CRISTO RAUL.ORG '

READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

THE

CRETAN INSURRECTION OF 1866-7-8

WILLIAM JAMES STILLMAN

U. S. Consul in Crete

TO THE MEMORY OF LE GRAND LOCKWOOD, OF NEW YORK, IS DEDICATED, IN RECOGNITION OF THE UNOSTENTATIOUS, UNPROMISED, AND UNRESERVED LIBERALITY WHICH RENDERED IT POSSIBLE FOR THE AUTHOR TO REMAIN IN CRETE DURING THE INSURRECTION

INTRODUCTORY. Crete and the Cretans 

CHAPTER I. (April, 1866.) Ismael Pasha 

CHAPTER II. (May, 1866.) Agitation

CHAPTER III. (July, August, 1866) Days of Terror

CHAPTER IV. (September, 1866) Mustapha Kiritli Pasha

CHAPTER V. (October, 1866) Russian Intervention

CHAPTER VI. (November, 1866) The Convent of Arkadi

CHAPTER VII. (December, 1866) Pym and the Assurance

CHAPTER VIII. (December, 1866) Ignatieff Again

CHAPTER IX. (January, February, 1867) More Disaster

CHAPTER X. (March—May, 1867) Effect of Hellenic Politics

CHAPTER XI. (June—September, 1867) Hussein Avni

CHAPTER XII. (October, November, 1867.) Sphakian Campaign

CHAPTER XIII. (December, 1867) The Last of the Victims

CHAPTER XIV. (1868) Ali Pasha Fails

CHAPTER XV. The year after the war

Preface.   

In committing to print the subjoined record of the Cretan revolt of 1866-7-8, I am fulfilling a duty in regard to a series of events quaeque ipse vidi et quorum pars magna fui, and which, if not in themselves of importance, are so as a revelation of the manner in which political influences work in the East, and perhaps still more as a curious exemplification of the weight which personal accidents, private intrigue and pique, and the capacity or incapacity of obscure officials, may have in determining the affairs of great empires.

In taking the position I did with reference to the insurrection, I was actuated only by a love of justice, and in no wise by sentimental or religious prejudices; but I hope it may be permitted me to say that, if I learned how fatal are the defects of the Greek race, its bitterness in personal rivalry, want of patriotic subordination, and the extravagance of its political hostilities, I saw also that it possesses admirable qualities, which the interests of civilization demand the development of; high capacity for political organization, for patriotic effort and self-sacrifice; and endurance and equanimity under misfortunes, which few races could endure and retain any character or coherence. Their amiable and refined personal qualities, and their private and domestic morality, have, justified in me a feeling towards them for which I was utterly unprepared on going to the Levant, and give me a hope that the manifest lesson of the Cretan revolt may not be lost in their future, either to them or to the friends of the better civilization. I feel that the Hellenes are less responsible for the vices of their body politic than their guardian Powers, who interfere to misguide, control to pervert, and protect to enfeeble, every good impulse and quality of the race, while they foster the spirit of intrigue, themselves enter into the domestic politics of Greece in order to be able to control her foreign, and each in turn, lest Greece should someday be an aid to some other of the contestants about the bed of the sick man, does all it can to prevent her from being able to help herself. No just and right-thinking man can make responsible for its sins or misfortunes, a people which is denied the right to shape its own institutions without a studied reference to the prejudices of its protectors; to manage its own affairs without the meddling of foreign ministers, who dictate who shall be its administrators; to protect even its own constitution against the violence and usurpation of an irresponsible and incapable head, without the secret but efficacious intervention of some foreign Power.

A witness of every step of the late diplomatic intervention in Greek foreign affairs, I saw that in all the corps diplomatique at Athens Greece had not one friend—every one helped to push her into the abyss; not one word of real sympathy or friendly counsel did she find from any foreign representative. The United States, which had, perhaps, more than any other nation a powerful moral influence, and could have helped her by wise words and calm and disinterested moral intervention, had chosen to send as the dispenser of that influence the most incapable, ignorant, and obsequious diplomat I have ever known in the service of our Government—a man who was an actual cipher in any political sense, and who, on arriving in Greece (our first representative there), hastened to mingle himself with the party intrigues of the country, ranging himself on the side of the king, against the people, in such a way that his advent was, to use the words of one of the leading statesmen of Greece spoken to me at the time, “like a wet blanket” to the hopes of liberalism in Greece.

The Hellenes must learn that they have no friends, save in the unprejudiced and charitable individuals who know them well enough to be able to overlook their foibles and petty vices, in view of the solid and genuine claims which they have to our liking and the support of Christendom. As one of those, I await the day when Greece shall have been mistress of herself long enough to prove whether or not she can govern herself wisely, before I lend my voice to her blame for her failures or her offences.

The Publishers feel bound to inform the reader that during the delay which has attended the publication of this work, several of the personages mentioned in it, and some whose character or conduct is severely criticized, have died. This explanation will relieve the author of the appearance either of bad taste or of vindictiveness; while to the fact that he was unable to give his personal supervision to the work in passing through the press are due the errata which may be discovered, and an occasional want of uniformity in the spelling of proper names.

New York, February 1, 1874.

INTRODUCTORY.

A STUDENT of classical ethnology, curious to restore the antique man, can do no better, so far as the Greek variety is concerned, than to go to Crete and study its people. The Cretan of today preserves probably the character of antiquity, and holds to his ancient ways of feeling and believing, and, within the new conditions, as far as possible of acting, more nearly than would be believed possible, and affords a better field of investigation into the nature of the classical man than any existing records.

The island is one of those paradisiacal isolations which facilitate civilization in its early stages, and preserve it from the encroachments of progress in the later. Its low latitude secures it against cold in winter, and its insular position against extreme heat, while the range of high mountains running longitudinally through it gives its climate a salubrity possessed by no section of the world’s surface so near the sun. The standard summer temperature is from 82° to 86° Fahr., and once only in a residence of nearly four years I saw it as high as 92º. The minimum was 520. Wild flowers never are wanting except in midsummer. The almond blooms in February (I have seen it in blossom on Christmas), and all the known fruits follow it in succession, each finding some locality and climate suited to it.

The fertility of the plains, and the inaccessibility of its mountain fastnesses, made prosperity easy and conquest difficult, while its remoteness from the shore of either continent, made ancient invasion not easy, and preserved the type of the composite Greek race from the barbaric innovations of Greece proper, so that we have the Greek race of B.C. 700 undoubtedly more purely preserved than anywhere else.

Only in prosperity and weight in mundane matters, in comparative consideration, they have passed to the other end of the scale from that in which Homer could say of their land: “There is a country, Crete, in the midst of the black sea, beautiful and fertile, wave-washed roundabout, with a population infinite in number, and ninety cities. The races are different, and with different languages—there are Achaeans, there are the huger Eteocretans, the Cydonians, the crest-waving Dorians, and the divine Pelasgi. Theirs is Cnossos, a great city, and theirs is King Minos, who talked nine years with great Jove”.

This enumeration has evidently no relation to chronological order, and unfortunately we have no intelligible traditions as to the order of settlement in Crete. Diodorus Siculus says that “the first inhabitants of Crete dwelt in the neighborhood of Mount Ida, and were called the Idaean Dactyls”. But Scylax says that, according to early Greek tradition, Cydonia (in the western end of the island) was known as “the mother of cities”. Its position and character of site indicate rather a settlement of Pelasgi coming from the west.

Spratt finds in the geological record clear evidence of the Greek Archipelago having been formerly a fresh-water lake or series of lakes, and, if this be true, Crete must have been connected with the main lands of Europe and Asia Minor, in which case the aboriginal inhabitants would be a land migration, probably from Aryan sources. That a Phrygian colony known as the Idaean Dactyls brought here knowledge of certain arts and religious mysteries, and became to the people with whom they mingled, semi-divine, appears probable. The subsequent visit of the Tyrian Hercules, who, on his way to get the cattle of Geryon, called here as the rendezvous of his forces, and, to recompense the Cretans for their friendship, purged the island of wild beasts, may indicate a Phoenician colony or passing expedition.

But admitting, as of possibility, that the Eteocretan was a land emigration, cavern-dwelling, as the abundance of the caves in the island suggests; a collation of all the traditions makes it probable that the first important immigration was Pelasgic, and from the Italian shores, noted in many Greek traditions as the Tyrrhenian Pelasgi (Etruscans?), whose colonies came down by the Morea and the isles of Cerigo and Cerigotto by easy journeys to Crete. [The records of Karnack show that, in the reign of Thotmes III, a great migration of Cretan Pelasgi came into Egypt, and became the Philistines (Pilisti or Pilisgi); proving that at this early period the hive was so full that it had begun to swarm.]

This first immigration became, if my conjecture goes to the mark, the Cydonian stock—the subsequent one which Homer speaks of as Pelasgic, being of much later date; the Dorian, which was of the highest importance in its effect, as finally assimilating or subjecting all other races, and the Achaean, a scarcely influential influx, coming within the recognized traditions. The author of the “Isles of Greece” supposes two aboriginal races in the island, a needless multiplication of “original Adams”, though an Asiatic or Phrygian race coming in at the east, and a Pelasgic at the west, seem to have been the first recognizable elements in the population.

The myth of Jupiter and Europa is regarded as concealing the history of the introduction of the worship of the moon by a Phoenician colony, who, combining with the population of the eastern end of the island, whose peculiar deity was Jupiter, produced the race over which Minos came to rule, from this fabled to be the son of Jupiter and Europa. The journey of Europa along the river Lethe indicates the course of this colony to the capital of Minos, Gortyna, which more anciently had borne the name of Larissa, a Pelasgic name, from which we might conjecture that it was founded by the colony of Teutamos, who, with a band of Dorians, Achaeans, and Pelasgi, the builders of all the early Greek cities, is said by the early historians to have arrived in Crete three centuries before the Trojan war, and to have settled in the eastern part of the island, and given the early city its Pelasgic name.

The present inhabitants betray differences of character so great as almost to indicate difference of race. The Sphakiotes are larger of build, more restless and adventurous, thievish and inconstant, turbulent and treacherous, than the people of any other section. The Seliniotes, in the western extremity, are the bravest of the Cretans, but less turbulent or quarrelsome, not given to stealing, and of good faith. In the eastern end, especially the region of Gortyna and Cnossos, the blessings of the rule of Minos seem to rest in pacific natures. The great Dorian invasion, about 1,000 BC, gave the island, a dominant caste, uniformity of language and customs, but without complete fusion of races.

The language of Crete today is a Dorian dialect, and preserves many characteristics noted by the ancient authors. The use of Kappa as c is used in Italian, either hard or soft (in terminal syllables generally the latter), the use of r for l, especially with the Sphakiotes, and the presence of many words in modern Cretan which have disappeared from modern continental Greek, with a comparative rareness of Turkish words, and entire absence of Albanian and Slavonic, show how much less the Cretans have been affected by outside influences than other parts of the Greek community.

There is a trace of genuine Cretan literature, though its chief work, the “Erotókritos”, is by an Italian colonist, Vincenzo Cornaro. They have, however, many songs and many bards, though to any but Cretan ears the music is far from agreeable. I knew one of the popular singers, Karalambo, poet and singer at once, as most of them are (and many are improvisatori of considerable facility). He was so much in repute that no wedding or festivity was considered complete anywhere in the range of a day’s ride from Chania unless Karalambo was there; and at other times he used to sing in the cafes on the Marina, screaming, to the strain of a naturally fine tenor, songs which, though to me not even music, used to melt his audiences into tears. He was a patriot as well as poet, and when the insurrection of '66 actually broke out, his songs were so seditious, and excited the Khaniote Christians so much, that he was driven into the mountains, and, joining a band of his neighbors, was one day wounded by the accidental discharge of a pistol one of his comrades was cleaning. The wound was fatal from want of surgical attendance.

The Cretan music is always of a plaintive character, and monotonous; in singing, they have a habit of incessant quavering, and this, with the drawling tone, makes it far from agreeable to an ear accustomed to cultivated music, but it has a decided character of its own.

There were in Kalepa before the insurrection two improvisatori of considerable repute, who were accustomed to carry on musical disputes, one singing a couplet, and the other replying in a similar one. Sometimes it was a match of compliments, and sometimes the reverse, but following with tolerable exactitude the metre, a four-lined stanza, the second and fourth lines rhyming. All the ballads I have seen are in this form, the music also differing but little to my ear, though possibly to a Cretan there may be wide differences.

The Cretans possess, in common with all the Greeks, the avidity for instruction and quickness of intellect which make of this race the dominant element in the Levant. They are tenaciously devoted to their religion and to their traditions, which have kept them up and preserved the national character against such a continuation of hostile influences as probably no other people ever lived through. The history of Crete is a series of obstinate rebellions and barbarous repressions, since the first conquest by the Saracens in ad 820, a conquest which was followed by an almost complete apostasy from Christianity—sword-conversion, and by persistent attempts on the part of the Byzantine emperors to reconquer it, until 961, when Nicephorus Phocas succeeded in driving the Saracens out. They seem to have made no considerable addition to the Cretan stock, since the population rapidly returned to Christianity, to which, judging from the known and more recent past, they had always probably remained devoted at heart. At the division of the Byzantine empire, Crete passed to Boniface, Duke of Montserrat, and from him was purchased by the Venetian Republic, 1204, from which time till its conquest by the Turks, completed in 1669, the Cretans were under a yoke that would probably have depopulated any other section of the Old World. The cruelties and misgovernment of the governors sent from Venice would be incredible if not recorded by Venetian historians and official records. The Venetians seem to have regarded the Cretans much in the same light as the English colonists of America did the Indians, and, when their wretched state came to the knowledge of the Senate, they sent commissioners to examine into it, from whose reports I translate some extracts (quoted in Italian by Pashley), who, from the original documents in the public library of Venice. Basadonna, the first of these officers whose reports remain, says (1566):

“The tax gatherers and others dependent on them use against these unhappy people, in one way and another, strange and horrible tyrannies. It would be a matter worthy of your clemency immediately to abolish so odious and barbarous exactions, since to maintain them is to abandon these wretched men to most cruel serpents, who lacerate and devour them entirely, or oblige the few of them who remain to escape into Turkey, following the footsteps of innumerable others who, from time to time, have gone away from this cause”.

Then from Garzoni (1586):

“In all the villages in which I have been, I have seen the houses of the inhabitants, in the greater part of which there is not be seen any article for the uses of dress or table; and for food, they are without bread or corn; they have no wine; their women are despoiled, their children naked, the men slightly covered, and the house emptied of everything, without any sign of human habitation. And this wretched people is compelled by established custom to give to the cavaliers two angarie [twelve days’ work] each per annum, and is obliged also by ancient regulation to work as much more as the cavalier may need for the pay of eight soldini a day, which amounts to a gazetta [two Venetian soldi, or about one penny] and a fifteenth, introduced by them two hundred years ago, and not since increased. They are obliged to keep chickens and hens according to the number of doors [I do not feel sure of having properly translated this expression, obscure in the original], their masters having applied the term of doors to houses, which are built by the peasants themselves, and have no kind of use of doors, because the Cavaliers, industrious for their own advantage, make doors as frequently as possible to increase the number of royalties. The beasts of labor, called donnegals, are obliged to plough a certain quantity of land, for which, planted or not, the peasant must pay the third. The donnegals are also obliged to work two angarie per annum. Mules and other beasts of transport must make two voyages to the city for the master. Animals of pasture the tenth, and a thousand other inventions to absorb all the productions of the land. If the peasant has a vineyard planted (the ground always belonging to the Cavaliers) and trained by him, although on land before wild, he must pay to the master, before marking the division for the royalty (which by ancient regulation gives one-third to the Cavalier and two to the peasant), five measures, called mistaches, for each vineyard, under pretext that he has eaten part before the vintage, for the use of the pattichier [in Crete, even now, an open shallow kind of vat built in the fields, of flat stones, and cemented, in which the grapes are trampled], and under other most dishonest inventions. And to increase still more the royalty, they divide the vineyard into so many parts that few return more than fifteen mistaches, in such a way that with fraud founded on force they take two-thirds for themselves and give one to the peasant.

“There are chosen for judges of their country, as I have said, Castellans—writers who serve as secretaries; and Captains to look after the robbers, who all set rapaciously to rob these poor people, taking what little any of them may have hidden from the Cavaliers under pretext of disobedience, in which the peasant abounds, by reason of his desperation, so that he is in every way wretched. The Castellans cannot by law judge the value of more than two sequins, although by some regulation they are allowed authority to the sum of two hundred perperi, about fourteen sequins; and because they have eight per cent, for the charges they make, all causes amount to two hundred perperi, however small it may be, in order to get their sixteen of charges, with thousand other inventions of extortion to eat up the substance of the poor. The Captains, whose name indicates their functions, have their use from robberies, and always find means to draw their advantage from the same, plundering the good and releasing the guilty, to the universal ruin. . . . The men chosen for the galleys are in continual terror of going, and those who have the means, with whatever difficulty, from some vineyard, or land, or animals, throw all away unhesitatingly for a trifling price to pay for their dispensation, which costs fifteen or twenty sequins—expense which they cannot support. The poorest, hopeless of their release, fly to the mountains, and thence, reassured by the Cavaliers, return to their villages, so much the more enslaved as they are fearful of justice, and by their example make the other villagers more obedient, attributing to the Cavaliers the power of saving them from the galleys... To which, add the extortions to which they are subjected by a thousand accidental circumstances, execution of civil debts, visits of rectors and other officers, to whom they are obliged to give sustenance at miserable prices.

So that the peasantry, oppressed in this manner, and harassed in so many ways, annoyed by the reasonings of the Papists, and made enemies of the Venetian name, ... are so reduced by the influences I have enumerated, that I believe I can say with truth that, with the exception of the privileged classes, they desire a change of government, and though they know they cannot fall into other hands than those of the Turks, yet, believing they cannot make worse their condition, incline even to their tyrannical rule”

I extract from the opinion of Fra Paolo Sarpi (1615), a more Jesuitical, and, it would seem, more palatable advice to the Senate, since it was, in the end, and to the end followed: “For your Greek subjects of the island of Crete, and the other islands of the Levant, ... the surest way is to keep good garrisons to awe them, and not use them to arms or musters, in hope of being assisted by them in extremity; for they will always show ill inclination proportionably to the strength they shall be musters of ... Wine and bastinadoes ought to be their share, and keep good nature for a better occasion ... If the gentlemen of these colonies do tyrannize over the villages of their dominion, the best way is not to seem so see it, that there may be no kindness between them and their subjects; but, if they offend in anything else, it will be well to chastise them severely, etc. ... And in a word, remember that all the good that can come from them is already obtained, which was to fix the Venetian dominion, and for the future there is nothing but mischief to be expected from them”.

What a pity that Sarpi had not lived before Dante, that he might have been niched in the “Inferno”:

Questo é de' rei del fuoco furo.

I have only space to epitomize a passage of the history of Crete, under the Venetians, to show how utterly infamous, unjust, and devilish was their régime. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the provinces of Selino, Sfakia, and Rhizo seceded, and established an independent government, which was for some time unmolested by the Venetian authorities. The governor of the seceded republic finally presuming to ask in marriage for his son the daughter of a Venetian noble, the latter, to revenge the insult, plotted with the governor of Chania and, pretending to consent, lured the family of the soi-disant Greek governor, with a company of nearly 500 of his compatriots, to the marriage feast. The guests having been intoxicated and gone to sleep, and the signal given to the authorities at Chania, the governor came with 1,700 foot and 150 horse, took the whole prisoners, and in various ways and different places massacred them, except a few who were sent to the galleys.

This was followed up, for the better terrifying of the seditious, by a raid on the village of Foligniaco, near Mournies, and on the edge of the plain of Chania, in which they took the whole population prisoners asleep, burned the village, hanged twelve of the primates, ripped open three or four pregnant women, wives of the principal people, put to death and exiled the whole population remaining, except five or six who escaped. The Provveditore then called on all the Greeks of the lately revolted district to come in and surrender themselves, but, as they naturally declined, they were put under a ban which is perhaps the most horrible sentence ever given by a civilized community. No inhabitant of the proscribed district could secure his life except on condition of bringing in the “head of his father, brother, cousin, or nephew”

“At length a priest of the family of the Pateri-Zapa entered the city, accompanied by his two sons and by two of his brothers, each of the mournful party carrying in his hand a human head. (Of the five heads, the first belonged to the son of the priest, the second to one of his brothers, the third to his son-in-law, and the fourth and fifth to sons of one of his brothers.) The wretched men placed their bleeding offerings before the Signor Cavalli and the other representatives of Venice, and with the bitterest tears stated whose heads they were. The facts were duly established by witnesses; even the governor who had been sent to Crete to extirpate the seditious Greeks was moved, and the law was at length abolished”

This was under the auspices of Christianity. Under the Crescent, things were at first better, but finally such as to cause wonder how there is still a Cretan people, considering that even Dante could say:  

“Nel mezzo 'l mar siede un paese guasto

Diss'egli allora che s'appella Creta”.

The Venetian rule had reduced the population of the island to about 160,000, the tenth of its probable number under the Byzantine emperors. The anticipations of Garzoni were to the full realized, for the Cretan, favoring the Turkish conquest, made it possible, and avenged himself in the way of the weak. The Turks, in recompense for the important assistance rendered them by the Cretans, exempted them from conscription or military tax, but learned no lesson from their conquered enemies, and, until the cession of the island to Egypt in 1830, Crete was the scene of the most unbridled license of individuals and fanaticism of sects.

In passing from the Venetian to the Turkish despotism the Cretans had exchanged bad for worse. The Venetian was oppressive to the last degree in pecuniary extortions, but the Turk brought in slavery of another form—the harem and all its horrors to a captive people, even then celebrated for the beauty of its women. The Turkish rule has never been, and probably never will be, anything but piracy—the rule of the strong hand. The great object of government was to wring from the governed the largest possible amount of plunder; it is so still. No motive of civilized government has ever yet entered into the head of the Ottoman. The development of a country’s resources, even to increase its revenues, has never been thought of. A race of nomad conquerors, holding the land as if it waited the trumpet that should expel it, and could only reap where its predecessors had planted, but never from its own sowing, it has extorted, butchered, and enslaved, without leaving behind it more than its bones to fertilize the soil. The noble public works which marked the Venetian regime in Crete were allowed to fall into decay, the walls of the cities show the shot-holes made by the siege-guns, only filled up when it was necessary to keep the wall from falling.

Of the early period of Turkish rule in Crete we know little. Pirates keep no record; and the only insurrection of any note we hear of was that of 1770, which seems to have been mainly a Sphakiote affair, and to have resulted, on the whole, favorably for the mountaineers, from their having been allowed to maintain a virtual independence, as up to 1860 no Turkish garrison was ever permitted in Sphakia. The fortress of Samaria has not been, in the records of modern history, penetrated by an enemy in arms.

From 1770 to 1821, the condition of Crete was that of a man on the rack. The conquests and the advantages of apostasy had induced many Christians to become Mussulmans; others followed from the bitter persecutions which began soon after the insurrection of 1770, and made the life of the Christian in the plains utterly intolerable. The former class generally became, ipso facto, fanatical persecutors of their late fellow-Christians, and the children or grand-children of the converts became oblivious of their ancestors’ creed and relations, and as, under the Koran, they lapsed into a more complete ignorance than the Christians, they soon became as fanatic as any. The influx of Turks was never considerable, but the Cretan Mussulmans, becoming the governing class, disposed of the lives and properties of their Christian fellow-countrymen entirely at their will. Their agas, or chiefs, by force of character became captains of bands of these Janissaries, as they were called, and established a sway beside which the Venetian was a bed of feathers. The Venetian was inhuman; the Janissary was devilish. I have known several men who lived in the island while the Janissary government was in full force, and who have testified to me of the occurrence of such horrors as no system of slavery known since the establishment of Christianity can show.

Every rayah (beast or domesticated animal) was utterly at the mercy of his aga, who could kill, rob, or torture him at will, without responsibility before any law, or any obligation towards him. If the aga wanted money, he went to any rayah he suspected of being possessed of any, and ordered him to hand it over. If he wanted work done, he ordered the rayah to do it. If he fancied the rayah’s wife or daughter, he went to his house, and ordered the man out of it until his lust was satisfied, and if any resisted he was killed like a dog. If a Christian celebrated his nuptials with a girl of great beauty, he received from the aga a hand­kerchief with a bullet tied in the corner of it, and if he did not at once send his bride to the aga he paid the penalty with his life. The only resource was to fly to the mountains before the aga had time to send his men to seize him. Most of the beautiful girls and women were sent to the mountains as a precaution, which is probably one reason why the women of the higher mountain districts are so much more beautiful than those of the lowlands.

The Janissaries even ruled the governors sent by the Sultan, and deposed or assassinated them when they did not please. Needless to say that the poor islanders had no hope of justice as against their tyrants. It was forbidden to any Christian except the archbishop to enter the city gates on horseback, and, the Bishop of Chania having transgressed this law, the Janissaries took him prisoner, and determined to burn him and all his priests. About to carry out this decision, the Pasha intervened, and to pacify them issued an order that no Christian man should sleep in the walls of Chania, and accordingly the whole adult male population was mustered out every night, leaving their wives and children in the city. There is hardly room to wonder that the Cretan is still a liar, rather wonder that he is still a man, with courage to revolt and die, considering that only one generation has intervened between him and a slavery more abject than any domestic servitude the civilized world knows of.

The oppression became more and more brutal and blind, and the Cretans, crushed and stupefied, thought of nothing but saving life by the most abject submission. Even when the agitation which led to the Greek war of independence began, the Cretans were not moved; but in June of 1821, the Mussulmans massacred a large number of Christians, some thousands, in the three principal cities. This was followed up by a demand that all the Christians should give up their arms, a demand which was followed by the revolt of Sphakia, the mountaineers having never consented to this degradation. The rising of the district about Ida followed, and the war was so vigorously carried on that in a month the open country was almost entirely cleared of Mussulmans.

This stage of the war developed a man whose name has become one of the historical in Crete, Antoni Melidoni. Collecting a small band of bold men, he swept from one end of the island to the other, falling on the negligently guarded posts, and taking them by storm in rapid succession. His hardihood knew no impossibilities, disparity of numbers made no difference in his calculations, he measured moral forces alone, and flung his sword and name into the scale against any opposing numerical force. Surrounded at night by superior forces, he led a charge sword in hand on the hostile circle, broke it, and drove the Pasha’s army from the field, not permitting its disordered masses to reform until the walls of Heraklion sheltered them. A detachment that made a sortie to attack him was destroyed, and another victory following this, the Pasha of Heraklion, expressing admiration of his prowess, begged to be favored with an interview. The Cretan hero, trusting himself to no temptation, treachery, or delay, replied that the Pasha would soon be his prisoner, and that then he might look at him as much as he liked. And the prophet fulfilled the prediction to the letter.

