They took the guns first, then turned them around. In the autumn of 1788, the Black Sea Cossacks came at the tiny island of Berezan in their shallow boats, seized the Ottoman cannon that had been meant to keep them out, dragged their own guns up from the water's edge, and began methodically battering the island's fortress from close range. With Russian boats adding their fire from the water, the whole assault was over in a matter of hours. For a fighting community that had lost its homeland and was searching for a new one, it was a hard-won prize at the mouth of the Dnieper.
The Black Sea Cossack Host was a new formation for old warriors. Descended in large part from the Zaporozhian Cossacks whose stronghold had been dissolved a decade earlier, these horsemen and boatmen now fought for the Russian Empire in its latest war against the Ottomans, prowling the coast and rivers in their light flotillas. In the autumn of 1788, with the great struggle for the fortress of Ochakov underway just up the estuary, the Cossacks were ordered to hold the right bank of the Berezan River, set pickets along the shore, and prevent Ottoman-aligned Danube Cossacks from landing. When that rival Danubian force melted away, the island of Berezan itself became, for a time, the main base of the Black Sea Cossacks' naval flotilla, a foothold on contested water.
After the heavy fighting around Ochakov, the small island had been more or less forgotten, which left an opening. The Cossacks struck. They captured the enemy's cannon and swung them against the very fortress they had defended, then hauled ashore their own guns, taken from the boats, and added them to the bombardment. Out on the water, Russian craft opened fire as well, catching the garrison between two lines of shot. Pressed from land and sea at once, the Ottoman defenders could not hold, and the fortress fell. The assault took only a few hours. It was the kind of sharp, improvised action the Cossacks excelled at: fast, close, and decided less by numbers than by nerve and the willingness to close the distance.
The reckoning, as recorded in Prince Potemkin's report, was lopsided but not bloodless. The Ottoman garrison lost eighty killed and three hundred and twenty taken prisoner. The Cossacks lost twenty-nine men in all, and the accounting names their ranks with a fighting community's care: twenty-four ordinary Cossacks, four kurin atamans, and one regimental starshyna, each a leader whose loss was felt. In the days that followed, the Black Sea Cossacks pressed their advantage, falling on an Ottoman convoy near Akkerman, seizing several ships and handing them to the Russians. They finally left Berezan in the spring of 1789. Years later, when many of these Cossacks were resettled far to the east in the Kuban, they carried the memory of this fight with them and founded a settlement, a stanitsa, which they named Berezanskaya, after the island they had stormed on a November afternoon.
Berezan Island lies at 46.60°N, 31.41°E, near the mouth of the Dnieper-Bug estuary, about 8 kilometers from Ochakiv. From 2,000-4,000 feet it appears as a small, isolated tableland surrounded by open water, its southern end rising steeper than its low northern shore. Nearest airports are Mykolaiv (UKON) up the estuary and Odesa (UKOO) to the west along the coast.