Our voyage is drawing to a close. At Gallipoli, a large Turkish town handsomely situated at the mouth of the Dardanelles, we took on board the Turkish governor, with his pipe-bearer and train of attendants, escorted by thirty or forty boats, containing three or four hundred people, his mightiness taking a deck passage. Toward evening we were entering the Sea of Marmora, the ancient Propontis, like one of our small lakes, and I again went to sleep lulled by the music of a high-pressure engine. At daylight we were approaching Constantinople; twelve miles this side, on the bank of the Sea of Marmora, is the village of St. Stephano, the residence of Commodore Porter. Here the domes and minarets of the ancient city, with their golden points and glittering crescents, began to appear in sight. High above the rest towered the mosque of Sultan Achmet and the beautiful dome of St. Sophia, the ancient Christian church, but now, for nearly four hundred years, closed against the Christians' feet. We approach the walls and pass a range of gloomy turrets; there are the Seven Towers, prisons, portals of the grave, whose mysteries few live to publish: the bowstring and the sea reveal no secrets. That palace, with its blinded windows and its superb garden, surrounded by a triple range of walls, is the far-famed seraglio; there beauty lingers in a splendid cage, and, lolling on her rich divan, sighs for the humblest lot and freedom. In front, that narrow water, a thousand caiques shooting through it like arrows, and its beautiful banks covered with high palaces and gardens in the oriental style, is the Thracian Bosphorus. We float around the walls of the seraglio, enter the Golden Horn, and before us, with its thousand mosques and its myriad of minarets, their golden points glittering in the sun, is the Roman city of Constantinople, the Thracian Byzantium, the Stamboul of the Turks; the city which, more than all others, excites the imagination and interests the feelings; once dividing with Rome the empire of the world; built by a Christian emperor and consecrated as a Christian city, a "burning and a shining light" in a season of universal darkness, all at once lost to the civilized world; falling into the hands of a strange and fanatic people, the gloomy followers of a successful soldier; a city which, for nearly four centuries, has sat with its gates closed in sullen distrust and haughty defiance of strangers; which once sent forth large and terrible armies, burning, slaying, and destroying, shaking the hearts of princes and people, now lying like a fallen giant, huge, unwieldy, and helpless, ready to fall into the hands of the first invader, and dragging out a precarious and ignoble existence but by the mercy or policy of the great Christian powers. The morning sun, now striking upon its domes and minarets, covers it, as it were, with burnished gold; a beautiful verdure surrounds it, and pure waters wash it on every side. Can this beautiful city, rich with the choicest gifts of Heaven, be pre-eminently the abode of pestilence and death? where a man carries about with him the seeds of disease to all whom he holds dear? if he extend the hand of welcome to a friend, if he embrace his child or rub against a stranger, the friend, and the child, and the stranger follow him to the grave? where, year after year, the angel of death stalks through the streets, and thousands and tens of thousands look him calmly in the face, and murmuring "Allah, Allah, God is merciful," with a fatal trust in the Prophet, lie down and die? We enter the city, and these questions are quickly answered. A lazy, lounging, and filthy population; beggars basking in the sun, and dogs licking their sores; streets never cleaned but by the winds and rains; immense burying-grounds all over the city; tombstones at the corners of the streets; graves gaping ready to throw out their half-buried dead, the whole approaching to one vast charnel-house, dispel all illusions and remove all doubts, and we are ready to ask ourselves if it be possible that, in such a place, health can ever dwell. We wonder that it should ever, for the briefest moment, be free from that dreadful scourge which comes with every summer's sun and strews its streets with dead.
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CHAPTER XII.
Mr. Churchill.—Commodore Porter.—Castle of the Seven Towers.—The Sultan's Naval Architect.—Launch of the Great Ship.—Sultan Mahmoud.—Jubilate.—A National Grievance.—Visit to a Mosque.—The Burial-grounds.
There is a good chance for an enterprising Connecticut man to set up a hotel in Constantinople. The reader will see that I have travelled with my eyes open, and I trust this shrewd observation on entering the city of the Cæsars will be considered characteristic and American. Paul was at home in Pera, and conducted us to the Hotel d'Italia, which was so full that we could not get admission, and so vile a place that we were not sorry for it. We then went to Madame Josephine's, a sort of private boarding-house, but excellent of its kind. We found there a collection of travellers, English, French, German, and Russian, and the dinner was particularly social; but Dr. N. was so disgusted with the clatter of foreign tongues, that he left the table with the first course, and swore he would not stay there another day. We tried to persuade him. I reminded him that there was an Englishman among them, but this only made him worse; he hated an Englishman, and wondered how I, as an American, could talk with one as I had with him. In short, he was resolved, and had Paul running about every street in Pera looking for rooms. Notwithstanding his impracticabilities as a traveller, I liked the doctor, and determined to follow him, and before breakfast the next morning we were installed in a suite of rooms in the third story of a house opposite the old palace of the British ambassador.
