“Brutes!” Martyn exclaimed with great emphasis. “How these fellows can be descendants of the old Greeks beats me altogether.”
“The old Greeks were pretty cruel,” Horace, who had just joined them, said. “They used to slaughter their captives wholesale, and mercy wasn’t among their virtues. Besides, my father says that except in the Morea very few indeed are descendants of the Greeks; the rest are Bulgarian or Albanian, neither of whom the Greeks of old would have recognized as kinsmen.”
“It is a case of distance lending enchantment to the view,” Miller laughed; “our illusions are gone.”
“Never mind, we must make the best of them, Miller; they are not Greeks, but at any rate they are all that is left of the Greeks. Their actions show that their Christianity is a sham, but at the same time they are an intelligent race capable of some day becoming a great people again, and they are struggling to throw off the yoke of a race intellectually their inferiors and incapable of progress in any sort of way. That is what my father said to me as we were walking up and down the deck this morning. That is the light I mean to look at it in the future. It is a capable people struggling with an incapable one, and if they are savage and vindictive and debased it is the faults not of themselves but of those who have so long been their masters.”
“Good,” Martyn said; “that is the most satisfactory view of the thing, and we will stick to it and shut our ears as much as possible in future against all stories to the Greeks’ disadvantage.”
In the afternoon a fleet of vessels were seen standing out from the land.
“There is one of the Greek fleets,” Captain Martyn said. “Now we will try her rate of sailing with them. Stand on for a little bit longer and then haul her wind on the same tack they are sailing.”
The trial was perfectly satisfactory. By nightfall the Greek fleet were far behind, and the Misericordia again shaped her course for Cyprus. For a week they cruised backwards and forwards under easy sail about midway between Cyprus and Alexandria, without meeting with a single craft flying the Turkish flag. Half a dozen vessels were overhauled, but these were all Austrian, Italian, or British. The appearance of the schooner evidently excited profound distrust in the minds of the masters of all these vessels, for they all hoisted every rag of sail they could set and did their best to escape from her, but Captain Martyn had no difficulty in overhauling them and satisfying himself of their nationality. The astonishment of the masters when the smart gig manned by six English sailors rowed alongside was unbounded, and was only equalled by their satisfaction.
“You have given us a nice fright,” the master of one of the English ships said to Miller, who, accompanied by Horace, had boarded him. “What on earth are you flying that Greek flag for? We took you for a pirate, for half these fellows are no better when they get the chance.”