I arranged to ascend the Amoor on the steamer Ingodah, which was
appointed to start on the eighteenth of September. My friend Anossoff
remained at Nicolayevsk during the winter, instead of proceeding to
Irkutsk as I had fondly hoped. I found a _compagnon du voyage_ in
Captain Borasdine, of General Korsackoff's staff. In a drenching rain
on the afternoon of the seventeenth, we carried our baggage to the
Ingodah, which lay half a mile from shore. We reached the steamer
after about twenty minutes pulling in a whale-boat and shipping a
barrel of water through the carelessness of an oarsman.

At Nicolayevsk the Amoor is about a mile and a half wide, with a depth
of twenty to thirty-five feet in the channel. I asked a resident what
he thought the average rapidity of the current in front of the town.

"When you look at it or float with it," said he, "I think it is about
three and a half miles. If you go against it you find it not an inch
less than five miles."

The rowers had no light task to stem the rapid stream, and I think it
was about like the Mississippi at Memphis.

The boat was to leave early in the morning. I took a farewell dinner
with Mr. Chase, and at ten o'clock received a note from Borasdine
announcing his readiness to go to the steamer. Anossoff, Chase, and
half a dozen others assembled to see us off, and after waking the
echoes and watchmen on the pier, we secured a skiff and reached the
Ingodah. The rain was over, and stars were peeping through occasional
loop-holes in the clouds.