In the morning I began to examine my companions. They were, in all, a captain and six sailors, probably all part owners, and two passengers from one of the islands, not one of whom could speak any other language than Greek. My knowledge of that language was confined to a few rolling hexameters, which had stuck by me in some unaccountable way as a sort of memento of college days. These, however, were of no particular use, and, consequently, I was pretty much tongue-tied during the whole voyage. I amused myself by making my observations quietly upon my companions, as they did more openly upon me, for I frequently heard the word "Americanos" pass among them. I had before had occasion to see something of Greek sailors, and to admire their skill and general good conduct, and I was fortified in my previous opinion by what I saw of my present companions. Their temperance in eating and drinking is very remarkable, and all my comparisons between them and European sailors were very much in their favour. Indeed, I could not help thinking, as they sat collectively, Turkish fashion, around their frugal meal of bread, caviari, and black olives, that I had never seen finer men. Their features were regular, in that style which we to this day recognise as Grecian; their figures good, and their faces wore an air of marked character and intelligence; and these advantages of person were set off by the island costume, the fez or red cloth cap, with a long black tassel at the top, a tight vest and jacket, embroidered and without collars, large Turkish trousers coming down a little below the knee, legs bare, sharp-pointed slippers, and a sash around the waist, tied under the left side, with long ends hanging down, and a knife sticking out about six inches. There was something bold and daring in their appearance; indeed, I may say, rakish and piratical; and I could easily imagine that, if the Mediterranean should again become infested with pirates, my friends would cut no contemptible figure among them. But I must not detain you as long on the voyage as I was myself. The sea was calm; we had hardly any wind; our men were at the oars nearly all the time, and, passing slowly by Ægina, Cape Sunium, with its magnificent ruins mournfully overlooking the sea, better known in modern times as Colonna's Height and the scene of Falconer's shipwreck, passing also the island of Zea, the ancient Chios, Thermia, and other islands of lesser note, in the afternoon of the third day we arrived at Syra.
With regard to Syra I shall say but little; I am as loath to linger about it now as I was to stay there then. The fact is, I cannot think of the place with any degree of satisfaction. The evening of my arrival I heard, through a Greek merchant to whom I had a letter from a friend in Athens, of a brig to sail the next day for Smyrna; and I lay down on a miserable bed in a miserable locanda, in the confident expectation of resuming my journey in the morning. Before morning, however, I was roused by "blustering Boreas" rushing through the broken casement of my window; and for more than a week all the winds ever celebrated in the poetical history of Greece were let loose upon the island. We were completely cut off from all communication with the rest of the world. Not a vessel could leave the port, while vessel after vessel put in there for shelter. I do not mean to go into any details; indeed, for my own credit's sake I dare not; for if I were to draw a true picture of things as I found them; if I were to write home the truth, I should be considered as utterly destitute of taste and sentiment; I should be looked upon as a most unpoetical dog, who ought to have been at home poring over the revised statutes instead of breathing the pure air of poetry and song. And now, if I were writing what might by chance come under the eyes of a sentimental young lady or a young gentleman in his teens, the truth would be the last thing I would think of telling. No, though my teeth chatter, though a cold sweat comes over me when I think of it, I would go through the usual rhapsody, and huzzah for "the land of the East and the clime of the sun." Indeed, I have a scrap in my portfolio, written with my cloak and greatcoat on, and my feet over a brazier, beginning in that way. But to you, my dear ——, who know my touching sensibilities, and who, moreover, have a tender regard for my character and will not publish me, I would as soon tell the truth as not. And I therefore do not hesitate to say, but do not whisper it elsewhere, that in one of the beautiful islands of the Ægean; in the heart of the Cyclades, in the sight of Delos, and Paros, and Antiparos, any one of which is enough to throw one who has never seen them into raptures with their fancied beauties, here, in this paradise of a young man's dreams, in the middle of April, I would have hailed "chill November's surly blast" as a zephyr; I would have exchanged all the beauties of this balmy clime for the sunny side of Kamschatka; I would have given my room and the whole Island of Syra for a third-rate lodging in Communipaw. It was utterly impossible to walk out, and equally impossible to stay in my room; the house, to suit that delightful climate, being built without windows or window-shutters. If I could forget the island, I could remember with pleasure the society I met there. I passed my mornings in the library of Mr. R., one of our worthy American missionaries; and my evenings at the house of Mr. W., the British consul. This gentleman married a Greek lady of Smyrna, and had three beautiful daughters, more than half Greeks in their habits and feelings; one of them is married to an English baronet, another to a Greek merchant of Syra, and the third—.
