The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II

by William James Stillman

CHAPTER XX

CONSULAR LIFE IN CRETE

Cholera was raging all over the Levant, and there was no direct communication with any Turkish port without passing through quarantine. In the uncertainty as to getting to my new post by any route, I decided to leave my wife and boy at Rome, with a newcomer,—our Lisa, then two or three months old,—and go on an exploring excursion. Providing myself with a photographic apparatus, I took steamer at Civita Vecchia for Peiraeus. Arrived at Athens I found that no regular communication with any Turkish port was possible, and that the steamers to Crete had been withdrawn, though there had not been, either at that or at any previous time, a case of cholera in Crete; but such was the panic prevailing in Greece that absolute non-intercourse with the island and the Turkish empire had been insisted on by the population. People thought I might get a chance at Syra to run over by a sailing-boat, so I went to Syra. But no boat would go to Crete, because the quarantine on the return was not merely rigorous but merciless, and exaggerate to an incredible severity. No boat or steamer was admitted to enter the port coming from any Turkish or Egyptian port, though with a perfectly clean bill of health, and all ships must make their quarantine at the uninhabited island of Delos. Such was the panic that no one would venture to carry provisions to that island while there was a ship in quarantine, and during the fortnight I waited at Syra an English steamer without passengers, and with a clean bill of health, having finished her term, was condemned to make another term of two weeks, because a steamer had come in with refugees from Alexandria, and had anchored in the same roadstead. Mr. Lloyd, the English consul, protested and insisted on the steamer being released, and the people threatened to burn his house over his head if he persisted; but, as he did persist, the ship was finally permitted to communicate with Syra, but not to enter the harbor, and was obliged to leave without discharging or taking cargo, after being a month in quarantine.

At last an English gentleman named Rogers, who lived at Syra, an ex-officer of the English army, offered to carry me over to Canea on his yacht of twelve tons, and take the consequences. I found the consulate, like the position in Rome, deserted, the late consul having been a Confederate who had gone home to enlist, I suppose, for he had been gone a long time, and the archives did not exist. There was nothing to take over but a flag, which the vice-consul, a Smyrniote Greek, and an honest one, as I was glad to find, but who knew nothing of the business of a consul, had been hoisting on all fête days for two or three years, waiting for a consul to come. I was received with great festivity by my protégés, the family of the vice-consul, and with great ceremony by the pasha, a renegade Greek, educated in medicine by the Sultana Valide, and in the enjoyment of her high protection; an unscrupulous scoundrel, who had grafted on his Greek duplicity all the worst traits of the Turk. As, with the exception of the Italian consul, Sig. Colucci, not one of the persons with whom I acted or came in contact in my official residence survives, unless it may be the commander of the Assurance, an English gunboat, of whose subsequent career I know nothing, I shall treat them all without reserve.

The Pasha, Ismael, I at once found, considered it his policy to provoke a conflict with any new consul, and either break him in or buy him over; and the occasion for a trial of strength was not long coming. The night patrol attempted to arrest the son of the vice-consul in his house, in which I had been temporarily residing while the house which I took was being put in order, and over which the flag floated. I at once demanded an apology, and a punishment for the mulazim in command of the patrol. The pasha refused it, and I appealed to Constantinople. The Porte ordered testimony to be taken concerning the affair, and the pasha took that of the mulazim and the policeman on oath, and then that of my witnesses without the oath, the object being, of course, to protest against their evidence on the ground that they would not swear to it. I immediately had their evidence retaken on oath and sent on to Constantinople with the rest. The Porte decided in my favor, and ordered the apology to be made by the mulazim. As the affair went on with much detail of correspondence between the konak and the consulate for some weeks, it had attracted the general attention of our little public, and the final defeat of the pasha was a mortification to him which he made every effort to conceal. He denied for several weeks having received any decision from the Porte, in the hope, probably, that he would tire me out; but as I had nothing to do, and the affair amused me, I stuck to him as tenaciously as he to his denials, and he had to give in. It was a very small affair, but the antagonism so inaugurated had a strong effect on the Cretans, who found in me an enemy of their tyrant.