So far, however, Christian and Turk fought on equal terms. No discipline entered on either side—the Janissary fought the partisan, and the superior enthusiasm of liberty turned the scale in favor of the Christian. They had yet to meet their strongest foes—internal dissension and disciplined force. The first did its work quickly, and Melidoni was assassinated by Russos, the Sphakiote chief, in jealousy of his dominant influence. A Moreote chieftain, Afendallos, was sent from Greece to replace him, but, incapable and without control of the Cretans, his command was in every way unfortunate, and he was superseded by a French Philhellene of ability, Baleste, who for a moment restored the fortunes of Crete, but, deserted by the wretched Afendallos in the heat of battle, and the Cretans being carried away in panic by the example, Baleste was surrounded by the Turks and killed. At the same time, an Egyptian army coming in to reinforce the exhausted and demoralized Janissaries, the war became for the Christians a series of disasters, relieved for a time by the management of Tombasis, a Hydriote chief, who again cleared the open country of the Turks, and laid siege to Chania. The arrival of new forces from Constantinople obliged him to retire to the highlands, and an Egyptian fleet arriving debarked a fresh army, which, marching into the interior, surprised a great number of villages, and in a single raid put to the sword nearly 20,000 men, women, and children. Tombasis, watching his opportunity, fell on a small detachment of Egyptians, and cut them to pieces. The Christians rallied, and, swarming down from the mountains, assailed the retiring army with such fury that they killed 7,000 men.

A new Egyptian expedition of 10,000 troops with a large squadron reinforced the Ottoman army, and the commander, Ismail Gibraltar, so-called from having been the first Turk to sail beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, an able, adroit, and comparatively humane man, began to assail the Sphakiotes on their weak side, and induced them by bribery to withdraw from the hostilities. The other districts, many times decimated, had not the force to maintain the struggle, and Tombasis, after making a vain effort to rally the elements of another struggle, abandoned the island, which submitted almost entirely. Thousands of the most devoted and patriotic Cretans went to Greece, where they fought bravely for the common nationality. We see still on the plains of Athens the tomb of the corps that perished there to a man refusing to turn their backs to the Turk.

After the battle of Navarino (20 October 1827), the insurrection broke out anew; an expedition from Greece under Kalergis captured Grabusa by stratagem, Kissamos was taken by siege; soon the Cretan Mussulmans (the regular Egyptian forces being engaged in the Morea) were shut up again in the three fortresses of Chania, Rethymno, and Heraklion, and would soon, in all probability, either have abandoned the island or have perished in it, had not the three allied powers decided that Crete should be united to the government of Mehemet Ali, and notified their decree to the Christian population.

The establishment of the Egyptian régime was at first productive of great relief to the Christian population, as Mehemet Ali had shrewdness enough to comprehend that their oppression would be the disfavor of the Christian powers, now for the first time clearly recognized to be mistresses of the fortunes of the Ottoman Empire, and to perceive that for material prosperity the Christian element was far more available than the Mussulman, corrupted and degraded by long unchecked and unmeasured abuse of power, and dependence on servitude of others, the most hopeless of all slavery. Order was re-established, and political organization, which Crete had never known, was introduced, exiles began to return, and all promised a better régime than any Cretan could have hoped for under foreign rule.

The Pasha, in his designs of obtaining complete independence, saw also that he must someday count the Turkish population of Crete as his enemies; all these causes combined gave the Christians an advantage over the Mussulman element. After a time, however, the pirate’s instincts took the predominance, and Mehemet Ali, well assured of his possession, began to measure the capacity of the island for extortion of taxes. The promises made at the time of pacification were unheeded, imposts succeeded each other, until the population, alarmed, had recourse to their immemorial expedient of an assembly, and, several thousand strong, Christian and Mussulman alike, they met at Murnies, unarmed and accompanied by their families. This habit of so assembling has from ancient times played an important part in the history of Crete, and was known as Syncretism. To this day, every crisis and every important measure referring to the general welfare is discussed in a full assembly of deputies of the whole population.

The assembly of Murnies was peaceful; no one brought his arms, no violence of any kind was perpetrated on any interest or person. The assembly petitioned the protecting powers for redress and the fulfillment of the promises made at their submission, but the indifference of the soi-disant Christian powers to everything that implied the rights of the subject had already descended on the Greeks, so lately emancipated by the “untoward event”; and the French and English residents at Alexandria, more charmed by Egyptian music than the claims of justice, heard what was agreeable to the Viceroy, and the English agent even advised him to make an example of insubordination which should save him any future trouble. So encouraged, the arbiter of life or death to this brave people sent orders to execute a number of persons, both Christian and Mussulman. The Governor, Mustapha Pasha, now known as Mustapha Kiritli (Cretan), a hard and barbarous Albanian, bred in the brutalities of the long wars with the Christians, readily complied, and seized a number of persons at Chania indifferently. At the same time, the same orders were sent to other provinces, and a general and simultaneous execution took place. Many of the victims had no connection with the assembly, nor does the number or quality seem to have been fixed.

The Albanian butcher caught the spirit of his master’s order, and hanged at random. Pashley says that thirty-three were hanged, but perhaps he had a desire to diminish the enormity of the deed for which he declares the English agent at Alexandria to have been largely responsible. Residents at Chania at that time have assured me that over eighty were hanged at Murnies, and the then Austrian consul at Chania has repeatedly declared to me that there were several hundred victims, and that he himself had seen the bodies hanging on the trees of Murnies, until the whole air round was infected by them. This was in 1833, and until 1840 the Butcher held the island tranquil under the rod of his menace.

In 1840, insurrectionary movements took place, which were attributed to English influence, and said to be encouraged by the English admiral at Suda. I have heard from residents at Chania (non-Cretan) that the admiral facilitated the introduction of muskets and ammunition, and advised the chiefs to ask for an English protection. This proposition was favored at the assembly of that occasion, but the Turkish authorities secured its rejection by persuading secretly the chiefs that their choice would be between annexation to Greece and English protection, and as, of course, they preferred the former, the project was unanimously rejected, having secured which, and the consequent English indifference, Mustapha, by an energetic blow, suppressed the movement.

In 1858, a similar crisis was made use of by the French government, whose agent openly took the part of the insurgents, bullied the authorities, and encouraged the Cretans to look for French support. The assembly was held at Nerokouros, and petitioned the Sultan for relief from the most weighty grievances of the population. It was at once determined to suppress the movement, like the former, by force, but disturbances breaking out in the Christian provinces of Turkey, and the attitude of France causing distrust, the Porte finally yielded, made the concessions demanded, and the assembly broke up. This outbreak was remarkable for one incident which may have had much to do with the solution arrived at. The government had determined to obtain from its adherents an address in opposition to that of the assembly, and it was considered needful to have the signature of the Bishop of Chania.

This prelate, one of the most worthy and pious bishops Crete has had in modern times, refused to sign, and compulsion was applied, the Bishop being shut up in a room with the council, and a pen put into his hand and applied to the paper by force. But he resisted all pressure, declaring that, if they killed him, he would not sign what he knew to be a falsehood. This contest of will lasted hours, when the physique of the Bishop gave way, and he fainted, not having yielded. He was earned to his house in great excitement, which rapidly spread and increased, until he died in the course of the day. The Cretans regarded him as a martyr, and his death fired them with still greater enthusiasm.

Never was moment more favorable for insurrection; and that the Cretans contented themselves with such moderate demands as the relief of some of the newest and most oppressive taxes, and yielded on the promise only of redress, dispersing quietly to their homes, shows that they were not, as they were represented by unfriendly writers, disposed to factiousness and insurrection.

The promises made in 1858 were never fulfilled—if there is honor amongst thieves, there is none amongst Turks; and when, at the death of Abdul Medjid, his successor, Abdul Aziz, was reminded of the promises made to the Cretans, he replied that he was not bound by the engagements of his predecessors, and Cretan reforms lapsed into the abyss of good (and bad) intentions. From that time the island was moved by discontent. The next governor, Ismail, a clever, cunning Greek renegade, charlatan in everything but intrigue, of the worst possible faith and honesty, avaricious, mendacious, and cruel, but plausible and persuasive, succeeded in delaying agitation by promises and bribes, by dividing the chiefs one against the other, till 1864, when another assembly was held, and another petition drawn up and delivered to the governor to be forwarded to Constantinople, when the assembly dispersed. Ismail immediately convoked an assemblage of his adherents, and had a counter-petition forwarded, assuring the Porte of the perfect content of the Cretans with their governor and their state. The true petition was never heard of again, but the bearers of the false one received the Medjidieh, and Ismail the thanks of the Sultan, with presents which he valued much more.

The ensuing winter was one of great distress, and the spring passed without renewal of the disturbances or petitions, but in the autumn of that year, after my arrival in the island, I heard that there would be an assembly the following spring, 1866. The discontent was very great. New taxes on straw, on the sale of wine, on all beasts of burden, oppressive collection of the tithes, together with short crops for two years in succession, had produced very great distress, and the Governor added to these grievances his own extortions, with the most shameful venality in the distribution of justice, and disregard of such laws of procedure and punishment as existed. The councils were absolute mockeries, and the councilors his most servile tools. The summer of my arrival, I was told by the surgeon of the civil hospital of a death that had just occurred under his care, in prison, of an old man, arrested for an offence which his son had committed, and because the son could not be found.

Men accused of offences by Ismael’s partisans were thrown into prison, and kept indefinite periods without trial until some friend went to bribe his accuser. Ismael never went out into the island for fear of assassination, so well did he know the hatred borne him. This was the state of the island when I arrived in 1865.

CHAPTER I.

THERE was an annual fair at Omalos in the month of April, and I had intended to make this the occasion of a journey through Sphakia. The Pasha was very earnest in counselling me not to go, and magnifying difficulties for the passage; but this only made me more disposed to go, if only to cross his humor, as he had been exceedingly annoying to me, and we carried on a polite war, defensive on my side, but on his, part of a systematic course of bullying the consuls in order to diminish their influence with the people. His tactics were to encourage infractions of the consular prerogatives, imprison their employees or protégés, make questions at the custom-house, etc. He had, immediately after my arrival, got up a question with me, a patrol of zaptics (Albanian police) having entered the consulate to seize and carry off one of the sons of the vice-consul, who resided in the consulate.

I demanded an apology, which he refused. We then exchanged sharp notes, first in French, and then on his part in Turkish, to which I replied in English—a mutual checkmate. Meeting him at a whist party just after, he complained that I had written in English, and he had been obliged to hunt Chania for three days in order to find some person in confidence who could translate it for him, to which I replied that after four days’ search for a person whom I could admit into the secrets of the consulate, I had been finally obliged to have recourse to the public interpreter. He thereupon promised to write in French, and in this language the diplomatic broil went on. The beginning of the row had been an exchange of words between the patrol and the offending protégé. Whose the fault of the first word was an open question, but one with which mine had nothing to do, as no provocation justified infringement of the consular privilege of exterritoriality. The zapties were put on trial. I had four witnesses, who deposed that they saw them in the house. The four zapties swore that they had not entered the doors, and the Pasha declined to render judgment against them, saying that, as there were four witnesses for and an equal number against, the truth could not be ascertained. I demanded that the testimony should be taken down for transmission to Constantinople, whither I intended to appeal. By this time the affair occupied the whole attention of the population of Chania, a large majority being on my side, and the declaration of my intention to refer the affair to Constantinople annoyed the Pasha very much, as he saw that he would be compelled to make excuses. He, ingeniously, in taking the testimony of my witnesses, omitted administering the oath, while he administered it to his own. When, therefore, the certified copy of the proceedings was delivered me, I called in the parish priest, and took the evidence anew under oath, affixed it to the record, and sent it all on. This was having a trump too many for him, as he had intended to invalidate the evidence of my witnesses on the ground that they had refused to take the oath.

Judgment was delivered in Constantinople, ordering the apology to be made for violation of domicile, and the minister on my part engaged my protégé to make a declaration that he. had not had any intention of insulting the authorities. But, with this positive order communicated to both of us, he denied for several weeks that he had had any orders on the subject; but as I stuck to the affair like a leech, having nothing else to absorb my energies, he finally admitted judgment, and ordered the mulazim to ask my pardon, but cunningly managed to have the amends made in his own audience-room to escape éclat. I said nothing, but waited until he made me a visit, and without any warning introduced my culprit; and before he knew what was passing, the Roland was delivered for his Oliver. He did not attempt to conceal his annoyance, nor I my satisfaction, for he had notified me that he expected our apology chez lui. This was not the end of the Liliputian diplomatics, for on my next visit to him the Tasha insisted on presenting me with an intaglio, which, he said, he had bought of a peasant some days before. He knew that I was an amateur of gems, and he was a collector, and had several very fine ones. The intaglio was exquisite, but the genuineness doubtful, and, when he insisted on forcing it on me in spite of my repeated refusals, I accepted it, with the intention of sending it to the government if genuine, so as not to be tinder obligations to him. Reaching home, I drew a file across it, and found it to be a paste copy worth a dime. I immediately wrote him a note, enclosing the file, and telling him that, as he was a buyer of gems, and might not know how well they were counterfeited, I begged to enclose him an instrument I had found very useful.

After this skirmish, the general result of which, enormously magnified in popular report, was a mortifying defeat to the Pasha, merely from the obstinacy with which he had fought the question, we got into a chronic state of pique, and my resolution to go to Omalos and Sphakia put him into a great irritation. He had no right to oppose my going, but tried to make trouble, and began to talk about intrigues, etc. However, the news coming down from the mountains that the fair was to be turned into an Assembly stopped me, for a Cretan imbroglio is something into which no wise man will allow himself to be drawn voluntarily. On the 12th of April, the Assembly began to gather at Omalos, whence it moved to Boutzounaria, then to Nerokouro, nearer to Chania, where it remained until the gathering was nearly complete, when it moved back to Boutzounaria.

CHAPTER II.

THE real agitation began when the Assembly finally adjourned to Boutzounaria, a tiny village at the edge of the plain of Chania. Three thousand men were assembled on a little plateau overlooking the plain, and about three miles from the city. Here gushes out of the living rock the stream which supplies the city with water, by an aqueduct which dates from the Hellenic times. Metellus cut it when he laid siege to Cydonia, and the Cretans in the war of Greek independence repeated the offence, and though, in the latter case, the siege was raised by a fleet and army coming to the assistance of the Turks, the sufferings produced by cutting off the water were very great.

From here the people had a safe retreat into their fastness above, and had nothing to fear from the Turkish forces. They came unarmed, but kept patrols at night on all the roads leading from the city to guard against surprise. By day they could observe the whole plain from Suda to Platania; and here, looking down on the orange groves of Murnies and Perivoglia, the wide expanse of olive orchards, and the fields where thousands of sheep, the property of Mussulmans mainly, feed while the herbage is green with the spring rains, they passed the time much after the old Greek fashion, games of agility and strength occupying the time of the young, while the old discussed the affairs of state; but no disorder occurred during the session of the Assembly proper.

Sheep were roasted whole, the messengers came and went, deputations from the further districts came in slowly, others whose affairs demanded their presence at home went away, there being none of those professed politicians who live by attending conventions, and making the public harm their good, so that there could be no vicarious expression of opinion.

Finally, all was done, the ne plus ultra of democracy had said its say, and signed its name for the indignant regards of the most despotic of sovereigns. A solemn deputation of gray-headed captains of villages, the executive committee, brought to each of the consuls a copy of the petition, and consigned the original to the Governor for transmission to Constantinople. This functionary had been growing uneasy about the apparent unanimity and deliberateness of the Assembly, and, having cast his lead occasionally and found the water deeper than he thought, began to be anxious to see the Assembly dispersed. The moral force of the recognition by the consular corps of the peaceful and legal character of the meeting had dissuaded him from interrupting its labors; but, the petition once delivered, he peremptorily ordered the Cretans to go home and wait the answer, intending to repeat the trick he had so successfully tried before, namely, arresting the chiefs and calling a counter-assembly; and, further ordering the committee to disperse, it refused.

This was the position into which the Pasha had desired to draw the Cretans. Their Assembly was perfectly legal, they having a firman which permitted them to meet unarmed, the Porte having long before seen the impolicy of depriving them of a custom which was of so great antiquity and reverence; but the Pasha hoped to give an illegal color to their refusal to obey his order, and, according to his habit of making his will the supreme law, determined to make use of their persistence in their rights to precipitate the collision which he knew they were unprepared for; and, having once excited armed resistance, even against an illegal use of authority, he confidently counted on the support not only of his own government, but of the consuls. To this end, he called a conference of the consular corps, at which, having stated the measures he had taken, he declared his intention to use the military force at his disposal to disperse the Assembly. In this conference, a division was shown as to the advisability of using force.

The French consul (a Levantine of the lowest order, a bastard of one of the De Lesseps family by a Jewish adventuress, and an intense hater of the Greeks ever since the society of Syra, where he was once Chancelier de Consulat, refused to recognize his mistress, a retired saltimbanque from a cafe chantant of the Champs Elysées) supported the Pasha in everything, and even urged him to greater arbitrariness.

The English consul, Mr. Dickson, a man of the most humane character and entire honesty, had an unfortunate weakness before constituted authorities, and the greatest possible respect for the Turks, coupled with an Englishman’s innate dislike for a Greek. He had his orders, moreover, to cooperate with his French colleague, and, with his good faith and unsuspecting nature, he was no match for his intriguing and mendacious yoke-fellow, who led him wherever he wished. It was like coupling a faithful mastiff to a dirty bazaar dog. These two supported the Pasha from very different motives, but with the same result. All the others opposed any violence as inexpedient and unjustifiable, being entirely assured of the peaceful intentions of the committee.

Ismael opened the discussion by rehearsing his labors with the Assembly to induce them to submit and disperse, and declared that, having exhausted persuasion, he should employ force if the committee did not at once dissolve. Mr. Dickson said that his Excellency deserved great credit for his moderation, and hoped that he would continue to show the same quality, adding that thus far the Assembly had behaved in a strictly legal manner, being convoked in accordance with their privileges, but admitted that, if they refused to disperse on order, they rendered themselves amenable to force. M. Derché, the French consul, urged their immediate violent dispersal, but the others all declared their opinion that, the Assembly having met for a legal purpose, and having so far comported themselves in an entirely unoffensive manner and showed no intention of going beyond the object for which they had met, the Pasha had no pretext for the employment of force.

Mr. Colucci, the Italian consul, then stated that he had received information that the committee had expressed their willingness to disperse on receiving the assurance that the signers of the petition should not be persecuted by the Pasha, and that he considered that the Governor owed this assurance, since he and all others admitted that the Assembly and committee had so far committed no illegal act. His Excellency dodged the suggestion, and, rising, was about to dismiss the conference, when, seeing that all was on the point of being won to the arbitrary course of the Pasha, I begged to offer my protest against any implied endorsement on my part of the proposed violence, as, until the assurance of immunity had been given the Cretans, the peaceful expedients for assuring tranquility had not been exhausted, or need for employment of force arisen. The Italian, Russian, and other consuls followed me in protest.

The Pasha, disconcerted, sat down again, and the discussion was renewed. His Excellency hesitated, but Derché came to his relief with reasons for his not according the immunity asked, saying that the Pasha had no right to compromise the intentions of his government. I replied that there was no question of Constantinople in the matter. The Cretans had confidence in the good-will of the Sultan, but not in his Excellency. Mr. Dickson was of opinion that the assurance was already implied in the Pasha’s promise to support the petition with the Porte, and that, as the Assembly had committed no act to deserve persecution, it could not be supposed that they would be subjected to it. He therefore regarded the assurance as uncalled for. Six consuls were against the Pasha, and two with him, but he took M. Derché’s clue, and stood firm on the ground which that led him to, and so the conference ended.

The Pasha had, however, failed in getting the moral support of the consular corps to the blow which he had intended to strike, and dared not send the troops out. He made a great blunder in calling the conference, as the consuls had no right of intervention in the affair, but, like all over-cunning people, he caught himself in the trap he set for us. Having invited us not really to get our opinion, though he asked it, but to get our endorsement to his policy, he not only failed in this, but got a rebuff which made the experiment more hazardous than if he had said nothing. It had another bad effect for him in making public the difference between his Excellency and the consular corps, and, as the latter is believed in Turkish countries to be omnipotent, the popular feeling was immensely strengthened. The irritation of the Pasha against the consular corps was unbounded, especially against Colucci and myself; indeed, I may say, peculiarly against myself as an old enemy and the spokesman of the opposition.

Popular rumor magnified the difference, and myths as wild as those of the day of Minos made the tour of the island; one which I saw in a Greek newspaper represented me as rising in the conference and declaring that, if the Pasha sent troops against the committee, I would go and put myself in front of them, and then we should see if the troops dared fire!

Meanwhile, all the friendly consuls united in urging the dissolution of the committee, and leaving the protection of individuals to the governments of the protecting powers, as the only means of averting what was seen to be a disastrous affair for the Cretans. That this was the true policy events have shown.

The Cretans were not prepared to fight at that time, their friends on the Continent were no more prepared to assist them, and there was no supply of powder or arms in the island, nothing but old tufeks, trophies of the war of 1821-30; the whole Turkish empire was at peace, and its available force ready to be poured on the island. The committee wavered and half-decided to disperse, they offered to put themselves as a committee into the hands of the Pasha, and await in his palace, or other quarters assigned them, the reply to the petition. This was refused, and the critical question hung by a hair.

The influence of two persons prevailed over the committee against that of the consuls—one a priest called Parthenius Kelaides, there being two Parthenii in the committee; the other a Greek physician, temporarily in the island, known by the two names of Joannides and Pappadakis, long resident in England, an ultra-radical, and one of those who, ultra-demagogical in all their tendencies, are really honest in their intentions, and, wishing to do good, only succeed in doing the greater evil.

In Crete, Dr. Joannides is generally considered as the immediate cause of the disastrous turn events took, and, as soon as the insurrection took active form, he abandoned it to its manifest destiny, and has never been heard of since in the island. It has always been a question if the Russian consul was sincere in his union with his colleagues of the majority, it being thought by some that in his hostility, mainly personal, to the French consul, he secretly took ground against the unconditional submission, that the Pasha and M. Derché might not carry the day. Be this as it may, I am confident that with regard to fighting he was in accord with his colleagues, and considered that actual insurrection should be avoided, and that the instructions of the government were to this effect. But he was a man of very unsound judgment, and so passionate and personal in his way of seeing men and matters that I have always been of the opinion that, from mere personal feeling against Derché, he secretly strengthened Parthenius, over whom his influence was supreme, in his obstinacy, and so prevented the dispersal of the committee, which finally withdrew to the mountains to be secure from a coup de main. Before doing so, however, they offered to allow two or more battalions of troops to guard them at Boutzounaria, a proposition which the Pasha refused peremptorily, knowing that, so long as the committee remained a constituted body, the Cretans would respect its authority, but that, if they dissolved and dispersed, they would lose all right to act, or control over the people. So ingrained is the Cretan’s regard for the law of his ancient tradition that, while the whole population would have risen at once at the call of the committee as long as it was constituted, not one of the districts would have regarded an appeal made by the individual members when they had ceased to represent in due form the original Assembly. The question at issue was not, then, a trivial one, and in the reply to it lay the decision of peace or war.

CHAPTER III.

UNABLE to provoke a direct collision with the committee, the Pasha had recourse to another expedient: he called in the entire Mussulman population of the island to the walled cities. Totally unprepared for this unnecessary step, the unfortunate Mohammedans broke up their establishments of all kinds, and repaired to the fortresses in a state of the greatest irritation at the sacrifice they had made and the privations they had had to endure.

One complained that he had left his harvest uncut, and another had left his after it had been garnered; one told how he had been obliged, at a ruinous sacrifice, to dissolve partnership with a Christian neighbor with whom he had been engaged in silk-growing, the chief industry of the island, the Christian having no money to pay him for his share; and another had thrown all his silk-worms to the fowls. The consuls, on becoming aware of this movement, protested to the Pasha against a step so likely to produce collisions between the two religions; on which the Pasha sent counter-orders to his coreligionists to remain at home. The bearers of these orders met the Mussulmans on the roads, and succeeded in halting several bodies of them, while others, without provisions or protection from the weather, insisted on entering the cities. This confusion and vacillation increased the suffering and irritation of the people, and finally brought about the effect desired by the Pasha—a feeling of hostility against the Christians. A large body of these refugees encamped before the gates of Canéa, and menaced the Pasha with insurrection if they were not permitted to enter. The Pasha yielded, threw open the gates, and again sent secret messengers to invite the fugitives en route to come into the city.

Heraklion, Chania, and Rethymno were speedily filled to over­flowing by an exasperated mob of fanatics, whose menaces against the Christian population were neither measured nor secret. The Christians remembered past insurrections, and most of them had been witnesses of the scenes of 1858, when the armed Mussulmans had dragged the body of a Christian they had killed through the streets of Chania, and before the consulates, firing their pistols at the doors of the most obnoxious, and were only prevented from wholesale massacre by European men-of-war in the port. The entry of the Mohammedans was the signal for a panic with the Christians, and a frantic exodus commenced. The Lloyd steamers were overcrowded every trip; several Greek steamers came over, and caïques, and sailing-boats even, were freighted full, and sailed for Milos, Cerigotto, and other islands. In Heraklion, unrestrained by the presence of European representatives, the Mussulmans entered the houses of the Christians by force, and obliged the latter to make room for them; the same took place in Rethymno; while in Selinos the whole Christian population took to the mountains. Meanwhile, the Pasha had informed his government that insurrection was imminent, and demanded reinforcements of troops. These, beginning to arrive, exhilarated the Mussulman population, who now began to prepare for hostilities, and their priests began openly to preach a crusade against Christianity. A Dervish, who arrived with a battalion in which he served as chaplain, landed with a green banner, spread his carpet on the marina in front of the custom-house, and, after his prayer, began to preach the holy war and the extermination of Christianity, declaring that “the cross must no longer stand, but be put in the dust”. The rabble of porters and boat­men, mainly Arabs, Syrians, and other foreign Mussulmans, and intensely fanatical, were roused to the highest enthusiasm, and shouted “Amin! amin!” to his exhortations, when he continued his itinerary of the city. Information of the fact being brought to me, I took a witness of the Dervish’s conduct, and remonstrated at once with the general-in-chief, Osman Pasha, who ordered the Dervish on board a frigate and sent him to Heraklion, where was no European to report his proceedings.

The emigration of Christians to Greece continued until about 12,000 souls left the island, and at all points of contact mutual irritation of Christian and Mohammedan increased. The hostility of the Mussulmans to the consuls who opposed the Pasha became especially virulent, and we were, openly and continually threatened with being the first victims of the new crusade.

By this time it became evident to all in the island that the Pasha was laboring to provoke a collision, and that M. Derché was doing his best to assist him, but neither side seemed inclined to take the first step in open hostilities— the committee because they did not desire them, and the Pasha because he desired to avoid the responsibility of them. The first blood shed was of Christian by Christian, and furnishes so good an illustration of Cretan manners that it seems worth detailing. During the exchange of words which had taken place between the Pasha and the Assembly, a messenger of the former, a Cretan Christian, was insulted by one of the committee’s people, spit on, and bitterly reproached for his unpatriotic subserviency. His son shortly after assassinated the insulter. Both were Sphakiotes, a race with whom blood-vengeance is a religious obligation. It was supposed that the assassination was instigated by the Pasha as the means of bringing on hostilities; and, when the relatives of the murdered man went to execute justice on the murderer, they found the house fortified, and after a short skirmish, during which a child of the murderer was killed by a ball fired through the door, the attacking party retired to wait a more convenient opportunity, and the Pasha sent a battalion of troops to the locality to protect the murderer’s house, making no pretense whatever of bringing him to judgment. The move very nearly succeeded in bringing on hostilities, a captain of one of the adjoining villages, with his men, going at once to drive out the intruding Turks. The committee sent a body of picked men to disarm the villagers, in which they succeeded by stratagem, and so averted a collision.

