Some weeks elapsed before Dr. Hepworth came from New York and reached Paris, from whence we started together for Constantinople. On our way we broke our journey at Vienna. In travelling on to Belgrade we gave up our sleeping berths to the King of Servia and his father, ex-King Milan, who both travelled by our train, the Orient express. On our arrival at the Servian capital early next morning we witnessed their official reception at the station by the authorities, who looked very much like a gathering of peasants at a country fair. King Alexander did not present a sympathetic appearance; but there was a touch of human nature in the expression of poor Milan which enlisted our sympathy.
We arrived in Constantinople about the middle of October, and encountered at the outset the dilatory tactics which marked the execution of every project emanating directly from his temporizing Majesty. This seemed to depress Dr. Hepworth very much; but as I had known cases of Turkish Ambassadors being kept dawdling about Constantinople for months after they had been appointed to their post, the delay did not surprise me. When, however, one week succeeded another without any decisive step being taken, or any date being appointed for our departure from Constantinople, we were driven to the conclusion that there must be some special cause for the delay. This proved to be the case. Information had reached the Sultan that Dr. Hepworth was really an American clergyman with a strong bias in favour of the missionary element, that he had contributed articles to the Herald fiercely condemning the Turkish Government for its treatment of the Armenians, and that he had written editorial sermons for that paper regularly every Sunday for many years past. Under these circumstances the Sultan hesitated to place it within his power to enter Armenia. Such was the information vouchsafed to me by a secretary of the Sultan, accompanied by a request that I should come up to the Palace and have an interview with His Majesty.
Munir Pasha, the Grand Master of Ceremonies, was present as interpreter on the occasion, and in the course of the audience confirmed what I have just stated. I could not deny that Dr. Hepworth, though a journalist by profession, had in early years been a clergyman, and that he still wrote short sermons in the form of editorials in the Sunday number of the New York Herald. For all this, I assured the Sultan that, though Dr. Hepworth’s sympathies were undoubtedly with the Armenians, this did not necessarily imply unfairness of mind; whereas, if the information to be obtained in Anatolia should turn out to be of a nature to exculpate the Turkish authorities from complicity in what had taken place, Dr. Hepworth, as an honest man, would report accordingly. The very fact of his known sympathy with the Armenians would then double the weight of his testimony. I succeeded in convincing the Sultan; he even agreed that our route should take any direction Dr. Hepworth might decide upon. Nothing was to be hidden or disguised from us, and in case of any difficulty arising I was always to be at liberty to telegraph directly to His Majesty without let or hindrance on the part of the officials accompanying the expedition. The Sultan concluded: “You have already given me substantial proof of your impartiality. Render me this service, and I will grant you any favour you like to ask of me.”
To this I impulsively replied, somewhat quixotically as it strikes me to-day, that he might rely on me doing my best in the interests of truth and justice without any consideration of reward entering into the matter on my part. As a matter of fact, I neither solicited nor subsequently received the slightest remuneration from the Sultan or anybody else for a task the arduous and perilous nature of which I was far from realizing at the time, and the outcome of which was a journalistic triumph for the New York Herald.
The impression I gained from this interview was that the Sultan was sincere in his wish to get to know the true state of affairs. He believed that the revolutionary activity of the Armenians, connived at by Russia, had been the primary cause of the massacres in Asia Minor as in Constantinople, and that the governors of the different provinces had done their best to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. Abdul Hamid is not the only autocrat who has found it an impossible task to get at the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. For it goes without saying that His Majesty’s estimate of what had taken place was based on partial and incomplete information. On the other hand, our journey furnished us with abundant evidence that the Sultan’s views were not without some justification, and that, as a rule, the governors of the different provinces we traversed were men of tried capacity and integrity. Viewed from this distance of time, there can be no doubt that the policy of the Sultan in excluding foreign journalists from Armenia was a mistaken one. It resulted in a one-sided version of the events becoming generally accepted—the lie with twenty-four hours’ start, according to Napoleon, is immortal—and it gave opportunities for “writing up” atrocities without any of the extenuating features which provoked them obtaining publicity.