On the ninth day the wind fell, the sun once more shone brightly, and in the evening I embarked on board a rickety brig for Smyrna. At about six o'clock P.M. thirty or forty vessels were quietly crawling out of the harbour like rats after a storm. It was almost a calm when we started: in about two hours we had a favourable breeze; we turned in, going at the rate of eight miles an hour, and rose with a strong wind dead ahead. We beat about all that day; the wind increased to a gale, and toward evening we took shelter in the harbour of Scio.
The history of this beautiful little island forms one of the bloodiest pages in the history of the world, and one glance told that dreadful history. Once the most beautiful island of the Archipelago, it is now a mass of ruins. Its fields, which once "budded and blossomed as the rose," have become waste places; its villages are deserted, its towns are in ruins, its inhabitants murdered, in captivity, and in exile. Before the Greek revolution the Greeks of Scio were engaged in extensive commerce, and ranked among the largest merchants in the Levant. Though living under hard taskmasters, subject to the exactions of a rapacious pacha, their industry and enterprise, and the extraordinary fertility of their island, enabled them to pay a heavy tribute to the Turks and to become rich themselves. For many years they had enjoyed the advantages of a college, with professors of high literary and scientific attainments, and their library was celebrated throughout all that country; it was, perhaps, the only spot in Greece where taste and learning still held a seat. But the island was far more famed for its extraordinary natural beauty and fertility. Its bold mountains and its soft valleys, the mildness of its climate and the richness of its productions, bound the Greeks to its soil by a tie even stronger than the chain of their Turkish masters. In the early part of the revolution the Sciotes took no part with their countrymen in their glorious struggle for liberty. Forty of their principal citizens were given up as hostages, and they were suffered to remain in peace. Wrapped in the rich beauties of their island, they forgot the freedom of their fathers and their own chains; and, under the precarious tenure of a tyrant's will, gave themselves up to the full enjoyment of all that wealth and taste could purchase. We must not be too hard upon human nature; the cause seemed desperate; they had a little paradise at stake; and if there is a spot on earth, the risk of losing which could excuse men in forgetting that they were slaves in a land where their fathers were free, it is the Island of Scio. But the sword hung suspended over them by a single hair. In an unexpected hour, without the least note of preparation, they were startled by the thunder of the Turkish cannon; fifty thousand Turks were let loose like bloodhounds upon the devoted island. The affrighted Greeks lay unarmed and helpless at their feet, but they lay at the feet of men who did not know mercy even by name; at the feet of men who hungered and thirsted after blood; of men, in comparison with whom wild beasts are as lambs. The wildest beast of the forest may become gorged with blood; not so with the Turks at Scio. Their appetite "grew with what it fed on," and still longed for blood when there was not a victim left to bleed. Women were ripped open, children dashed against the walls, the heads of whole families stuck on pikes out of the windows of their houses, while their murderers gave themselves up to riot and plunder within. The forty hostages were hung in a row from the walls of the castle; an indiscriminate and universal burning and massacre took place; in a few days the ground was cumbered with the dead, and one of the loveliest spots on earth was a pile of smoking ruins. Out of a population of one hundred and ten thousand, sixty thousand are supposed to have been murdered, twenty thousand to have escaped, and thirty thousand to have been sold into slavery. Boys and young girls were sold publicly in the streets of Smyrna and Constantinople at a dollar a head. And all this did not arise from any irritated state of feeling toward them. It originated in the cold-blooded, calculating policy of the sultan, conceived in the same spirit which drenched the streets of Constantinople with the blood of the Janisaries; it was intended to strike terror into the hearts of the Greeks, but the murderer failed in his aim. The groans of the hapless Sciotes reached the ears of their countrymen, and gave a headlong and irresistible impulse to the spirit then struggling to be free. And this bloody tragedy was performed in our own days, and in the face of the civilized world. Surely if ever Heaven visits in judgment a nation for a nation's crimes, the burning and massacre at Scio will be deeply visited upon the accursed Turks.
