Happy we Englishmen and Scotsmen, who know not what this malaria means! The worst story on the subject that I remember was a personal adventure of my friend Beard. The scene of this adventure is a little out of the way of Adalia, but it may serve to illustrate the style of thing prevailing generally in this direction any where within hail of a marsh. Beard was engaged in that (to those who like it) delightful, but occasionally perilous duty of surveying. This involves the being sent away in the boats for weeks at a stretch, during which time you go groping along the coast, or threading out-of-the-way channels between islands. It is easy to conceive that with fine weather, and healthy shores, this must be a welcome duty to a young officer, full of zeal, and unaccustomed to command. But sometimes the course will lie along deadly shores, past which you must creep, and snatch hydrographical facts from the teeth of death. Beard, poor fellow—and yet, considering that he lives to tell the tale, we should rather congratulate than pity—Beard was in command of a party of seven. Any one who knows the service, knows that an officer accustomed to command a particular boat, if he be a good fellow, acquires a strong fellow-feeling for and with his men. This is but human nature, seeing that they are subject to frequent and long isolations from the rest of the ship's company. I have felt this influence strongly myself, and am persuaded that a sailor is never so amiable a being as when away from his ship and from civilisation, on some scrambling boat-expedition. He then puts off altogether that selfishness of bearing which it often suits his humour while on board to affect. Beard was one who entered fully into the spirit of these expeditions; indeed he might have led one to suppose that he would willingly have agreed to pass his life in a boat. On this particular occasion they were coasting along Thessaly—those shores so beautiful to look at, but of which the beauty, when the mists of night descend upon them, reek with the breath of death. They proceeded cautiously; and as their labours were protracted into new days and weeks, and none of their little band had been stricken, they began to hope, and perhaps to believe themselves seasoned and safe. The time for them to rejoin the ship at last arrived, and not a man had been ill. One man did indeed complain in the morning, but he laid in his oar, and they hoped would soon be better. Presently another was forced to claim the same exemption, and another. In short, they reached the ship with great difficulty, and as by miracle, and not one of the party could mount the side. They were all hoisted in, and in a few hours the only man of the party who lived was my friend. In the pretty island of Sciathos is a tomb, wherein sleep the whole party save that one. I have stood by this, and read in the sad story of its inscription a sufficient warning on the subject of marsh malaria. Once or twice I have come in its way, but never willingly, and happily always without calamitous result. Once only I have slept within its problematical range, and that was off that pestiferous bit of coast near Epidaurus, and I fancy at a season when the marshes had not their steam up.
We had among us a lesson, but not of this melancholy character, on the absurdity of attempting to brave the daylight heat of summer. It is so natural for an Englishman to look upon the mere natives of any place to which he may come in his travels, as cheats and ignoramuses, that we, as a matter of course, and most complacently, admitted the natives en masse and every where to that rating. In the course of our vagaries we stumbled on the pretty island of Mytilene, in the very piping hours of summer. Very cool and pleasant did it look to us shipmen, hanging down its umbrageous olive groves nearly to the water's edge—and very pleasant should we have found it to be, had we been content to defer our landing till the authorised hour of eventide. But besides that the place looked so inviting, we felt bound to give way to a little enthusiasm at this approach to the birthplace of the lady who gave Horace the model of
"Jam satis terris nivis atque diræ" &c.
so nothing could hold us in from immediate disembarkation, and a cross country ride. We went right across from one harbour to another—for it has two, which between them nearly bisect the island. But so frightful was the heat, that nothing but youth and English blood exempted us from the penalty of fever. Some of the party were very nearly knocked up mid-way; and we should scarcely any of us have managed to get back to the ship as we did, had it not been our fortune to meet a resting-place in the village of Loutri. Such attempts as this are the causes of the sad casualties that we occasionally find happening to Eastern travellers. How many have paid with their lives the penalty of an unseasonable journey in Syria, especially on the coast between Beyrout and Jerusalem. Only choose well your time, and you may proceed in perfect security, so far as the dangers of nature are concerned. Any attempt at forcing a journey is a folly; and a folly of which the correction will come with the first experiment, if it leave to the person any future opportunity of sublunary conduct.
