[B] One of whom was a dragoman of the English consulate at the time.
[C] Levantine is a term applied to people of foreign ancestry born in Turkey and brought up there. With few exceptions, they are the most corrupt, venal, and morally degraded class of the population of the Turkish empire. They furnish all the legation and consular dragomans, a class whose corruptibility has passed into a maxim.
[D] The real reason for the insistence of the committee on the promise of immunity was this: A daughter of one of the Pasha's council, his âme damnée, a Cretan, by the name of Petrides, finding one day a list of persons designated for exile and the bagnio, in which was the name of her lover, a young Cretan, stole the document and gave it to him. It contained the names of all the prominent chiefs of the petition movement, and many in the city who were only known for their liberal opinions.
[E] The position of Candanos, although impregnable to direct assault, was commanded on all sides by hills within speaking distance, but which the Cretans had neither artillery nor rifles to take advantage of.
[F] The Rhizo or "root" of the mountains is the hilly district intervening between the higher mountains and the plains which border the sea. Malaxa it the "root" nearest the sea.
[G] Certain European journals, discrediting this atrocity, and, strangely enough, on the ground that it had really happened in the previous great revolution, affected to consider all the atrocities as fictitious. The incident repeats itself in Cretan history, and I had information from European officers of the Turkish troops of several cases in this war committed under their personal observation.
[H] This estimate, and some of the details I give, I received from the secretary of Mustapha Pasha after the war was over.
[I] The few men who were spared from this massacre were those who were able to appeal to Mustapha Pasha, or some of his suite, on the ground of ancient personal relations, or who succeeded in obtaining his clemency by some sufficient plea, after surrender. That all the butchery was not due to the heat of assault is shown by this and by several incidents reported to me. One of the latest parties of the combatants who surrendered on a promise of their lives was passed in review before the Pasha himself, and all who wore European clothing passed under the sword at once, as volunteers, though amongst them were several Cretans from the adjacent villages, whose relatives attested their nativity. When the refectory surrendered, the Pasha swore on the head of the Sultan to spare its inmates, who were required to hand out all their arms, and were afterwards butchered, even to the women. Mr. Skinner, in his "Roughing it in Crete," gives an account of his visit to Arkadi some months later, when he found the bodies still unburied, and describes the scene in the refectory with ghastly verity. After the fighting was all over, a party of irregulars went round with lighted candles, and, holding them to the noses of the corpses, gave the coup de grace to all who breathed. Two Cretans had managed to hide on the roof of one of the buildings, where they remained till the next day, when, as the Albanians were leaving, one of them shot a pigeon which fell on the roof where the Cretans had hid, and, going up to secure his game, discovered the unfortunates, who were put to death in cold blood. On the march back to Retimo, all who could not keep up were at once killed, and those who reached the city were kept for months in prison and in extreme misery.
[J] A promise which Omar kept by violating and keeping on his ship as his mistress the most beautiful of the young girls who surrendered.
[K] Acting Consul-General Rogers to Lord Stanley (Received November 27).