October 9, 1828
Yuriy Chernov,
This is Shurik Kalmakoff. Do you remember me? We were once best friends—we were close enough to have been brothers—in Vladivostok, Russia, years ago, until you left for Stoke-on-Trent in 1821. I hope to come to see you soon, and although my own tale is long, it is not so important that it cannot wait until we’ve docked at harbour in Britain. I am a sailor now, and have so been since after you left Russia, and as the end of our voyage is near, I want to tell you the tale of my foster father, employer, and Kapitan.
Kapitan Vladislav Monrova was not always a seafaring man. He had once been a man of family; he had had a daughter, Zoya, and a wife, Inna Elena. They lived on the harbour off the Sea of Okhotsk in 1810. That was the year that Zoya would be married, the year that Vladislav would christen his first watercraft, the Enazoya, and, ultimately, the year that the Monrova family would be destroyed.
Months after Zoya Monrova’s wedding (the captain had never said exactly how long after), reports of a fast-spreading disease swept through the Okhotsk Gavan’. The harbourfolk were urged strongly to send for a vaccine to this un-named disease; Vladislav Monrova stepped up to the task, as he felt it was his duty to do the Gavan’ a favour, after so many people had helped to create for Zoya her dream wedding. Vladislav left for the vaccine on his cargo ship Enazoya in the month of April.
Vladislav returned a month and a half later. In the time he was away, though, the disease itself had swept through the harbour like a storm surge, killing over 200 of the little seaport’s 811 residents—two of whom were Inna Elena and Zoya.
The deaths of Vladislav’s only family—for he, before he had married Inna Elena, had been a waif himself—nearly drove the man mad. He burnt the Enazoya to its bones and let it sink to the bottom of the Okhotskoe More, and attempted time and time again to end his own life. Zoya’s newly widowed husband, Ilya Shefner, had Monrova locked away, for his own protection; five years passed before the captain could once again see the light of day—and the Sea.
In the year of 1819, Vladislav Monrova took his life’s savings to the bank farther into the mainland, and spent all he’d ever had on the biggest ship he could afford. It was a triple-mast, quadruple-sailed rig with a fair-sized hull and forecastle. The bit of harbour shinplaster that Monrova had left over from his purchase was used to stock the galley with fruits and vegetables and cooking supplies and vodka.
The only thing that Vladislav had forgotten in his calculations of cost and supply was the second most important thing (next to, of course, the ship itself)—the crew. He found himself penniless and crewless then, without anything like to a plan. But with the popularity of migration to the Americas, he found that he could gain revenue by transporting people from Russia to the New Land, and would thereby gain crewmen, if not only temporarily, and bonds of friendship on both continents.
Kapitan Monrova never did recount much on his many journeys to and from the Americas, even when he was almost three sheets to the wind; all I’ve been privy to is that he made many travels between August of 1819 and fall of 1821.
By the Spring of 1822, Monrova had enough rubles to hire a crew. When he had finished recruiting, the captain had 44 crewmen, men he had come to trust from the Motherland, and some from the Americas, between his journeys between the continents. Whence the crew had been completed, the Kapitan shifted his focus on trade and got his Russian Traders License.
And so, Vladislav Monrova christened the Moraya Koshka; and so the harbourman became the Kapitan; and so the sea took him.
Море Взяет Его
Shurik Kalmakoff
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