An occasional trip with the boats to the watering-place, a Turkish bath, and a stroll in the bazaar of the town behind the castle, gazing with a glass at the tombs of Ajax and Achilles, and the long, undulating shores of Asia, eating often and sleeping much, are the only appliances to our philosophy. One cannot always be thinking of Hero and Leander, though he lie in the Hellespont.
A merchant-brig from Smyrna is anchored just astern of us, waiting like ourselves for this eternal northeaster to blow itself out. She has forty or fifty passengers for Constantinople, among whom are the wife of an American merchant (a Greek lady), and Mr. Schauffler, a missionary, in whom I recognised a quondam fellow-student. They were nearly starved on board the brig, as she was provisioned but for a few days, and the commodore has courteously offered them a passage in the frigate. Fifty or sixty sail lie below Castle Europe, in the same predicament. With the “cap of King Erricus,” this cruising, pleasant as it is, would be a thought pleasanter to my fancy.
Still wind-bound. The angel that
“Looked o’er my almanac
And crossed out my ill-days,”
suffered a week or so to escape him here. Not that the ship is not pleasant enough, and the climate deserving of its Sybarite fame, and the sunsets and stars as much brighter than those of the rest of the world, as Byron has described them to be (vide letter to Leigh Hunt), but life has run in so deep a current with me of late, that the absence of incident seems like water without wine. The agreeable stir of travel, the incomplete adventure, the change of costumes and scenery, the busy calls upon the curiosity and the imagination, have become, in a manner, very breath to me. Hitherto upon the cruise, we have scarce ever been more than one or two days at a time out of port. Elba, Sicily, Naples, Vienna, the Ionian Isles, and the various ports of Greece have come and gone so rapidly, and so entirely without exertion of my own, that I seem to have lived in a magic panorama. After dinner on one day I visit a city here, and the day or two after, lounging and reading and sleeping meanwhile quietly at home, I find myself rising from table, hundreds of miles farther to the north or east, and another famous city before me, having taken no care, and felt no motion, nor encountered danger or fatigue. A summer cruise in the Mediterranean is certainly the perfection of sight-seeing. With a sea as smooth as a river, and cities of interest, classical and mercantile, everywhere on the lee, I can conceive of no class of persons to whom it would not be delightful. A company of pleasure, in a private vessel, would see all Greece and Italy with less trouble and expense than is common on a trip to the lakes.
“All hands up anchor!” The dog-vane points at last to Constantinople. The capstan is manned, the sails loosed, the quarter-master at the wheel, and the wind freshens every moment from the “sweet south.” “Heave round merrily!” The anchor is dragged in by this rushing Hellespont, and holds on as if the bridge of Xerxes were tangled about the flukes. “Up she comes at last,” and, yielding to her broad canvass, the gallant frigate begins to make headway against the current. There is nothing in the whole world of senseless matter, so like a breathing creature as a ship! The energy of her motion, the beauty of her shape and contrivance, and the ease with which she is managed by the one mind upon her quarter-deck, to whose voice she is as obedient as the courser to the rein, inspire me with daily admiration. I have been four months a guest in this noble man-of-war, and to this hour, I never set my foot on her deck without a feeling of fresh wonder. And then Cooper’s novels read in a ward-room as grapes eat in Tuscany. It were missing one of the golden leaves of a life not to have thumbed them on a cruise.
The wind has headed us off again, and we have dropped anchor just below the castles of the Dardanelles. We have made but eight miles, but we have new scenery from the ports, and that is something to a weary eye. I was as tired of “the shores of Ilion” as ever was Ulysses. The hills about our present anchorage are green and boldly marked, and the frowning castles above us give that addition to the landscape which is alone wanting on the Hudson. Sestos and Abydos are six or seven miles up the stream. The Asian shore (I should have thought it a pretty circumstance, once, to be able to set foot either in Europe or Asia in five minutes) is enlivened by numbers of small vessels, tracking up with buffaloes, against wind and tide. And here we lie, says the old pilot, without hope till the moon changes. The “fickle moon,” quotha! I wish my friends were half as constant!