It was late in the afternoon when I landed, and my landing was under peculiarly interesting circumstances. One of my fellow-passengers was a native of the island, who had escaped during the massacre, and now revisited it for the first time. He asked me to accompany him ashore, promising to find some friends at whose house we might sleep; but he soon found himself a stranger in his native island: where he had once known everybody, he now knew nobody. The town was a complete mass of ruins; the walls of many fine buildings were still standing, crumbling to pieces, and still black with the fire of the incendiary Turks. The town that had grown up upon the ruins consisted of a row of miserable shantees, occupied as shops for the sale of the mere necessaries of life, where the shopman slept on his window-shutter in front. All my companion's efforts to find an acquaintance who would give us a night's lodging were fruitless. We were determined not to go on board the vessel, if possible to avoid it; her last cargo had been oil, the odour of which still remained about her. The weather would not permit us to sleep on deck, and the cabin was intolerably disagreeable. To add to our unpleasant position, and, at the same time, to heighten the cheerlessness of the scene around us, the rain began to fall violently. Under the guidance of a Greek we searched among the ruins for an apartment where we might build a fire and shelter ourselves for the night, but we searched in vain; the work of destruction was too complete.
Cold, and thoroughly drenched with rain, we were retracing our way to our boat, when our guide told my companion that a Greek archbishop had lately taken up his abode among the ruins. We immediately went there, and found him occupying apartments, partially repaired, in what had once been one of the finest houses in Scio. The entrance through a large stone gateway was imposing; the house was cracked from top to bottom by fire, nearly one half had fallen down, and the stones lay scattered as they fell; but enough remained to show that in its better days it had been almost a palace. We ascended a flight of stone steps to a terrace, from which we entered into a large hall perhaps thirty feet wide and fifty feet long. On one side of this hall the wall had fallen down the whole length, and we looked out upon the mass of ruins beneath. On the other side, in a small room in one corner, we found the archbishop. He was sick, and in bed with all his clothes on, according to the universal custom here, but received us kindly. The furniture consisted of an iron bedstead with a mattress, on which he lay with a quilt spread over him, a wooden sofa, three wooden chairs, about twenty books, and two large leather cases containing clothes, napkins, and, probably, all his worldly goods. The rain came through the ceiling in several places; the bed of the poor archbishop had evidently been moved from time to time to avoid it, and I was obliged to change my position twice. An air of cheerless poverty reigned through the apartment. I could not help comparing his lot with that of more favoured and, perhaps, not more worthy servants of the church. It was a style so different from that of the priests at Rome, the pope and his cardinals, with their gaudy equipages and multitudes of footmen rattling to the Vatican; or from the pomp and state of the haughty English prelates, or even from the comforts of our own missionaries in different parts of this country, that I could not help feeling deeply for the poor priest before me. But he seemed contented and cheerful, and even thankful that, for the moment, there were others worse off than himself, and that he had it in his power to befriend them.
Sweetmeats, coffee, and pipes were served; and in about an hour we were conducted to supper in a large room, also opening from the hall. Our supper would not have tempted an epicure, but suited very well an appetite whetted by exercise and travel. It consisted of a huge lump of bread and a large glass of water for each of us, caviari, black olives, and two kinds of Turkish sweetmeats. We were waited upon by two priests: one of them, a handsome young man, not more than twenty, with long black hair hanging over his shoulders like a girl's, stood by with a napkin on his arm and a pewter vessel, with which he poured water on our hands, receiving it again in a basin. This was done both before and after eating; then came coffee and pipes. During the evening the young priest brought out an edition of Homer, and I surprised him, and astounded myself, by being able to translate a passage in the Iliad. I translated it in French, and my companion explained it in modern Greek to the young priest. Our beds were cushions laid on a raised platform or divan extending around the walls, with a quilt for each of us. In the morning, after sweetmeats, coffee, and pipes, we paid our respects to the good old archbishop, and took our leave. When we got out of doors, finding that the wind was the same, and that there was no possibility of sailing, my friend proposed a ride into the country. We procured a couple of mules, took a small basket of provisions for a collation, and started.
