The chance for which North waited and prepared came at last. There was a celebrated house of English commission agents and merchants at Constantinople—the house of Messrs. Hedges and Palmer. Their business was very large, but through mismanagement it had fallen into the utmost confusion. North was invited to become a partner and set things straight. He jumped at the invitation. Through his doggedness, resourcefulness, and adroitness, old debts were recovered, compounded for, or written off, the book-keeping department was reorganised; and order was evolved out of chaos. As soon as Mr. Hedges saw the business fairly under way he retired to England at the beginning of 1670, leaving him and Palmer to carry on by themselves. Then the trouble began. Palmer was everything that North was not. He lived in a great house and at great expense. His table was loaded with plenty, and guests were never absent from it. They came at noon and spent the rest of the day helping their host to empty his bottles. By the time North had finished his work Palmer had finished his dinner. North returned home very tired and found his partner very drunk. After many unpleasant scenes, he took a strong line. He wrote to all the correspondents of the firm in Europe, explaining the reasons which led him to break with his partner and soliciting the continuance of their patronage to himself. His reputation stood so high, and apparently Palmer’s so low, that the principals did not hesitate.
This may be described as our Factor’s first stride. He was now captain of his own ship. Only, as English merchants did not care to trust single agents abroad, because on their deaths, or even in their lives, there was always danger of embezzlement, he thought fit to take into partnership his younger brother Montagu, who, like himself, had been bred a Turkey Merchant and then resided as factor at Aleppo. Henceforward North’s career was one continuous run of prosperity. He soon became the chief English merchant in Constantinople, was elected Treasurer by the Levant Company, and went on amassing wealth at a great rate, deeming no enterprise too high or too low for the end he had in view, imparting to everything he did a touch of his own original genius.
The ordinary Englishman in the polyglot Levant was content to transact his business through interpreters. North would have nothing to do with vicarious communication. He acquired Italian, which was the Lingua Franca of the Near East, the debased Spanish spoken by the Jews of Turkey—descendants of the refugees expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella—who had made themselves indispensable as brokers to Franks and Turks alike, and (a much rarer accomplishment) the Turkish tongue. Moreover, he learnt the laws of Turkey. In litigation before a Turkish court he was his own pleader, as in conversation he was his own interpreter. He did not, however, trust implicitly to his own intimacy with the subtleties of Ottoman Justice. He kept a tame Cadi to whose advice he had recourse upon occasion. Further, before a trial, he took care to make his case known to the judge and to quicken the judge’s intelligence with a present. When his case came on, if North had no true witnesses to produce, he produced false ones. Indeed, he preferred the latter kind on principle, having found by experience that a false witness was safer; for, if the judge had a mind to confuse a witness, an honest man who did not know the game could not so well wriggle through the net of captious questions as a rogue versed in all its rules.
The Honourable Dudley showed equal tact in his other dealings with the Turks. Not the least remunerative of his occupations was usury—lending money to necessitous pashas at 20 or 30 per cent. Now, by Turkish law all interest was illegal, and the debtor could not be forced to pay a farthing on that score. So a world of cunning and caution was needed, and the wisest might suffer through inadvertence. To avoid accidents, North combined hospitality with business. He built and furnished a room where his victims could loll on soft cushions, sip endless cups of coffee and liquids stronger than coffee, smoke endless tchibooks in safety (under Mohammed IV. tobacco was rigorously forbidden), and be fleeced in comfort. The host, it goes without saying, was not fastidious about the morals of his guests. No narrow prejudices of virtue ever hindered his familiarity with all human beings that chance might fling in his way. The sinner and the saint were equally welcome, so long as there was anything to be got out of them. Among his most intimate boon companions and clients was a particularly unsavoury captain of one of the Grand Signor’s galleys. North used to lend him money and also to palm off upon him his rotten cloths.
The fertility of North’s invention did not stop there. His shrewd study of human nature had taught him that men are influenced by externals far more than by essentials. He endeavoured to make the Turks feel at home with him by making himself outwardly like one of them. Knowing their prejudice against clean-shaven faces he grew a prodigious pair of moustaches, such as the best of them had. He tried to sit cross-legged, as they sat, and learnt to write as they wrote, resting the paper on his left hand, and making the lines slope from the left top corner downwards. He taught himself to use parables, apologues, and figures of speech, as they did, and to swear as they swore. Of this last accomplishment he was especially proud. He held that for purposes of vituperation Turkish was more apt than any other language, and he grew so accustomed to its aptness that even when he returned home his tongue would run into Turkish blasphemy of itself. Let us add another external trait that tended to make this infidel acceptable to true believers, though it was a trait for which he was indebted to nature rather than to self-culture. “It seems,” says his biographer, “that after he found his heart’s ease at Constantinople he began to grow fat, which increased upon him, till, being somewhat tall and well whiskered, he made a jolly appearance, such as the Turks approve most of all in a man.”
North’s pains to please had not been wasted. The Turks whom he entertained at 30 per cent were so delighted with this wonderful Giaour that they pressed him to become really and wholly one of them by abjuring his false religion. North always parried these awkward blandishments with his usual adroitness. He never argued on religion, or indeed on any other subject, with the Turks. Nobody likes to be contradicted, and the Turks were not accustomed to bear dissent from a Giaour. Our Treasurer would not lose profitable customers for any consideration. He had not gone to Constantinople to quarrel but to climb; and he had long since learnt that at Constantinople, as elsewhere, climbing could only be performed in the same posture as crawling. So without attempting to argue, he laughed away the suggestion of apostasy by saying, “My father wore a hat and left that hat to me. I wear it because my father left it, and”—clapping his hands on his head—“I will wear it as long as I live!” He knew the Turks well enough to know that he lost nothing in their eyes by his attachment to the paternal hat. For though keen on proselytising—always by temptation and persuasion, hardly ever by constraint—they had little respect for the proselyte.
By such means our Treasurer waxed not only wealthy but also wise. The Turks, as a rule, were too proud to converse familiarly with Christians, thinking (perhaps not without reason) that few Christians were worthy of their confidence. The result was that the English and other Franks who lived amongst them and dealt with them knew about as much of Turkish life, of Turkish ways of thought, of Turkish maxims of conduct, as an undesirable alien dwelling in Whitechapel knows of English life. Dudley North was the only Frank who, thanks to his natural adaptability and flexibility, had contrived to insinuate himself, more or less, into the spirit of Turkey. On those occasions of convivial expansion, while his guests sedulously swilled his liquids, North not less sedulously pumped their minds. He picked up every hint that dropped from their lips, hoarded it in his retentive memory, connected it with other hints, and, assisted by uncommonly quick powers of deduction and induction, learnt a good deal more in five minutes than the average European would in as many months. Conscious of his unique position as a first-hand authority on the Turks, he thought very little of Rycaut as an expert in the religion, manners, and politics of the Ottoman Empire. He described his work as very shallow. Once he went over the whole of it, and noted on the margin its errors. That copy, with some other curiosities he had collected and a Turkish dictionary he had compiled, was stolen from him. He could never discover the thief, but he thought that the things he had lost might perhaps be found among the belongings of the Rev. John Covel.
From this it would appear that the Consul and the Chaplain had not an admirer in our Treasurer. Nor, it may be presumed, had he in them fanatical worshippers.
Such was the Honourable Dudley: independent, self-reliant, holding in profound contempt the weaknesses, stupidities, and conventionalities of his neighbours; yet withal knowing how to use them for his own ends; a man infinitely flexible of plan, but fixed of purpose, and, happen what might, intent not to play the dilettante in this world.[69]