Ismael was cruel and dishonorable; he violated his given word and pledges without the slightest regard for his influence with the population. I have since seen a good deal of Turkish maladministration, and I am of the opinion that more of the oppression of the subject populations is due to the bad and thieving instincts of the local officials than directly to the Sublime Porte, and that the simplest way of bringing about reforms (after the drastic one of abolishing the Turkish government) is in the Powers asserting a right of approbation of all nominations to the governorships throughout the whole empire. When, as at certain moments in the long struggle of which I am now beginning the history, I came in contact with the superior officers of the Sultan, I found a better sense of the policy of justice than obtained with the provincial functionaries.

Ismael Pasha had only one object,—to do anything that would advance his promotion and wealth. He regarded a foreign consul, with the right of exterritoriality, as a hostile force in the way of his ambitions, and, therefore, until he found that one was not to be bought or worried into indifference to the injustice perpetrated around him, he treated him as an enemy. I always liked a good fight in a good cause, and I had no hesitation in taking up the glove that Ismael threw down, and my defiance of all his petty hostile manoeuvres was immediately observed by the acute islanders and put down to my credit and exaltation in the popular opinion. The discontent against his measures was profound, and the winter of my first year in the island was one of great distress. Ismael had laid new and illegal taxes on straw, wine, all beasts of burden, which, with oppressive collection of the habitual tithes (levied in accordance not with the actual value of the crops, but with their value as estimated by the officials), and short crops for two years past, made life very hard for the Cretan. Even this was not enough; justice was administered with scandalous venality and disregard of the existing laws and procedure. Not long after my arrival at Canea, the hospital physician, a humane Frenchman, informed me that an old Sphakiot had just died in the prison, where he had been confined for a long time in place of his son, who had been guilty of a vendetta homicide and had escaped to the Greek islands. According to a common Turkish custom, the pasha had ordered his nearest relative to be arrested in his place. This was the old father, who lay in prison till he died.

The capricious cruelty of Ismael was beyond anything I had ever heard of. One day I was out shooting and was attacked by a dog whom I saluted with a charge of small birdshot, on which the owner made complaint to the pasha that I had peppered accidentally one of his children. Ismael spread this report through the town, learning which I made him an official visit demanding a rectification and examination of the child, which was found without a scratch. The pasha, furious at the humiliation of exposure, then threw the man into prison, and as he, Adam-like, accused his wife of concocting the charge, he ordered her also to prison for two weeks, without the slightest investigation, leaving three small children helpless. I protested, and insisted on the release of the man, who had only obeyed the wish of the pasha in making the charge against me.

Having no occupation but archaeological research and photography, I decided to make a series of expeditions into the mountain district, and to begin with a visit to the famous strongholds of Sphakia. The pasha protested, but as I had a right to go where I pleased, I paid no attention to his protests, and he then went to the other extreme, and offered to provide me with horses, which offer I unfortunately accepted. The horse I rode and the groom the pasha sent with him were equally vicious. The man, when we saddled up the first day out, put the saddle on so loosely that as we mounted the first steep rocky slope the saddle slipped over the horse's tail, carrying me with it, and the horse walked over me, breaking a rib and bruising me severely, and then tried to kick my brains out. I remounted and kept on, but that night the pain of the broken rib was such, and the fever so high, that I was obliged to give up the journey and go back to Canea. I found that the pasha had anticipated a disaster, and heard of it with great satisfaction.

As soon as restored, I set out on a trip to the central district of Retimo, then perfectly tranquil, the agitation in Sphakia, which preceded the great insurrection, having already begun, and making my venturing there imprudent. I was anxious to see something of the provincial government of the island, as, in Canea, where the foreign consuls resided, there was always the slight check of publicity on the arbitrariness of the official, though what we saw did not indicate a very effective one. I had a dragoman in Retimo, a well-to-do merchant, who served for the honor and protection the post gave him, and his house was mine pro tem., and over it, during my stay, floated the flag of the consulate. We made an excursion across the island to the convent of Preveli, situated in one of the most beautiful valleys in the island, sheltered on the north, east, and west by hills, and lying, like a theatre, open to the south, and looking off on the African sea. The entrance was by a narrow gorge, and here we witnessed one of those natural phenomena that still impress an ignorant people with the awe from which, in more ancient times, religion received its most potent sanction. The wind passing through some orifice in the cliff far above our heads, even when we felt none below, produced a mysterious organ-like sound, which the people regarded as due to some supernatural influence. As all the modern sanctuaries in that part of the world are founded on the ruins of ancient shrines, I have no doubt that our hospitable shelter of that night was on the site of some temple to one of the great gods of Crete.