Amongst the troops which arrived were 8,000 Egyptians, and with them the general-in-chief of the Egyptian army, Schahin Pasha, an accomplished diplomat and administrator of the Eastern type, munificent in gifts and promises, and magnificent in ceremonies and negotiations. He came in pursuance of a grand plan, concocted at Constantinople between the Marquis de Moustier, the Turkish and Egyptian governments, which was to coax or hire the Cretan chiefs into appealing to the Viceroy for protection, when, on the application of the plebiscite, the island was to be transferred to Egypt, on the payment by the Viceroy to the Sultan of a certain consideration, said to be £400,000 down, and £80,000 per annum tribute. De Moustier was to have received £100,000 as payment for his services in managing the affair, and in due course of time, it was whispered, the Bay of Suda, having been duly fortified by the Egyptians and made a naval station, was to have been transferred tale quale to France. Schahin, on arriving, placed himself in relations with the French consul, and under his advice concocted the plan of operations. It was a fatal mistake, and led to the ruin of the whole intrigue. Derché could comprehend but two kinds of men—those who are bought and those who buy them. He himself was of the former class; Schahin was a prince in the latter. Derché’s opinion of the Cretans was that any could be bought or frightened into their project, and Schahin, accepting Derché’s estimate, bid munificently for the votes of the Cretan chiefs, made presents to the churches, startling professions of liberality towards the Christians, and comported himself in the most approved style of Eastern potentates towards the consuls and all other influential personages.

Having prepared, as he supposed, a favorable reputation with the Cretan committee-men, he set out for the Apokorona, the rocky region which contains the passes to Sphakia, where the committee had moved its headquarters. There he commenced direct operations by distributing large sums of money amongst the influential Cretans, who, nothing loath, accepted the money, making no promises. At this juncture, the Governor-General, getting wind of Schahin’s plans, insisted on attending him during his interviews with the committee, and joined him in the Apokorona. He had a plan of his own, with which that of Schahin militated, and for which he had been for several years pre paring. This was, having prepared and precipitated the insurrection, and crushed it, as he confidently anticipated doing between bribery and force, to draw up a petition for signature by the Cretans, praying that the island might be made a principality, with Ismael as prince. He therefore did all in his power to prevent an understanding between Schahin and the committee. Many days passed thus in intrigues and counter-intrigues, until Ismael was struck down by a dangerous fever, and was brought back to Canéa scarcely alive, leaving the field open to Schahin, who thereupon made a rendezvous with the committee, but, with Egyptian faith, arranged a battalion of troops so as to catch them as they came to keep it. The wily mountaineers detected the trap, and broke off all communications, so that Schahin was obliged to return to Chania having gained nothing, and cursing the Cretans as a hard-headed, impracticable set of villains. He left, however, 4,000 troops at Vrysis, an important strategical point in the Apokorona, menacing the approaches to Sphakia and the headquarters of the committee, and holding the most direct communication between the eastern and western parts of the island.

Having learned the worthlessness of M. Derché as a means of influencing the Cretans, he had begun to enquire amongst the islanders whose influence would best be employed to serve his purposes, and was referred to the Russian consul and myself; I presume primarily to myself, from the fact that all the new proposals and negotiations were directed at me, and, after many idle compliments and some magnificent entertainments, his Excellency condescended to open his plans with apparent frankness to me, and proposed to me in so many words to pay me any sum I should name if I could bring to bear the influence necessary to secure the success of the Egyptian scheme. I took his propositions into consideration, and immediately communicated them to our minister at Constantinople, by whom they were, I believe, laid before Lord Lyons, who, I presume, quashed the matter, as it never was heard of more in the island.

Meanwhile, the agitation in the island, and the hostility between the Mussulman and Christian population, were rapidly increasing. One of the principal Cretan Mohammedans, notorious for his activity and cruelty in the war of 1821-30, and who served the troops at Vrysis as guide and interpreter, was killed under the following circumstances: Having entered a cafe in one of the Christian villages near Vrysis, he was boastingly narrating his former feats, amongst which was the murder of a white Christian family of eleven persons, whom he found at supper in their own house unarmed, and, after having been welcomed by them, he closed the doors, and killed the whole on the spot. He continued boasting of what he would do in the coming war in the same vein, and on leaving the cafe was waylaid by a relative of the murdered family, and shot dead.

This was the first Mussulman blood, and the body was carried with great pomp to Chania, and lay in state outside the gates, the remonstrances of the consuls preventing it from being carried through the city according to the intention of the relatives. The family of the new victim being large and influential, it gathered in numbers outside the gate, blocking it up temporarily, while the women of the connection went en masse to the palace of the Pasha to demand vengeance on the murderers. The Mussulman population became intensely exasperated, and proposed retaliating on the Christians in general, beginning with the consuls. The whole consular body united in pressure on the Pasha to induce him to repress the agitation, and succeeded so far that no immediate outbreak occurred. The body was buried without worse demonstrations than insults and menaces to all Christians, whoever and wherever, and the crowd dispersed by order of the Pasha.

But though no actual violence occurred, the state of excitement was intense, and it became evident that, in spite of all the influence of the consular body, the least untoward incident might precipitate a general massacre of the Christians in the cities. The exodus by sea continued, and the houses of the Russian, Italian, and Swedish consuls, and my own, at Khalepa, were besieged by terror-stricken crowds of Christians without the means of emigrating to Greece, and bringing their household goods to be stored under the protection of the flags. In the Italian consulate alone were over 150, and several cabins clustered round my door were filled with women and children, while hundreds more, abandoning everything, took to the mountains.

The Mussulmans were anxious for the fighting to begin. The Governor had distributed rifles and ammunition ad libitum to his Cretan co-religionaries. The Russian and Italian consuls and myself urged at Constantinople concessions and the removal of the Governor, and all except the English and French begged for the dispatch of a man-of-war for the protection of European residents. M. Derché and Mr. Dickson, considering that the presence of any European flag would be an encouragement to the insurrection, refused to unite in this request.

Several times the gates of the city had been closed to prevent a sortie of the Mussulmans in the city to attack the consulates. We doubled the number of our cavasses, got revolvers and rifles in order, prepared mattresses for barricading the houses, and organized a strong patrol from the Cretans who had taken refuge in the consulates, to watch the roads by which the Turks would come from Chania.

At this juncture news arrived of the appointment of the former Governor-General of the island, Mustapha Kiritli Pasha, to supersede Ismael. The Imperial Commissioner, for this was the title by which he was to be known, had great personal influence over the Cretans of both religions, and, if he had come immediately on his appointment, would probably have succeeded in averting the insurrection. I find in my correspondence of this date, August 28, 1866:

“As to the insurrection itself, it waits to draw first blood. The Greeks to the number of thirty to thirty-five thousand [an enormously exaggerated estimate, I afterward found] are concentrated in the mountains, and determined to fight it out to the bitter end. The delays of diplomacy to right a wrong that was too patent even for your [English] consul to blind himself to, have permitted a trouble to grow that might have been rooted up with reasonable concessions on the part of the government, and now nothing but death and desolation will bring back Crete to Turkish rule. They will now insist on independence where they only demanded common justice. We shall doubtless have another sanguinary, desperate struggle, and a depopulated island, unless Europe intervenes to right the wrong it did in 1830”.

The troops in the Apokorona were face to face with the Cretans armed to protect the committee, and that step forward would make a collision certain. The irregulars, proud of their new rifles, were firing in every direction all over the country. One heard rifle-balls whistling past, falling on the roofs and everywhere continually. Still no European ships. By every post we pleaded with our ministers at Constantinople for protection. The anxiety and excitement became almost unendurable. The whole community seemed to be in a state of tension and apprehension that approached madness. I found myself going continually and unconsciously to my balcony, telescope in hand, although ten minutes before I failed to discover an object in the range of vision. I grew, like the genius of the Arabian tale in his vase of lead, ready to curse the tardy deliverer that he tarried so long. The sight of a steamer on the horizon produced a loathing, as one after another we had watched them approach only to see the accursed crescent increase on our vision. One night a party of Mussulmans, passing through the suburb in which we resided, in frolic fired several pistol-shots, yelling “Death to the Christians!”. In a few minutes, all that remained of Christianity in the quarter outside the gates of the consulates were rushing in a state of uncontrollable panic to beg admission. My cavasses were obdurate and indifferent, being Mussulmans, and refused to open, and, while I lay listening for indications of further and serious disturbance, my wife had descended, thrown the doors open, admitting the crowd of women and children, who passed the rest of the night seated on the floor of the consulate. None of us left our walls needlessly, and then only with an armed guard. My children for weeks did not pass the threshold, and, when business called either of us, whom the Cretans called the friendly consuls, to the palace of the Governor-General, we were greeted passing through the streets with unmistakable scowls and menaces. The sentinel at the city-gate as I passed one day, instead of presenting arms, as etiquette requires to a consular officer, saluted me as an infidel dog, accompanying the epithet with a menace and, grimace comprehensible even to one who understood not a word of Turkish. I begged my wife at last to take the children and go to Syra, where they would be in security, but she resolutely refused, believing that her departure would be the signal for the last panic among the Christian women, who depended on our protection. Only they who know the extent and bitterness of Mussulman fanaticism can estimate the danger or anxiety of those few weeks.

CHAPTER IV

THE first relief was the flying visit of Admiral Lord Clarence Paget, in the Psyche dispatch-boat, direct from Constantinople en route for Malta, to inform us that the Arethusa had been ordered to Crete. This was a reprieve of a few days, and was followed by complete freedom from anxiety on the arrival of the Arethusa, the sound of whose saluting guns at Suda Bay (the port of Chania for large ships) produced an emotion which was like waking from a long nightmare. We all went to Suda to pay our official and personal visits, which the officers returned, and blue­jackets swarming in the town, and racing over the plain of Chania like mad fox-hunters, hilarious, indifferent to yata­ghan or bullet, as if they were anything but Giaours, assured both Turk and Christian that at least the Europeans must be respected. We took down our barricades, and again moved about freely; yet the feeling was so strong amongst the Mussulmans that the English were on their side that the native Christians experienced no benefit from the cause which brought us comparative relief. We attended service the Sunday subsequent to the arrival of the Arethusa on board, and, lunching with Captain McDonald, were called from the table to see the stars and stripes rounding the point and entering the bay. They floated from the gaff of the corvette Ticonderoga, whose commandant, being at Trieste, came for old friendship’s sake to look after us on getting the first news of the insurrection. Her stay for a few days was a demonstration of force which, so far as I was concerned, left a most healthy impression as to my being supported by the United States Government, the more that the Ticonteroga sailed from Suda direct for Constantinople (according to her commander’s original intention), a course which produced a general impression in Crete that she had gone to support my view on the question. Nothing could exceed in friendliness and cordiality the manner in which the commander, Commodore Steedman, and his officers supported me in my difficult position, and identified the national dignity with the respect due to the humblest of its representatives. The Arethusa, a few days after her arrival, was succeeded by H. B. M.’s gunboat Wizard, which during several subsequent months was our only and sufficient protector. Her humane and gallant young commander, Murray, will ever be remembered with gratitude and honor by every European resident in Crete during the insurrection. He placed us all under obligations of many kinds which a passing notice can only faintly recognize.

Meanwhile, the dissension between the Governor-General and the Egyptian Pasha increased in violence, until anything like co-operation became impossible, the policy of the latter being clearly pacific with a show of force. He wished to avoid a collision as long as possible, hoping still to conciliate Cretan public opinion, while Ismael was determined to do everything in his power to bring about hostilities. The Egyptian therefore threw himself for support on the consular body, from whom he received that degree of support which their instructions and personal sympathies rendered possible, as, with the exception of M. Derché, all the members of the corps were anxious to prevent bloodshed.

The committee sent to the Italian and Russian consuls and myself urgent entreaties that we would persuade the Egyptians to withdraw from Vrysis, a position which provoked attack by the Cretans, as, if maintained by the troops, it prevented all strategical movements by the insurrectionary forces. This request we all urged on the attention of Schahin, and he energetically demanded from the Governor-General permission to withdraw the menaced battalions. The effective reply of the Governor was to withdraw all the Turkish supports, and leave Schahin to his own resources, compelling him to devote two of his four battalions remaining to keeping open the communications of Vrysis with the sea-shore. While this family quarrel paralyzed the government at Chania, the Mussulmans in Selinos, a fortress on the south side of the island, were shut in by strong guards of Christians posted on the hills round about, and were even more impatient than at Canéa because more inconvenienced, and finally made a sortie on one of the adjoining Christian villages. They were fruitlessly warned back, and, persisting, were fired upon, and several killed and wounded. Ismael immediately called a council of war, and made a requisition on Schahin for a battalion of Egyptians to go with another of Turks to the relief of the Seliniotes. Schahin sent for me at once to advise him on the matter. I recommended him strongly not to obey the requisition, as the breach of the peace having taken place between the indigenes of the two religions justified him in assuming that hostilities did not exist, and, according to his instructions, that he was under no circumstances to be drawn into an offensive movement. He therefore returned answer that, his battalions at Vrysis being menaced, and this affair being only a collision between Cretans of the two religions, he was not justified in withdrawing any of his remaining troops from a position where they might be needed to secure the safety of those already compromised, and declined to obey the requisition. The expedition was therefore abandoned, though the steamers were lying in the roadstead with steam up ready to transport the troops. At the same time, news arrived from Vrysis that the Cretans had concentrated at the passes, and forbade the sending of any more supplies to the Egyptian camp, under penalty of attack. This produced another request from Schahin to the Russian consul and myself to urge the committee to take no such offensive step, he promising at the same time not to make common cause with the Turkish troops, even should they be attacked, so long as the Egyptian troops were not molested in any way.

On the heels of this came news of another sortie from Selinos of the Mussulmans, which had been repulsed, as well as another of the regular troops made in support of them. The receipt of this news brought excitement in Chania to its culmination, and irritation toward the insurgents (for such they had substantially become) began to find expression in acts of violence to unoffending Christians in and about the city. A Christian who kept horses for hire at the gates of the city, was attacked and beaten and stabbed to death; immediately after, another, in the city, met the same fate; and the authorities taking no notice whatever of these murders, the fanatics, emboldened and having tasted blood, murdered, pillaged, and robbed in every direction.

The panic which ensued amongst the few remaining Christians was indescribable. Many started on foot, alone or in small parties, for the mountains, but, having been entirely disarmed, most of them were cut off and murdered on the way. Others, coming to the city in ignorance of these events, were met and shot down on the roads. No one was allowed to carry arms to defend himself, nor was any investigation made into these matters. The state of the country for the next few days defies description. Gunshots were heard in every direction, and the more friendly of the Mussulman peasantry brought news of single bodies here, and groups there, by the roadside, in houses, and in chapels, where they had taken refuge. No one dared go out to investigate the truth of most of these reports, but the secretary of the Greek consul made an excursion, accompanied by several cavasses, as far as Galatas, a village of the plain, three miles from Chania, and counted seven dead bodies naked by the way. By the seaside, between my house and the city, were the slaughter-houses where all the cattle and sheep for the use of the city and army were butchered. Here were ordinarily immense flocks of ravens, accustomed to batten without disturbance on the offal thrown out on the shore. Within two or three days the whole of those birds deserted the shore, where they did not reappear for weeks, but were to be seen in small flocks hovering amongst the olive-groves of the plain.

During this state of things, extreme hostilities broke out at several points of the island. The messengers we had sent to the committee to urge a truce with the Egyptians had not been permitted to pass the lines, or for some other reason failed in reaching their destination, so that our message was never received by the committee, who, in pursuance of their previous resolution, summoned the Egyptians peremptorily to leave the Apokorona or take the consequences, and, the refusal being equally peremptory, the committee ordered their forces to close at once upon the troops, cut off access to the springs, and close the passage to all relief. The unfortunate Egyptians, disastrously repulsed in an attempt to recover the springs of water from which they had their daily supply, were driven within their entrenched camp and closely blockaded. The battalions ordered to reopen the communications, being also repulsed m their attack in the passes, and those in camp having exhausted all their ammunition, food, and water, were compelled to surrender at discretion. The Cretans permitted them to march out with their arms and all of their equipments they could carry, and gave them forty-eight hours to send mules without escort to carry off the remainder. No parole even was exacted not to bear arms in future.

Simultaneously with this affair, the Turkish troops at Selinos, having made a sortie in force on the Christians who beleaguered them, were drawn into the defiles of the mountains, and were then attacked, beaten, and driven into the mountain fortress of Candanos, where they were blockaded closely. These feats of arms naturally elated the Cretans, and exasperated the Turks correspondingly. The Governor-General lost all self-possession, and abandoned the reins of government to his subordinates. Confusion became anarchy, and, to increase the dismay, the few remaining Christians in the cities were forbidden to leave the island. The Egyptians, mortified by their defeat, assailed the Christians in the villages nearest their new encampment in the most brutal and barbarous manner.

The presence of the Wizard in the port alone prevented a general massacre of the Christians in Canéa. Assemblies of the Mussulman Cretans were held in their quarter of the city, with the avowed purpose of going out to kill the Christians in the suburbs, beginning with the consuls. The military authorities had the presence of mind to close the gates to all Christians entering or Mussulmans leaving the town. The whole Christian population of the island seemed in arms, and considerable parties of them made raids within sight of the walls of the city, carrying off as prisoners a number of Mussulmans who were engaged in getting in the vintage.

At the moment when it seemed impossible that con­fusion should not end in universal anarchy and massacre, the Imperial Commissioner arrived. Mustapha Kiritli Pasha had, by an impartial and energetic, if barbarous, administration of the affairs of the island, secured the respect and even esteem of the Christians, while his merciless repression of previous insurrections had inspired the strongest belief in his military capacity. As he entered the town, a Christian was shot down in the road behind him, one of the few who, influenced by the old regard for the Pasha, ventured to follow in his train; and, at the same moment, another was stabbed to death within a few hundred yards— a well-known employee of one of the principal Turkish beys, whose position had hitherto been his protection. The installation of Mustapha checked these disorders, and, investigation being ordered into them, the Governor-General, whose incapacity and malevolence became apparent, was peremptorily ordered to leave for Constantinople, not even being allowed time to pack his household furniture. The Commissioner at once commenced organizing and preparing expeditions to attack the Christians and relieve the troops cooped up at Candanos. The Cretan Mohammedans, to the number of 5,000, were regularly enrolled as volunteers. Strict orders were given in every direction for the protection of unarmed individuals, and in all the villages within the power of the government forces the option was given to the inhabitants of inscribing themselves as friends of the government and taking written protection —a course which would expose them to the hostility of the insurgent forces— or of joining their coreligionists in the mountains. A proclamation was issued, directed to the committee, in which the insurgents were summoned instantly to submit and give up their arms. No concessions were made, none even promised; the purport of the firman was, “Submit, be good children, and you shall see what you shall see!”. As was to be expected, the committee, flushed by its recent successes and encouraged by the promise of succor from Greece, where committees had been formed at the first news of hostilities having commenced, rejected the proclamation contemptuously, and issued a counter-proclamation, which was forwarded to all the consuls and to the ministers at Constantinople.

As I shall have, in the course of this history, to make serious question of the conduct of the Greek government, I shall do it the justice to say that, to the best of my information, it had up to this time utterly discouraged the insurrection as injudicious and ill-timed. But the affair of Vrysis had so great an effect on public opinion in Greece that the government was obliged to make concessions to it.

Mustapha found the Egyptian army diminished and utterly demoralized by defeat. About 12,000 Turkish troops were in the island, indifferently equipped and in a poor state of discipline; added to these, he had his 5,000 irregulars and a few hundred Albanians. From these he organized an army of about 10,000 men, with whom he marched to the relief of Candanos. The direct passes were all held by the Cretans in such strength that the Turks were unable to force their way, and they were obliged, therefore, to make a long detour through the western part of the island, constantly harassed by parties of the insurgents, who held all the advantageous positions on the route.

The expedition succeeded in relieving Candanos without a fight, the Cretans retiring before the overpowering forces of the Commissioner, not too soon for the besieged, who were at the verge of starvation before relief arrived. The siege was marked by the usual atrocities of those religious barbarian conflicts. An incident, related to me by a Christian Cretan who assisted at the siege, will suffice to show the animus by which they were already possessed. Some of the besieged Cretans, recognizing a brother of a prisoner in their possession amongst the besiegers, killed the prisoner, and, cutting him up as the butchers cut meat, hung the members above the parapet, calling to the besiegers that they had meat yet. The besiegers retaliated by treating half-a-dozen prisoners in the same way, aid calling to the besiegers that, if they wanted more, they might come and get it

The Commissioner withdrew immediately, taking in his escort all the Mussulman families who had been blockaded in Selinos and Candanos, together with those of some neighboring villages who had not hitherto been molested by the Christians, the insurrectionary committee having still hopes of conciliating the opposition of their Mussulman compatriots, and, in pursuance of this policy, having given orders to do everything possible to induce the Mussulmans to make common cause with the Christians. These, however, augmented the train of the Commissioner with their families and flocks, and the return of the army so encumbered was slow and dangerous, the Christians following and harassing the flanks, showing resistance in front at all difficult passes, and cutting off stragglers; the troops, in retaliation, destroying all villages on the road of return as they had on that of going. I had been able to watch from my balcony the departure of the troops, and follow their line of march by the smoke of the burning villages; and after two weeks’ absence, during the latter part of which no communications had been kept up between the army and the capital, the wildest panic prevailing at headquarters, where rumors were generally believed to the effect that the whole army had been blockaded, I was able, from the same point, to perceive the return of the troops by the same ominous indications. In returning by a shorter route than that followed in going, the army had to pass by a difficult ravine, called Kakopetra, where the Christians made a determined attack and attempt to block the road, in which they would certainly have succeeded had they possessed modern firearms, but as they were armed mostly with the tufeks of their grandfathers, or pistols of the war of Greek independence, an attack on equal terms was impossible. The Pasha, by throwing out his irregulars on both sides to keep back the insurgents, and pressing down the road, with the imperial troops and Egyptian regulars escorting the families and flocks, succeeded in forcing his way through, though with serious loss. A European surgeon attached to the government hospital at Canéa assured me that the killed amounted to 120 and the wounded to upwards of 800, the wounds being mostly slight from spent balls apparently fired from pistols. In fact, if the Cretans had been well armed and provided with good ammunition, the campaign would probably have ended there and then, and Kakopetra become as famous as Askypho in the great insurrection, when the same Mustapha, in 1823, was blockaded, and his army almost exterminated, himself, with his immediate followers, only escaping by scattering the contents of the military treasury on the road.

The successful return of the army to Chania was the signal of the most enthusiastic rejoicings on the part of the Mussulman population of Canéa, who, with the extravagance of a semi-barbaric people, had passed the last few days in the wildest frenzy of fear and irritation.

CHAPTER V

THE rescue happily concluded, the Pasha organized a movement against Lakus, Theriso, Keramia, strong points where the Christians had assembled in considerable numbers and from whence they might harry the plains of Chania carrying off flocks and occasionally prisoners. This expedition consisted of twelve thousand men. While the organization was going on, the Christians came down to the number of several hundred, and took possession of the direct road to Theriso, and attacked the block-house on the hill of Malaxa overlooking the plain, and three miles from Chania. The attack on the block-house necessarily failed from the want of artillery, and the Commissioner succeeded in reinforcing the garrison strongly after a sharp repulse in which the reinforcements were driven back nearly to the plain country, as I myself was able to perceive, watching the skirmish through a telescope. The day after, two battalions were ordered to clear the road to Theriso, held by the insurgents, and were assisted by a battery of artillery, taking the Cretans in flank from the block-house of Malaxa, firing across an impassable ravine. The attack lasted the whole afternoon, and, watching the affair through my glass, I could perceive that neither the direct nor the flank movement produced the least impression on the insurgents, who maintained their position till nightfall, when the troops were withdrawn to the plain. The next day the attack was renewed with five thousand men and a considerable force of irregulars.

The Cretans fell back from their position of the day before to the ridges and ravines which cut up the plateau of Keramia, where they received the attack of the troops, and, always retreating but contesting every inequality of ground, they fell back to the precipitous spurs of the White or Sphakian Mountains on the further side of the plain, where they made good their position during the remainder of the day. The losses on either side we were never able to ascertain, though the Cretans admitted a loss of seven killed and thirty or forty wounded, among the former being a son of Manosouyanaki, the chief captain of the district, who commanded the defence. The troops returned at night, having occupied the whole day in making an advance of about three miles, but the official report the next day declared that the movement had been perfectly successful, without the loss of a man killed or wounded. The expedition against Lakus, proceeding westward, turned that position, which the Cretans abandoned without contest, and retreated across the almost impassable ravine which separates the hill of Lakus from the central chain of mountains, to Zurba, a village situated on a bold bastion, which could only be attacked successfully from the higher mountains, and which they had fortified in a rude manner as depot and hospital. The number of Cretans at Zurba amounted to six hundred, the attacking force as many thousand, with two batteries of artillery; but after two days’ bombardment, during part of which time I counted (Zurba being only nine miles in a straight line from my house) thirty shots per minute, and three assaults, the Turks were obliged to abandon the attack and move on to Theriso. This village, an ancient stronghold of Crete, which, with the ravine leading to it, has been the scene of many disasters to the Turkish troops in the different insurrections, is situated in a valley surrounded on all sides but one by abrupt hills, and could easily have been held by five hundred well-disciplined and resolute men against the whole Turkish army. The Cretans lacked not resolution, but unfortunately for their discipline the news arrived at this moment that the Panhellenion blockade-runner had landed her first cargo of arms and supplies on the north side of the island, on learning which nearly the whole force stationed for the protection of Theriso went to assist in the debarkation of the cargo. Mustapha took this moment for the attack on Theriso, which he occupied without opposition, and evacuated with equal celerity on receiving warning of the return of the Cretans, armed with the rifles of the Greek national guard and reinforced by a body of Hellenic volunteers. The Cretans, following their usual policy, however, gathered on his flanks and harassed his retreat, for it virtually became such, until he reached the positions attained in the previous attack by Keramia, where he encamped to reorganize the movement onward through the Rhizo against the Apokorona.

