CHAPTER X

THE CASPIAN OIL FIELDS

The railway across the Caucasus from Batoum on the Black Sea to Baku on the Caspian Sea is 558 miles long, the distance from Batoum to Tiflis, the capital of the Caucasus, being 218 miles, and from Tiflis to Baku 340 miles. The latter route is almost a straight line, following the broad valley of the river Kur, a swift and turbulent stream of water about the same colour as our own Mississippi. For three fourths of the distance the track runs at the base of the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, which are always in sight from the left hand windows of the cars going east. On the right hand is a broad prairie stretching out to the horizon, and with the exception of much low and swampy land the greater part of it is closely cultivated.

The farmers do not live upon their farms, however, but stay in the villages for mutual protection, which was necessary in ancient days, although they might be safe enough in these times if they lived in isolated places as our farmers do. It is very largely the custom all over Europe for the farmers to live in villages and go back and forth to their fields in the morning and at night. Scattered among the cultivated fields in the Caucasus are little huts of brush and sod, used as summer residences by the farmers, who bring out two or three days’ rations with them, and after working in the soil all day crawl into these miserable little shacks to sleep for the night.

There are many cattle and sheep upon the hillsides, and every herd and flock is attended by a shepherd, sometimes a man and sometimes a woman, and often a child. Even the geese have to be attended as they meander. No animal of value is ever left alone, and such attention is necessary to keep them from straying into the cultivated fields, for there are no fences. The property is divided by landmarks of stone; there are no other boundary marks, and you wonder if the farmers do not sometimes get into the wrong harvest field or plough up a piece of their neighbour’s land by mistakes.

There are a good many orchards of cherries, apricots, peaches, and other fruit, and a few vineyards, which belong to Germans. Wherever you see a vineyard down in that country, you may rely upon it that a German either owns it, or has set out the vines on rented land. The Germans are altogether the best farmers and make the most money, because of their economical methods, their intelligent industry, and their thrifty habits. About half way between Tiflis and Baku is a German colony that looks like an oasis in the desert. It is surrounded by mile after mile of vineyards.

Women work in the fields on equal terms with the men without any distinction of labour, and sometimes one is tempted to think that they carry the heavier ends of the load. You see young girls ten and twelve years old with hoe and spade when they ought to be in school or learning to sew and bake in the kitchen. But the czar needs so many men in his army that their mothers and sisters are required to go into the fields. You will notice, too, that women are switchmen and flagmen all along the railway lines, and if you will keep looking out of the car window you will see at every crossing a woman with a flag in her hand standing at attention, like a soldier on guard duty, as the train rushes by.

The government owns and operates the railway, and, although the running time is very slow, not more than fifteen or eighteen miles an hour, the management is admirable, and there are some excellent features which might be imitated with profit by the railway companies in the United States. For example, at every railway station on the platform, is a big wooden tank of cool water with plenty of dippers. Beside it is a similar tank of hot water, so that the passengers, who expect it, bring their teapots along with them. When the train stops, those in the third-class cars rush out for hot water and then go back to their places and enjoy a cup of home-made tea.

Trains of tank cars stand on every side track, and we seemed to pass one every few minutes, which is natural, because crude and refined petroleum is the principal freight hauled over the Caucasus from the oil wells at Baku to Batoum, the principal shipping port on the Black Sea.

Sleeping cars are free--at least every first-class railway carriage is arranged in compartments, so that the back of the seat can be lifted to make an upper berth, which is quite as comfortable as those in American Pullmans, but passengers have to carry bedding with them, sheets and pillows and blankets, and make up their own bunks when it comes time to retire. There is either a dining-car or a buffet on every train, from which coffee, tea, eggs, cold meats, bread and butter are served, so that a journey is made very comfortable.

When we went to bed, a few hours after leaving Tiflis, we were passing through a beautiful and highly cultivated agricultural country. When we awoke in the morning, we were in a desert and everything smelled of oil. The first thing I saw, looking out of the car window, was a long caravan of camels loaded with cans of refined petroleum, plodding through the sands on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

The surroundings are forbidding. The Caspian Sea is not an attractive body of water. Its shores are as barren as a granite bowlder. There is no fresh water either above or below the surface of the ground anywhere around the coast, and the inhabitants are required to bring their supply in pipes for a long distance or else condense sea water. At every port is a floating condenser, some worn out steamer or sailing vessel which has served its time carrying cargoes and is now anchored at a convenient place off the shore and filled with machinery for transforming salt water into fresh. Sometimes the product is carried ashore by pipes, but usually in large tank barges, and then peddled around the streets like milk in our cities, from house to house.

