Commander Sherard Osborn of the Vesuvius now took over as senior officer in the Sea of Azov from Captain Lyons, who returned to join his father il Sevastopol. The admiral did not want his son to miss the next bombardment later that month, but was shocked when the Miranda was hit by a shell and its commander wounded in the leg. So well-liked was Captain Lyons that his unexpected death on 23 June at the age of thirty-five causcd even Queen Victoria to commiserate w'th the admiral on the loss of his 'gallant and beloved son'.31 The intrepid Commander Osborn, also thirty-five years old, w th a trip to the Arctic already behind him, and equally competent, now impressed Lyons's grieving father with his reports of further successful sorties in the Sea of Azov. On 19 July he returned to reconnoitre Taganrog in the gunboat of Her Majesty's steam-vessel Jasper, and reported to the vice-admiral that 'every part of that town showed signs of the severe punishment it had received when we visi< ed it under the late Captain Edmund Lyons of the Miranda'. Two shots were 'thrown Jito' the new battery being constructed on the heights near the hospital next to the harbour, but there had been no response. Osborn nevertheless ordered two gunboats to remain in the vicinity of the town, and requested Commander Craufurd on 20 July to continue to 'harass the enemy' and ensure that no munitions of war were able to reach Taganrog by water from the River Don.32 There was no mention in British accounts of the capture of the Jasper at the end of July by Cossack troops, who handed over its flag to the cathedral in Taganrog; the ship's cannons to this day are kept in the basement of the c;ty museum.
A few weeks later, Osborn reported to Vice-Admiral Lyons that he had returned to aganrog on 5 August to discover 'signs of great activity in the garrison': batteries had been thrown across streets and roads leading from the water. Closer inspection revealed five heavy guns lurking beneath the cliffs, which were summarily destroyed. These turned out to have been old ship guns, which, as Osborn commented drily, would have actually posed a far greater danger to the Russian gunners than to their Biitish targets.33 Pavel Chekhov and Evgenia's brother Ivan had caught sight of the gunboats of the Vesuvius, the Wrangler and the Beagle that Sunday (24 July according to the Russian calendar) after leaving morning serv ce in Taganrog's Cathedral of the Assumption, where Evgenia's mother, Alexandra, had remained to pray. Evgenia was by then eight and a half months pregnant w Ъ her first child, and now in great alarm at the prospect of further bombardments. She and Pavel abandoned the samovar boiling in the yard, and their lunch of chicken soup, and decided to flee forty miles or so mland to Krepkaya, where Pavel's parents 1 ved, tal mg lodgings with the local priest. Chekhov's eldest brother, Alexander, was born there two weeks later on 10 August.34
The Chekhovs were not the only residents of Taganrog to take fi ight at this new offensive. Count Egor Petrovich Tolstoy, the Governor of Taganrog, had been so incensed by the Allied squadron's first attack that he sent a dispatch to the St Petersburgh Gazette, depicting it a cruel and unnecessary act, while at the same t me apparently claiming a Russian victory (this was because the late Captain Lyons had been 'forbearing and merc'ful', according to Osborn). Then in July, John Martin, an English businessman resident in Taganrog, wrote a letter to the Admiralty condemning the behaviour of the British towards the civilian inhabitants of the town as excessively cruel, and alleging that Her Majesty's officers had been sighted 'dining under an awning on board the gunboat, and drinking toasts with brutal hilarity'. A letter from the former British Consul in Taganrog, J. P. Carruthers, subsequently revealed that Count Tolstoy had in fact persuaded Martin to write the letter, although Martin had animus enough of his own since his livelihood had been badly damaged by Allied operations n the Sea of Azov. When he was finally shown this letter, Osborn penned a robust but slightly tongue-in-cheek dispatch to Vice-Admiral Lyons in his defence. 'That the destruction of an enemy's resources must necessarily be a pa lful duty, I need not remind you, sir, and no doubt, individuals have occasionally suffered. The Cossacks have repeatedly drawn our fire upon places they could not defend: the blame must rest with them, not us,' he began. He acknowledged that his steamer had indeed fully succeeded in harassing the 'victorious' garrison of
Taganrog, as well as its gallant governor, "and I dare say alarmed the inhabitants; the numbers of mothers and babes destroyed Mr Martin leaves to my imagination'. He found it hard to comprehend, however, that anyone could believe British naval officers to be capable of such brutality as to fire at women and children, and dismissed this as mahcious falsehood'. Whether or not Count Tolstoy had gi/en an order for his men not to fire on British troops at one point, he continued, it had not been obeyed, and even if it had, Lieutenant Hudson could not reasonably have been expected to be 'prepared for the humane eccentricities of the Governor of Taganrog'. He also remonstrated with the complaint about the Taganrog hospital being h t by pointing out that it was likely to suffer fire because of the earthen rampart pierced with embrasures a hundred yards in Ls rear, and the entrenchment parapet and guns stand:-ig in front of it. 'Humanity would suggest that the sick had better be in a safer spot,' he commented drily.35
The impressively moustachioed Count Tolstoy was governor of aganrog from 1854 to 1856 A veteran of Russia's wars with Persia and Turkey, he was, according to his contemporary N. V Sakharov, rather more negligent when it came to dea ing with complaints that came to him and was always the last of the governors to submit his annual report. Despite his own personal honesty and strongly held religious views, his lackadaisical attitude to his civic duties led to the flourishing of bribery and corruption among his officials. Egor Petrovich was a distant relative of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, then a young officer currently establishing his literary reputation with his war reportage from Sevastopol and later to become something of a paternal figure to Chekhov - he was three years younger than Chekhov's father. Many years later, the war would be a favourite topic of conversation for Chekhov and Tolstoy when they were both living in the Crimea for health reasons.
On 14 September 1855, a week after the Allies occupied southern Sevastopol, and Lev Nikolaev^h had started his last of three outspoken indictments of the appalling conditions in the Russian army there, a lubnant Vice-Admiral Lyons telegraphed the Royal Navy headquarters in London to report that the Russians had burned their steamers in the harbour ('thus the late Russian Black Sea fleet is annihilated'). Meanwhile, Commander Osborn found the fortifications in the supposedly 'harmless commercial town' of Taganrog to be continually on the increase, despite its governor's protestations to the contrary. A large garrison, and uniforms belonging to nine separate infantry and five cavalry regiments, had been observed by the naval officer delivering letters and clothes to Allied prisoners of war held in the town, and nearly 20,000 troops were noted to have benefited from a stay in the town on their way to the Crimea. The governor could thus hardly be 'astonished at the occasional exchange of shots on the efforts of our gunboats to delay his proceedings'. The abominable conditions endured by rank-and-file soldiers in the Russian army under Nicholas I (mercilessly exposed by Tolstoy in his Sevastopol dispatches) meant that young men dreaded having to join up; being killed on duty was seen as far preferable to surviving. A revealing comment from Commander Osborn shows just how bad the situation really was: