When the Russian Pacific Squadron attempted to break out of Port Arthur on August 10, 1904, and met defeat in the Battle of the Yellow Sea, the fleet scattered. Most ships limped back to port or sought refuge in neutral Chinese harbors. Captain Mikhail Fedorovich von Schultz, commanding the Novik, chose a different path entirely. After coaling at the German concession of Kiaochow, he pointed his cruiser east -- not toward the safety of a neutral port, but around the full length of Japan, through the open Pacific, aiming for Vladivostok. It was a plan that the commanding officer of the cruiser Diana dismissed as suicidal. Diana headed for Saigon instead. Schultz pressed on alone.

The Novik slipped past Yakushima in the Osumi Islands at dawn on August 14 and turned north into the Pacific. A Japanese merchant vessel spotted her, and the Imperial Japanese Navy dispatched cruisers to intercept. But a stroke of luck intervened: the Japanese reassigned the cruisers Niitaka and Tsushima to the Shanghai area to hunt for the Russian cruiser Askold, leaving Novik's Pacific route unguarded. She steamed north for days through open ocean, threaded Friza Strait between Uruppu and Etorofu in the Kurile Islands, and entered the Sea of Okhotsk. By the time she reached Korsakov, she had circled Japan -- a feat that spoke as much to the audacity of her captain as to the fog of war that allowed it.

The respite at Korsakov was brief. The Japanese cruiser Tsushima found the Novik in the harbor and the two ships exchanged fire. Both sustained damage, and Tsushima withdrew to make repairs. But Novik was in worse shape, her machinery breaking down after the punishing trans-Pacific voyage. When the cruiser Chitose arrived to reinforce the Japanese force, Schultz recognized the situation was hopeless. Rather than surrender his ship, he ordered Novik scuttled in the harbor. Sixty of her crew were assigned to an Imperial Russian Army garrison of about 500 men at Korsakov, tasked with guerrilla operations against any Japanese landing on southern Sakhalin.

The sunken Novik did not rest on the harbor floor for long. In August 1905, as the Russo-Japanese War drew to a close, a Japanese engineering team arrived at Korsakov to claim the cruiser as a prize of war. After a lengthy effort to refloat her, they towed the hull all the way to Yokosuka Naval Arsenal for repairs. On August 20, 1906 -- the second anniversary of the battle that sank her -- the ship was commissioned into the Imperial Japanese Navy as the aviso Suzuya. She served under the rising sun flag until 1912, when she was reclassified as a second-class coastal defense ship. A year later, she was sold for scrap. The Novik had sailed under two empires' flags and fought on both sides of one of the early twentieth century's defining wars.

Korsakov harbor today is a quiet port town on Sakhalin's southern coast, the waters calm over the spot where the Novik settled into the mud. The battle left no monuments visible from the air, but the harbor's strategic position -- commanding the approaches to the Sea of Okhotsk and the strait separating Sakhalin from Hokkaido -- explains why both empires fought over it. The engagement is remembered in Russian literature, depicted in Aleksandr Stepanov's novel Port Arthur and Valentin Pikul's Katorga. For those who know the story, the harbor at 46.83 degrees north carries the weight of a ship that ran farther and fought harder than anyone expected.