Our host's family had cooked us some chickens. While we were sitting eating them a multitude of visitors, women especially, who had never seen Franks before, came in, gazed, and asked questions. There was a great deal of laughing and talking, but every man was heavily armed. After dinner we went out for a walk and visited some remarkably pretty villages. The name of one was Malta, the others I could not make out; all more in the interior. The churches were very pretty. Each had a tall steeple in the Gothic style with bells, which a boy, proud of his freedom and anxious to show it, running on, would ring as we came up; for, as you know, neither bells nor steeples are allowed by the Turks. We saw a new tower, the tower of the beyzesday, or captain of the Mainiotes, armed with two thirty-pounders which had been given him, and though not very solidly built, standing in a fine position. We were told that all these towers are provisioned for a siege, and one of those near Kalamata has food for five years—not that I believe it. All slept together, ten of us covering the whole floor of a tiny room.
We went back in the morning to Kalamata, leaving behind us our host. He had been warned by letter from Kalamata not to go back there, for reports had been circulated by the Turks that he was gone to Maina to raise recruits and he would probably be arrested if he landed.
We had been so interested with our glimpse of the free Greeks—the Greeks who had always been free from the days of Sparta, who had maintained their independence against Rome, Byzantium, the Franks, Venetians, and Turks—that we longed to see more of them; and the reports we heard of a temple near Cape Matapan gave us hopes of a return for the expense of an excursion. We therefore agreed with a certain Captain Basili of Dolus, owner of a boat, that he should take us to Cyparissa and protect us into the interior. Meanwhile we went home to get our baggage &c. As we rowed along the shore a storm hung on Mount Elias, rolling in huge coils among the high perched villages, and the awful grandeur and air of savage romance it gave to the whole country whetted our appetites to the utmost.
When we landed at Kalamata, however, a dispute about payment for the present trip led us to refer to the consul for a settlement, and incidentally to our telling him our plans. As soon as he heard them he objected vigorously. The man we had engaged was, he said, a notorious murderer; it was well known that he had assassinated a certain Greek doctor for his money when he was bringing him from Coron, and he might do the same for us on the way to Cyparissa. It would be better if we insisted on going into Maina to write to a certain Captain Murgino at Scardamula and put ourselves under his protection. As he was one of the heads of the Mainiote clans, and a man of power, he would be able to guarantee our safety.
As this advice was supported by a French gentleman of Cervu, a Monsieur Shauvere, who seemed to be reliable, we took it, and wrote that same evening to Murgino; but the first engagement had to be got rid of, and that was not so easy. Whatever his intentions had been, the boatman from Dolus thought he had made a profitable engagement, for he demanded 50 piastres indemnity, first for expenses incurred and next for the slight. He threatened to attack us on the way if we ventured to engage another boat. Finally we agreed to refer the dispute for settlement to the Albanian Mainiote, our late host.
We received an answer from Murgino to say that we should be very welcome, and that he would send a guard to meet us four hours from his house.
We accordingly set off in the evening to go by land, and arrived at night at a village called Mandinié; and there we had to sleep, for the road was too breakneck for us to go on in the dark. Our host was exceedingly hospitable, and gave one a good impression of the free Greeks.
Early in the morning we went on to Malta, and met four of Murgino's men come to meet us. We also fell in with the young captain or chieftain of Mainiotes on his way to Kalamata. He had a guard of eight or ten men, all armed and handsomely dressed, their hair trailing down their backs like true descendants of the Spartans, who combed their long hair before going into battle.
As regarding the origin of the name Malta, it may be called to mind that the Venetians during their occupation mortgaged part of the Morea to the Knights of St. John, and this may have been one of their fortresses.
Having hired mules to carry our luggage, as the road is too bad for horses, we proceeded to Scardamula, a distance of 1½ hour. There we were rejoined by my servant Dimitri, whom I had sent on to arrange the affair of Captain Basili, the Dolus boatman. He had found the man in a state of exasperation, refusing to accept any accommodation, saying it was an affair of honour, and vowing that we should pay in another way. The wife and mother of the Albanian officer, dreading his resentment, had hung terrified on his (Dimitri's) arm, assuring him that we should be assassinated on the road. He himself arrived hardly able to speak with terror and pale as paper.