in a bay or roads so open as to render any sailing marks unnecessary, over the whole of which the same depth of water generally prevails. During the two days of her stay the weather was thick, and the ship again under quarantine, so that observation and communication with the shore were again impracticable. The town, however, appeared from the sea to be handsomely built, and the lazaretto and other quarantine establishment far superior to that of Sebastopol.[1] There were no fortifications, or guns mounted, and the salute fired by the Blonde was returned by a Russian brig, the only vessel of war then at Odessa.
Arrian makes mention of a town called Odessus, somewhere in this neighbourhood, where was a harbour, and makes its distance to be one hundred and forty stadia from Olbia, near the mouth of the Borysthenes. To determine the exact site of Olbia[2] is not altogether so easy a task; but whether we take it to be very nearly where the modern town of Cherson was established in 1774, at the confluence of the Inguletz with the Dnieper, under an ancient name again falsely applied, and which is very commonly supposed to have been built out of the ruins of the ancient Olbia; or even go the length, which some others have gone, of placing it at Otchakoff, where the lake into which both the Dnieper and Bug empty themselves flows into the open sea, the distance from either place to the modern Odessa so greatly exceeds the distance
- ↑ There is a very good account of Odessa, in August, 1804, by J. H. Sievrac, appended to McGill's Travels, vol. ii. p. 192, &c. The lazzaretto was then building.
- ↑ The chief data for the site of Olbia appear to be in Herodotus, Dio Chrysostom, and Strabo. From the former, (lib. iv. cap. 17, 18, and 53) it appears, that between the Hypanis and the Borysthenes there was a point or tongue of land, ἔμβολον τῆς χώρης, and that upon this, near to the Hypanis, lived the Olbiopolitæ, also called Borysthenitæ; the city of Olbia and Borysthenis being one and the same place. From Dio Chrysostom's Thirty-sixth Oration it also appears, that the city of Olbia was on the Hypanis, although it derived its name from the Borysthenes; ἤ γὰρ πόλις τὸ μὲν ὄνομα εἴλκφεν ἀπὸ τοῦ Βορυσθένους διὰ τὸ κάλλος καὶ τὸ μέγεθος τοῦ ποταμοῦ κεῖται δὲ πρὸς τῷ Ὑπάνιδι. He also describes the tongue of land under the same name with Herodotus, as being ὀξὺ καὶ ςερεὸν, ὥσπερ ἔμβολον, περὶ ὅ συμπίπτουσιν οἱ ποταμοί. Strabo, in describing it, says, πλέυσαντι δὲ τὸν ΒορυσΘένη ςαδιόυς διακόσιους, ὁμώνυμος τῷ ποταμῷ πόλις· τί δ᾽ αὐτὴ καὶ Ὀλβία καλεῖται. And in another place where he has mentioned the Borysthenes (next in order after the Tyras or Dniester, if our present text is perfect,) he adds, καὶ πλησίον ἄλλος ποταμὸς Ὕπανις, speaking of it as close and secondary to the Borysthenes. Now it is usual to call the Hypanis the Bug; and hence arises the difficulty of fixing the site of Olbia, because at the distance of the Bug from the Dnieper it is quite impossible that they can be said to form ἔμβολον τῆς χώρης, or that a city on the banks of the one could in any sense or degree be said to be on the other. But if we call the Inguletz the Hypanis, as has been done by Madame Guthrie after Peysonnel, we have then the ἔμβολον, formed by the junction of that river with the Dnieper, as described by Herodotus and Dio Chrysostom; and the city of Olbia placed upon it might be said to be on either river, though closer to the one than the other; and it would nearly occupy the position of Cherson, though not on precisely the same spot. We may add, that Hypanis is not an unfrequent name of a river, the Cuban having been so called, or rather now bearing the same name. And if the Bug was called Hypanis, the Inguletz may have been called so too, an idea which is perhaps strengthened by Strabo's expression of ἄλλος ποταμὸς Ὕπανις. This site of Olbia agrees also with its distance from the sea according to Strabo.