For two or three days I was hors du combat, and put myself under the hands of Dr. Zohrab, an Armenian, educated at Edinburgh, whom I cordially recommend both for his kindness and medical skill. On going out, one of my first visits was to my banker, Mr. Churchill, a gentleman whose name has since rung throughout Europe, and who at one time seemed likely to be the cause of plunging the whole civilized world into a war. He was then living in Sedikuey, on the site of the ancient Chalcedon, in Asia; and I have seldom been more shocked than by reading in a newspaper, while in the lazaretto at Malta, that, having accidentally shot a Turkish boy with a fowling-piece, he had been seized by the Turks, and, in defiance of treaties, bastinadoed till he was almost dead. I had seen the infliction of that horrible punishment; and, besides the physical pain, there was a sense of the indignity that roused every feeling. I could well imagine the ferocious spirit with which the Turks would stand around and see a Christian scourged. The civilized world owes a deep debt of gratitude to the English government for the uncompromising stand taken in this matter with the sultan, and the firmness with which it insisted on, and obtained, the most ample redress for Mr. Churchill, and atonement for the insult offered to all Christendom in his person.
My companions and myself had received several invitations from Commodore Porter, and, accompanied by Mr. Dwight, one of our American missionaries, to whom I am under particular obligations for his kindness, early in the morning we took a caique with three athletic Turks, and, after a beautiful row, part of it from the seraglio point to the Seven Towers, a distance of five miles, being close under the walls of the city, in two hours reached the commodore's residence at St. Stephano, twelve miles from Constantinople, on the borders of the Sea of Marmora. The situation is beautiful, abounding in fruit-trees, among which are some fig trees of the largest size; and the commodore was then engaged in building a large addition to his house. It will be remembered that Commodore Porter was the first envoy ever sent by the United States' government to the Sublime Porte. He had formerly lived at Buyukdere, on the Bosphorus, with the other members of the diplomatic corps; but his salary as chargé being inadequate to sustain a becoming style, he had withdrawn to this place. I had never seen Commodore Porter before. I afterward passed a month with him in the lazaretto at Malta, and I trust he will not consider me presuming when I say that our acquaintance ripened into friendship. He is entirely different from the idea I had formed of him; small, dark, weather-beaten, much broken in health, and remarkably mild and quiet in his manners. His eye is his best feature, though even that does not indicate the desperate hardihood of character which he has exhibited on so many occasions. Perhaps I ought not to say so, but he seemed ill at ease in his position, and I could not but think that he ought still to be standing in the front rank of that service he so highly honoured. He spoke with great bitterness of the Foxardo affair, and gave me an account of an interesting interview between General Jackson and himself on his recall from South America. General Jackson wished him to resume his rank in the navy, but he answered that he would never accept service with men who had suspended him for doing what, they said in their sentence of condemnation, was done "to sustain the honour of the American flag."
At the primitive hour of one we sat down to a regular family dinner. We were all Americans. The commodore's sister, who was living with him, presided, and we looked out on the Sea of Marmora and talked of home. I cannot describe the satisfaction of these meetings of Americans so far from their own country. I have often experienced it most powerfully in the houses of the missionaries in the East. Besides having, in many instances, the same acquaintances, we had all the same habits and ways of thinking; their articles of furniture were familiar to me, and there was scarcely a house in which I did not find an article unknown except among Americans, a Boston rocking-chair.
We talked over the subject of our difficulties with France, then under discussion in the Chamber of Deputies, and I remember that Commodore Porter was strong in the opinion that the bill paying the debt would pass. Before rising from table, the commodore's janisary came down from Constantinople, with papers and letters just arrived by the courier from Paris. He told me that I should have the honour of breaking the seals, and I took out the paper so well known all over Europe, "Galignani's Messenger," and had the satisfaction of reading aloud, in confirmation of the commodore's opinion, that the bill for paying the American claims had passed the Chamber of Deputies by a large majority.