Vacation days in Greece

by Rufus B. Richardson

DALMATIA

June, lovely June, has been the bringer of two good things to me—Sicily and the Dalmatian coast; and now that the charm of the latter is fresh it seems almost to outshine the former.

When I came on board the Austrian Lloyd steamer Galatea at Corfu I had little idea of what awaited me. One reads of this “Norway of the South,” this “Switzerland in the sea”; but how little these comparisons convey until the landscape has really been seen. My main purpose was rest from the heat of Greece, and a more or less careful study of the ruins of Spalato.

This Dalmatian line is adapted to one who wishes to travel lazily. The stops as far as Spalato are longer than the passages; the boat, however, starts in each case promptly according to the schedule. The only exception was at Corfu; when all was ready, and we were just about to hoist the anchor, a Greek boatman came up alongside with a barge loaded with casks and boxes. It was so characteristic of a Greek.

While we were moving along the coast of Albania until late in the afternoon, there was nothing new to look out for; and so there was time to get acquainted with the ship and the passengers, to get one’s bearings. There were the rules for passengers printed in five parallel columns—English, French, German, Italian, and Greek—emphasizing the cosmopolitan constituency of the travelling public. In Europe, and especially in the Orient, it always pays to read regulations, particularly the English column, to see how foreigners wrestle with our language. Rule 3 said: “Every damage is to be made good by the person who dit it.” Rule 11: “It is prohibited to any passenger to middle with the command and direction of the vessel.” As I had always trusted to the captain to run his own ship, I felt safe on that point. Particular anxiety for the ladies ran through the rules. One rule was: “Gentlemen are not allowed to enter the cabins of the ladies,” and as a final snapper at the end of the last rule was this sentence: “Passengers having a right to be treated like persons of education will no doubt conform themselves to the rules of good society by respecting their fellow-travellers and paying a due regard to the fair sex.” As we had no ladies at all on board until the journey was about half finished it began to seem as if they had been frightened away.

The captain, like most of the captains of this line, was of Slavic origin. Of other languages than his own he knew only Italian. In this he did all his “cussing” at every port; and it seemed to produce everywhere the proper effect. His gentlest conversational tone was like the blast of a trumpet and could be heard from stem to stern. I took an early opportunity to go up to the bridge when he was there, and remark apologetically that I was travelling per vedere qualche cosa. His laconic reply was, “Ma perchè no?” With that I felt myself installed on the bridge, and I spent more hours there during the voyage than any one of the officers. Perhaps the third-class passengers standing below suspected me of attempting to “middle with the command and direction of the vessel.”

Toward evening we passed Akrokeraunia, the massive headland ending off a chain of mountains back of it over six thousand feet high, in antiquity the cynosure of sailors crossing by the shortest line from Italy to Greece. The modern name, Capo Duro, suggests its pitilessness. There it stands running out to the northwest, and so bidding defiance to the strongest wind of the region. The sea has beaten against it since there was a sea; it has broken away a good deal of it, if we may judge by a single isolated island thrown out in front of it. The high mountains seem saying to the sea, “You waste your vain fury on those lower rocks. What will you do when you come to us?” But it is the business of the patient sea to help “draw down the Aonian hills,” and until there shall be no more sea Capo Duro must yield inch by inch.

Having passed Akrokeraunia, we turned sharply to the right, and changed our course from north to south until we dropped anchor in the harbor of Valona. As far as Cattaro the chief function of our boat was the transportation of freight, and that was the reason why the stops were so long. The captain was an ardent fisherman; hardly was the anchor down when his little boat dropped astern, and he fished sometimes far on into the night. He counted his catch not by numbers, but by kilos; and since the other officers in a circle around the stern, leaning over the taffrail, vied with the captain, fish were plentiful on board. All along this shore were great forests of holm-oak, and the cargo that we took on here was almost entirely valonia, so much used in Europe by tanners.

In the night we got off, and I missed the site of the great ancient city Apollonia, a little to the north of our stopping-place. But in the forenoon we stopped at Durazzo, the ancient Dyrrhachium, which, situated at the beginning of the great Via Egnatia, saw the passage of so many Roman armies into Greece. Cæsar and Pompey passed that way to their great struggle for the possession of the world. In earlier days it was known under the name of Epidamnos, as the colony of Kerkyra which set its mother city at war with her own mother city, Corinth, and so lighted the fire that destroyed Greece in the dreadful Peloponnesian war. At Durazzo my only first-class fellow-passenger got off.