The surroundings of Baku remind me of the nitrate towns on the coast of Chile, which are also waterless; but it is much larger and more finely built than any of them. There is already a population of 130,000 or more at Baku, and the boosters are boasting of an expected 200,000 at the end of this decade. There is no doubt that Baku is growing very fast in people and in wealth, although the oil industry is not prosperous. The Standard Oil Company of the United States is driving Russian oil out of every country except Russia and its provinces. There are many evidences of wealth in Baku; many fine business blocks and residences, churches and school-houses, shops and restaurants, and, indeed, it is quite as up-to-date as any city in the East. The large wholesale houses indicate an extensive trade, and its merchants practically control the markets of Central Asia.

The activity upon the docks indicates that there must be a large commerce on the Caspian. The quays along the seashore in front of the city for a mile or more are occupied by steamers and sailing vessels discharging and receiving cargoes, which lie in great stacks upon the wharves. Long processions of carts and wagons are constantly coming and going between the docks and the railway stations. Nearly all the commerce of Central Asia is handled there and it is brought or carried away by the two railways, one running to Batoum and the other to Odessa and Moscow.

Baku is an ancient Persian city and belongs to Russia by conquest. A majority of the inhabitants are still Persians, who furnish the manual labor; the next largest racial division are Armenians, who keep the small shops, and many of the larger ones, for that matter, and compose the mercantile class. And then come the Tartars, who are third in numbers and there, as everywhere else, are the disorderly element.

The old city is a typical Persian town, half surrounded by a wall built in the twelfth century, with monumental towers and gates, several of which have been preserved. The followers of Zoroaster came here in early times, attracted by the burning springs of naphtha, and built temples for fire worship at intervals along the coast. The Parsees of Bombay, descendants of fire worshippers who were driven from Persia by Mohammedan mobs, formerly kept up a perpetual fire upon an altar near the city, but it was extinguished several years ago, and an oil refinery now stands upon the spot.

We had rather an exciting experience trying to find one of the old temples of the fire worshippers. We hunted around the old Persian town until we discovered a man who knew where it was, and he sent two small boys to show us the way. Following them through a labyrinth of narrow streets, we came to a small block of land enclosed with a high stone wall and guarded by soldiers, who drove us off. When we tried to look through the cracks in the gates to get a glimpse of the buildings inside, they pointed their rifles at us and were dangerously demonstrative. We did not imagine that we were doing anything wrong. Our motives were as innocent as those of a Sunday-school teacher, but the guard evidently suspected that we were up to some kind of mischief, and finally threatened us with instant death unless we left the place.

At that critical moment a polite citizen came along, who remonstrated with the belligerent guard. He explained to us that the ancient temple was now used as a magazine for ammunition and had to be closely guarded because of the energy of anarchists and revolutionists in the city.

There is a Byzantine fortress 800 years old, and an imposing tower 180 feet high and 84 feet in diameter. It is circular in form, with an oblong extension, and built of regular courses of cut stone, alternating out and in about four inches. There are four doors at the base, but they are all sealed up except one. They call it the Kiskala, which in Persian means the Tower of the Virgin, and several romantic stories are told about its origin, but we finally discovered that it was built for a prison by the early Persians and is now used by the Russians for the storage of military supplies.

In ancient times, for thousands of years--no one knows how long--the Persians used to come up to the shore of the Caspian Sea, where the city of Baku now stands, and scrape from the ground the seepage from the springs of oil that were found near the water. They used these scrapings for lubricating purposes, for fuel, for light, for healing wounds, and for various other useful purposes, and exercised much ingenuity in cleansing and applying them.

At some remote date--it may have been as far back as the time of Daniel the Prophet--the fire worshippers, the followers of Zoroaster, found here several oil springs on fire. The naphtha must have caught fire by accident, but they considered it a miracle, and through many centuries made pilgrimages to worship and adore the flames. Ultimately they built a temple, a square structure of brick with a dome and four chimneys, through which, in some ingenious manner, they conducted the natural gas which exhales from the naphtha springs, and thus were able to maintain four bright flames. The temple was in the centre of a large courtyard, inclosed by a high wall, in which were rooms for the accommodation of pilgrims. The gateway was monumental and above it rose a square tower about fifty feet in height, at the four corners of which were chimneys through which the gas was conducted in the same manner as at the temple within the inclosure, and the light could be seen for many miles in every direction. They called it “The Shrine of Grace.”