In a campaign of seven days, he had destroyed nearly a score of villages, most of them undefended; had utterly destroyed all hope of compromise or conciliation; and, though he had penetrated the strongest outposts of the insurgents, had attained no other result than the temporary possession of the position of Lakus, the village being a mass of ruins, as a base of operations in case of a new attack on Theriso or an expedition against Omalos, amid the western peaks of the White Mountains. He had anticipated great moral effects from his mountain artillery, but the Cretans learned to despise it. With their old-fashioned fire­arms, they had managed to harass the Turkish troops to such an extent that they looked to the days when they should fight with rifles with enthusiasm and resolution. Then every burned village left an additional number of men who, having lost all their property, had no interest in peace; so that every advantage he had gained had only increased the force opposed to him. I urged this consideration as strongly as possible on the Commissioner in several visits, which was all the better reason in his mind to make him insist on his policy. He had expected that his name would induce immediate submission, or, at least, that in a single battle he would make so decided an impression that the favorable terms he was then prepared to offer would be at once accepted, but, till the military power of the Cretans was completely broken, the Porte was determined to make no concessions of any kind. The insurgents, on the other hand, were already under the influence of Hellenic enthusiasts, and receiving munitions of all kinds by the blockade-runners, and the drift of their counsels was toward war. It was clear now that the Porte had made a most disastrous blunder, in fact an unbroken series of blunders in all its measures. It should not have entertained the project of transference in the beginning; in the second place, having decided on the transfer, it should have carried it out logically, and not by a bastard popular vote enforced by the presence of an Egyptian army; and finally, having decided to send the Commissioner, it should have sent him at once, instead of keeping him and the answer to the petition waiting for three months. Its whole course was irritating and unjust. It had had no excuse for the employment of force, and was warned by the consular corps, without exception, of the previous dishonest, tyrannical, and impolitic conduct of Ismael Pasha. If it had a consistent policy in the whole matter, it could only have been to provoke an insurrection in Crete when all the other provinces were unable to rise, and so disarm by a crushing suppression the enemy most dreaded of all its subject provinces.

The finale of the Theriso campaign was marked by the appearance of the great Deus ex machina of the insurrection, the Russian frigate Grand Admiral, and the commencement of the real moral intervention of Russia in the already complicated affair. The Russian commander, Boutakoff, was too fit a selection for the role which events compelled (or permitted) him to play to have been intentionally chosen by any government. In the three years subsequent to his arrival, I saw him often, and knew as much of his opinions and feelings as it is permitted an outsider to know of a Russian official, and both his acts and language have always confirmed my impression that the Russian Government did not influence the turn events took, and anticipated only a speedy and disastrous end to the insurrection, while entertaining the most cordial sympathy and good wishes for a more prosperous end than any sane man would have expected. In fact, with the exception of the boldest of the insurgents and some harebrained Greeks, no one in the island anticipated anything but ruin from the movement. Captain Boutakoff was a devout and liberal Christian, a type of all that is most chivalric, patriotic, and compassionate in manhood, large-brained, prudent, and, if zealous enough to merit all the honors then and since conferred on him by his sovereign, he was never capable of any patriotic vice worse than the most profound reticence. To know him as I knew him was to conceive a better opinion of his country. I am morally certain that Boutakoff never said or did anything to encourage in any way the hopes of the Cretans, or lead them to indulge in dreams of European intervention in their favor. His position was that of a humane observer, and with all the sympathy which existed between him and myself, and the mutual confidence in our personal intercourse, I could find in his language and acts no trace of arrière-pensée in favor of any other interest than the real good of the Cretans. My own strong sympathy with the unhappy islanders made me the ally and co-operator with whoever gave them any help, and placed me, I have good reason to believe, high in the confidence of the Russian authorities in Crete and Constantinople; and, with no political interest in the matter other than Cretan, I am free to confess that, while I believed Russian policy in Crete to be the good of Crete, I was willing to aid in carrying out any plans that policy might point out. If, then, these plans had pointed out the secret encouragement of the insurrection as desirable, I am certain that I should have been influenced in that direction. It will be seen before I have finished that I am no apologist for the Russian conduct of this affair when it had become matter of European interest and action; but I must do the Russian Government the justice to declare that it is in no wise responsible for the disaster and carnage which the war brought on, and that it was not until several months that it openly gave the revolt moral encouragement (as a means of weakening the Turkish empire?)

The Imperial Commissioner having concentrated and reorganized his troops at Condapoulo, a village of the plain of Keramia, transferred his base of operations to Kalyves, on the sea and at the mouth of the river which drains the Apokorona, and as soon as the change was effected commenced his march toward Krapi, the main pass of Sphakia. The troops were first opposed at Stylos, the first of the natural positions of which the country affords so many, and were repulsed in a first attack. The vanguard were of Egyptians, who were in this campaign systematically put foremost and encouraged in every brutality and ferocity, in the hope apparently of making them good troops, their natural temper being unfavorable to that end. Though the result of this treatment certainly did show that nobody is so brutal and devilish as a coward, and the fellahs eminently distinguished themselves in devastation and killing of defenseless people, they never succeeded in exciting any other feeling than hatred and contempt in the Cretan. At Stylos, as in other places, they were beaten with ease, and it was only on the following day, when the Cretan positions were flanked and the irregulars sent forward, that the insurgents evacuated their strong positions. In this affair the Egyptian general, Ismael Pasha, urging, his troops to retrieve their disgrace at Vrysis, was mortally wounded. The troops attacked the position of Campos, which was abandoned by all combatants, the remaining inhabitants being put to death, and the insurgents relinquished all the country as far as Vafé to the Turks, who ravaged it in the most thorough manner, with the extreme of barbarity and atrocity to all the Christian inhabitants who were unfortunate enough to fall into their hands. In the neighborhood of Kephala there are numerous grottoes, partly natural and partly excavated, as places of refuge from immemorial times, some of them celebrated in the traditions of the island for the sieges they had maintained. Into these many of the Christians retreated, taking with them their effects. In one of these about two hundred villagers, mostly old men, women, and children, had taken refuge, and, refusing to surrender, were stifled in the cave. A woman came, one day, to my house to obtain protection and charity, having been brought a prisoner to Canéa, and narrated to me the circumstances of her cap­ture. She was, she told me, on her way from her village to a larger one in the Apokorona to purchase bread, and was in the company of eleven men, all Christians and unarmed, going with the same intention. They were stopped in the road by a party of Seliniote irregulars, who deliberately beheaded the men and piled their heads in the path, taking her with them to headquarters to extort from her information as to the places of concealment of her compatriots. Giving no desired indications, she was about to be beheaded, when two Egyptians whom she had sheltered and fed after the defeat of Vrysis recognized her, and, stating her kindness to the Pasha, she was released and sent to Chania.

The consequence of this severity was not what Mustapha Pasha expected it to be, to intimidate the Cretans into submission, but to drive them into the high mountains, where hundreds perished from hunger and cold. As children as well as adults of both sexes were welcome game to the fanaticism called out by the first taste of Christian blood, and no partial submission was accepted, the cruelty being the means to an end quite characteristic of Turkish policy and the nature of the Albanian, who years before had earned the title of the butcher of Crete and as the submitted had no power to induce the submission of the more resolute insurgents, there was no possible safety to any portion of the population except in the mountains, where a large proportion of the weakest died, leaving the men unencumbered for vengeance. Every step of the Turkish authorities was a blunder. Submission being useless unless complete, and complete submission out of the power of any one to enforce, there remained only complete insurrection, and this the commissioner succeeded in exciting, with a renewal of all the old religious animosity, and a desperation natural to men to whom surrender brought no protection, and submission no guarantee.

CHAPTER VI

NO resistance was after this offered until Vafé was reached. Here about two hundred Greek volunteers and a thousand Cretans, under the command of Hadji Mikhali, of Lakus, and Costa Veloudaki, of Sphakia, were concentrated. The Cretan chiefs were opposed to any regular fighting, and counseled a retreat into the ravines, where they could entangle the troops and attack them without serious risk to themselves, while a pitched fight was not only not in the way of the islanders, but, if lost, as they considered it must be in view of the overpowering Turkish forces, it would discourage the movement greatly. Zimbrakaki, the commander of the volunteers, with the most of his men, wished not to abandon so strong a position, at which they had, moreover, constructed a strong redoubt, without fighting, and it was decided to make a stand. The majority of the Cretans, however, recognizing no authority but that of their captains, withdrew before the fight, which, had Mustapha been a commander careful of the lives of his troops, might have been decided by flanking movements without firing a shot, as his army was composed of ten thousand regulars and fully three thousand irregulars, Albanian and Cretan, while the Christians were hardly five hundred. No forces the committee could have assembled would have made the stand a prudent or justifiable one under the circumstances, and its result was what the Cretan chiefs had foreseen. Mustapha, as usual, opened with a direct assault of Egyptians, which was repulsed with heavy loss; but, in the meantime, a body of Albanians were engaged in climbing the heights which protected the flanks of the position, and so nearly succeeded in surprising the Greeks that they only saved themselves by precipitate flight. A few gallant fellows, indifferent to the odds or the certainty of defeat, were killed, taken prisoners, or escaped by suicide. The committee, with the Hellenes, retreated to Askyfo, and made the best preparations to defend the ravine which their demoralized forces permitted; and so formidable was the position that Mustapha decided not to attack it, but to be content with the moral advantage of the victory at Vafé, which was nearly fatal to the insurrection, in spite of the triviality of the losses of the Christians, which did not surpass thirty killed of both Hellenes and Cretans. The latter had attributed invincibility to their allies, and to find them defeated so utterly at the first encounter paralyzed the insurrection for the moment; and, if the Turkish commander had moved energetically on Askyfo, it is not probable that any serious defence would have been made, and, as there was then no other center of resistance, the taking of Askyfo would have left the movement without any power of forming another nucleus of moral force. The committee must have dispersed, and the thousands of families assembled in Sphakia must have surrendered.

But Mustapha, remembering his former disaster in the defile of Krapi, hesitated, waited at Prosnero and in the Apokorona, while the Sphakiote chieftains craftily negotiated, and made their calculations on the amount of assistance they could get from Greece, the measure of Concessions or personal advantages they could hope for as the price of submission, and prolonged the practical truce until the reaction from the effects of the late defeat began. Hadji Mikhali, with his Lakiotes, went back to Lakus and Theriso, entirely abandoned by the troops, and resumed his old policy of little and incessant raids to harass the Turkish commander and keep his own men from the despondency of inaction.

The immediate salvation of the insurrection was, however, the arrival of Col. Coroneos, the ablest by far of the Greek chiefs, and the only one, it would seem, who was capable of adapting his plans to the kind of material he had to work with. He arrived too late either to prevent or assist in the battle of Vafé, and, seeing the danger the insurrection was in of dying of despondency and the dissidence of its chiefs, moved at once into the central provinces, and, collecting together such Cretans as he could find, surprised and cut off two small Turkish detachments, and with unimportant advantages reawakened the enthusiasm of the fickle and excitable islanders, gained for himself the prestige of victory, and rapidly recruited a considerable force.

At the same time, slight advantages were won by Hadji Mikhali near Chania, and by other chiefs in the eastern provinces, where an Ottoman detachment had been disastrously repulsed in an attempt to penetrate into the Lasithri district. Coroneos, with a small body of volunteers, established his headquarters at the old fortified convent of Arkadi, a building of Venetian construction of such size and strength as to be a fit depot of supplies and place of refuge as against anything less than a regular siege. From here he harassed the detachments which issued from Rethymno, and kept alive the movement in the district between Sphakia and Mount Ida, and on several occasions menaced the city of Rethymno, which is fortified by a low wall, almost unprovided with artillery. Mustapha, after nearly a month of indecision and negotiation, in which the Cretans showed a diplomatic ability and duplicity quite worthy the antique reputation of the race, found himself compelled to act against the new dangers which Coroneos had conjured for him. He moved with great rapidity from Episkopi, where he had made his headquarters in order that he might watch both the great passes into Sphakia, Krapi and Kallikrati, to Rethymno, and thence to the attack of Arkadi, which had been left with a small detachment of volunteers and about one hundred and fifty Cretan combatants, including the priests. Besides these, there were about one thousand women and children, whom Coroneos had made every attempt to dissuade from remaining, but, on account of the opposition of the Hegumenos, who would not consent to the expulsion of his own relatives, the rest could not be induced to leave a place of traditional security, well provisioned and adequately defended against any attack they could conceive of, Coroneos only persuaded about four hundred to return to their villages. The Greek commander, with the main body of his forces, had been watching Mustapha after his taking position at Episkopi, and followed his movements to prevent, if possible, his investment of Arkadi. Taking the circuit of the hills, he only reached the convent after Mustapha’s vanguard, which he engaged until nightfall, when his men mostly withdrew to the mountains, and Arkadi was necessarily abandoned to its fate.

Mustapha, arriving the next day, summoned the convent to surrender, but, having no faith in his observance of the conditions, the Christians refused, and the attack was ordered. The small rifled pieces (mountain-guns) were found to produce no effect on the walls or on the new masonry with which the gateway had been filled up, and, the fire from the convent being found to be unexpectedly hot and effective, the investment was made complete, and reinforcements sent for from Rethymno, whence nearly the whole garrison and Mussulman population came to his aid, making the total force employed about 23,000 men, regulars and irregulars, being, in fact, by much the greatest part of the Ottoman force in the island. Heavy artillery was also ordered from Rethymno, and two or three old siege-guns were transported with great difficulty (a distance of about twelve miles), and placed in battery; and, having demolished the masonry in the gateway, an assault was made, but the fire from the monastery was so vigorous that the attacking column was unable to face it, and after two or three assaults had failed, neither the Turkish regulars nor their officers being willing to renew it, a body of Egyptians were placed in front and driven in at the breach by the bayonets of the Turkish soldiers in their rear.

The convent was a hollow square of buildings, with a large court, in the center of which stood the church. The inner and outer walls were equally solid, and the cells and rooms opening into the court were garrisoned with bodies of the insurgents, who poured a hail of bullets into the mass of Ottomans entering, but, the entrance once made, defence and submission were alike fruitless. The troops killed all who fell into their hands, fighting their way from cell to cell, and bringing even their artillery into the rooms to penetrate the partition walls. And so the struggle of extermination was fought out, until one of the priests, who had previously expressed to his companions the determination to blow up the magazine if the convent were entered, finding death inevitable, fulfilled his threat, and changed what was before but a profitless butchery into a deed of heroism, which again saved the insurrection from the jaws of failure. The result of the explosion was very limited so far as the combatants were concerned, and probably did not kill a hundred Turks.

But even this catastrophe did not stop the carnage. The troops recoiled, but again returned, and the last of the combatants defending themselves in the refectory, having exhausted their bullets, surrendered on the faith of an oath that their lives should be spared, and were at once put to death. At the end, thirty-three men and sixty-one women and children were spared.

The few men who were spared from this massacre were those who were able to appeal to Mustapha Pasha, or some of his suite, on the ground of ancient personal relations, or who succeeded in obtaining his clemency by some sufficient plea, after surrender. That all the butchery was not due to the heat of assault is shown by this and by several incidents reported to me. One of the latest parties of the combatants who surrendered on a promise of their lives was passed in review before the Pasha himself, and all who wore European clothing passed under the sword at once, as volunteers, though amongst them were several Cretans from the adjacent villages, whose relatives attested their nativity. When the refectory surrendered, the Pasha swore on the head of the Sultan to spare its inmates, who were required to hand out all their arms, and were afterwards butchered, even to the women. Mr. Skinner, in his “Roughing it in Crete”, gives an account of his visit to Arkadi some months later, when he found the bodies still unburied and describes the scene in the refectory with ghastly verity. After the fighting was all over, a party of irregulars went round with lighted candles, and, holding them to the noses of the corpses, gave the coup de grace to all who breathed. Two Cretans had managed to hide on the roof of one of the buildings, where they remained till the next day, when, as the Albanians were leaving, one of them shot a pigeon which fell on the roof where the Cretans had hid, and, going up to secure his game, discovered the unfortunates, who were put to death in cold blood. On the march back to Rethymno, all who could not keep up were at once killed, and those who reached the city were kept for months in prison and in extreme misery.

Of the pandemonium that the walls of Arkadi enclosed, I have heard many and ghastly hints, and have in vain asked eye-witnesses to tell me what they saw; they all said it was too horrible to be recalled or spoken of. One of the most violent of the Mussulman fanatics of Crete, who had performed all the pilgrimages and holy works required by the Koran, and earnestly desired as the last grace of this life to die in the holy war against the infidels, and had fought recklessly in all the battles he had been able to participate in, went home after Arkadi in despair, declaring that destiny forbade his dying the holy death. Mustapha was a general of the old type, and did not care to win bloodless victories or spare the lives of his troops, and the result, apart from the moral effect, was far more disastrous to the Porte than to the insurrection. The losses in killed and wounded were certainly not less than 1,500, and were estimated at a much higher figure. The army was occupied thirty-six hours in bringing the wounded into Rethymno, and nearly 500, unable to find place there, were brought on to Canéa (480 was the number given me by a European surgeon in the Ottoman service). The Pasha himself saw that he had made a blunder, and everything which the local administration could effect to disguise and conceal the nature of the event was done. I had, however, fortunately sent a trusty man to Rethymno on the first intimation of the movement, with orders to get me the most minute and exact information possible, and his report, with the confirmation of certain Turkish employees and submitted Christians residing at Rethymno, was in the main accepted by most of my colleagues of the consular corps as the nearest to the truth which had been obtained; and, though in these lands of fable and myth no exact history can well be written, I believe that this is substantially the truth as to Arkadi.

CHAPTER VII

MUSTAPHA immediately retraced his steps to Chania, and, housing himself outside the walls, having sworn not to re-enter his capital until the insurgents had been subdued, called a council to plan measures to strike a quick blow at the insurrection before the effect of Arkadi should be felt in the public opinion of Europe. Up to that time the struggle had seemed to me a hopeless and insane one, and though my warmest sympathies had been, of course, with the Cretans, as victims of a monstrous injustice—a sequence of crimes—I had not dared utter a word of hope or encouragement in reply to all the earnest appeals to me by the friends of the insurrection. Now, seeing the enthusiasm that Arkadi excited amongst the insurgents and even the mutis (submitted Christians), I felt that there was a hope that Christendom would be compelled to listen to the history being enacted before it on this sea-girt mountain ridge. That the Pasha also felt this was evident both from his words and acts. He made new and more tempt­ing offers to the Sphakiote chiefs, and employed the well-known appliances of Eastern politics to make friends amongst the insurgents, but with only partial success. At the same time, he made preparations for another attack on Sphakia, but this time from the west via Selinos. He, therefore, leaving Mehmet Pasha to guard Krapi with four or five battalions, concentrated all his available forces besides, at Alikianu, his point de départ for the first Theriso campaign. All this country had been abandoned, and had to be reconquered, particularly Theriso, which, if unoccupied, would be a menace to his communications with Chania. At the same time, a concentration of the volunteers and insurgents took place in the plain of Omalos, by which alone access is had to Sphakia from this side. A force of volunteers recently landed were engaged in a foolish siege of Kissamos, a worthless position to either side, as it was commanded by the men-of-war, and could not be held if taken; and the different chiefs of the volunteers were kept ineffective by dissensions and jealousies amongst themselves, each refusing to obey any other. Coroneos and Zimbrakakis, however, united their forces to resist the attack on Omalos. The volunteers, under the command of Soliotis, a Hellenic officer, made a gallant defence of the position of Lakus, but were compelled to retreat to the upper ridges which border Omalos, while Theriso was abandoned before a flank movement of Mehmet Pasha, obliged temporarily to leave the Apokorona undefended. Omalos, however, resisted direct attack, and the Pasha moved round by the passes of Kissamos to the west of the mountains, devastating as he went, and driving before him all the non-combatants of the country he passed through. By this time the snow had fallen with unusual severity of cold for that climate, and the insurgents, although ill-provided against an inclemency they usually escaped from in the plains below, were in many respects better off than the troops, who were compelled to march through ravines which were often mountain torrents in this rainy season; and as they did not carry tents, that they might move with greater rapidity, and were often cut off from all communication with the base of supplies for days together by the rain filling the roads, at best only bad mule-paths, they suffered prodigiously without fighting or even the encouragement of the sack of villages. The Egyptians, clad only in linen which their climate required, perished by cold and wet in hundreds; pneumonia became an endemic in the army; and, to add to the misery, the beasts of burden perished under the hardships, and lined the paths with their corpses.

Mustapha was as merciless a commander as enemy, and, though the army was suffering extreme misery, he kept a vigilant watch for his opportunity, and when, after two weeks of fatiguing outpost duty, waiting in hunger, rain, snow, and frost, the Hellenes who guarded the difficult pass of St. Irene were frozen and starved into negligence, he made a dash, one foggy morning, surprised the post, and, taking possession of the heights crowning the ravine, his army defiled leisurely over into the valleys of Selinos. The Greeks moved over to the pass of Krubtogherako, which admits to the plain of Omalos from the Selinos side, and the Pasha, believing a defence ready, encamped in the still undevastated valleys, and passed some days in burning and ravaging, destroying vineyards and mulberry-trees wherever they could be reached. The olive-trees, as the reliance of the future income of the island, were mostly spared.

Meanwhile, a “moral intervention” was being prepared, which brought respite to the insurrection and deranged all the plans of the Pasha. The atrocities of Arkadi had finally impressed public opinion with the conviction that the old barbarities of the Greek and Turkish wars were being perpetrated anew; and even the English consul at Chania became convinced that barbaric massacre and ravage were being employed as the means of subduing the spirit of the islanders, and had reported to his Government certain of these atrocities, remonstrating, at the same time, to the Commissioner. The reports of those consuls who had by this time, become characterized as the “friends of the insurrection”—viz., Colucci (Italian), Dendrinos (Russian), Sacopoulos (Greek), and myself—had spread through the European journals the news of these barbarities and excesses to such a degree that remonstrances were made by the ambassadors at Constantinople, while the clear-headed and true-hearted Murray had from the beginning, with great justice and discrimination, measured the facts and manifested the warmest sympathy with the Cretans. At this juncture came H.B.M.’s sloop Assurance, Commander Pym, relieving the Wizard, ordered to Malta. We parted from our gallant protector with an emotion not easily comprehended by those who do not know the nature and nearness of the dangers of the previous four months, or how the resolute and outspoken manhood of the young officer in his one-gun steamer had stood so long between us and death, as the representative of a power in civilization which subsequent years made me honor more and more—the English navy. Fortunately, Pym had learned from Murray, in the few days which elapsed between the arrival of the Assurance and the departure of the Wizard, what was the real position of affairs, and followed the traditions of his predecessor. He had, moreover, a certain defiance of red-tape and a feverishness to distinguish himself which did not always measure carefully the purport of general orders, and which, perhaps, in battle would have made him turn a blind eye to a signal of recall, and now disposed him to abandon on any pretext the cold-blooded neutrality of his government.

Pym soon determined that a very small pretext would suffice to make him throw himself in the way of a decided intervention in behalf of the non-combatants, and did not fail to exert all his influence on Dickson to obtain an official request that he should cruise on the coast in advance of the Pasha’s army, and to seize every available opportunity for affording refuge to any Christian in distress who may seek protection on board his ship, and to convey such refugees to Greece. Pym had declared to me (and possibly to Dickson) that he should, on his own responsibility, take such a step if he did not get the requisition from the consul; and, on leaving for a run to Heraklion, said that he should go thence to Selinos and put himself in the way of humanity. Under these circumstances, Dickson’s humanity, further stimulated by Murray’s and Pym’s enthusiasm, got the better of his official prepossessions, and, without waiting for a reply from his Government to a petition addressed to all the Christian powers to send ships to save the women and children exposed to such chances as those of Arkadi, had followed up his remonstrances to the Commissioner with a proposal to send a ship to pick up the families gathered before the army in its movement into Selinos. The Commissioner, still under the impression of the effect produced by recent events on European public opinion, dared not refuse his consent to such a demand from his best friend, and, it may be conceived, reluctantly, verbally, and evasively gave it. But Dickson, too honest and earnest to comprehend the duplicity, took him literally at his word. As a consequence of all these considerations and conclusions, the Assurance found herself at Suia of Selinos while Mustapha was pounding away at the passes, and took three hundred and fifteen women and children and twenty-five wounded men on board and transported them to Peiraeus.

No act could have been purer or more free from ulterior views than this of Pym’s—an expression of what not only he, but all of his fellow-officers of the English navy whom I saw on the station, with one exception, felt—the compassionate desire to stand between women and children and the devilish policy which butchered them to terrify their husbands and fathers into submission. I saw Pym and his officers on their return from this voyage, and not one of them but would have given a month’s pay to have gone on another similar trip. Their Government, in passing judgment on the act, could not condemn it, but to two parties, unfortunately, it was a political movement—the Hellenes, who insisted on considering it an intervention in their favor, and so compelled the English Government to forbid its repetition; and the French, who regarded it as a maneuver to block the game of the Viceroy. The French-agent who afterwards succeeded Derché assured me that they had the most conclusive evidence that Captain Pym had orders from London to give the insurrection a jog, because the annexation to Egypt would have been the result of the failure of the insurrection at this juncture, and that, although Pym was immediately recalled and, to all intents and purposes, disgraced, and I believe retired on account of his venture, he was only so in appearance, and really had been rewarded for his apparent punishment.

There were, at this time, two Italian corvettes, an Austrian frigate and gunboat, and a French gunboat, besides the Russian frigate, all of which, except the Frenchman, had, or were reported to have, orders to follow the lead of any other Power in rendering assistance to the non-combatants, and most of the commanders were anxious to follow Pym, but their delay in learning of his venture, and the quick disapproval of it, deterred all from intervention, and while correspondence was going on the war seemed suspended. It appeared finally to be decided that no one should imitate the English commander. The insurrection seemed on the point of collapsing, through the severity of the winter and the discouragement of the Cretans. Volunteers had been coming over from Greece—a motley mass of all nations—many of them from Smyrna and other Turkish parts, who, as soon as they landed, began to breed disaffection and maltreat the Cretans, creating the most angry feeling in the island, which did not stop short of violence. At this time, the whole body were driven into the Sphakian mountains, where, exposed to intense cold, half-fed, and without any discipline, they were dangerous only to the insurrection, and yielded readily to proffers of the Pasha to give them free exit and conveyance to Greece. A portion of them accepted the proposition on condition that they should be sent on European ships, and the Vice-Commissioner called a council of those consuls whose governments had naval representatives in Cretan waters, to propose that their ships should go to receive the disaffected volunteers but with the condition that no non-combatants or Cretans should be accepted. None of the commanders were willing to accept the mission on these terms, except the French, and the gunboat which he commanded went, therefore, to Lutro, a port of Sphakia (the Port Phoenix of St. Paul), and embarked four hundred and eighty men, who were landed at Peiraeus, where they were received with violence and insults by the excited populace, and some barely escaped paying the last penalty for their defection.

