Works of A.P. Chekhov, Vol. 10: Sakhalin Island

*) Nevelskoy’s wife, Yekaterina Ivanovna, when traveling from Russia to join her husband, covered 1,100 versts on horseback in 23 days while ill, crossing the boggy marshes and wild, mountainous taiga and glaciers of the Okhotsk tract. Nevelskoy’s most gifted comrade, N. K. Boshnyak, who discovered Imperatorskaya Gavan Imperial Harbor when he was only 20 years old, recounts in his notes: "On the transport Baikal, we all crossed together to Ayan and transferred there to the weak barque Shelekhov. When the barque began to sink, no one could persuade Mrs. Nevelskaya to be the first to go ashore. 'The commander and officers leave last,' she said, 'and I will leave the barque when not a single woman or child remains on the ship.' And that is what she did. Meanwhile, the barque was already lying on its side..." Further, Boshnyak writes that, often being in Mrs. Nevelskaya’s company, he and his comrades never heard a single complaint or reproach; on the contrary, one always noticed in her a calm and proud awareness of that bitter but high position which Providence had ordained for her. She usually spent the winter alone, as the men were on assignments, in rooms with a temperature of 5°C. When in 1852 ships with provisions did not arrive from Kamchatka, everyone was in a more than desperate situation. There was no milk for infants, no fresh food for the sick, and several people died of scurvy. Mrs. Nevelskaya gave her only cow for the general use; everything fresh went into the common pool. She treated the natives simply and with such attention that even the uncouth savages noticed it. And she was then only 19 years old (Lt. Boshnyak: "Expedition in the Primorsky Territory," Morskoy Sbornik 1859, II).