Zoroaster, founder of the fire worshippers, lived in Persia before the time of Cyrus the Great, and about six hundred years before Christ. He taught the existence of a Supreme Being who created two other mighty beings and imparted to them as much of his own nature as seemed good to him. One of them, Ormuzd, remained faithful and was regarded as the source of all good, while Ahriman rebelled, and became the author of all the evil upon the earth. The religious rites of the fire worshippers were exceedingly simple. They adored fire, light, and the sun as the emblems of Ormuzd, the source of all light and purity, and performed their worship on the tops of mountains, having neither temples, nor altars, nor images. Their priests were called Magi, whose learning was so celebrated that their name has been applied since to astrologers, prophets, necromancers, and all orders of magicians and enchanters.

The religion of Zoroaster continued to flourish after the introduction of Christianity and in the third century was the dominant faith in the East until the conquest of Persia by the Mohammedans in the seventh century compelled the greater number of the fire worshippers to renounce their faith. Those who refused fled to India, where they still exist under the name of Parsees, which is derived from Pars, an ancient name for Persia. At Bombay the Parsees are an enterprising, intelligent, and wealthy class of the population, and are distinguished for their integrity and business ability. They have numerous temples in which they worship fire as the symbol of divinity.

This temple stood at the village of Sourakhany, about ten miles from Baku. The site is now owned by the Kokovev Oil Company. It was abandoned about 1880. For a century or two before that date pilgrims came all the way from India, and the Parsee merchants of Bombay, famous for their riches and enterprise, furnished the money to maintain the fire and entertain the pilgrims.

Why the temple was abandoned and the lights were allowed to go out I have not been able to ascertain. The only reasonable explanation is that after that part of the world was wrested from Persia by the Russians something must have happened, or some regulation may have been introduced, which made it difficult or impossible to continue the ceremonials and maintain the pilgrimages. However that may have been, the form of worship and the nationality of the worshippers were gradually changed, until now Russians and Armenians adore the oil for the money it brings instead of for its symbolic significance.

The development of the petroleum industry was very slow and began late. The inhabitants of the old Persian city of Baku utilized the oil for light and fuel gas undisturbed until 1856, when a Russian named Kokreff and an Armenian named Mirsoeff obtained a concession from the Russian government to operate wells and refine the product. They had a monopoly for twenty years, but did a very small business, producing an insignificant quantity and a poor quality of burning fluid compared with the product of the present day.

In 1876 the concession was revoked and there was a rush of prospectors and speculators to this territory. Everybody who could raise enough money to drive a well did so, until to-day, within a radius of ten miles from the city of Baku, are 736 wells, producing more or less oil and belonging to almost as many people. The largest number are on a peninsula extending into the Caspian Sea, called Apocheron, between six and eight miles north of the city, with about one third as many at a place called Bibbi-Eybat, about three miles south.

There are over a hundred independent companies, but only twenty-five are doing a refining business, and of these only eight have sufficient capital to conduct their operations upon a paying basis. The large distribution of the interests is, however, very demoralizing. It has been a bad thing for the town and the industry and for everybody concerned, because whenever any large enterprise was undertaken, cut-throat competition has been used to interrupt and embarrass it. As one gentleman expressed it, it would have been to the advantage of everybody concerned if half the oil that has been produced at Baku had been allowed to run into the sea.

There are three large companies, the largest one belonging to the family of the late Alfred Nobel, the Swedish philanthropist, who founded the Nobel Institute at Stockholm and endowed it with funds from which the prizes for the promotion of peace, science, and literature are annually paid. Colonel Roosevelt, you will remember, went to Christiania in May, 1910, to receive the Nobel prize for peace which was awarded him because of his success in conciliating Russia and Japan and putting an end to the recent war.

Alfred Nobel, himself, was largely interested in the development of the Baku oil industry at the beginning, but, about the year 1877, he withdrew, and his brothers, Ludwig and Robert Nobel, continued the work. They turned their holdings over to a stock company many years ago, and Emmanuel Nobel, a son of Ludwig, now holds the controlling interest in the company. He is the Rockefeller of Russian petroleum and is estimated to be worth $60,000,000. Although a Swede by birth and ancestry, he is a Russian subject, maintains a splendid palace in St. Petersburg and has a villa with a large park in the Crimea, where he goes for the summer.

The next richest man is an Armenian named Mantashoff, who still lives in Baku and looks after his interests. There is also a Tartar gentleman who has made millions in the oil fields and is spending a part of his income in the erection of a splendid building for a college in the city of Baku. The institution will be provided with an endowment sufficient to maintain a competent faculty and pay for the free education of a certain number of young men of Tartar families forever. It will be altogether the most imposing building in Baku when it is finished, and it stands upon the principal street.