CHAPTER VIII

THE remaining auxiliaries, paralyzed by want of organization, the usual dissensions of the chiefs, and their mutual jealousies, even more than by their want of supplies, retreated before Mustapha, who, after some weeks of indecision, resumed his campaign; but, instead of following up his advantages by land, and getting possession of Omalos as a better base of operations, and preventing the Cretans from reoccupying it, he embarked his troops at Sugia, and attempted to land at St. Rumséli, the entrance of the ravine of Samaria, the stronghold and place of refuge par excellence of Sphakia, and where, at this time, were gathered thousands of women and children. This movement menaced too closely the mountaineers, who opposed the landing, and finally repelled the attack, as well as a subsequent one at Tripiti, nearer to Sugia, when Mustapha returned to his camp in Selinos, and passed another period of inaction, during which the insurrectionary committees in Greece, admonished by the imminent danger the movement seemed to have evaded for the moment, renewed their efforts to send relief, and threw over other bodies of volunteers, mainly Mainotes, a hardy, courageous race, regarded as better irregulars even than the Albanians, who, landing in the eastern provinces, revived the insurrection where the government was ill able to meet it. The best of the volunteers, under Coroneos and Yennissarli, recovering from their demoralization by rest and the removal of the more disorderly elements, moved eastward to join the new bodies, leaving the Sphakiotes to guard their own country. If Mustapha, after the affair of Krustogherako, had followed the attack up with vigor, two weeks would have finished the insurrection. Even as it was, Sphakia being strongly disposed to purchase freedom from conquest by neutrality, and several of the captains having openly embraced the Turkish cause, there seemed very little hope for the prolongation of the insurrection, when another of those wanton acts of barbarity, which had on more than one occasion strengthened the insurgents instead of weakening their courage, gave it another jog.

The Russian minister at Constantinople had, as soon as the news reached that place that an English ship had rescued a number of non-combatants from Crete, obtained from the Grand Vizier a reluctant consent that other ships might intervene, and dispatched a steamer at once to Crete, with orders to the Grand Admiral to commence deportation. A violent storm favored the Turks by delaying the avviso for several days, and, when final y the order came, we had the news that the English Government had disapproved Pym’s acts, and the Commissioner (who had plenary powers in all matters connected with Crete) had withdrawn the permission given to Dickson, and both Dendrino and Doutakoff hesitated to execute the order, anticipating its revocation. The former, a timid, irresolute man, master of the arts of intrigue, but lost as soon as he had an open part to play in which he must bear the responsibility of decision, was more concerned for his own security than for the fate of the Christians, and hesitated to give a requisition to the captain to move, while the latter, indifferent to the consequences to himself, as against the relief of the Christian sufferers, hesitated to move before getting renewed orders after the long delay, lest he might compromise his Government in the event of a change of its momentary policy, which was to avoid all appearance of ultra-advocacy of the insurgent cause. It lacked but two or three days of our regular weekly courier when the avviso had arrived, and both the Russian officials had decided to wait the courier before moving.

As for myself, since the affair of Arkadi I had thrown aside all reserve, and, while never going beyond the limits of moral intervention, I had used all my influence with my colleagues, and with our minister at Constantinople as well as our Government, to provoke acts of positive intervention. I made no secret of it, nor did the Turkish Government of its hostility to me. A patrol of zapties watched my front door, and another my back door, and no Cretan dared enter my house. I was regarded as the postman of the insurgents, and so complete was the delusion that the authorities entirely neglected to watch my colleagues, two of whom daily received and sent letters to the mountains. All the little persecutions which a petty local government could inflict were laid on me, and I reciprocated, as I best could, by disseminating news of the true condition of the insurrection, and stimulating the activity of my colleagues. Mr. Moms, our minister at Constantinople, at first strongly under the influence of the English ambassador, the just and liberal Lord Lyons, became convinced that nothing was to be expected in the way of humane intervention from England, and passed entirely over to the Russian policy, and lent me his whole prestige and influence, made himself my defender at the Porte, and gave me instructions after my own drawing up. I made common cause, therefore, with my Russian colleague, on whose irresolution I managed, in most cases, to impose my resolutions, and, little by little, gained all the control over him which I desired for critical emergencies, while I flattered his amour propre by giving him the credit of making up his own mind. I had also organized a sort of news agency, by which I was able to get the earliest and most reliable news of all movements in the island, so that gradually not only the consuls but the naval officers came to expect from me the most reliable information.

During the few days of suspense between the arrival of Boutakoff’s orders and the arrival of the courier which should confirm or revoke them, the act of brutality to which I have alluded came to quicken decision. I had received news that a Turkish frigate, hoisting English colors, had run in near the coast of Sphakia, and when the unfortunate refugees, expecting aid, came down to the shore, the Turks opened on them with shot and shell. A Turkish cannonade is generally a pretty harmless affair, except for accidental casualties, but the affair gave me all the justification I needed to put a pressure on Dendrino to issue a requisition for the Grand Admiral to go at once to the south coast of the island. That night the post steamer was due, and, from the absence of any dispatches to the Italian commander similar to those to the Russian, I anticipated that the movement had failed, and that counter-orders would come to Boutakoff by the post. I went at once, therefore, to Dendrino, and, putting the most ener­getic pressure on him, dictated a letter to Boutakoff, who was on board the frigate at Suda, requesting him to get up steam and go to the Sphakian coast without delay, and did not leave till I saw the messenger on the way and beyond recall, knowing that if I left Dendrino it would stop there. Boutakoff, nothing loth, fired up at once, and at nine p.m. was on his way. At midnight the post arrived, as anticipated, with counter orders, but too late. Except myself, no one was so glad that the countermand failed as General Ignatieff, the Russian minister.

The Grand Admiral went to Tripiti, where were thousands of non-combatants hiding in caves and living amongst the rocks, waiting the relieving European ships, but when the Russian boats ran in they were fired on by the Cretan guards, made suspicious by the Turkish frauds. Once assured of their friends, however, the people swarmed out of their holes like ants, and, as Boutakoff told me, in a few minutes the whole coast was lined with them, more than he could possibly stow. He took about 1,200, and sailed for Peiraeus.

This deportation had a triple effect: first, in strengthening the Russian party in the island by assuring the Cretans of the good faith of the Russian Government, that party having been hitherto very inconsiderable; second, in relieving a large body of men of the care of their families; and, third, in deciding doubtful and uninvaded districts to take up arms, and breaking off the negotiations between the Commissioner and the Sphakiote chiefs, by which the former had hoped to have Sphakia given up without combat. The most tempting offers were refused, and the people of Eastern Sphakia, under the command of old Costa Veloudaki, entered on the war-path again, and, surprising a Turkish post at Episkopf, drove the garrison, with serious losses, back to Rethymno; and, near the same time, Coroneos and Korakas on one slope of Ida, and Petropoulaki, the chief of the Mainote volunteers, on the other, harassed and drove back all the outposts in the open country, and shut up the Turks of the central district in the fortress of Rethymno; while some battles, better worth the name than the desultory skirmishes which most of the combats had been, were fought in the open country around Candia, where Reschid Effendi proved himself a shrewd and capable strategist, and drove the insurgents back to the western slopes of Ida after sharp fighting, in which the dissensions of the Greek and Cretan chiefs were more conspicuous than their wisdom; but everywhere the insurrection showed new vigor.

CHAPTER IX

IMMEDIATELY after the affair of Arkadi, I had, in conveying to our Government the petition of the Cretans for ships to be sent to carry away their families, recapitulated the course I had taken, and proposed to the Government that, if an American man-of-war came to Crete for the deportation of non-combatants, and the local government made any protest, I should reply that, their conduct having been in violation of every dictate of humanity and law, they were not entitled to appeal to the latter in their own behalf, and that I should advise the officer in command to remove the families without reference to Turkish prohibition. I received in reply the following dispatch:

Department of State, Washington, Dec. 25, 1866.

W. J. Stillman, Esq., U. S. Consul, Chania:

Sir: Your dispatch No. 32, with regard to the Cretan insurrection and the attitude you have assumed in the matter, has been received.

Your action and proposed course of conduct, as set forth in said dispatch, are approved. Mr. Morris, our minister resident at Constantinople, will be informed of the particulars set forth in your dispatch, and of the approval of your proceedings.

Rear-Admiral Goldsborough has been instructed to send a ship of-war to your port.

I am, sir, your obedient servant,

                                                         W. H. Seward.

This dispatch was immediately communicated to Mr. Morris by him to the Hellenic minister at Constantinople; and thence to the committee at Athens; thence to the insurgents, through whom it rapidly spread and confirmed their warlike resolutions. The Russian commander, like Pym, had been obliged to desist from any new attempt, and waited for our steamer to come. The Italian commanders were eager to avail themselves of their standing instructions to follow the ships of other nations in this work, and so a new phase of the struggle awaited the appearance of the Stars and Stripes.

Meanwhile, Mustapha Pasha, skirmishing along the coast of Sphakia, bargaining and cajoling the chiefs of the formidable Sphakiotes, wasted his time and troops in fruitless encounters and under the inclement season. At length, unable to proceed by land, and compelled by his programme to pass through the canton, he embarked all his troops at Suia, and transported them to Franco Castelli, where there is a plain country between the mountains and the sea, and, after negotiations with the chiefs of the villages on the south slope, was permitted to go, without molestation, through the defile of Comitades into the plain of Askyfó, where he encamped to receive the submission of the Sphakiotes. What were the inducements which permitted him to pass by a ravine where one hundred resolute men could have destroyed his whole army, I do not know; but it is hardly conceivable, considering subsequent events, that it was owing to any general complicity of the mountaineers, but probably to the defection or bribing of that chief whose place it was to guard the shore end of the defile near which his village was. He had long been known to be a warm personal friend of the Pasha, and had on one occasion prevented a blockade-runner from landing her cargo on his territory.

The day after Mustapha had entered Askyfó, one of the captains of that section came to me to ask for counsel, saying that they were undecided whether to submit or fight, on account of their families; but, if the foreign ships were coming, as they had heard, they would attack Mustapha in Askyfó. I replied that I could in no wise counsel him, or make myself responsible for what they should do, but translated for him Mr. Seward’s dispatch, and told him that I expected daily a ship, and that as soon as she came she would go, in company with the Russian, to the coast of Sphakia, and relieve the families there. He returned to Askyfo, and a council was held, at which it was decided to attack Mustapha at once. The Pasha, warned by his spies, broke up his camp at midnight, and, when the Christians gathered at the head of the defile of Krapi at daybreak, they found the heights guarded and the rear-guard of the Turkish army already entering the ravine. The Christians were but six hundred men, but they attacked at once. The pass is not a simple gorge, but a precipitous pass, in some places divided by sub-ridges with only mule-paths, and in some passages very bad at that, the way being partially choked with boulders and overgrown with scrubby oaks, amongst which the Christians concealed themselves in squads, and fired on the passing troops in security and deliberation, sometimes even throwing stones on them. The latter lost all order, and in confusion and separate parties passed through, scarcely having the courage to stop and return the fire. An attendant of the Pasha, who rode at his side (when the path permitted), told me that the balls were like an infernal hail, and that the Pasha pushed through without stopping to make any defence. Defence was impossible, indeed; for no rear-guard dared make a stand, with the certainty of being blockaded and cut off when the main body had passed through. The Egyptians—timid as sheep in danger, but brutal as wolves when they had to deal with defenseless Christians—paid the penalty of their cruelty, and received no quarter. The native guides saved themselves in the rout, and many of the troops, confused in the intricacies of the way, hid themselves in the thickets, where, for several days after, parties were discovered and dispatched, no quarter being given.

What the losses were was never known, returns not being to the taste of the old irregular, or consoling to his Government; but when the army reached the Apokorona and re­assembled, it was reported by Mustapha (official report, February 6, 1867) at 6,000 men, too large an estimate in the opinion of the officers of the men-of-war at Suda, who witnessed the defile as they debouched on the plain of Chania, whence they had gone out for the Theriso campaign, in October, 17,850, with eight guns, by the official statement to Mr. Dickson (Cretan Blue Book, Mr. Dickson’s dispatch of October 15, 1866), besides several thousand irregular reinforcements. The commander of one of the Italian ships, who took the trouble to count some of the battalions, reported one of them to me at less than 300, and this an Egyptian battalion which had come 900 strong. It was evident to all in Canéa that Mustapha’s administration was an utter failure. The spring had come; new bodies of volunteers had been thrown into the island, and the trips of the blockade runners continued without a single disaster. The Turkish forces, which, at the assumption of the command by the Commissioner, had been above 30,000, were now, by my estimate, less than 20,000. The official reports, as usual, chanted victory, but the under-officials at Chania were not so reticent, and a profound gloom settled over the whole Mussulman population. The more energetic of the Turkish commanders openly attacked Mustapha’s cautious policy, and demanded a more dashing campaign.

Mustapha, by way of reply and justification, gave to the most noisy of his insubordinates a division to attack the insurgents at Omalos, where the prudent, if a little useless, Zimbrakaki commanded a body of volunteers, and was supported by Hadji Mikhali with his Lakiotes, Criaris, one of the bravest of Crete, with the Seliniotes, and all the men of the destroyed villages of the Rhizo and Kissamos, a desperate throng which every movement of the Turks did but increase. Ali Riza Pasha, to whom the movement was entrusted, unwilling to risk again the twice-attempted road by Lakus, made his attack by a pass further to the west, which led to a declivity by which approach to the plain of Omalos was possible but not easy, and which the Cretans call kakoi plevroi (bad slopes). The assault was against men hidden amongst huge fragments of rock and brush­wood, and, though obstinately pushed, made no headway, and the troops, after losses, as usual unreported, retreated to Hosti in the valley, where they were followed and surrounded by the Cretans, and all communication was cut off with Canéa for two or three days. Here Hadji Mikhali performed one of those feats which recall the old days of Greek heroism. Descending at night with a small party of picked men, he cut his way through the Turkish camp, and disappeared on the other side. The Turks began an indiscriminate firing of musketry and artillery in every direction, and kept it up until daylight. Mikhali was certainly the most remarkable character developed by the insurrection. The son of a chieftain of the same name, who is one of the traditional heroes of the “great insurrection” (1821 to 1830), he inherited an influence, with genuine strategic abilities and undaunted courage, which, with great personal prowess, made him the terror of the Turkish authorities. I have often remarked the unconscious adaptation of Homer's description of Achilles used by the Cretans in speaking of Mikhali, his most-dwelt-on characteristics being his beauty, his swiftness of foot, and immense strength and stature.

Ali Riza was only rescued from the hands of the Cretans (for M. Zimbrakaki never ventured from his safe retreat, though he had now an opportunity to destroy the whole division of Turks by an energetic and concentrated attack, and the Hadji had to work with his own people) by a strong column from Canéa opening up the way for his retreat; and with the abandonment of this plan all hopes of making any impression on Sphakia were abandoned, the more as all the villages now took up arms and threw off any pretense of composition.

In the eastern provinces, at the same time, Reschid Effendi, organizing an army including all the disposable forces at Heraklion and Rethymno estimated at 10,000 men, moved to attack the volunteers and Cretans under Coroneos, Petropoulaki (chief of the Mainotes), Korakas, Skoulas, and others, for once fortunately united, in Amari, the broken country on the western slope of Ida. Their plan seemed to be to pass through the canton to the south shore, and return by the plain of Messara and the eastern slope of the mountain to Heraklion. The Christians drew the whole force of the Turks into a difficult position at Yerakari, and then, by a vigorous hand-to-hand attack, cut the column in two, the smaller half pursuing the proposed route, the other being driven back to Rethymno, losing baggage, two guns, and quantities of ammunition and provisions. The smaller detachment, pursued, were overtaken at St. Thomas, where they had halted to rest, and again routed and pursued to the neighborhood of Heraklion.

Both the divisions of Ali Riza and Reschid, in returning, avenged themselves on the submitted Cretans in their way. The following extract from a letter from Lieut. Murray to Mr. Erskine, English Minister at Athens, characterizes the position of things in the whole island :

“Chania, February 24, 1867.

Things appear to get worse and worse, and the end appears further off than it did six months ago. Today the troops returned from an unsuccessful attempt to force a passage into Omalos, partly owing, they say, to the plain being covered with melted snow, but in a great measure owing to the stubborn resistance offered by the insurgents under Zimbrakaki. What the next move will be I am as yet unable to say; report says they are going to Kissamos. I fancy, unless reinforcements arrive, they will soon have to withdraw inside the fortified towns.

February 25.—A sad tale was told to me yesterday. A shoemaker living in Chania, and well known to all as a quiet, peaceful man, fled to the hills when the insurrection broke out. There he followed his trade till three months ago, when, the country round Canéa appearing to be pretty quiet, he came and settled at the village of Fourna, in the plain of Alikianu. A few days ago, his wife ran in and said, ‘There are soldiers coming into the village’. He replied, ‘Don't be alarmed, they have been here before’. A few minutes afterwards, two soldiers dragged him out of the house, and beat him so that they broke his arm, which caused him to faint. His wife brought him some water, as did also an officer, and left him. Shortly afterwards, while he was still unable to rise, two other soldiers came up and dispatched him with their swords. This is the history of one out of eighteen killed in the same village that day, told me by his poor wife, who, together with her four children, came to seek redress from Mustapha Pasha. He gave her two hundred piastres, and said he would enquire about it.

“I am sorry to tell you that the troops have again gone out—one division to Kissamos, the other to Apokorona. The people are again flying to the hills before the advent of the troops, and I greatly fear more atrocities”.

CHAPTER X

BY this time, the Powers had learned how utterly mendacious all the Turkish official reports were, and that the insurrection was further than ever from being suppressed; and the Porte, dreading the effect of the knowledge of the utter failure of the Imperial Commission from which it had promised itself such immense results, developed a new plan, in which the douceurs of a plébiscite were to be administered by its armies, and a new assembly constituted, who were to sit at Constantinople, and represent both the Mussulman and Christian populations as an advisory council on the new measures of reform which were to pacify the conquered islanders. The most curious of all the strange characteristics of this affair were the persistence of the Turkish Government in misinforming Europe of the position of the struggle, and the willingness of official Europe to be misinformed. Now, at a moment when every corps of the Turkish army had been defeated, the Porte, with a ludicrous gravity which would have been comical in the extreme if one could have forgotten the misery of starvation, of barbarism, death by cold and fire and sword, with atrocities without name which were momentarily being perpetrated by its authority on the helpless victims of its paternal tenderness, sent to Crete its ablest diplomatic agent, Server Effendi, with the following proclamation, nominally addressed to the Commissioner, but really to the Powers, Server Effendi being actually the plenipotentiary, Mustapha being in disgrace, but openly honored by an honor as delusive as the victories by which he had secured it:

“It is needless to tell thee that we are deeply grieved at the insurrection which has been fomented in Crete by ill-intentioned people, at the evils which have resulted from it to the inhabitants, and at the blood which a cruel necessity has forced to flow. If, notwithstanding all their efforts, our Government have not been able to prevent these misfortunes, if the paternal advice which they gave to the misguided inhabitants, in order to bring them back to the line of duty, have remained fruitless, the responsibility must wholly fall, before God and the tribunal of public opinion, upon the instigators of these calamities.

“The wise behavior, however, of the islanders who, understanding the real state of things, remained faithful to us, and, on the other hand, the bravery of which our Imperial army has given most signal proofs in fighting against the insurgents, as well as the wise measures which thou hastened to take, have powerfully contributed to restore peace and security in all parts of the island, with the exception of such as are infested by the presence of foreign brigands. Those islanders who, giving way to culpable insinuations and deluded by false promises, have some time followed these seditious agents, have hastened to profit by the general amnesty granted beforehand, and have returned to their duties. A committee has therefore been formed in our capital for the purpose of examining and framing a future mode of administration of the island for the new Governor, who is to be sent there as soon as matters shall have reassumed their normal condition. Thus the committee will have to look to the best means of repairing the ills sustained by the country, to perfect the administration in conformity with the legitimate and indispensable wants of the people, and to effect thus that prosperity which results from the development of agriculture and commerce; in a word, they will have to procure a general bettering of the condition of the country. But for these measures relating to the government of the island to succeed, and for the welfare and prosperity to be realized, it has been deemed necessary to consult likewise some of the principal people of the island, who enjoy the confidence of the inhabitants. On the suggestion, therefore, of our Government, we have approved of and instruct thee to proceed to the election, by the inhabitants, of one or two notables, Mohammedans or not, taken in each district, and to send here as soon as possible those who may have been selected. Be careful to bring to the knowledge of the public the present Imperial firman, and to be at the same time with the inhabitants of the island the interpreter of the good intentions with which we are animated towards them”.

Server Effendi was really a most intelligent and (for a Turk) humane administrator, and, had he not been crippled by the necessity of keeping up the absurd pretense of an actual conquest achieved, might have found some sortie from the difficulty, which would have arrested the train of disasters which afterwards brought the Porte so near to its final quietus. He made himself no delusions, and, I believe, propagated none at Constantinople. In point of fact, no one of the responsible governments there was now deceived; but the Sultan had passed into a monomaniacal condition of fury on the subject of the conquest of Crete, and no Grand Vizier could have remained in office who proposed an abandonment of the war without conquest. The powers, except England, counseled the Porte to yield a principality, and it is probable that, if England had acceded, the Cretans would, at that time, have accepted this solution of the question in spite of the Hellenic influence. The policy of England has always seemed to me mistaken to Turkey and faithless to the Cretans, for, in effect, all the powers signatary of the protocol of February 20, 1830, were morally bound to secure to the Cretans a similar condition to that of Samos. But it must, at the same time, be admitted that this policy was open, consistent, and, so far as Turkey was concerned, loyal, while that of France was double, disloyal to all her allies, wavering, and entirely egotistic; and that of Russia was consistent only in its unfaltering hostility to Turkey, and its willingness to favor any affair that promised to weaken her empire. The tactics of Greece were of a nature to make the chances of Crete more precarious than they need have been. The policy of Crete for Greece, rather than Crete for her own good, made confusion and jealousy in the conduct of the war much greater than they need have been. What the Cretans wanted was a good leader, arms, and bread. Greece sent them rival chiefs without subordination, a rabble of volunteers, who quarreled with the islanders, and weakened the cause by deserting it as soon as they felt the strain of danger and hardship; and if, after the first campaign, they were more wise in enrolling men to go to Crete, they still allowed the jealousies and hostilities of the leaders to go unchecked by any of those measures which were in their power. But the radical fault of the Hellenes was that they compromised the question by the introduction of the question of annexation, and forced it into the field of international interests, disguising the real causes and justification of the movement, and making it impossible for England consistently with her declared policy to entertain the complaints of the Cretans without also admitting to consideration the pretensions of the Hellenes. If the latter had not intruded their views on the tapis, the former might have been heard; but, from the moment in which annexation to Greece became the alternative of the reconquest of Crete, the English Government could clearly not interfere against the Porte without upsetting its own work, and if, in some minor respects, especially the question of the principality, she had been more kind to Crete, no one could have found fault with a policy which was, in its gene­ral tendency, obligatory on her. Her great mistake was in not recognizing more clearly the utterly irresponsible nature of the Turkish administration, and compelling the Porte to redress the wrongs which even Dickson, philottoman as he was to the last degree, could not ignore the reality of, before they had passed into the arbitration of arms. I believe that, if Lord Lyons had had the direction of affairs from the beginning, he would have composed the difficulty without bloodshed, for he saw clearly and understood the real merits of the question.

Server Effendi succeeded in naming deputies from nearly all the districts of the island, and in compelling most of them to go to Constantinople. One escaped, and came to my house to ask asylum. Of course I was compelled to give it, and he remained for six weeks my guest, when he escaped, disguised as a Russian sailor, on board a Russian corvette, and went to Greece. The others were sent under guard to the capital, where they also demanded protection from the Russian Legation, declaring that they came against their own will, and that of the Cretan people; and so in effect ended a farce, put on the stage with all the appliances of the Turkish Government, and played with their best actors.

The arrival of a new swift steamer from England, for the purpose of running the blockade, gave a new (flan to the insurrection, and the Arkadi (formerly the Dream of American blockade celebrity), was from this time until her destruction in August of 1867 an element of the first importance in the war. The former blockade-runner, the Panhellenion, was a slow steamer, never making above nine miles per hour, and her success in provisioning without a mishap the insurrection for nearly a year, with a squadron of thirty ships to watch her, is one of the most surprising instances of capacity on one side, or incapacity on the other, in the history of marine warfare. The Arkadi not only brought arms and supplies, but she carried away at almost every trip numbers of non-combatants, and formed a safe and reliable means of communication between Greece and Crete, by which messengers, supplies of all kinds, and every requisite for the war were transported with tolerable certainty. The warm weather enabled the insurgents to re-enter the field in greater numbers, and it finally became evident that the war was to be one which would only be finished by the exhaustion of the resources either of Greece or Turkey.

A change in administration at Athens had brought a more capable and thoroughly national council into power, under the presidency of Mr. Comoundouros, the ablest and clearest-headed statesman of the Hellenic kingdom, who had discouraged an appeal to arms until the war became a fait accompli, when he advocated a policy of aid to Crete coûte qui’l coûte, and, on assuming power, made the insurrection his chief care. The whole resources of Greece were devoted to it, and the funds of the insurgent committee at Athens were fed directly from the national treasury. There was, no doubt, scarcely any disguise about the complicity; but public feeling in Greece was so thoroughly enlisted that no government could have existed which did not unmistakably favor the insurrection. Unfortunately for the success of the Greek plans, the government did not impose on the Cretans an effective organization and a supreme commander. It still based its chief hope on European intervention, and counted on a limitation of the struggle by their influence, instead of preparing to act in the most complete independence. There was some excuse for this in a states-man-for-the-moment, in the fact that intervention had already begun by the overtures of Russia, acceded to at this date by France, whose Emperor was at the juncture ready to come to an understanding with the Czar on the basis of mutual concession; but Comoundouros should have seen that the readiness of Greece to endure and prolong a war with Turkey would be the best argument for the interven­tion the former desired. Greek politics have always had the fault of being based on sentimentality, and calculating too much on the sympathy of Christendom and classical scholars, neither of which has ever played a noteworthy part in modern Hellenic history, for even the genuine philhellenism of 1821 would have accomplished nothing had it not been that Turkey stood in the way of Russian combinations. The Greeks seem never to comprehend that governments are purely political, and never influenced by sentiment or religious affinities. They count that Hellenism and Christianity must always be weighed in the Eastern question, and in this case calculated on forcing the hand of the Christian powers by these appliances; while if they had proved that they were capable of conducting the war with energy and good system, preparing themselves meanwhile for a war with Turkey, Europe must have interfered, as a war between Greece and Turkey involved too momentous questions to be risked for so small an affair as Crete, and Christianity might have got the casting vote in deciding which side interference should favor. If Russia had been sincere in her friendship for Greece, she might have helped the question to a speedy ending by giving the word to the Danubian provinces to rise; but she has never desired a strong Hellenic kingdom, and this Comoundouros understood clearly, and that any intervention voluntarily made by Russia would be for her own interest purely, and that, holding as he did the initiative in a movement of all the Christian races, he could, by the employment of it, compel Russia to favor his plans or lose her prestige with them, and to a great extent her moral influence. It was with this view that he prepared movements in Epirus and Thessaly, while Montenegro became agitated, and the seeds of the Cretan trouble seemed wafted over the whole Turkish Em­pire.

