Beginning of Steam Navigation down the Belaya River: Dating Issue

Abstract

This article considers the issue of dating the first voyage made by steamship along the Belaya River and the start of regular steam navigation in the region. Referring to the analysis of documents kept in the Department of Manufactures and Domestic Trade of the Ministry of Finance and the Economic Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the author explains the need to verify the time framework of the modernisation of water transport on the Belaya River and the main events that accompanied it. According to historiography, the first steamship voyage on the Belaya River took place in 1858, when SS Groznyi and Bystryi arrived in Ufa. However, the author concludes that the first steamship voyage took place in 1856. It is suggested that in 1856, steamships worked in the lower reaches of the Belaya River transporting cargoes from small village berths. Steamships could not reach such big cities as Ufa or Birsk due to the absence of reliable information about depth measurement, so there is no information about those voyages in provincial documents. The first attempt to create a regional shipping company in the Southern Urals was not made in 1870, but in 1858. Due to the imperfection of tax legislation, the attempt to establish regional steam navigation was unsuccessful in 1858. The Belaya Shipping Company was hardly the first regional shipping carrier. As early as the second half of the 1850s and 1860s, the first regional owners of steamships appeared, consisting mostly of merchants and manufacturers, for whom river transportations were not a major activity — they considered them a need for the development of their main businesses.