The second largest company is controlled by a French syndicate organized by the Rothschilds twenty-two years ago, and the third in importance is owned by local Armenians. These three companies practically control the refining industry, which is very large, considering the area of the oil fields, much larger than in any part of the United States.

Baku produces more oil than any other single field. Last year (1909), its total product was 55,863,504 barrels, and Groznyi, the neighbouring district, produced 6,249,627 barrels, making the total from the Caspian 62,113,131 barrels, as compared with 179,562,479 barrels produced in the United States.

Austria is the second producer of the countries in Europe and reports 12,612,295 barrels for 1908; Roumania comes next, with 8,252,157 barrels, and Germany, 1,009,278 barrels.

From these figures, you will see that the industry at Baku is very important, and the Russian government derives a revenue of between $60,000,000 and $75,000,000 a year by taxing it. There is a direct tax upon the producers, an additional tax of thirty cents upon every pood, which is eight gallons, produced, beside the income from the sale of stamps required on contracts, bills of lading, and all other commercial paper. The little city of Baku, with 130,000 inhabitants, and they mostly Persians, Armenians, and Tartars, is the fourth source of revenue for the Russian treasury.

Most of the refineries, especially those of the Nobel and French companies, are located at what is called in Russian, Tchorny Gorod, or the “Dark City,” which is connected with Baku by street car lines. The Nobel Company has provided homes for its officers and employés at the “White City,” a mile or two away--Biely Gorod, as it is called in Russian.

The Dark City consists of a large number of refineries, surrounded by high railway tracks, mostly covered with tank cars, and the gutters on both sides are filled with a network of pipes tapping a myriad of tanks and conducting the oil between the wells and the refineries and the reservoirs where it is stored for shipment. The Dark City is located upon the shore of the Caspian Sea, where extensive docks have been built and pumps provided for filling tank boats, which carry oil up the Volga River into the interior of Russia as far as Moscow, via Astrakhan, where it flows into the Caspian.

Mr. Norman, an English engineer, who formerly lived in Chicago, and spent several years in the employ of the Standard Oil Company, showed me around the Nobel refineries and told me an interesting story of the development of the industry here.

“Naphtha Springs, as they were called, have been known here for ages,” said Mr. Norman. “The fire worshippers came a thousand miles for thousands of years to worship them until the Russians conquered the territory. In the ’50s a steamship company on the Caspian Sea undertook to collect oil by scraping the surface of the ground, and they carried it to other ports. It was also shipped into the interior by camel caravans. Then two gentlemen, a Russian and an Armenian, obtained a concession to work the deposit, and had a monopoly until 1876, when the Nobel Brothers of Sweden--Alfred, Ludwig, and Robert--came down, put their brains to work, built refineries, and have been here ever since. They now practically control the industry, employing about 10,000 people and have refineries and machine shops covering an area of one and a half square miles.

“Mr. Arthur Lessner, also a Swede, is general manager. The company is a stock concern, organized under the Russian laws, and its shares are dealt regularly in on all the stock exchanges of Europe.

“The specific gravity of the Baku oil is much higher than that of the American oil,” continued Mr. Norman. “It has a naphtha basis, while the American oil has a paraffine basis. This oil is more like that of California. It is better for fuel than for illuminating purposes and is used for steaming on the railways and steamships in this part of the empire.

“The distinctive feature of the Nobel refineries is a continuous system of distillation; that is, a series of stills from which the various properties of the oil are extracted as the crude raw material is passed from one to another, each having a higher temperature than the last.

“There are eighteen pipe lines between the wells and the works,” said Mr. Norman, “which were built by the Nobels about thirty years ago. Until then the oil was carried on the backs of camels and in carts. The common labour is performed by Persians, who are paid from thirty to thirty-five cents a day (American money), and the skilled labour is Armenian, which is paid from sixty to seventy-five cents a day. The Nobel Company has provided neat and comfortable tenement houses for its employés at the White City, with clubhouses, hospitals and other humane provisions.”

Mr. Norman says the industry is not prosperous; that the Standard Oil Company is driving the Baku product out of Europe and that Russia is now practically the only market the Baku manufacturers are able to control.

A new oil field has been found within the last year or so near the town of Maikop, in the northern foothills of the Caucasus range of mountains, and there has been a good deal of excitement in consequence. Very little is known about conditions there, however, and the condition of the market, because of the aggressive policy of the Standard Oil Company, is not encouraging for its developement. The Standard Company, everybody admits, can produce a better quality of refined petroleum as well as lubricating oil and other by-products, and sell them at a less price in every market in the world, except the Russian Empire, which is protected by a prohibitory tariff, than the Baku refiners.