From Erzurum the road north through what had once been western Armenia passed the waterfalls at Tortum and followed the course of the Coruh River as it zig-zagged its way down through the gorge whose rocky scarps displayed every earth-tone imaginable (rusts and purples) in parallel undulating striations. Down along the coast, Gilbert crossed over the Russian frontier into Georgia and the once bustling seaport of Batum.
Batum lies at the southern point of a triangular alluvial plain whose several rivers flow down from the surrounding mountains into the Black Sea. In its semi-tropical climate, Batum was surrounded by eucalyptus and palm trees, forests of magnolias and blue hydrangeas, and tea plantations up to the lofty mountains. A cosmopolitan life had briefly been enjoyed by newly enriched Greek, Armenian and Moslem oil magnates, but its formerly peaceful mixture of Georgians, Armenians, and Moslems exploded violently during labour strikes, some led by Stalin, under the harsh working conditions in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Georgia claimed to have been the legendary Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece. In Greek mythology Jason sailed with his fellow Argonauts from Thessaly through great obstacles across the Black Sea to Colchis at the end of the world known in Greek legend in order to steal the Golden Fleece and bring it to the West. In the twentieth century the westerners’ quest in Georgia was for black gold. The oil fields around Baku on the landlocked Caspian Sea had exuded fumes and oil for millennia. Not until the 1870s, however, were the fields drilled and exploited, largely by the Nobel family for export to Russia. After Batum had been surrendered by the Ottomans to the Russian Empire in 1878, Batum began to flourish as the harbour for exporting produce from Georgia and Azerbaijan. The Rothschilds built a railroad and later a pipeline to convey oil from Baku through the Caucasus mountains to their refinery at Batum. From here, fleets of oil tankers sailed out across the Black Sea and through the Dardanelles and on to Europe and Asia. By 1888 the Baku oilfields rivaled American production. Thus Batum had become the main outlet for oil from Russia and Persia to the rest of the globe.
With the collapse of the Tsarist government in 1917 and the withdrawal of Russian imperial forces, three idealistic socialist democracies soon declared their independence in the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas – Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. For a brief time Italy opened commercial shipping lanes from Batum and began negotiations with both the short-lived Georgian government and the white Russians for the oil and mineral wealth of Georgia, but all opportunities abruptly ended with the Bolshevik capture of Georgia in 1921. Not long before Gilbert set out for the East, in February 1924 Mussolini officially recognized the new Communist regime by concluding a commercial and navigation treaty with Bolshevik Russia, the first of the western Allies to do so. Italy would be able to transship exports, i.e. oil, from Baku to Batum for her merchant marine to ship home. The expanding Italian navy would soon grow increasingly reliant on oil from Soviet Georgia.