Pending the question of intervention, the transport of families waited the arrival of the American ship, of which no advices came. I telegraphed to Admiral Goldsborough for news of her, and received reply that he knew nothing of any orders for Crete. Subsequent information showed that our Secretary of Legation at Constantinople, a Levantine, and, like his class in general, devoted to the Turkish Government, and a most rancorous and persistent assailant of both Mr. Morris and myself in the journals of Europe and America (and whom the disgraceful condition of our diplomatic service permitted to assail the acts of his superior and the declared policy of his own government), acting in the interests of the Turkish Government, had put himself in communication with the naval authorities by the intermediation of officers attached to the squadron in European waters, and instigated the revocation of the decision of the Government, and, when finally the Canandaigua arrived in the middle of March, she had orders to do nothing in any way disagreeable to the Turkish authorities; and I soon found that the state of feeling in the navy was anything but favorable to the employment of our ships for humane purposes, I myself, as instigator of their discomfort, being treated by the officers with a degree of incivility which showed as little good-breeding as esprit de patrie, and was manifested so openly as to encourage the local authorities in their systematic persecution of me. With the exception of two or three of the younger officers, the whole wardroom broadly expressed their sympathies with the Turkish Government, so that, after having persuaded Captain Strong, who sympathized somewhat with the awkwardness of my position, to run down to Rethymno with me to look into the condition of the Christian families shut up in that town, I saw the Canandaigua sail, with a heartfelt desire not to see one of my country’s men-of-war again while I was on the station. The Commissioner showed his appreciation of our official servility by ostentatiously ignoring the visit of Captain Strong, passing the Canandaigua by without notice, while he visited all the other foreign men-of-war in the harbor.

CHAPTER XI

TO compensate myself for the slights of my fellow-countrymen, and at the same time escape from and retaliate for the annoyances of the Turkish officials, I sent to Corfu for a little cutter-yacht, and until it came sent my family to Syra. All official intercourse had ceased between the Commissioner and myself, and, encouraged by our Secretary of Legation, who maintained a correspondence with the dragoman of the Commission, the Pasha showed his determination to drive me out of the island. It was forbidden to let me a house, the one I had having become untenable from the number of military hospitals gathered round it. I found it almost impossible to be served in the market, which was under official control, and every movement I made was so watched, and locomotion made so dangerous by the random discharges of the muskets of the irregulars, which were fired off on all occasions, and even with none, the balls constantly being heard passing overhead, that I determined on passing the summer on board the Kestrel, which I did, running from port to port in the island, and over to the Greek islands, whenever the fancy took me. In this way I revenged myself most agreeably. My satisfaction was greatly increased by seeing the disgrace of my adversary, the Commissioner, who was recalled, having utterly failed in everything but devastation. He was replaced by Hussein Avni, a cautious and heavy-witted man, a good disciplinarian, but a most fanatical Mussulman, and so forewarned of my dangerous qualities that I found, to my great amusement, that I was considered the head and front of the insurrection. As with all the espionage they could apply, no act of complicity could be discovered, I was credited with superhuman cunning, it never entering the heads of the rusés Mussulmans that I had nothing to conceal, and that, while they were watching my house at Kalepa, the insurgent messengers came in at the city gates almost every day. In fact, except as a witness of events, I had ceased to be of any importance to the insurrection; and, entirely unsupported by any moral or diplomatic influence of my own Government, and wearied of a struggle which brought to me but a succession of spectacles of misery and barbarity, I would gladly have left the island, where the extraordinary expense of living was devouring my substance without any recompense, but that I had become in public opinion, both in Greece and Crete, so identified with the existence of the insurrection that my resignation or recall would have been a danger to it in the eyes of its friends. The moral, intervention of my own Government amounted to the despatcher before quoted, a fustian despatcher from Mr. Seward to Mr. Morris about “the brave and suffering Cretans”, and a buncombe resolution of Congress, in view of which the people of the East, having to deal generally with governments whose words have a positive value, supposed that we were the friends of the Cretans, and I determined to avail myself of the delusion, as far as my own position was concerned, and conform to what was really public opinion in America, confident that the Government cared nothing about the matter pro or con. The Porte threatened to revoke my exequatur. Nothing would have pleased me better, for I knew that this would compel my Government to do something, and Ali Pasha seemed to have the same opinion, for the threat was dropped. A strong pressure was then applied at Washington to have me recalled, and Mr. Seward had consented, and decided to call me home, I was informed, under pretext of consultation on some public affairs; but General Ignatieff, getting wind of it, telegraphed to St. Petersburg that I must be retained, and a telegram from there to Washington settled the matter, I conjecture, as nothing more was heard of it. This I believe was the extent of the part performed by the American Government, and, trivial as it was, it seems to me the least creditable played by any government concerned.

Hussein Avni was only the locum tenens of the Serdar Ekrem, Omar Pasha, whom the Porte had decided on sending to Crete as a final and reliable agent, his name being, as was supposed, so formidable as to discourage any protraction of the resistance. In the interregnum, Hussein undertook no measures against the insurrection. Ali Riza Pasha, being beaten at Topolia in an attempt to penetrate into Selinos, where a new gathering of volunteers and insurgents had been made, contented himself with ravaging the plain districts of Kissamos which had hitherto escaped. Whole villages, which had submitted without any resistance, were plundered, the women violated by order of the officers, until in some cases death ensued; and of the men, some were killed, others beaten and tortured in many ways, all who could escape taking refuge in the caves and hiding places along the shore, where they escaped by small boat to Cerigotto. I ran over later in the Kestrel, and saw several hundred of these miserable wretches, women and children mainly, and saw two row-boats arrive with their lading so crowded that it was a marvel how they could have made the passage of twenty miles or more of open sea, in any weather. I saw one old blind man of ninety who had been wrapped by the soldiers in cloths on which they poured oil, and then, setting them on fire, left him to his fate. His friends came back in time to save his life, but I saw the broad scar of the burning, covering nearly his whole chest.

Omar Pasha arrived on the 9th of April, and on the nth a body of 2,000 insurgents came down to the heights of Boutzounaria, and attacked the guard of the aqueduct, to show his Highness, apparently, that they were not discouraged. They were driven back with the loss of three killed, the plan of attack having been betrayed by a miller in the neighborhood, and the troops been reinforced in the night before the appointed day. At the same time, a more decidedly offensive strategy seemed to be adopted by the whole insurrection, owing to the new material brought over by the Arkadi, and in several places combats of comparative importance took place. The insurgent chiefs made no concealment of their satisfaction at the change in the command, fearing the wiles and personal influence of Mustapha more than all the artillery and discipline of the Generalissimo. Omar had landed with great pomp and circumstance—horses and guns, cavalry and a staff, new and splendid uniforms. Amongst the others I paid my respects to the new victim, and found him, to my surprise, a weak, conceited, bombastic old man. He assured me that his plan and appliances were so complete and irresistible that within two weeks from the time he set out the insurrection would be crushed. I ventured to suggest that he would find on getting into the interior that the work was much more diffi­cult than he imagined, and that the neglect of the Porte to construct good roads when they had command of the island made their work very difficult. He replied that it could not be more difficult than Montenegro, and he had conquered that, etc. I left him with much less apprehension for the success of the campaign than I had previously entertained. He was a strong contrast to the quiet, concentrated, nisi Mustapha.

The political intervention of Russia commenced at this juncture by the negotiation of a secret arrangement with the Viceroy, by which he engaged to withdraw his troops from Crete, and a division was actually embarked for Egypt before the Serdar Ekrem succeeded in arresting the defection, which was completed on his return from the campaign, seven months later, when a number, which, with the previous departure, amounted to about 10,000 men, the remainder of a total of 24,000 Egyptians landed in Crete, returned to Egypt. The change in French policy was also marked by the recall of the slavishly pro-Turkish consul Derché, incapable either of honesty or good policy, and whose demoralization had made him worthless even to his own government, and the replacing of him by M. Tricou, a clever, quick-witted Parisian, but long in the service, and lately stationed at Alexandria. There seems to be little doubt that he was authorized to use his eyes to the disadvantage of Omar Pasha if possible. [Tricou arrived just too late to be received by Omar before setting out, and followed him to Heraklion with the intention, if not the order, to follow him through his campaign; a surveillance which Omar bluntly declined, to his cost, as events proved.]

He occupied about two weeks in organizing his troops, receiving heavy reinforcements from Turkey, including some splendid-looking regiments with full ranks, and then, with about 15,000 men, set out for the conquest of Sphakia. The Cretans, as if to reply to the new manifesto of the Porte, formed a provisional government, and chose Mavrocordato, an able Greek administrator, and most trustworthy and patriotic man, as president, decreeing at the same time that all authority should be exercised in the name of the King of the Hellenes. But the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of reconciling the claims of the rival chieftains, and of enforcing any kind of administrative system in the island, deterred Mavrocordato from assuming his post, though the brutum fulmen of proclamation on both sides still continued, the only practical question being which side would stand most killing. Strategy on either side was of trivial importance, tactics of none. The Cretans rolled stones and felled trees into the passes, already nearly impassable, and Omar and his staff planned, on the chart, a campaign for a country none of them had ever seen, and with the greatest contempt for the judgment of those who knew it. Mehmet Pasha, who still retained command in the Apokorona, though he had been obliged to retreat to the seaside, advanced anew, and formed an entrenched camp near Vrysses, while Omar, with the bulk of the army, moved on to Episkopi, and waited there the arrival of the troops at Rethymno. When all were ready, a joint attack was made, by Mehmet on Krapi and the Serdar Ekrem on Kallikrati, a much longer but less precipitous pass, which led into Askyfó from the east.

Zimbrakaki, with Veloudaki and other Cretan chiefs, and Soliotis of the Greeks, commanded at Krapi, and Coroneos at Kallikrati, and the affair ended as had all the former attacks, Mehmet being driven back to his camp, and Omar to Episkopi. These were affairs of sharpshooters entirely, where no opportunity of employing discipline for the attack offered, and the troops exposed themselves to a fusillade which they could not reply to. But, with the irritation of defeat, the Ottoman Generalissimo gave way to the most brutal impulses of revenge. Villages which had just submitted, and whose people had remained within the Turkish lines, were put to sack, and the last outrages of war perpetrated on the inhabitants.

The rumor which accompanied the Serdar Ekrem, that in spite of his professions of moderation and legality (as opposed to Mustapha’s policy) he had secret orders to stamp out the disaffection by the severest rigor, found now clear confirmation. What under the Commissioner, subsequent to Arkadi, was variable and overlooked barbarity in the subordinates, was, under the Generalissimo, the law and order of things, and he himself partook of the plunder of the defenseless, and rejuvenated the lusts of his old age with the pick of the captive Cretan maidens. The testimony of several of the European officers in the army was offered me, proving that Omar Pasha dishonored even his adopted country by his violation of his word, by his depravity and his cruelty, and himself set the example to his army of everything which could add to the misery and despair of unhappy Crete.

It is as natural for the Turkish authorities to deny as for the Christians to exaggerate the atrocities committed, but evidence of a nature not to be rejected, or even questioned in its general import, establishes that the policy adopted was one of subduing Crete by terror, and to this end full license was given to the soldiery. One entry in a memorandum book kept by Geissler (Pilaver Pasha), Omar’s chief of artillery, and which I had the chance to read, said, noting the entry into one of the villages near Goidaropolis: “O. Pasha ordered the division to ravage and rape”. All villages were burned, and all prisoners murdered or worse. The chiefs of four villages who came to make their submission were at once beheaded. The population invariably fled to the high mountains on the approach of the troops.

It will hardly be edifying to follow further in detail this barbarity; and with the general statement that the policy here indicated was followed throughout Omar’s campaign unflinchingly, and that the French consul was refused permission to accompany Omar in his movements, that no civilized witness might bring his deeds to light, I shall drop the theme, which sickens me to recall even at this long interval. My duty then compelled me to investigate, as now to declare, these things, but I spare the civilized world and myself any further recital of the deeds of the Croat Pasha.

The 6th of May a force of volunteers, commanded by Dimitrikarakos, landed in the eastern provinces, where up to that time hostilities had been very unimportant. A large body of insurgents quickly rallied round the volunteers, and, establishing their headquarters at Lasithe, they swept the country up to the walls of Candia. This compelled a new concentration of forces to meet the new emergency, and Omar set out, via Rethymno, through Mylopotamo to Heraklion, sending word to Reschid Effendi to come to meet him en route. Coroneos, meanwhile, had not been idle, and while Zimbrakaki and Costa Veloudaki, with the Apokoroniotes, some volunteers, and most of the Sphakiotes, remained to keep Mehmet in check, and profit by an unguarded moment to attack him, Coroneos and his followers kept near the army of Omar Pasha, waiting until he should be entangled in the ravines of Mylopotamo to attack him, and when he had reached Margaritas, he was beset furiously by the whole body of the men of Agios Basilios and the Amariotes, with the volunteers who accompanied Coroneos. The Turks, shut into narrow ravines overlooked by bold heights, defended themselves with difficulty, and were soon entirely hemmed in, unable to advance or retreat. The fire of the Cretan rifles penetrated into every part of the Turkish encampment, Omar’s tent being several times pierced. At a council of war, called on the emergency, the opinion was general that the position was critical, and some considered it as next to hopeless. There was nothing to do but take shelter and wait for Reschid and his irregulars, who, well acquainted with the mountains and the Cretan method of fighting, would be able to form an advance-guard, and, by skirmishing vigorously, protect the march of the regulars, utterly helpless in this kind of warfare.

The passage of the troops through this section was described to me by several eye-witnesses as anything but military. They cowered at the first attack, and refused to move forward in the ravines except when preceded by a cloud of irregulars to drive back the Christians, every onslaught of whom produced a panic; but, as they were behind as well as before, retreat was impossible, and there was no alternative to the Turks but to take to such defenses as the ground permitted and defend themselves as they best could. The Albanians and Circassians were not sufficiently acquainted with the country, cut up with interminable ravines, covered with olive groves, and defended by men who knew every inch of the ground. The wretched Turks lost all courage, even that of despair, and a European officer in the Egyptian service who was present said to me that most of his comrades entertained no hope of escape, and Coroneos has since assured me that if the other chiefs had responded to his call for help, the total destruction of the army, including the Serdar Ekrem and his staff, was practicable.

As has generally been the case in Greek wars, the jealousies of the chiefs were the safety of the Turks. Petropoulaki, a Mainote palikari of the old war, who commanded in Malavisi and Temenos, and watched Candia from the eastern slopes of Ida, refused to come to the aid of Coroneos; and when Reschid moved from the east, entered the defiles of Mylopotamo at Damasta, instead of throwing himself before the Turkish division and delaying their advance, he attacked them in the rear after they had gone through, and, though he inflicted severe losses on them and took much of the baggage, he rather facilitated than otherwise the junction of the two Turkish corps, and, after a short pursuit, abandoned him, instead of following up and uniting with Coroneos. Skoulas, chief of Mylopotamo, alone kept up the chase, and Coroneos, warned in time of the advance of Reschid, dispatched a small body of men to oppose his junction with Omar. Reschid, however, with the greatest obstinacy and gallantry, hammered away regardless of loss, and, fighting all night long, effected his junction, with which Coroneos’s hope of bottling up Omar was lost. The Generalissimo embraced Reschid as his savior, and promoted him on the spot. What made the matter still worse for the Cretans was that their ammunition was exhausted, and supplies did not arrive in time, so Coroneos reluctantly fell back, leaving the way open. The next day his ammunition arrived.

CHAPTER XII

ON the march forward through Mylopotamos the troops avenged themselves for their flight and losses in the most barbarous manner. Olive-trees were burned and cut down, every house burned, and every luckless Christian who fell into their hands sent with short shrift to his account. The European officer above alluded to declared to me that he was an eyewitness of the oft-repeated incident of burning the refugees in one of the caves, around the mouth of which a huge pile of green wood was piled, and fired while the troops hurried on, without waiting to see what the result might be; and so reached Damasta only slightly opposed, and debouched on the open country of Candia.

This occupied from the 18th to the 20th of May. The Turkish army then concentrated near the remains of Cnossos, and without entering into Candia moved on to Pediada, where Omar established his headquarters at Castale, near the foot of the Lasithe Mountains. He now announced his plan, which was to sweep round the insurgent forces, and push them all westward into Sphakia, where he would shut them up and finish the war. That he entertained no such expectation, however, was evident from the order of his attack on Lasithe, which he made at a single point, so as rather to disperse than gather in the insurgents. The 3d of June he sent Reschid to attack the northern pass of Lasithe, by Abdou. The column of irregulars entered the little plateau, which is as an ante-chamber to the great plain of Lasithe, without opposition, and his men at once camped, and began to cook their supper, or whatever else the desire of the bashibazouk might be. They were, in this state of confusion and security, suddenly attacked by the Cretans, and utterly routed and driven back to the plains below, leaving their dead and wounded on the ground. The news of the disaster followed the dispatch announcing the entry so closely, that both became known in Heraklion that same night. Reinforcements were continually arriving, and the Pasha had now in the field for the attack 18,000 men. With these he renewed the attack on Lasithe in two directions, from Abdou on the north, and from the west by Mathea and the pass which was defended by the mountain called Lasithe Effendi—a very strong position, but in a state of defence in no ways equal to its natural advantages. The insurgent force gathered in the Lasithe at this time was the largest the insurrection had ever seen assembled, and is estimated by competent assistants at about 5,000, but with no head, though many commanders. The force was sufficiently well organized to have defeated Omar Pasha, but, after three days' cautious skirmishing, the Turks penetrated on several sides, the irregulars turning Abdou by a difficult and undefended approach at the east, and the insurgents retired in disorder and in every direction; some by Messara into the Ida district, but the larger portion into Rhizo Castron, south of Lasithe, and the higher ridges of the Lasithe range, which Omar did not attempt to penetrate.

On hearing that Omar had arrived at Heraklion, and was about attacking Lasithe, I ran down in the Kestrel to watch his movements from nearer, and get more reliable information than the consular agents there generally furnished, as well as to convey more promptly the news to Greece and Constantinople, the agents only reporting back to their superiors at Chania. On the arrival of the first news of the entry of Reschid into Abdou, Omar sent off an express with the news to Syra and Constantinople, but when the later report came, of the surprise and repulse, I was able, to the great annoyance of the authorities, to send by the Austrian post steamer, which left the next day, to correct the advices by the new information which I received from the son of Reschid Pasha, who was in great anxiety for the fate of his father, a raid of the Christians having temporarily cut his communications with headquarters. For two or three days the panic and confusion in Candia were extreme.

Orders were then issued for the bulk of the army to concentrate at Dibaki, and Omar moved across the plains of Pediada and Messara, Reschid taking a line further west by St. Thomas and the slopes of Ida, while the troops who had moved further into the Lasithe country attempted to pass directly to the coast. Two battalions of Egyptians in this movement were caught in the ravines of Sime, and almost annihilated, leaving baggage, arms, and mules, loaded with ammunition and provisions, in the hands of the Cretans, who hung on the rear of every detachment, harassing more successfully than they had opposed them.

At Dibaki the army was reorganized for the Sphakian campaign. It was the beginning of July when it began to move. The fleet had been waiting at Dibaki some time, and embarking the bulk of the regulars, still strengthened by fresh troops from Constantinople, they were landed at Franco Castelli, and took immediate possession of the heights commanding Kallikrati. The forces under Coroneos were on their way to oppose this movement, but, moving by land, were too late, and Zimbrakaki and his Sphakiotes made no opposition. Reschid, meanwhile, moved from Dibaki through Agios Basilios, his march being facilitated by the assassination of the chief of that district, which left the Christians without a head, and paralyzed their defence in great measure, though opposition enough was made to render his march slower than the plans of Omar had provided, and gave time to Coroneos to get to Kallikrati, where he immediately commenced operations by an attack on Omar's positions on the hills south of the plain. He began the combat with forty men, who were rapidly increased to 1,500, whom he divided into two bodies, of which the heavier, massing unperceived on the left flank of the Turkish position, after the defence had been concentrated against the feint made by Coroneos himself, charged energetically, and carried the two positions on the Turkish left. The ground was very favorable to irregular operations, rocky, with much small growth of trees, making artillery useless. The Cretans held the positions taken, and in them prepared an attack for the day after.

On this day the insurgent force had augmented to 2,000 men, and the plan of operation was a slight variation only of that of the day before, the feint being on the left, but, unfortunately for it, the order to the commander who should have made the real attack was kept in the pocket of the officer who carried it until an hour after the time at which the assault was ordered to be made, so that though the diversion of Coroneos was very well carried out, and the Sphakiotes under him penetrated to an abattis which had been constructed around the principal position of the Turkish army on a conical hill called Avgon (die egg), the expected flank attack was not delivered, and the troops who had held the positions on the light had time to concentrate against Coroneos, and he was driven back. Preparations were, however, made for the third day, with forces still increasing, when the news that Reschid had arrived at Gaiduropolis, and consequently menaced their rear, demoralized the Cretans, compelling Coroneos with his volunteers to fall back on Askyfo.

Mehmet Pasha, once more attacking Askyfó by Krapi, while Omar’s troops and Reschid with his bashi-bazouks passed by the mountains from Kallikrati to Asfendu, and so into Askyfo, had been opposed by Zimbrakaki, Soliotis, and the Sphakiote chiefs for three days, when, finding the defence concentrated at the head of the gorge, he climbed the hills at his right, passed over into Askyfó, took possession of Kares, on the edge of the plain, barricading himself there without attempting to advance further. Coroneos, on his retreat to Askyfo, threw a force of several hundred Sphakiotes and volunteers behind him, and for several days his communications with Canéa and his base at Vryses were cut off, when Reschid succeeded in getting into Askyfo and supplying him with provisions, of which he stood much in need, having left Vryses with six days’ rations, and now been twelve days out without further supplies. Zimbrakaki had retired to the heights between Askyfo and Anopolis, followed by Omar’s forces, while Reschid occupied the southeastern part of Askyfo, Mehmet being in the northeastern. The indefatigable Coroneos took position at Muri with about 800 men, and thence menaced the communications between the latter chiefs, and so effectually that Mehmet was obliged to evacuate Askyfo, and get back to Vryses, when, falling on the rear of Reschid, Coroneos compelled him to fall back to Kallikrati. The Greek chief then placed himself between Omar and his auxiliaries, and watched both, ready to attack either when the development of their plans should tell him what to do. Omar pushed on to Anopolis, and thence to Aradena, where he was gallantly opposed by a small force of Greek volunteers under Smolenski and Nicolaides. The Greeks, attacked in front and on both flanks, while Zimbrakaki, at an hour’s journey, remained idle, and Petropoulaki, a league away, guarded an unattacked pass, were forced to fall back, and leave Aradena to the Turkish troops, after a display of courage which called forth the praises of their enemies. But here the defenses of nature stopped the invaders. The great stronghold of Sphakia, Samaria, was impregnable from the side of Aradena, the mountains hardly giving place for undisputed passage to pedestrians. The troops were accordingly withdrawn to the seaside, and as the shore gives no passage, a detachment was carried by ships to the entrance of the gorge of Agios Roumeli. An energetic assault penetrated as far as the village which gives name to this valley, a distance of half a mile, but here the Cretans, concentrating in numbers, and aided by the masses of rock and torrents, stopped all further advance, and the troops were withdrawn; and, their passage through Sphakia to Canéa being barred, they were sent round by sea, leaving the country as hostile as they had found it, but desolated and ravaged as the paese guasta never had been before. The losses of the army in this campaign had been frightful. The sun of July, beating on those bare rocks with southern slopes, with rare and unhealthy wells, fatigues of climbing and battle, merciless driving and pushing to enable Omar to telegraph to the Sultan at Paris the conquest of Sphakia, had been a hundredfold more fatal to the Turks than Cretan bullets. Sunstrokes and dysenteries carried off hundreds. Amongst the deaths was that of Geissler, Omar’s chief of artillery, in whose journal the writer read after his death these words: “Who could have believed that I could ever have assisted in the subjugation of these unhappy Christians!”. He had done his utmost at the beginning of the campaign to check the barbarities by which it was sought to terrify the Cretans into submission, and having remonstrated with Omar for one case of peculiar and repulsive atrocity, a coolness arose between them, which continued until Geissler’s death.

Omar reached Chania by ship August 30, not having even done as much towards the conquest of the island as Mustapha, no division of his troops having passed from sea to sea except by the plain of Pediada, etc. His losses since leaving Chania cannot be estimated at less than 20,000 to 25,000 men—the estimate made by the most competent persons of the total force employed in the Sphakian campaign being not less than 45,000, while, on leaving, he himself declared that he had not over 20 000 troops, all told, in the island, and European officers in the service declared to me that this was an overestimate.

Returning for a moment to follow Reschid in his retreat from Sphakia, we shall so conclude this campaign. Waiting a day or so at Kallikrati, he seemed undecided what course to take, and Coroneos watched him, fearing a raid on the undevastated district near Kallikrati, but, urgently summoned by the Assembly to Sphakia to resist Omar, he was on the way to obey, when he received news that Reschid had broken up his camp, and was in retreat on Dibaki. He instantly sent messengers to the men of Agios Basilios to hasten to stop the way at Halara, a most difficult pass of their canton, while he followed him with all the forces he could muster. Flight and pursuit were rapid, but when at Halara Coroneos overtook the Mussulmans, he found no force in Reschid’s way, and that he had occupied the pass without resistance. Pursuit recommenced next day, and in passing by Amari, Reschid escaped an ambush of the Amariotes by taking an unused and difficult way in preference to the commonly travelled one at which they lay in wait for him, and, incessantly harassed, and losing men and baggage continually, was caught again by his Greek adversary near Melambos, in a parting fight, in which, it is said, he received a wound from which (or from some other cause) he died a few weeks later at Heraklion.

This was the general result of the great expedition which would end the insurrection in two weeks. Nothing had been gained, an army wasted; and when, on October 3, the remnant of Egyptian troops left, there was no Turkish force out of gunshot of the fortresses except a small garrison at Dibaki, under the guns of the fleet.

With the practical and complete failure of Omar Pasha to subdue the island, all hope of military success seemed to fail the Turkish authorities. Omar returned from Sphakia with his army by sea, save a body left in Selinos, who made an expedition on Omalos, and, after penetrating with slight resistance to the plain, found themselves unable to keep up their communications with the coast, and abruptly evacuated it again, suffering considerable loss in forcing the passes outwardly. The elastic system of resistance adopted by the Cretans, and finally acceded to by the Greek chiefs, wore out the Turkish forces without giving them the prestige of tangible victory. There were no fortresses to capture, no accumulation of stores to destroy, and the very poverty and want of military coherence made a strength for the insurgents in face of the wretched strategy of the Turks. 