Our road lay directly along the shore; on one side the sea, and on the other the ruins of houses and gardens, almost washed by the waves. At about three miles' distance we crossed a little stream, by the side of which we saw a sarcophagus, lately disinterred, containing the usual vases of a Grecian tomb, including the piece of money to pay Charon his ferriage over the river Styx, and six pounds of dust; being all that remained of a man—perhaps one who had filled a large space in the world; perhaps a hero—buried probably more than two thousand years ago. After a ride of about five miles we came to the ruins of a large village, the style of which would anywhere have fixed the attention, as having been once a favoured abode of wealth and taste. The houses were of brown stone, built together, strictly in the Venetian style, after the models left during the occupation of the island by the Venetians, large and elegant, with gardens of three or four acres, enclosed by high walls of the same kind of stone, and altogether in a style far superior to anything I had seen in Greece. These were the country-houses and gardens of the rich merchants of Scio. The manner of living among the proprietors here was somewhat peculiar, and the ties that bound them to this little village were peculiarly strong. This was the family home; the community was essentially mercantile, and most of their business transactions were carried on elsewhere. When there were three or four brothers in a family, one would be in Constantinople a couple of years, another at Trieste, and so on, while another remained at home; so that those who were away, while toiling amid the perplexities of business, were always looking to the occasional family reunion; and all trusted to spend the evening of their days among the beautiful gardens of Scio. What a scene for the heart to turn to now! The houses and gardens were still there, some standing almost entire, others black with smoke and crumbling to ruins. But where were they who once occupied them? Where were they who should now be coming out to rejoice in the return of a friend and to welcome a stranger? An awful solitude, a stillness that struck a cold upon the heart, reigned around us. We saw nobody; and our own voices, and the tramping of our horses upon the deserted pavements, sounded hollow and sepulchral in our ears. It was like walking among the ruins of Pompeii; it was another city of the dead; but there was a freshness about the desolation that seemed of to-day; it seemed as though the inhabitants should be sleeping and not dead. Indeed, the high walls of the gardens, and the outside of the houses too, were generally so fresh and in so perfect a state, that it seemed like riding through a handsome village at an early hour before the inhabitants had risen; and I sometimes could not help thinking that in an hour or two the streets would be thronged with a busy population. My friend continued to conduct me through the solitary streets; telling me, as we went along, that this was the house of such a family, this of such a family, with some of whose members I had become acquainted in Greece, until, stopping before a large stone gateway, he dismounted at the gate of his father's house. In that house he was born; there he had spent his youth; he had escaped from it during the dreadful massacre, and this was the first time of his revisiting it. What a tide of recollections must have rushed upon him!
We entered through the large stone gateway into a courtyard beautifully paved in mosaic in the form of a star, with small black and white round stones. On our left was a large stone reservoir, perhaps twenty-five feet square, still so perfect as to hold water, with an arbour over it supported by marble columns; a venerable grapevine completely covered the arbour. The garden covered an extent of about four acres, filled with orange, lemon, almond, and fig trees; overrun with weeds, roses, and flowers, growing together in wild confusion. On the right was the house, and a melancholy spectacle it was; the wall had fallen down on one side, and the whole was black with smoke. We ascended a flight of stone steps, with marble balustrades, to the terrace, a platform about twenty feet square, overlooking the garden. From the terrace we entered the saloon, a large room with high ceilings and fresco paintings on the walls; the marks of the fire kindled on the stone floor still visible, all the woodwork burned to a cinder, and the whole black with smoke. It was a perfect picture of wanton destruction. The day, too, was in conformity with the scene; the sun was obscured, the wind blew through the ruined building, it rained, was cold and cheerless. What were the feelings of my friend I cannot imagine; the houses of three of his uncles were immediately adjoining; one of these uncles was one of the forty hostages, and was hanged; the other two were murdered; his father, a venerable-looking old man, who came down to the vessel when we started to see him off, had escaped to the mountains, from thence in a caique to Ipsara, and from thence into Italy. I repeat it, I cannot imagine what were his feelings; he spoke but little; they must have been too deep for utterance. I looked at everything with intense interest; I wanted to ask question after question, but could not, in mercy, probe his bleeding wounds. We left the house and walked out into the garden. It showed that there was no master's eye to watch over it; I plucked an orange which had lost its flavour; the tree was withering from want of care; our feet became entangled among weeds, and roses, and rare hothouse plants growing wildly together. I said that he did not talk much; but the little he did say amounted to volumes. Passing a large vase in which a beautiful plant was running wildly over the sides, he murmured indistinctly "the same vase" (le même vase), and once he stopped opposite a tree, and, turning to me, said, "This is the only tree I do not remember." These and other little incidental remarks showed how deeply all the particulars were engraved upon his mind, and told me, plainer than words, that the wreck and ruin he saw around him harrowed his very soul. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? This was his father's house, the home of his youth, the scene of his earliest, dearest, and fondest recollections. Busy memory, that source of all our greatest pains as well as greatest pleasures, must have pressed sorely upon him, must have painted the ruined and desolate scene around him in colours even brighter, far brighter, than they ever existed in; it must have called up the faces of well-known and well-loved friends; indeed, he must have asked himself, in bitterness and in anguish of spirit, "The friends of my youth where are they?" while the fatal answer fell upon his heart, "Gone murdered, in captivity and in exile."