But no one should mention Mytilene without saving a word or two in praise of its beauty. All shrivelled up as we were by the heat—for we were almost past the sudatory stage—we drank in some refreshment from the scenery. Port Olivet has quite the appearance of a lake, and it is only when quite at the spot that you perceive the real nature of the locality. The hills around are finely shaded; and the masses of olive-trees assumed, in the then lurid glare of sky and water, that shadowy appearance that we used to see in Turner's pictures. They are very famous for the production of a fine oil from their olives, which is the staple commodity of the island, and of which they export considerable quantities. By all accounts, nature, unassisted, may claim the praise of this produce, for they are said to be careless manufacturers. We went into one or two of the εργαστηρια to witness the process of compression, but could not take it upon our veracity to utter an opinion anent them. At least they seem in a fair way to improve their wares; for the new consular agent of France (whom, by the way, we took to his Barataria) is especially knowing in this line, and hopes to produce, in a short time, oil that shall be equal to that of France or Lucca.
After all this talk about the impossibility of travelling in the summer, it augurs ill for our account of Adalia, to say that it was the very heat and rage of summer when we landed there. But as we were not volunteers on the occasion, we did not choose our own season. Like the fifty thousand Cossacks who marched off to the East Indies, not because they liked it, but because they were sent, we were saved all the trouble of deliberation; and once arrived at the spot, we were sufficiently old stagers to adapt ourselves to the ways and means of the place. I remember that we were delighted at the start: catching at the prospect of change, as at the hope of improvement. Certainly things were bad enough with us in Smyrna bay at that time. The pitch was boiling in the seams, the water was hissing along-side; the sky seemed an entire sun, so truly were the fiery rays rendered back from every part of the glowing concave. The sea-breeze, one's only solace under such circumstances, was continually forgetting to come. In spite of the common profession, that without the sea-breeze it would be impossible to live hereaway, we continued to pant through days of breezeless existence. At this time it was that I arrived at the conclusion which is now established in the code of my economics, that the endurance at Calcutta or Port Royal is a joke compared with what one has to undergo in these milder latitudes. The dweller in Anatolia has no such range of Fahrenheit to alarm him into defensive measures, and thus he falls comparatively unprepared into the conflict with the dog-days. Your Bengalee mounts defences of tattees and punkahs that cool down a hot wind, or whistle air into presence in a trice. Whereas in this part of the world, as the Sirocco blows, so it must steal into your room, parching your face, and covering you all over with a clammy stickiness, through which you may distinctly feel the subdolent shudder of incipient ague. When he has darkened his room, and spread cool mats on the floor, the poor Smyrniot has nothing farther that he can do. And if such be the case of those who dwell within the mansions of Ismir, who have at least thick walls between them and the sun, what is likely to be the state of those disgraziatos, who people the busy town of ships in the bay?—the rash men
"—digitos a morte remotos
Quatuor aut septem."
Custom, they say, may bring a man to any thing, as it did M. Chabert to the power of living in an oven; to which achievement, by the way, I should not wonder if the first step had been the passing of a hot summer on board ship in harbour. You may any day see, at some of our gigantic iron-works, custom bringing men to such a pass, that they can endure to stand before a fire that would be the death and cooking of an ox. And so I suppose it was by force of custom that we were able to undergo a style of thing that ought to have been the stewing of any ordinary flesh and blood. But it was a stupid and languid life that we were leading, scarcely venturing on deck even beneath the awning, and not dreaming of shore except quite in the evening. Sometimes a morning's interest would be excited by some story of plague in the Lazaretto, and a proposed adjournment of the ship to Vourlah, to be out of harm's way; and such speculations, though not exactly pleasurable, were at least anti-stagnative in character. In any thing like decent weather it is not bad fun to get down to Vourlah for a time, and to fly from the gaieties of the metropolis to the pleasures of the chasse at Rabbit Island. It must ever be soothing to a spirit that has not quite forgotten "the humanities," to walk upon the turf which witnessed the infant gambols of Anaxagoras; and besides that, the locality is pretty, and worthy of being visited on its own account. The town is at the distance of some miles from the Scala, which last is the grand watering-place for the ships on this station. Some few years ago, when the two fleets, French and English, were here, an extempore town was devised on the beach, for the benefit of the thousand and one hangers-on who are always found in such neighbourhoods. This was a stretch of luxury on their part; for generally these nautical suttlers need no other shelter than that of the boat which contains their wares. They are always ready for a start, and glad to be allowed to follow almost any whither in the wake of a ship. I should think they might be rated amongst the most honest of their compatriots, as they certainly may amongst the most hard-working and courageous.
