near Lake Baikal. Traveling upriver, the party stopped every two or three hours at post stations on the riverbanks to change horses. “Boys! Out the horses! Lively!” the drivers shouted as the sleighs pulled up to the post stations. Kennan crawled out of his warm fur bag and went into the station. He displayed a padarozhnaya, a travel pass he had purchased in Yakutsk that directed post station masters to provide his party with fresh horses and drivers and, if needed, food and lodging. The nights were clear and cold, sometimes minus forty or minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and the snow-covered ice was smooth and fast. Kennan lay in his fur bag listening to the jingling bell and watching the moonlit silhouette of the river’s forested shoreline as it flew by.

…

On December 13, 1867, leaving their two Russian companions behind in Irkutsk, Kennan and Price set out in a single sleigh on the Great Siberian Post Road, a central Siberian road extending three thousand miles from the Ural Mountains to the Amur River. Their sleigh overtook and passed slow-moving westbound caravans of two hundred sleighs loaded with tea from China and convoys of Cossacks transporting gold from Siberia. From the opposite direction came marching exile parties of convicts on their way east to hard labor prisons and mines. Their circumstances would become of intense interest to Kennan when he returned to Siberia eighteen years later, but now he paid them not much more attention than he did the white Yakut ponies in the fields pawing at the snow to uncover grass. They crossed the Ural Mountains, and on January 7, 1868, Kennan reached Nizhny Novgorod, which was then the eastern end of the Russian rail network. Kennan and Price sold their sleigh and boarded a train. Two days later, having traveled nearly six thousand miles since leaving the Sea of Okhotsk and changed horses, reindeer, and dogs two hundred and sixty times, they stepped off the train in St. Petersburg to behold a dazzling, snow-dusted, golden-trimmed fairy tale of a city, part architectural confection, part Potemkin village.

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by | 10 March 2025 · 3:12 am

First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 52-54:

The failure in 1865 to lay the Atlantic cable hardly deterred the directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. With the bitter learning experience of the earlier failed attempts, the engineers improved both the cable’s design and manufacture and made modifications to the gargantuan cable-laying ship, the Great Eastern, which sailed on June 30, 1866, from the Thames Estuary. Day after day, for the most part in calm waters, the Great Eastern steamed west, steadily paying out its cable. The ship anchored in late July in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, in sight of the wildly cheering inhabitants of the flag-draped hamlet of Heart’s Content. The Great Eastern trailed two thousand miles of undersea cable, which was spliced into undersea lines that ran to mainland Canada. “All well. Thank God, the cable is laid and is in perfect working order,” went the telegraphed message from Heart’s Content, which set off worldwide celebrations.

With the benefit of hindsight, some newspapers criticized Western Union for spending millions of dollars based on the “mere conviction” that the Atlantic cable would never be successfully laid. For a time the Western Union directors insisted publicly that they would not abandon the overland route through Siberia, but they had every incentive to do just that. The month before the Great Eastern reached Heart’s Content, Western Union had hedged its investment in the Russian-American telegraph line by merging with the American Telegraph Company, one of the backers of the Atlantic cable. If the cable was successfully laid, Western Union would receive a share of the profits. In effect, Western Union had put down a bet against its own men in the Siberian wilderness.

Almost as an afterthought, Western Union dispatched a company ship to Siberia, the Onward, which arrived off Gizhiga on July 15, 1867. “We have come up to carry all the employees home,” said the captain. Kennan found it heartbreaking to close a project to which he had devoted nearly three years of his life and endured all possible hardships, but his thoughts were also of home. Maj. Abaza went by an overland route to St. Petersburg, where he hoped to persuade the Russian government to complete the line through Siberia. Kennan spent August cruising along the Siberian coast aboard the Onward to gather up the telegraph line working parties. In September the Onward put in at Okhotsk, where a letter from Maj. Abaza directed Kennan to come to St. Petersburg. The Onward, with almost all the American telegraph workers on board, prepared to sail to San Francisco. On the day of the Onward’s sailing, Kennan and Dodd were both on the edge of tears. “He could only wring my hand in silence.”