CHAPTER XIII

ANOTHER step of the moral intervention which the Russian Government had been so long and so skillfully engineering came at this juncture to make the cause of the Porte more hopeless. The negotiations with France had resulted in a kind of entente on the Eastern question, by which the French emperor had agreed, under certain contingencies, to unite with the Russians in deporting the families of the Christian combatants. The new French agent, Tricou, had from the beginning shown a tendency to criticize Omar Pasha unfavorably, which the latter had increased by his contemptuous treatment of the new consul. Tricou had, consequently, set his agents to find out all the instances of Turkish barbarity obtainable—a ghastly roll, obtained from easily read records. It happened during the operations against Sphakia, which Omar nominally directed from on board the flag-ship of the squadron off the coast, that news came in of his having blockaded a number of families in a cave on the seaside and having attempted unsuccessfully to stifle them out (or in), and the active Murray went at once to make his Highness a visit, and ascertain if the catastrophe were avertible. He obtained from the Generalissimo a promise that the prisoners should not be attacked by any inhuman appliances, and should be guaranteed honorable treatment on surrendering. In the course of the conversation, Omar animadverted on Tricou in terms which Murray, in narrating his visit to me, declined to repeat, and which, in all their vagueness and possible malignity, I at once applied as a caustic to Tricou’s already wounded pride, in accordance with a systematic policy to make all the bad blood possible between the Pasha and my colleagues. The ruse succeeded to my best hopes, and thenceforward the irritated Frenchman sought every opportunity to punish the illustrious renegade, and his activity resulted in the following dispatch, sent while Omar was still engaged in the Sphakian raid:

(Translation.)

Chania, July 21, 1867.

M. le Chargé d’affaires :

The situation grows daily worse. I have had the honor of notifying to you the deplorable excesses which have been committed in the district of Kissamos; today I learn that massacres have broken out in the eastern part of the country.

For the last month, isolated murders took place daily in the neighborhood of the town of Chania; the native Mussulmans overran the country and abandoned themselves to the saddest iniquities in the Christian villages. These barbarous expeditions over, they would return to the town, and the gates opened before them to give passage to their bloody trophies. I had made strong complaints to the local authorities, but all my representations had remained without effect. Emboldened by impunity, the bashi-bazouks on the 12th and 13th of this month spread themselves over the district of Rhizo and massacred women and children. To revenge themselves, the insurgents carried off a young Turkish girl and killed her father. The Candian Government, which has for a long time forbidden Christians to enter the town, doubtless counted upon these atrocities remaining buried in silence. They let them go on, and the irregulars could glut their ferocity entirely as they pleased.

On the 17th, they invaded the villages of Humeri, Alcolohuri, Aghias Paraskevi, Shilus, and a great number of the villages of the district of Pediada, murdering the peaceable and defenseless villagers, old men, women, and children. The consular agents of Heraklion unite, and wish to send their dragomans to the places; but the Governor opposes this, and the carnage continues.

These sad tidings have deeply moved the consular body. As soon as I had been informed of them I went to the Imperial Commissioner, whom I found, I must say, deeply afflicted, but overwhelmed with the feeling of his impotence. He no longer attempts to deny the evil, but he feels himself incapable of staying its progress. From all parts of the island the most sinister reports reach us. Women and children wander along the shore, dying of hunger and exposed to the most horrible treatment. I am in a position to inform you, M. le Chargé d’Affaires, that three young Turkish officers, witnesses of the barbarities which have taken place at Kissamos, have given in their resigna­tion, to avoid presiding over such butcheries.

In so serious a situation, my English colleague and I thought it our duty to inform our respective governments in the promptest manner. We consequently drew up the following telegraphic dispatch, which we sent this day to the Peiraeus to be transmitted to Constantinople, as well as to the Cabinets of London and Paris:

“Massacres of women and children have broken out in the interior of the island. The authorities can neither put down the insurrection nor stay the course of these atrocities. Humanity would imperatively demand the immediate suspension of hostilities, or the transportation to Greece of the women and children”.

The Russian and Italian consuls address an identical telegram to St. Petersburg and Florence.

We cannot, M. le Chargé d’Affaires, remain blind to the fact that from impotence the Turks passed to fury, and from fury to extermination. I do not hesitate to say that, if this useless struggle were to be prolonged, the women and children would have no refuge but exile or death.

Omar Pasha continues his expedition of Sphakia. It is asserted that he has effected his junction with the corps of Mehmet Pasha, which is said to be entirely free. It would be very desirable that the Serdar should make himself master of this position as soon as possible; it is true that the insurrection would be scarcely weakened by it, but this success might perhaps induce the Porte to order a suspension of hostilities.

The aviso of the Imperial navy, the Prometheus, which has come to relieve the Salamander, anchored on the 17th in the harbor of Chania.—Accept, etc.

(Signed) 

             Tricou.

The consequence of the Russo-Frankish accord was that, on the receipt of the above dispatch at Constantinople, the French and Russian squadrons at Peiraeus proceeded to Crete, and there commenced to embark the families gathered along the coast. This undertaking, which had probably as little as possible to do with humanity in its secret springs, was evidently concerted, and waited only the arrival of some signal like Tricou’s telegram, followed accordingly by this preconcerted rejoinder from the French representative at Constantinople:

M. Outrey to Ali Pasha.

Therapia, July 26, 1867.

Highness: The consul of France at Chania sends me the following telegram [given above].

In view of such acts, which the Porte can but reprove, and in virtue of orders which I have received from my Government, I hasten to inform your highness that I have ordered Admiral Simon to repair to the Cretan coast with the ships under his orders, to receive and transport to Greece all the women and children who wander on the shores, dying of hunger, and exposed to frightful treatment. The mission of Admiral Simon, having no political character, cannot, I imagine, meet any difficulty from the Ottoman authorities, and I beg your highness to have the goodness to instruct his Highness Omar Pasha to lend all his sympathy to a work of humanity”.

Which is made clearer by the extract from the dispatch of the English chargé to Lord Stanley:

(Extract)

Mr. Barron to Lord Stanley (Received August 6).

Constantinople, July 23, 1867.

The French chargé d’affaires has called to inform me that, having received instructions from his Government to dispatch vessels to Crete for the purpose of removing homeless victims of the war, whenever it should be advisable, he deemed the last advices from the French consul at Chania (enclosed herewith in copy) to be such as to oblige him to use the discretionary power placed in his hands.

On the receipt of this dispatch he immediately concerted measures with the Russian Ambassador, who was provided in advance with corresponding instructions, and they both sent late on the 26th identical instructions by telegraph to their respective naval officers in the Mediterranean”.

The number of relieving ships sent to Crete in obedience to this accord was four French, three Russian, followed by two Italian; and, lest isolation should seem intervention, three Austrian, not over well-willed, and one small Prussian gunboat, that the now great Power might not be left out of the new question.

This movement had, in my opinion, no direct effect on the military question, the Sphakian expedition having already done its worst, and begun to recoil, before the arrival of Admiral Simon with his ships; but it did, no doubt, prevent the success of the conciliatory movement which followed. The Generalissimo, after his return to Chania, about the middle of September, issued a proclamation prepared at Constantinople, offering a general amnesty and an armistice of six weeks, preparatory to measures of a softer and more persuasive character. The Turkish officials, in their intercourse with the consuls, frankly admitted that force had failed, and that no hope of its more successful appliance remained. The depleted army could only with great difficulty, and slowly, be refilled. Reinforcements were obtained, but not enough to keep the cadres at their full condition, and a dispatch of the English consul at Beyrout attests the dread of this service which had infected the troops in other sections of the Ottoman empire, while battalions in Crete mutinied and refused to labor any longer.

Early in October, Ali Pasha arrived, to put in effect the sober second thought of the head of Islam. The manner and views of the Grand Vizier impressed me with profound respect and sympathy—his proffers seemed to me reasonable, and likely to assure to the Cretans a substantial liberty and reform. But they were too shrewd not to see that the ablest man in the Turkish empire had only come to Crete to try the last resort of his persuasion, because his case was nearly hopeless, and simultaneously with his arrival came stimulating dispatches from the Russian agents, encouraging the Cretans to hold out and strike now the final blow at the Turkish domination. They were assured by these dispatches in the most positive terms that if they withstood this temptation, and refused all the conciliatory propositions of Ali Pasha, their independence and annexation to Greece were certain. I feel confident that but for these assurances the scheme of Ali Pasha would have been accepted, for the island was harrowed and ravaged and miserable to the last degree. The campaign of Omar Pasha had destroyed, according to the declaration of a European officer engaged, six hundred villages. Except in Sigia, the extreme eastern peninsula, there was hardly a house with its roof on, and the people had no means to provide new rafters.

The discouragement was great, and required as counter­poise all the confident promises of Russia and the means and appliances of Greece to induce the people to decide to keep up the resistance.

My own opinion was that the Cretans had better accept Ali Pasha’s propositions, but our minister at Constantinople wrote me to urge their rejection with all my influence, as the certain condition of independence. I do not believe that our Government had any part in these instructions or policy. Mr. Seward had at one time given me the fullest endorsement of my pro-Cretan views, and at another was ready, on the remonstrance of the Turkish minister, to recall me for having done what he approved both in myself and Mr. Morris, and abstained only on another application being made by the Russian Government. Being on the spot, and as well able to judge as any one, it seemed to me wisest for the Cretans to accept autonomy and peace, but I obeyed the instructions sent me against my own feelings. I communicated the advices of my minister to those whose business it was to advise the insurgents. I felt a confidence in Ali Pasha which no other Turkish official had ever inspired me with, and a certainty that he would act in good faith. Humanity demanded peace in defiance of all politics.

Dissensions had arisen between the volunteers and Cretans; and the chiefs of the former, wearied of a pointless and resultless guerilla warfare, and sure that the question was only to be settled on the continent, in order to hasten the preparation of movements on Epirus and Thessaly, one by one returned to Greece, followed by most of their retinues. The Cretan combatants, relieved of their families, were quite sufficient for all the needs of the situation, and, well armed and provided, could have kept up the struggle for years, if disposed.

But the fatal blow to the insurrection was being prepared by its own friends. The Russian Government had, during the nuptial visit of the King of Greece to St. Petersburg, secured a complete ascendency over him, and immediately on his return to Greece it became evident that the dismissal of the Comoundouros ministry had been decided in that conclave with the execution of whose plans no motive of humanity ever interferes, whose deliberations no curious House of Commons pries into or clamoring journal opposes. The Russian Government had decided to take the direction of the insurrection, and to that end, to get rid of Comoundouros and his friends, whose anti-Russian tendencies were too strong to be bent to the desired course, the king, when the moment had arrived, made a difference with the ministry on some trivial point, and peremptorily dismissed it. But the chamber, with an unexpected constancy, refused to sanction any change in the administration, and the Russian minister in Athens then made overtures to the dismissed president of the council, offering to bring him back to power if he accepted the programme of St. Petersburg. He refused, and the chamber, unyielding, was also dissolved, and in the new election, in which the whole influence of the court and throne was exerted against the Comoundouros party, by the most violent and illegal measures the deposed chief and his principal adherents were kept out of the new chamber, which was, to a sufficient degree, subservient; and Bulgaris, the evil genius of Greece since her independence, under whose auspices at all times disorder and dishonesty, brigandage and peculation, had especially thriven, became the arbiter of the destinies of Crete.

At this time all means and supplies for the war came directly from the Hellenic treasury. Private contributions had never been great, and were almost exclusively confined to Greeks abroad—a comparatively trivial supply of food and clothing from America being the exception. Nearly 50,000 refugees from Crete were dependent on the Hellenic Government, which, with the means supplied to the war committee for military operations, constituted a drain on the resources of Greece sufficiently alarming, yet popular opinion was so strong in favor of continuing the insurrection that no government dared seem even to be lukewarm towards it; and with excellent opportunities for observing, I am able to assert confidently that the Hellenic people were ready to run all the risks of war with Turkey, rather than allow the Cretans to be reconquered, and that no government could have lived a day which did not proclaim, as the chief condition of its existence, the vigorous support of the Cretan insurrection.

What the views of Russia were in regard to the insurrection no outsider can, of course, say; but they seemed to be in favor of only making the Greek agitation a part of a great scheme, having its direction at St. Petersburg. The only immediate change, however, in the direction of the insurrection was the gradual suppression of the powers of the Cretan committee at Athens, and an occasional relaxation in the vigor of support, as if to try the condition of public feeling. I judge that Russia had made other combinations, which made the success of the insurrection as a Hellenic movement undesirable, and that she was gradually getting it in hand, to be able to suppress it when the proper moment came. To do this without sacrificing that influence over the Hellenes which would be so useful in certain contingencies, it was necessary to have a Hellenic instrument to do the work—hence the position of Mr. Bulgaris.

CHAPTER XIV

IN judging of such acts as the intervention of Russia, we have no standard but success, and the greater or less fitness of one of the participants to rule; but from the point of view from which I must look at it, the conduct of Russia seems to me as the most base, cruel, and politically dishonorable which I have ever known, being, as it was, practiced on a wretched people, co-religionary, whose sufferings had been extreme, and which, being offered a tangible and not inconsiderable concession in return for its efforts, was only induced to refuse it from faith in Russian promises of better things.

Ali Pasha landed on the 4th of October, and on the 13th Captain Murray reported to his Government: “The insurgents have thrown away a golden opportunity in the advent of Ali Pasha, for I believe, short of annexation, they might have anything they asked for. Whether the concessions would be temporary or not, is a matter of opinion; but his mission has completely failed”. This was clear to all, and in December following, the highest Christian functionary of the Turkish Government in the island said to me : “We have got to come to the principality with a Christian prince, and that before it is too late to gain even that—we have nothing to hope for from arms”.

Yet in a desultory way fighting went on. Omar Pasha went home in disgrace on the nth of November, but left for his successor, Hussein Avni, a plan for paralyzing the insurrection, by lines of block-houses running across the island and cutting it into three principal parts, each of which was then to be subdued in turn. But if the Cretans had been weakened by the withdrawal of the most of the volunteers, the Turks were enfeebled by sickness and extreme dejection, and the war was languidly carried on, the Turks maintaining themselves within their fortified lines and now and then making a sortie on some bold party of insurgents, the principal affair of the winter being an attack on Zurba, on the 13th of December, which was, like all the previous ones on the village, repulsed with disaster. And under such auspices—the insurrection, less disputed on its ground than at any previous period, holding posts with­in sight of Canéa; the hospitals of the island filled with sick troops (at and about Chania alone were an average of 3,000 in the hospital, with unexampled mortality from hospital gangrene and fevers, and the funerals ranging from ten to twenty per day); supplies very low, and the troops only paid three months’ pay for the last twenty—the year 1867 went out and the third year of the insurrection came in. And all through the spring and summer this state of things continued, neither the Government nor the insurrection capable of making the feeble effort necessary to extinguish the forces of the other. We in the Turkish lines suffered almost as much as if we were in a besieged town, for supplies from the interior were cut off, and they came not by sea; meat was very dear and poor, vegetables rare and sometimes unattainable, so that I was shut up in my house for three months with a scorbutic malady. What the unfavored must have suffered may be conceived. Despondency and gloom were dominant in all official circles. Building of block-houses went on slowly, but there were not troops enough left in the island to garrison all that were planned, while on the other hand the Hellenic Government gave only assistance enough to keep the insurgents from surrendering, and the Greeks from revolution, which would have been the most probable result of the open abandonment of the insurrection. In August of this year, I had unmistakable proof of the reality of the insurrection, having witnessed a skirmish between Zurba and Lakus, and narrowly escaped being taken prisoner near Theriso, with some of my colleagues and several officers of the men-of-war in port, Mr. Dickson and a portion of our excursion party having been actually captured by Hadji Mikhalis’ forces within an hour’s walk of Chania.

This season brought no change in the military position, there being a gradual weakening of the army until only about 5,000 regulars were disposable for field operation, and a total of less than 17,000 were reported to me by Turkish officers as the effective remaining from 82 battalions of Turkish troops, which with 22,000 Egyptians were the regular forces employed since the commencement of the insurrection, and of which only 10,000 of the latter had been since sent home otherwise than as sick or wounded.

In September of 1868 I left Crete under medical orders, and with the impression, generally felt in Crete, that the Hellenic Government was about abandoning the insurrection. On arriving at Athens, where I determined to wait the result, I found the Cretan committee so far convinced of the bad faith of the Bulgaris government that they meditated resignation en masse as an appeal to the people, and to discharge themselves of all responsibility for the impending collapse of the revolt. The Minister of Foreign Affairs soon after waited on me at my house to beg me to use my influence with the committee to persuade them to hold on, assuring me in the most earnest manner that the

Government had no intention of withdrawing its support from the Cretans, and that it intended organizing an expedition on a most effective. scale to reassure and reanimate the movement; and that it had the intention of directing this organization officially to ensure its efficiency.

Meanwhile the Provisional Government of the island had made an earnest appeal to Coroneos to return and assume the command-in-chief of the insurrection, and he had prepared a plan by which he was confident of keeping up the war through another winter by a judicious employment of Cretan forces. His plan was accepted by the committee, but, on being laid before the Government, was rejected under the pretense that the sum demanded (£10,000) was beyond its means, and it proceeded without reference to the committee to organize at more than double the expense an expedition under the old Mainote palikari, Petropoulaki, in so open and undisguised a manner that, with most other friends of the Cretans, I was convinced that it was meant to give Turkey an opportunity to brusquer les choses by (what Greece had hitherto avoided) open violation of international law.

Every subsequent movement of the Government confirmed me in this opinion. The bands paraded the streets openly with the Cretan flag; were furnished with artillery from the national arsenal; and embarked in two detachments for Crete, unmolested by any of the Turkish ships, though all the world knew when and where they were going; on landing they sent back the artillery, and not only made no offensive movement, but did not even defend themselves; the smaller detachment being cut to pieces in a few days, the other, fleeing in disorder to the plain of Askyfo, made overtures at once for surrender, carrying with them in their defection most of the Cretans of the western provinces. There still remained in the eastern provinces a strong nucleus of insurrection undismayed even by this apparent disaster, and capable of rallying 5,000 men. In compliance, however, with what has always seemed to me a preconcerted plan between the Porte and Bulgaris, Hobart Pasha, the new English commander of the Turkish fleet, waylaid the Ennosis blockade-runner in Greek waters on her return from Crete, and pursued her into the port of Syra, where he blockaded her with the whole squadron, leaving the coast of Crete utterly un­guarded, though there were still three good steamers at the disposal of the committee. But in the new excitement of this patent outrage on international law the Bulgaris government found its opportunity to withdraw all support from Crete, and, while public opinion was diverted to the not slight chances of war with Turkey, further supplies to the insurrection were cut off and it collapsed almost without notice.

In all this shaping of events there was no disguising the control of the Russian Government. The insurrection became a menace to bring on the Eastern question, for which Russia was not yet ready, and which she could not permit to be brought on under Hellenic auspices. The moment could not have been more auspiciously chosen for Greece to carry on a war with the Ottoman empire, and public opinion in Greece was unanimous in favor of this emergency rather than abandoning Crete, be the risks and event what they might. The Turkish army was already fully occupied—a further levy of troops would have been perilous, and Joseph Karam waited at Athens the signal to arouse the Lebanon. The Greeks had little money, but the Turks had comparatively less, for their army and navy had not been paid, were discouraged and mutinous, and the treasury was empty. Egypt was hostile, the Principalities ready to revolt. My own opinion then was, and is still, that if Greece had gone to war she had a reasonable chance of victory—not with­out disasters or great sacrifices, but her history has shown that she is capable of enduring both the one and the other; and if Russia had been friendly to her in this crisis, success would have been most probable. The Bulgaris administration, its object gained in the suppression of the insurrection, was in its turn overthrown by the popular indignation at the discovered trick, but when the diplomatic flurry had passed, and tranquility had returned to the Aegean, we had only to see drift over to the shores of their kindred land the debris of one of the best justified and best deserving revolts against misgoverning tyranny which modern history has recorded. All was quiet in Crete.

CHAPTER XV

THE last year of the war I had left Crete on a leave of absence of two months, which was extended indefinitely by Mr. Washburn, then Secretary of State, on account of the health of my family; but in April my wife, broken by the hardships of our Cretan life and sick-bed watching; and dejected greatly by the loss of a cause in which she had the most passionate sympathy, and by the misery of the unhappy Cretans around us, became insane and ended her life.

Simultaneously, Mr. Fish, now become Secretary of State, removed me from the consulate at the request of the Turkish Government, and in June I went to Crete to hand over the consular effects to my successor, and, on the petition of the Cretan chiefs still remaining in Athens, to obtain, if possible, some mitigation of the measures which prevented them from repatriating themselves. I found the island as I had left it, in peace indeed, but the peace of destruction and paralysis. Roads were being made, and block­houses being constructed, but no houses being rebuilt, and the roads were all military. The new Governor-General seemed amiable, just, and good-willed, but in Turkish disorganization the best will does not go far. The subordinates of the local administration were the spies, the traitors, and loyal people of the war, with rancors to vent and revenges to take. There was nothing to rob the people of, but there remained prisons and persecutions.

I found, naturally enough, all my efforts with the Governor useless, and that the condition of things made return unsafe for anyone who had taken a prominent part in the war; and so, despairing of finding any opening, I was about to return to Athens without awaiting my successor, but before going decided to make that visit to Omalos and Samaria which the insurrection had stopped and the state of hostilities ever since had rendered impracticable from the Turkish posts.

Even when peace had been restored and not a recusant fugitive remained in the mountain hiding-places, the local authorities could with difficulty reconcile themselves to the idea of my going there; and it was only after the failure of several petty intrigues to prevent my getting away, that they determined to pass to the other extreme and do hand­somely what they could not avoid doing. I set out in the dawn of a July day with an officer of the mounted police, a chosen and trusty man, with one private of the same force and my own cavass. The private rode a hundred yards ahead en vidette against any attack on the official dignity by unknowing peasant or unheeding patrol or straggler of the faithful, and discharged his duty on the road to my complete satisfaction, no countermarching troops daring to hold the narrow way to the detriment of the con­sular dignity. The lawlessness of the Turkish administra­tion in Crete has kept alive, more than in most of the Christian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the power of and respect for foreign officials. Just as much as the unjust Governor dreads the inspecting eye and the exposing blue-book, so much the Rayah hopes from them, and honors the Effendi as the Turk curses the Ghiaour; and so in Crete the extreme of official deference is kept up, corresponding to the degree of official oppression hitherto obtaining.

So, when my avant-courrier announced to the awkward squad of Anatolian infantry, ragged, sullen, that the “Consolos Bey” demanded the road, a savage frown of unwelcome gleamed through the disciplinary respect; while the shouting, chattering groups of Christian peasants ambling along on the mules and donkeys, with their little loads of fowls or oil for the market at Chania, were generally arrested by the summons of the guard, and drew up respectfully at the roadside, the most respectful dismounting until I had passed.

The road for ten or twelve miles runs westward over a level plain, the ancient bed of the Iardanos, by whose banks we know, from Homer, that the Cydonians dwelt. The fact that the Iardanos (now called Platanos, from the immense plane-trees growing on its banks) now empties into the sea ten miles from Chania, has puzzled geographers to reconcile Cydonia with Chania; but, on arriving at the point where the river debouches into and cuts across the plain, it will be seen that the new channel to the sea has been cut through the hills by the action of the river, and that the ancient course was evidently eastward through the still marshy plain into the bay of Suda, passing close to the position of Chania.

The roads in Crete are marked with historical associations of all ages, as the Appian Way with recollections of the great dead. The town that we pass, near the mouth of the Platanos, was the ancient Pergamos, whither Lycurgus, to evade the possibility of his laws being revoked, banished himself, where he died, and was buried. The town which we enter as we cross the Platanos at the ford is Alikianu, the scene of that atrocious and perfidious massacre of which I have told the story. It is a town of half-ruined villas—some, of the Venetian days—buried in orange-trees, and so surrounded with olive groves that but little of it can be seen from the river. The road we must follow only skirts it, following the river, until it rises on a ridge of mountains, zigzag and undulating, up to Lakus The Lakiotes are accounted among the bravest of the Cretans; and though military science, flank movements, and artillery made their town untenable in the late insurrection, it is still a formidable position. The village itself lies along under the summit ridge of the chain of hills which form a buttress to the Asprovouna, stretching north, with steep approaches from every side. It used to be a prosperous village, one of the largest in the island, but now its straggling houses were in ruins, two or three only having the roofs replaced, others having only a canopy of boughs laid over one end of the space enclosed by the blackened walls, enough to keep the dews off while the inhabitants slept, for rain never falls here through the summer months. All bespoke utter exhaustion and extreme poverty. The jaded, listless look of the people, the demoralization of war and exile, most of them having been of the refugees in Greece, the ravage and misery of all surroundings, made a picture which never has passed from my memory.

In the first capture by Mustapha Pasha, Lakus was taken by surprise and a flank movement of the Turkish irregulars, the Lakiotes having only time to secure their most valuable and portable goods and bury the church-bell, retiring up the mountain slopes beyond, firing a few shots of defiance as they went. When Ali Pasha arrived in Crete, he ordered the reconstruction of the church of Lakus, demolished by the Turks at the capture of the village, and the primates were ordered to find the bell. Declining to know its whereabouts, they were thrown into prison, to lie until they did, a few days of which treatment produced the desired effect, and the bell was hung over the reconstructed church. That afternoon notes of compulsory joy sounded from the belfry, and the insurgents from the ridge of Zourba opposite came down to the brink of the ravine to ask who had betrayed the bell. Their submitted towns­men replied by an avowal of the modus operandi of getting at the required knowledge; and the ‘patriots’ replied, “Ring away. We will come and ring it tonight”. And agreeably to promise, a band of insurgents came across the ravine at midnight, carried off the bell, and, hanging it on a tree near Zourba, rang the night out. The Turkish guard, which occupied the block-house in the village, scarcely thought it worthwhile to risk the defence of the bell, if indeed they knew of its danger.

At Lakus I had made my plans to breakfast and pass the noon-heat, but I had reckoned without my hosts, for, on “pitching my tent” and sending out my cavass to find a lamb to roast, I found evidence of the inroads of civilization—I could not get one for less than three pounds sterling—about fifteen times the usual price, and a sure attempt at swindle based on my supposed necessities. Fortunately my escort had amply provided themselves, and we had bread and cheese, caviar and coffee, to stay our appetites until we should reach Omalos, where were a garrison and an army butcher. So I ate my modicum of what they gave me, smoked my cigarette, and tried to doze, while the chattering villagers, holding themselves aloof in reminiscent dread of the Moslem, mingled their hum with that of the bees from the hives near us. My tent was an ancient mulberry-tree above, and a Persian carpet beneath; and, though I tried to sleep away the time, I did nothing but listen to the story my cavass, Hadji Houssein, was telling his companions of the adventure we had had the year before in the valley below, and which, lest he have not given the true version, I will tell as it happened.

In the bottom of the valley at our feet lies the village of Meskla, built along the banks of the Platanos, where it is a pure, cold, rushing mountain brook, of which, in any other part of the world, the eddies would have been alive with trout, but in which now there are only, as in all other Cretan rivers, eels. A party of official personages in Canéa, including her Britannic Majesty’s consul, myself, the American ditto, with the captain and officers of the English and French gunboats on the station, and an English colonel in the Turkish army, had made a picnic party to Meskla, in August of the last year of the war. The Turkish troops held Lakus and Omalos and the western bank of the Platanos down to the plain; but the insurgents still remained in possession of all the northern spurs of the Asprovouna, from Lakus east for twenty miles, including Zourba; and, while we drank toasts and ate our roast-lamb under the plane-trees by the river, a perpetual peppering of rifles was going on from the hill-tops on each side of the valley above. Was it fighting, or was it fun? I began to climb one of the nearest spurs on the Turkish side of the ravine to see, and, not to be suspected of both sides, took my way to the picket of Turkish irregulars, which, sheltered by a group of trees on the summit, was firing across the valley in a desultory way. As I showed myself in one of the windings of the path to the patriots at Zourba, I saw the smoke-puff of a rifle on the edge of a ravine, and the ball glanced along the rocks within three feet, spattering the lead over me in a most convincing way. I naturally made a flank movement, which shortly degenerated into the retrograde of a satisfied curiosity.

