All the way home our pilgrims felt miserable in a transcendent degree. The road was full of the disease and full of robbers. To escape the first peril, they shunned the towns and camped in the open. Every day they sent their tents before them to be pitched at the next konak. When they arrived there, they drew all the carts and coaches around them, made a great fire, supped, and then lay down to rest, as best they could, in their boots and clothes. But though they themselves did not go into the towns, most of their wagoners and servants did, so the danger of infection was, in a measure, the same. As to the other danger, not a day passed but they heard of some fresh exploit of the gangs that scoured the country-side. These stories had a most deplorable effect upon their nerves. They dared not straggle an inch from the road, and, the Rev. John says, “a calf with a white face disheartened them all”; observing thoughtfully, “if we had not had guards, it would have been very easy cutting our throats.”[170]
In this dishevelled manner our friends journeyed back the way they came, reaching their destination on September 27th.
It was a very weary ambassador who returned to Pera. But there was no rest for him yet. The Plague raged at Constantinople as at Adrianople. And that was not the worst. Two of his retinue, it now appeared, had the disease all the way home undiscovered. One of them, an Arab conductor of his litter, died the day after his arrival. The other, a young footman who always was about Finch and Baines, fell sick two days later in the Embassy. “I suspecting it might be the Plague, sent him out of my House to be attended by Armenians that are accustomd to it; and within two days the Boy dyed of the Plague.” With wondrous agility both knights fled to St. Demetrius Hill, which henceforth became Sir John’s summer resort.[171]
Distressing as all this was, it might have been worse. Lord Winchilsea had lost not only two servants, but also his daughter, and fled from place to place—from Pera to Yarlikioi, from Yarlikioi to Belgrade, from Belgrade to Zacharlikioi—in “perplexity where to find security unless in the providence of the Almighty,”—he fled with a wife in hourly expectation of a child, pursued by “this disconsolate disease.” Sir John’s other predecessor and kinsman, Harvey, on his way to Salonica had to carry in his own coach a friend who had fallen sick of the Plague on the road, “as longe as he was able to suffer the Journie,” and “to leave him att last at a town,” in Macedonia, where he died.[172]
It was all in the day’s work.
FOOTNOTES:
[155] Finch to Coventry, Sept. 9, 1675.
[156] Covel’s Diaries, p. 246.
[157] Life of Dudley North, p. 111.
[158] Harvey to Williamson, Nov.... 1670, S.P. Turkey, 19; Rycaut’s Memoirs, p. 318.