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by | 8 March 2025 · 6:07 am

Railroad Telegraph Duties, 1860s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 34-35:

He became a messenger-boy and trainee in a railroad company telegraph depot in Norwalk [Ohio], working in a different office than his father’s. He was promoted to the position of telegraph operator and manager at a salary of twenty-five dollars a month. In nineteenth-century America, children did menial and exhausting work in factories, farms, textile mills, and mines. Industrialists regarded the ideal machine as one so simple that a child could operate it. It was rare to give a young boy like George Kennan a serious responsibility like the signaling of trains.

As a train came through Norwalk, small boys peered through the depot’s windows to watch Kennan busily work his instrument to alert a central dispatcher of the train’s passing. The dispatcher then sent orders to the telegraph depot ahead of the train to give to its engineer: speed up, slow down (to arrive on schedule), halt at a siding, or make an unscheduled stop to pick up freight or passengers. At the depot ahead, a hapless employee went out to the side of the tracks and held out a five-foot pole with a large wire hoop, to which the dispatcher’s written order was attached. As the steam-whistling, smoke-belching train barreled toward the “hooper,” the brakeman reached down and, unless the hooper flinched, grabbed the wire hoop.

Initially Kennan functioned in a state of panic. “The excitement and responsibility of taking and transmitting orders upon which depended the safety of trains and passengers were a severe trial, at first, to my inexperienced nerves.” But he made no serious mistakes and “gradually acquired self-confidence, as the routine of railroad business became familiar to me.” Once he set up a field telegraph office at the scene of a train wreck, and on one local election night he helped his father receive the telegraphed tallies and announce them to an excited gathering.

American Morse Code (also called Railroad Morse or land-line Morse) in those days differed from current International Morse Code, which latter is better adapted for transmission through undersea cables.

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by | 7 March 2025 · 11:23 am

George Kennan’s Siberian Adventures

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 3-5:

George Kennan is a little-known American whose achievements have been overshadowed by a much younger, distant cousin, the diplomat George Frost Kennan, who was the chief architect of America’s Cold War containment strategy. The George Kennan of this story was an intrepid explorer, a leading American journalist, and after his Siberian exile investigation, a moral force whose writings and lectures about the inhumanity of the exile system compelled Russia to implement reforms.

Kennan went into Siberia twice. The first time was in 1865 when, as a member of a Western Union–backed venture called the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, he explored a route for a telegraph line through the subzero wilderness of northeastern Siberia. It was a classic young man’s adventure filled with challenges and hardships and driven by Kennan’s quest to prove his courage. Twenty years later he returned to Siberia with George Frost to investigate the exile system and found himself on a moral journey. By then he had become one of America’s most prominent defenders of Russia and its centuries-old practice of banishing criminals and political dissidents to Siberia. Kennan, who spoke Russian fluently and was regarded as a leading expert on Russia, believed that a thorough, objective investigation would vindicate his contention that the exile system, while hardly without flaws, was more humane than penal systems in European countries. He also hoped that his articles about the Siberian exile system would make him rich and famous.

Kennan and Frost traveled eight thousand miles in Siberia in horse-drawn carriages, river steamers, and sleighs and on horseback. They suffocated in sandstorms in the summer and endured winter temperatures of minus forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. They inspected dozens of prisons, observed the marching parties of exiled convicts, spoke with Siberian officials, and met with more than a hundred exiled opponents of the tsarist regime. Both men were plagued by disease, vermin that infested their clothing and luggage, the jolting and pounding of carriages without springs or seats (they had to sit on their luggage), and by the stress of police surveillance. Worst of all was the nervous strain caused by their unrelenting exposure to human suffering because the exile system, as Kennan discovered, in fact was a brutal instrument of the Russian Empire’s exploitation of Siberia’s vast natural resources and a means of suppressing and punishing dissent.

Kennan’s investigation discredited his own defense of the exile system, as he was the first to admit, and changed him as a person. When he returned to the United States, his overarching goal was no longer wealth and fame but to end the suffering of the exiles and bring freedom to Russia. His concept of courage, his attitudes toward women, his views on the Russian government’s oppression of its Jews had all changed. “What I saw heard and learned in Siberia stirred me to the very depths of my soul—opened to me a new world of human experience, and raised, in some respects, all my moral standards.”