The incident had a side interest to the whole party, for it showed us that the road we proposed to take might be dangerous, the more as we had a Turkish officer and his two attendants in uniform in our company. We had purposed following the river up still higher, and then crossing the ridge to Theriso.

Consulting one of the submitted Meskliotes, who waited his chance for the débris of the picnic, we were informed that it would be very far from safe to follow our proposed route, which was exposed in its whole line to the chance of shots from the main mountain ridge; but he offered to guide us by a road running along the side of the ridge furthest from the insurgents, and where he could warn any outposts of them that we were coming. This road was a fair sample of those which existed in Crete before the war, a mere bridle-path scratched in the slope of a huge land­slide, which rose above us two or three hundred feet, and descended three or four times that distance into the bed of the Platanos. Part of it was too dizzy and dangerous to ride, and we led our beasts hesitating and hobbling along. We were soon amongst the outposts of the insurgents, as we had unmistakable evidence on arriving at Theriso, where we found a detachment of a dozen or more rough, motley-looking fellows, armed with all kinds of guns, and clad in all ways except well. They looked askance at our fez-wearing colonel and his two cavalrymen, but from respect for the consular presences respected their persons. We drank with them at the spring, exchanged identifications, and pursued our way down the celebrated ravine, the scene of two terrible disasters to the Turkish army during different insurrections. Nothing can be more uncomfortable, in a military point of view, than one of these Cretan ravines. Cut in the limestone rock by the glacier torrents of ages, zigzag in their courses, and shut between abrupt ridges, with no road but an unsatisfactory bridle-path, the troop which is incautious enough to enter without crowning the heights on each side as it advances is certain to be hemmed in, and to be severely treated by a comparatively small foe or exterminated by a large one.

We had delayed too long, and, as we entered the most precipitous portion of the ravine, the red sunlight on the eastern cliffs told us that the sun, long shut from direct view, was sinking; and in our haste we missed the way, and fell into a vineyard-path, out of any line of travel. Immediately we heard voices hailing us from the hill-tops, to which we paid no attention, thinking them the cries of shepherd-boys, and continued until we found ourselves in a maze of vineyards, and the path and sun gone at the same instant. Now the hailing began with bullets. The uniforms of our Turkish escort demanded explanation, and as our guides had left us at Theriso we were helpless. To go back and explain was to be a better mark, and to march ahead, anywhere, was our only chance. Unfortunately, Hadji, who carried my hunting rifle, considered it his military duty to return the fire, and in a few moments, other pickets coming in, we had about forty sharpshooters popping away at us in the twilight. Our further passage was shut by an abrupt hillside, along which we must make a movement by the flank toward the road we had lost, and directly across the line of fire. The sound of the bullets suggested getting to cover, and as all path had now disappeared we dismounted and led our beasts at random, no one knowing where we were going or should go, and only aiming to turn the point of the ridge above us, to get out of the fire, which was increasing, and the pinging of Enfield bullets over our heads was a wonderful inducer of celerity. It was a veritable sauve qui peut. I saw men of war duck­ing and dodging at every flash and whistle in a way that indicated small faith in the doctrine of chances, according to which a thousand shots must be fired for one to hit. We found, at length, where the ridge broke down, a maze of huge rocks, affording shelter, but beyond was a deep declivity, down which in the dark we could see nothing; further on again was the river, along which the road led. We could hear the shouts and occasional shots of a detach­ment running down the road to intercept us, and another coming along the ridge above us. My mule was dead-beat, and could scarcely put one leg before another, and few others were better off. A short council showed two minds in the party—one to lie still to be taken, with the chance of a shot first; the other to push on for the road before the insurgents reached it. The only danger of any moment was to Colonel Borthwick and his Turks, who would be prizes of war, and to me the chance of a fever from lying out all night. The majority, nine, voted with me to go on, and, abandoning mules and horses, we plunged, without measuring our steps, down the slope, falling, slipping, tripping over rocks, in bogs, through over­topping swamp-grass, bushes (for the hillside was a bed of springs), pushing to strike the road before the insurgents should head us off, so as to be able to choose our moment for parleying. I knew if I could get there first, saving the chance, that all would be well; if a rash boy of fourteen saw me first, I might be stopped by a bullet before any explanation would avail.

Tired, muddy, reeking with perspiration, bruised on the stones, exhausted with haste and trepidation, we won the race, and halted behind a little roadside chapel to gather the state of things. Above, we heard voices of a colloquy, and knew that the remainder of the party were in safe custody, and our road was quiet. A short walk brought us to the outpost of the Turkish army, a village garrisoned by a couple of companies of regulars and a few Albanians. The commandant, a major, was outranked by Borthwick, who ordered him at once to send out a detachment to rescue Consul Dickson and his companions. The poor major protested and remonstrated, but in vain. “It was dangerous”, he said; but the colonel insisted, he ordered out a detachment, and then called for pipes and coffee, after which, under a heavy escort, we started for Chania. Borthwick obtained a battalion of the regulars in garrison, and started next morning at early dawn to rescue our friends; but no persuasion could induce the Turkish commander to enter the ravines. He posted his troops along the over­looking ridge and waited in ambush. I have it on Borthwick’s word that, while the troops were lying concealed, under orders to keep the most profound silence, a hare started up at the end of the line, and the Turkish commander instantly ordered the first company to their feet, and to make ready, and was about to give the order to fire when a hound of the battalion anticipated the volley by catching the poor beast and dispatching him on the spot.

Meanwhile, Dickson and his companions were in the hospitable hands of a party of Hadji Michali’s men, and at about eight a.m. came down the road into view of the ambush, escorted by a guard of honor of insurgents, none the worse for their adventure, and bringing back our beasts and baggage; but nothing would induce the Turkish officer to go the mile separating him from the insurgent outpost which had fired on us.

While Hadji told his story to his admiring companions (he was an excellent raconteur, and put the whole of his barbaric soul into the narration, though his respect for the Effendi kept his voice low and quieted a little his camp manner), one or the other of the three made my cigarettes and brought me fire, and only when the sun began to sink from the meridian did we move on.

As we passed the blockhouse, I found that the General-in-Chief had preceded me, and given orders that the honors due to a consular personage—the same as those paid to a superior officer in their own army—should be carefully observed, and so we had the whole garrison of each block­house on the way out at the “Present arms!” The road not only zigzags going from Lakus to the plain of Omalos, but makes such ascents and descents as well accounted for the fruitlessness of so many attempts to enter the plain, which is a sort of portico to Samaria. But now a fair artillery road followed the ridges up to the very plain, and blockhouses covered with their fire every point where an ambush could be made, and those little glens, famous in Cretan tradition for extermination of Turkish detachments, will never again help native heroism against organized conquest. We passed, in one of the wildest gorges through which the road passes, a blockhouse perched high on a hill-top like an eyrie, a peripatetic atom on the parapet of which caught my eye, as a wild goat might have done amongst the cliffs around. As we came into sight, looking again, I saw the garrison swarming down the hillside amongst the rocks like ants, wondered what they were at, and rode on, when at another turn the officer said, “They salute, Effendi!”. I looked around, and, only on his indication, saw drawn up in rank, hundreds of feet above me, a line of animalcules, which, by good eyesight, I could perceive was the whole garrison presenting arms, and they so continued presenting until, after turn upon turn of the road, they disappeared from view definitively, when I suppose they swarmed back to their fastness.

We passed through the ravine of Phokes, where Hadji Michali once caught a small detachment which incautiously attempted to penetrate to Omalos. I had heard the story of the fight, told at the time by an Albanian who was in it, in a brief but graphic way. The Christians waited invisible, he said, till the troops were in the bottom of the ravine, and then began to fire from many directions. The troops stopped, made a show of resistance, and then broke and made for the blockhouse at Lakus; “and those who couldn’t run well never got there”, he interjected laconically. He frankly admitted that he was so far in advance that he saw very little actual fighting, and made no halt, nor did any others, Mussulman or Christian, till they arrived at the door of the blockhouse, which he was surprised at their shutting in time to keep out the Christians.

It was well into the afternoon when we entered the plain of Omalos, evidently a filled-up crater, its level about five thousand feet above the sea. The snows and rains of winter and spring flood it, and as no stream runs from it the waters disappear by a Katavothron—a gloomy Acherontic recess—into whose crooked recesses the eye cannot pierce, and down whose depths is heard a perpetual cavernous roaring of water.

In the plain was no vestige of human habitation visible, except the tents of a battalion of regulars, and a two-story blockhouse on a spur of hill which projected into the plain. We rode into the camp, and were received with emphasis by the Pasha, who, with true Eastern diplomacy, expressed unbounded surprise at my visit, so entirely unexpected and, learning the result of my attempts at feeding in Lakus, called to the mess-boy to bring me the remains of the breakfast, apologizing abundantly, and informing me that I should be expected to dine with him and the commander of the post at eight. The residual breakfast, supplemented by a plate of kibaubs, the mutton-chop of the East, dispatched; the ceremonial pipes and coffee finished, and the more than usually complimentary speeches said, the shadows meanwhile falling longer on the plain; I accepted the Pasha’s offer of a fresh horse, and rode across to the famous descent into the glen of Samaria, the Xyloscala, so-called from a zigzag colossal staircase made with fir-trunks, and formerly the only means of descent into the glen. There was a detachment of troops building a blockhouse to command the upper part of the glen, and the commander kept me salaaming, coffee-taking, etc., until I saw that the sunlight was getting too red to give me time to explore the ravine, and I contented myself with a look from the brink down into the blue depths.

I doubt if, in the range of habitual travel, there is another such scene. It was as if the mountains had gaped to their very bases. In front of me were bare stony peaks 7,000 to 8,000 feet high, whose precipitous slopes plunged down unbrokenly, the pines venturing to show themselves in increasing number as the slope ascended, and ended in a narrow gorge. At the side, the rock rose like the aiguilles of Chamouny, cloven and guttered, with the snow still lying in its clefts, and broad fields of it on the opposite eastern peaks. I looked down through the pines and cedars that clung in the crevices of the rocks below me, and the bottom of the glen looked blue and faint in their interstices. The Xyloscala, destroyed by the insurgents at the beginning of the insurrection, was replaced by a laborious zigzag road, which sidled off under crags, and came back along slopes, blasted out of rock, and buttressed up with pines, seeming to me, where I stood, as if it finally launched off into mid-air, and would only help another Daedalus into the mystery of the labyrinth of pines and rock gorges below.

As I watched, the flame of the sunlight crept up the peaks across the glen, the purple-blue shadow following it up, changing the snow-fields from rosy to blue, and the peaks of pale-gray rock to russet, as the day died away. The chill of night reminded me to put my overcoat on. We rode back across the plain in the twilight, accompanied by the building gang, whose polyglot murmur was as cheerful and full of mirth as though they were peasants going home from the vintage.

Nothing can surpass the good-humor and patience of the Turkish soldier. Brutal and barbarous they doubtless (were when their fanaticism and the rage of battle united to excite them, but in camp and in peace I have found them always models of the purely physical man.

Our dinner was luxurious, and in the true Eastern manner. The Pasha, the Bey commanding the place, and his aide-de-camp made four with me, and one dish, placed in the middle of the table, served our fingers or spoons ac­cording as the viand was dressed, each one of the four scrupulously adhering to his quadrant of the copper circle. The dinner was almost interminable; it was dark and cold when the end did come.

The soldiers, gathered round their camp some half a mile away, had eaten their suppers and were at ease, the shouting of their merriment coming to us occasionally above the general hum. Presently we saw them taking fir-branches, and, each lighting one at the nearest camp-fire, come running to us at full speed, making a long mad­cap procession of torch-bearers, the pitchy fir giving out an immense flame; and, making for the headquarters, followed by the battalion band playing, they threw their branches in a pile on a level space before the Pasha’s tent, and then, turning to the right and left, sat down in a semicircle open towards us. A detachment was told off to keep up the fire, and a sort of glee club, accompanied by rude instruments, drums beaten by the hand, and a kind of flute and mandolin, commenced singing at the top of their voices the plaintive monotonous songs which all who have been in the East know.

This was the overture to a terpsichorean and dramatic entertainment most unique and amusing. The programme opened with a dance of Zebeques, the barbarous race who occupy the country behind Smyrna. They are wrapped in a sash from the armpits to the hips, with a sort of bag y knee-breeches, and bearing long knives thrust crosswise through their sashes. They formed a circle, and began a movement which seemed like a dance of men in armor, half stage-stride and half hop. The music struck up an appropriate air, and the dancers, joining in the song, circled slowly two or three times in the same staid and deliberate manner, then, drawing their knives, brandished them in time, quickening their pace, and hurrying around quicker and quicker as the song grew more excited, when they finally came to a climax of fury, rushing in on each other at the center of the circle as if to cut each other down. But the raised knives were arrested by the oppos­ing empty hands; and, the paroxysm passed, the song died down to its lower tone and moderate time, and the dance began a new movement, each dancer thrusting his knife into the ground at the center, and then repeated the quickening circles; this time, rushing, at the climax, on their knives and drawing them from the earth, they threw themselves on an imaginary enemy outside the circle, and, having hypothetically demolished him, returned to their gyrations, varying the finale by lifting one of the company into the air on their hands, and dropping him simultaneously with their voices. This lasted half an hour.

After an intermission, in which the soldiers, unawed by the presence of the Pasha, laughed and joked and shouted to their content, a soldier entered the circle dressed as an Egyptian dancing woman. He was one of the tallest men in the regiment, capitally travestied, and all who have seen the dance of the Almah can imagine the bursts of laughter with which his grave, precise imitation of one of them was received by the circle. I have never seen anything more exquisitely ludicrous. His figure seemed lithe as a willow-wand, and he twisted and bent, and bowed and doubled, with the peculiar expression of physique which seemed impossible to any other than the slender Egyptian girl.

Roars of applause followed this performance, and the next was a pantomime—“The Honey-Stealers”. Two men enter dressed as peasants, one carrying a gun on his back, and begin groping about as in the dark, run against each other, stumble and fall, and finally, by much listening, find a box, which had been placed to represent the hive. The thief lays down his gun to be more free in his motions, and a soldier runs into the circle and carries it off. Enter presently a third honey-seeker, blacked to represent a negro or some diabolical personage, it was impossible to say which, and, stumbling on the other two, an affray ensues, in the course of which the bees get disturbed, and come out in swarms, the luckless black getting the lion's share of the stings. At this moment an alarm is given, and the gunner misses his gun, upon which he falls on the black as the thief, and between the stings and the blows the intruder expires, the play ending with the efforts of the two living to carry out and dispose of the one dead, interfered with greatly by a spasmodic life remaining in the members, which refuse to lie as they are put. But this finally subsiding, the body is satisfactorily disposed of, and the pantomime gives way, amid the most uproarious laughter and applause, to a Circassian dance. The dancers were few, and the dance tame, and, not meeting any ap­preciation, gave way to a repetition of the Zebeque saltations, of which they seemed never disposed to tire.

The entertainment lasted till eleven o’clock, when, each soldier taking a branch of fir, the actors and audience raced off like a demoniac festival breaking up, the band following with a blare of trumpets and bang of drums, and we were left to our dignity and the dying embers of the theatre fire.

Although in July, the night was so intensely cold that, sharing the Pasha’s tent, and with all the covering he could spare me, in addition to my own Persian carpet over instead of under me, I was almost too cold to sleep, and the morning found me well disposed to put my blood in motion by vigorous, exercise. Coffee served, we rode over to the Xyloscala, and, after more coffee-and-pipe compliments, we began the descent of the new zigzag road. It was so steep that no loaded beast could mount it, and it took me two hours’ walk to get to the bottom, where the road straightens and follows the river, here a dancing, gurgling stream, rushing amongst boulders and over ridges, under overhanging pines, as though there were no tropics and the land had not had rain for two months. The whole gorge was filled with the balsamic odors of firs and pine, which covered the slopes wherever the rock would give them place; and above that, bare splintery cliffs overhung the gorge, so that it seemed that a stone would fall three thousand feet if thrown from the summit. A few Turkish soldiers, lazily felling or trimming pines for the blockhouses, were the only signs of humanity we saw. Above, in the pines, we heard the partridge’s note, as the mother called to her young brood to follow her. The gorge widened to a glen; the slopes receded slightly, and then, after another hour of walking, we came to a sharp turn in its course, where the high mountains walled up the glen to the east with a sheer slope of five or six thousand feet from the peaks to the brook bed, and the rocks on each side shut in like the lintels of a doorway. Here is the little village of Samaria, so long the refuge of the women and children of this section of Crete, and where, so long as arms and food lasted, a few resolute men might have defended them against all comers. I doubt if in the known world there is such another fortress. No artillery could crown those heights, no athletes descend the slopes; while the only access from below is through the river-bed, in one place only ten feet wide, and above which the cliffs rise perpendicularly over a thousand feet; the strata in some places matching each other, so that it seems to have been a cloven gorge—the yawn of some earthquake, which suggested closing again at a future day—and for two hours down from the glen there is no escaping from the river course, except by goat-paths, and these such as no goat would care needlessly to travel.

Pashley has described the village of Samaria, and its magnificent cypresses and little chapel, as they are now. No destruction, no sacrilege, has entered there; and perhaps this is the only church in Crete, outside the Turkish lines of permanent occupation, which has not been desecrated. The roof of the chapel is made of tiles, which must date from the early Byzantine Empire.

The river below here, the St. Roumeli, is a rapid perennial stream, which at times of flood shuts off all travel by the road. Lower down is a tiny village of the same name as the river, in a gorge into which only an hour’s sunlight can enter during the day—damp, chilly, and aguish—the residence of a half-dozen families of goat-herds. Pashley identifies a site near the mouth of the river as that of Tarrha, the scene of Apollo’s loves with Acacallis, who, if bred in this glen, must have been of that icy temperament which should have best suited the professional flirt of Olympus.

To travellers who care to visit Samaria, I would give the hint to leave their horses at Omalos, and have a boat to meet them at the mouth of the St. Roumeli, as the ascent is long and painful, even by the new road, which, since I saw it the torrents may have demolished. They may thus visit the Port Phoenix of St. Paul, which lies a few miles to the eastward, and landing at Sougia, west of St. Roumeli, have their horses come down by the pass of Krustogherako, and so return by way of St. Irene— a very wild pass of the Selinos mountains—to Chania.

We had made no such provision, and so we were obliged to toil back in the intense heat of the July sun beating down into the gorge, and, arriving past noon, to be refreshed by sherbet and coffee by the hospitable commander of the station at Xyloscala, the snow of the sherbet being brought from the opposite cliff two hundred yards away, but an hour’s climb to get to it. The commander was a more intelligent man than it is usual for Turkish officers to be, and he related how during the insurrection he had led a detachment round to the top of the opposing cliffs, and how when they got there they were like the twenty thousand men of the King of France, and had to come back by the way they went.

However, they have now a blockhouse at the Xyloscala, another at Samaria in sight and signaling of it, and a third at St. Roumeli, so that, for the future, there need be no doubt as to who holds the Heart of Crete.

The night’s discomforts had been too great to allow me to spend another in Omalos, so, after a slight detour to look at the immense wild pear-trees which grow on the plains, we rode directly back to Chania, accompanied by the Pasha. Meeting the priest of Lakus by the way, I gave the village a vicarious berating for having in such an ungrateful manner refused hospitality to a man who had been their advocate and friend so long, and whom they had obliged to go back to their enemies and his for a dinner. He seemed much ashamed, and the day after I received a profound apology from the primates pleading ignorance of my personality.

I improved the acquaintance with the Pasha (Mehmet Ali, “the Prussian”, so-called from his race, though he was brought up from boyhood as a Mussulman), whom I found more intelligent and liberal than any Turkish official I had met with, except Ali and Server Effendi, to introduce the condition of the chiefs of the insurrection remaining in exile, many of them old and worn out, afflicted with the nostalgia which mountain people know so well, and ready to submit unreservedly to the government. A nominal amnesty had been granted, relieving all from any political prosecution, but not from the civil suits for damages, etc., which might be brought against the chiefs who had taken sheep or cattle or destroyed any property. Two or three of the chiefs who had returned had already been thrown into prison on suits of this kind, and as the complainants were always adherents of the government through the war, and all the minor officials were of that class whose loyalty had been beyond question from the beginning, a civil suit had pretty much the same color as a political persecution. This state of things effectually prevented the return of any of the prominent personages of the insurrection, who, living in exile, were reasons of the strongest against the restoration of tranquility, and made a convenient appliance for agitation and renewed strife on any disturbance of the political atmosphere of Europe.

My only interest was the restoration of the island to such peace as was possible, and this Mehmet Ali comprehended, and, throwing aside all hostility, he entered into the discussion of the positions, and on a subsequent interview begged me to go to Constantinople and place the matter before Ali Pasha, to whom he gave me a letter of introduction.

I accordingly went to Constantinople, and was received in the kindest and most considerate manner by the Grand Vizier, to whom I stated at length my ideas of the difficulties of the pacification, and at his request made a memoir of all the facts and motives involved, with a description of the class of men to whom was entrusted the carrying out of the measures by which the Porte had hoped to conciliate the Cretans, embittered political and religious adversaries, full of wrath at the losses and indignities they had suffered, and more anxious to avenge their own wrongs than to secure the true interest of the Porte. He begged me to wait until he could send to Crete and obtain a report on my memoir, and, as he found on its receipt that my assertion was just, he promised to correct the abuses of administration, and proposed to me to go to Crete to superintend the carrying out of the measures which seemed necessary to restore the confidence of the late insurgents, pledging himself to accord complete immunity to any individuals whom I should designate as possessing my confidence, and offering me a stipend more than sufficient for all my needs in the service. I knew that so long as he was Grand Vizier I could depend on the fulfillment of these promises, but, in the event of any change of administration, the understanding between us would fail as between his successor and myself. I demanded, therefore, a comprehensive measure securing all the insurgents from civil suits on account of acts of war committed during the insurrection, as a condition of my acceptance of the official position thus created for me. This the Grand Vizier declared the government could not grant without assuming all the personal liabilities thus discharged, which he was not willing to recommend, and so, after several interviews and thorough discussion, I was obliged to decline the offer made me, much to my regret, for the islanders had ever a place in my regard, which, with the interest of common suffering and loss, the years of advocacy of rights kept back and redress denied, and perhaps the personal attachment I had found for me and mine in so many of them, disposed me to make any effort in my making ta secure their good. But to engage my faith and influence with them on such uncertain grounds as the continuance in power of a Grand Vizier, or the maintenance of harmony between myself and the local administration, was too great a risk for a prudent man, unwilling to engage others in a position from which he might not have the power to extricate them.

It was with such a pain as the waiting of my own sentence of exile would have given me that I went to meet the old captains on my return to Athens, and told them that there was no hope of their repatriation through my efforts at least. I never shall forget the silent despair in the face of old Costa Belondaki, tall and straight under his seventy-odd years, white-haired, and meager, but alert as a man of forty, as he turned from me when he got his sentence. As with his elder compatriots, the mountain nostalgia fevered him and the idle exile broke his spirit, but I could give him no hope that in his day European civilization or Turkish administration would be wise enough to economize his devotion to his country, and make use of rather than crush the spirit which makes Crete rebellious while its government is criminal.

The End

William James Stillman (June 1, 1828 – July 6, 1901)

was an American journalist, diplomat, author, historian, and photographer. Educated as an artist, Stillman subsequently converted to the profession of journalism, working primarily as a war correspondent in Crete and the Balkans, where he served as his own photographer. For a time, he also served as United States ambassador in Rome, and afterward in Crete during the Cretan insurrections. He helped to train the young Arthur Evans as a war correspondent in the Balkans, and remained a lifelong friend and confidant of Evans. Later in life, he seriously considered taking over the excavation at Knossos from Minos Kalokairinos, who had been stopped from further excavation by the Cretan Assembly; he was, however, prevented from pursuing that goal further by a failure to obtain a firman, or permission to excavate. Stillman wrote several books, one of which, his Autobiography of a Journalist, suggests that he viewed himself primarily as a writer.

Stillman was born in Schenectady, New York in 1828. His parents were Seventh Day Baptists, and his early religious training influenced him throughout his life. He was sent to school in New York by his mother, who made great sacrifices so that he might get an education, and he graduated from Union College of Schenectady in 1848. He studied art under Frederic Edwin Church and early in 1850 went to England, where he made the acquaintance of John Ruskin, whose Modern Painters he had devoured; was introduced to Turner, for whose works he had unbounded admiration; and fell so profoundly under the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais that on his return home in the same year he became known as the "American Pre-Raphaelite."

In 1852 Lajos Kossuth sent him on a fool's errand to Hungary to dig up crown jewels, which had been buried secretly during the insurrection of 1848-1849. While he was awaiting a projected rising in Milan, Stillman studied art under Yvon in Paris, and then, as the rising did not take place, he returned to the United States and devoted himself to landscape painting on Upper Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks and in New York City, where he started the Crayon. It numbered Lowell, Aldrich and Charles Eliot Norton among its contributors, and when it failed for want of funds, Stillman removed to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

There he passed several years, but a fit of restlessness started him off once more to England. He renewed his friendship with Ruskin, and went with him to Switzerland to paint and draw in the Alps, where he worked so assiduously that his eyesight was affected. He then lived in Paris and was in Normandy in 1861 when the American Civil War broke out. He made more than one attempt to serve in the Northern ranks, but his health was too weak; in the same year he was appointed United States consul in Rome.

In 1865 a dispute with his government led to his resignation, but immediately afterwards he was appointed to Crete, where, as an avowed champion of the Christians in the island and of Cretan independence, he was regarded with hostility both by the Muslim population and by the Turkish authorities during the subsequent Cretan uprising. In September 1868 he resigned and went to Athens, where his first wife (a daughter of David Mack of Cambridge), worn out by the excitement of life in Crete, committed suicide.

He was an editor of Scribner's Magazine for a short time and then went to London, where he lived with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1871 he married artist Marie Spartali, a daughter of the Greek consul-general Michael Spartali, although without his permission. When the insurrection of 1875 broke out in Herzegovina he went there as a correspondent of The Times, and his letters from the Balkans aroused so much interest that the British government was induced to lend its countenance to Montenegrin aspirations.

In 1877-1883 he served as the correspondent of The Times at Athens; in 1886-1898 at Rome. During this time he was assisted in his photographic work by the nascent archaeologist and photographer, John Henry Haynes. He was a severe critic of Italian statesmen, and embroiled himself at various times with various politicians, from Crispi downwards.

After his retirement he lived in Surrey, England where he died on July 6, 1901 at Frimley Green