But no such luck had been ours, as to be assigned so pleasant an adjournment. The longest cruise we had any of us managed to steal, was perhaps in one of the cutters, as far as what we Englishmen persist in calling St James's castle—a strange name for Turks to give a place, and which, in fact, we have devisedly corrupted from their word sandjeak.
At last, one happy day—happy in its result, not in the complexion it bore at its opening—we positively did receive orders for a start, and this is the way it came about: The representative of sultanic dignity at the somewhat retired watering-place of Adalia, was a man prone, like the greater number of his countrymen, to judge of things altogether in the concrete. The idea of power could by him be deduced only from present violence; and without some such sensible manifestations, it became to him like one of Fichte's "objects," i.e. all moonshine. With regard to foreign powers, they existed for him, and influenced his government, only so far as they sent occasionally a ship of war with its suggestive influence of a frowning broadside to look in his way. They have no very distinct idea, these gentlemen, of geography, nor of political science; all thus are sadly out in their estimation of the relative importance of places. To them the seat of their government is the world; or at least the place in it of importance second to Constantinople. If they be passed over in the distribution of our corps de demonstration, they are apt to ascribe the omission to a want of power on our part. Now, with all their excellencies, it call hardly be denied that they are sadly apt to presume on any want of power in a neighbour. So it happens that the unfortunate consuls who are stowed away in the obscurer establishments, are apt to suffer from their caprice. Should it so happen that the particular flag over whose interests the consul is appointed inspector, should not have been displayed in the neighbourhood lately by any ship of war, the short memory of a pasha is in danger of forgetting that nation's claim to respect; for any thing that he knows, it may have been revolutionised or sunk by an earthquake,—at least he cannot bear the trouble of imagining any other reason for the non-appearance of its executive ministers, than the obvious one of its having no ships to send. Thus, in matters of precedence, consuls are apt sometimes to get snubbed—a point on which, of all others, they are tender: or in matters of justice, their clients will find themselves ousted, in spite of the proverbial integrity of the Turkish judges. Perhaps the readiest way of stumbling on a grievance, is the kind of thing that gave rise to our visit, where some of the populace presume on your want of protection, and commit some aggression on your rights as a man and a brother. This being referred to the authorities, will be apt to be viewed by them in the light of that consideration which they happen to be lending at that moment to your nation. Poor fellows! we must not be hard upon them; nor will we doubt the sound foundation of the panegyrics which many travellers have pronounced on their honesty. They are honest, no doubt, so far as they understand the doctrine of the thing; but the fact is, they do not seem to understand the subject in the abstract. They have no idea of judging a foreigner's cause, without reference to considerations of his nationality and personal importance; and to pronounce readily a decision in favour of one against whom should lie the preponderance in these particulars, would be to them an absurdity. We have had occasion lately to be struck with the tone in which certain writers have spoken on the subject of Mussulman morals. The first notability about such accounts is, that they are very different from the reports of their predecessors—of such an accurate man as Burkhardt for instance; and the second notability, so far as most of us are concerned, is, that they are contrary to the general consent of travellers. That there are excellent men, and honest among them, is a fact; and it is a fact, that in general matters of bargaining, you may trust to them. But when the idea of probity is carried out, so far as to imply a view of things comparatively disparaging to Christian morals, it mounts to an anti-climax, and falls over into the province of nonsense. The Koran has provided them with much ethical guidance, of which individual Turks, of any pretence to religion, must be in some degree observant. But it is not true that the history of such cases, in their administration of justice, as might have occurred in the court of the old πολεμαρχος, will allow us to conclude that they are in possession of a rule coercing them to be just and brotherlike towards the unprotected stranger, abstractly and for justice's sake. Now, with us you may find many individual rogues, but never a roguish court, nor tolerated roguish public body. And of this difference between us Christians and them Turks, it will not be difficult for any one to supply the reason, who will give himself the trouble to think about it.