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

...who came to our steamer for dinner, a boring and bored gentleman, talked a lot during dinner, drank a lot, and told us an old anecdote about geese that, having eaten berries from under liquor and become drunk, were mistaken for dead, plucked, and thrown away, and later, having sobered up, returned home naked; at this, the official swore that the story with the geese happened in De-Kastri in his own yard. There is no priest at the church, and he comes from Mariinsk when necessary. Good weather happens here very rarely, just as in Nikolayevsk. They say that a surveying expedition worked here this spring, and in all of May, there were only three sunny days. Try working without the sun!

In the roadstead, we found the warships Bobr and Tungus and two torpedo boats. Another detail comes to mind: as soon as we dropped anchor, the sky darkened, a storm gathered, and the water took on an unusual, bright green color. The Baikal had to unload four thousand poods approx. 144,000 lbs of government cargo, and therefore we stayed the night in De-Kastri. To pass the time, the mechanic and I fished from the deck, and we caught very large, big-headed bullheads, the likes of which I had not caught in the Black or Azov Seas. We also caught flounder.

Ships are always unloaded here with agonizing slowness, accompanied by irritation and heartbreak. However, this is the bitter fate of all our eastern ports. In De-Kastri, they unload onto small barges called shalandy hopper barges, which can only dock at the shore during high tide and therefore often run aground when loaded; it happens that, because of this, the steamer sits idle for a hundred sacks of flour for the entire interval between low and high tide. In Nikolayevsk, the disorder is even greater. There, standing on the deck of the Baikal, I saw a tugboat towing a large barge with two hundred soldiers lose...