It is not my purpose to render an exact account of our journey, for such would fill a volume. This was done at the time by the late Dr. Hepworth,[[4]] who did not very long survive the fatigues of the journey, which at his time of life, he being then over sixty years of age, was a most arduous undertaking. My aim will be to give some incidents of our journey, the impressions which have remained in my mind as illustrative of the aspect of the country we passed through as we saw it, and the conversations we had with the people we came in contact with.
[4]. “Through Armenia on Horseback.” By the Rev. George H. Hepworth. London and New York, 1898.
The ostensible object of the expedition was to report upon the schools in the different provinces to be traversed, but behind this was obviously the intention of obtaining information outside the usual official channels with regard to the disturbances which had taken place in the year 1895 in that mysterious country which Europeans are in the habit of calling Armenia, although the number of Armenians distributed over an area about as large as France and Germany combined, making every allowance for the unreliability of statistics, can scarcely exceed a million and a half, whereas in the Russian provinces bordering on Asiatic Turkey there are probably even more, of whom, however, the world never hears anything. The route of our journey, as drawn up with the Sultan’s approval, would take us through Anatolia, Kurdistan, Mesopotamia, and Syria. We were to proceed by sea to Trebizond, and starting from thence to reach Erzeroum; from there to push on to Van, thence to Bitlis, to Diarbekir, and to Biredschik on the Euphrates; thence to Aintab in Syria, and on to Alexandretta, where we would take ship back to Constantinople. By this route we would traverse four out of the five so-called Armenian vilayets;[[5]] Erzeroum, Van, Bitlis, and Diarbekir, leaving Mamuret ül Aziz out of our itinerary. This plan was carried out with the exception that we omitted Van owing to the severity of the weather and the uncertainty of being able to keep within the projected time limit. Little did we realize what hardships we were to experience, although we had been warned at Constantinople that such a journey—never an easy one, and usually undertaken in the spring, summer, or autumn—involved very serious risks in the depth of winter, when snowstorms or floods might possibly keep us for weeks together in remote places. The chance of being attacked by Kurdish tribes, of catching some disease owing to the lack of all hygienic conditions in the country, the primitive nature of the accommodation, sleeping on the bare floor side by side with camels, buffaloes, oxen, horses, and dogs all in a state far removed from cleanliness, lastly the unaccustomed food: these were all matters for consideration.
[5]. The term vilayet is derived from the Arabic ejalet, and signifies a governorship—an area—a district such as would be administered by a pasha; thus a so-called “pasha tik,” or staathoudership. Hence the term “Vali” stands for the administrator of a vilayet. The vilayet of Erzeroum, for instance, has an area of nearly 50,000 square kilometres, with 645,000 inhabitants.
On a black windy November morning we started in the Austrian Lloyd steamer Daphne, and steamed through the Bosphorus, on our way to the Black Sea, our destination being Trebizond. Our little party was quite representative in its character. His Excellency Sirry Bey, one of the secrétaires traducteurs of the Palace, was in charge of the expedition. Halid Bey, his secretary, a fat, good-natured, harmless young Turk, was always busy taking notes. Two colonels of cavalry, aides-de-camp of the Sultan, were attached to the expedition, and six sergeants of cavalry (Suwarie Tschaoush) formed a military escort in case of unforeseen contingencies. One of these officers, Colonel Tewfik Bey, was an easy-going, lymphatic cavalryman, whose big travelling portmanteau was a horse’s entire load by itself, although all the other members of the expedition restricted themselves to small hand-bags in consideration of the difficulties of transport. The other officer, Colonel Rushti Bey, was the most interesting personality of our party, as a specimen of the aristocratic, carefully brought up Turk. A young fair-headed, handsome man, he was indefatigable—the first up and on horseback in the morning and never seeming to tire. He did not smoke or touch any wine or spirits. His bearing was chivalrous, and though not given to expansiveness, he was a man of the kindliest disposition. We had a Doctor Wallisch, a Hungarian in the Turkish service, on board, who was on his way to an appointment in Van. Fortunately for the party we managed to persuade him to accompany us on the whole of our journey. Our interpreter, Hermann Chary, an excitable little Roumanian Jew, who spoke eight or ten languages, was the same man I had picked up in Salonica in the spring of the year.