And Kennan’s investigation changed America. Today it is nearly impossible to conceive of the close diplomatic relations between Russia and the United States and the affection of Americans for Russia at the time of Kennan’s investigation. Many Americans held the benign perception of Russia as a “distant friend” of the United States, a colorful but mysterious land filled with tragically romantic characters. Kennan’s investigative reporting put an end to that. His articles for the Century magazine, a nearly one-thousand-page, two-volume book, Siberia and the Exile System, and a nine-year lecture tour about the exile system left Americans so appalled and angry at Russia’s mistreatment of its citizens that the relationship between the two countries was never the same.

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Filed under education, language, publishing, Russia, travel, U.S.

by | 23 February 2025 · 2:49 pm

Down the Danube: Romania

For two weeks in September-October this year, the Far Outliers took a Viking cruise down the Danube River from Budapest to Bucharest. Here are some impressions from our return to Romania at the end of our cruise. A photo album from the trip (Danube 2024) is on Flickr.

Romania is far better off than during our year there in 1983–84. It is almost self-sufficient in energy from its old oil wells and new natural gas fields, and Bucharest daytime traffic is in perpetual gridlock. We didn’t have time to ex­plore all our old haunts, but we did get to visit the Old Town: Calea Victoriei and the old merchant quarter of Lipscani (< Leipzig), where we had a big lunch at the renovated classic Hanul lui Manuc, which we well remembered from our earlier time there. Afterwards, we paid a short visit to the Village Museum of old buildings from all over the country. On a lovely spring day in 1984, we spent time there. Many of the old wooden buildings from that time had to be replaced after a big fire.

Our fancy hotel was north of the huge Parliament building and the huge People’s Salvation Cathedral, so we didn’t have time to explore our old haunts around the University of Bucharest and Parcul Tineretului (Park of Youth) near where we used to live. But my Romanian language returned enough that I was able to use it to talk with drivers, waiters, desk clerks, and others besides our guides with their fluent English. I was once or twice mistaken for an expat Romanian.

The next day we headed through the Carpathians to Brasov, with a long, tedious stop at the old royal palace at Sinaia, very much overtouristed. We had fond memories of Brasov and fell in love with it all over again. We met a Ukrainian old friend of an old friend (who had taught in Ukraine) for a fine dinner of Romanian cuisine at the Sergiana Muresenilor. We opted out of any guided excursions the next day and enjoyed walking around the old town, visiting the nostalgic Museum of Communism near our hotel, riding the gondola up to the top of Mt. Tampa, and exploring the old Romanian quarter outside the Schei Gate. where we found Colegiul Andrei Saguna, the first Romanian language school in old Kronstadt.

We also made a pilgrimage to the memorial childhood home of Stefan Baciu, and spent a long time chatting with the very hospitable docent. I had known that Baciu attended Andrei Saguna, where his father taught German and Latin. But I had not heard that his mother was the daughter of a prominent and wealthy Austrian forestry engineer, Arthur Sager, who had Jewish heritage. Baciu’s parents were among the wealthiest and most cultivated citizens of Brasov. They raised their children as Romanian Orthodox, and Baciu achieved some fame as a young poet. At the end of World War II, he got a diplomatic post to Switzerland, then went into exile in Latin America. He spent his last years in Honolulu, where he gave me a Romanian proficiency exam for graduate school, as my second language for academic research, after French, for which I took a standardized exam. (I had more use for German than French in my Papua New Guinea research.)

Our final stop in Romania was at scenic Bran Castle, a tourist trap wrongly tied to Count Dracula. We had spent an April weekend there after Easter in 1984, when it was a sleepy town with dirt roads and not chock full of tourists, traffic, and souvenir vendors. When I asked a Turkish-coffee vendor for two Armenian coffees, he nodded knowingly and said, yes, they were the coffee vendors back in the day. We enjoyed a leisurely lunch at a nice inn, and then boarded our Viking bus back to the Bucharest hotel for a very short night before heading for Otopeni Airport hours before dawn, when the roads were less crowded.

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Filed under Hawai'i, language, literature, migration, nationalism, Romania, travel, U.S.