The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II by William James Stillman

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A JOURNALIST, VOLUME II

IN TWO VOLUMES

WILLIAM JAMES STILLMAN

1901

[Illustration: W. Stillman]

CONTENTS

CHAP.

XX. CONSULAR LIFE IN CRETE

XXI. THE CRETAN INSURRECTION

XXII. DIPLOMACY

XXIII. ATHENS

XXIV. ROSSETTI AND HIS FRIENDS

XXV. RETURN TO JOURNALISM

XXVI. THE MONTENEGRINS AND THEIR PRINCE

XXVII. THE INSURRECTION IN HERZEGOVINA

XXVIII. A JOURNEY IN MONTENEGRO AND ALBANIA

XXIX. WAR CORRESPONDENCE AT RAGUSA

XXX. THE WAR OF 1876

XXXI. RUSSIAN INTERVENTION AND THE CAMPAIGN OF 1877

XXXII. A JOURNEY INTO THE BERDAS

XXXIII. THE TAKING OF NIKSICH

XXXIV. MORATSHA

XXXV. THE LEVANT AGAIN

XXXVI. GREEK BROILS--TRICOUPI--FLORENCE

XXXVII. THE BLOCKADE OF GREECE

XXXVIII. CRISPI--A SECRET-SERVICE MISSION--MONTENEGRO REVISITED

XXXIX. ITALIAN POLITICS

XL. ADOWAH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

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that the steamers to Crete had been withdrawn, though there had not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.

That journey gave me a sight of one of the remarkable Cretan women,
whose reputation for beauty I had always regarded, judging from the
women in the cities, as a classical fable. I had been making a visit
to the _mudir_ of the province through which we were passing, and,
after pipes and coffee, and the usual ceremonies, I mounted my horse,
and, at the head of my escort, rode out of the mudir's courtyard, when
my eye was caught by the flutter of the robes of a woman in a garden
across the road. Around the garden ran a high hedge of cactus, and as
I leaned forward in my saddle to look through one of the openings, a
girl's face presented itself to me at the other side of it, and we
stared each other in the eyes for several seconds before she--a
Mussulman girl--remembered that she must not be seen, when, wrapping
her veil around her head, she flew to the house. The vision was of
such a transcendent beauty as I had, and have since, never seen in
flesh and blood,--a mindless face, but of such exquisite proportion,
color, and sweetness of modeling, with eyes of such lustrous brown,
that I did not lose the vivid image of it, or the ecstatic impression
it produced, for several days; it seemed to be ineradicably impressed
on the sensorium in the same manner as the ecstatic vision I have
recorded of my wood-life. I suppose such beauty to be incompatible
with any degree of mental activity or personal character, for the
process of mental development carries with it a trace of struggle
destructive to the supreme serenity and statuesque repose of the
Cretan beauty. Pashley tells of a similar experience he had in the
mountains of Sphakia, and he was impressed as I was.

On our arrival at the city gates, returning to Retimo, we had an
experience of the mediaeval ways of the island, finding the gates
locked and no guard on duty. We called and summoned,--for a consul had
always the privilege of having the gates opened to him at any hour of
day or night,--but in vain, until I devised a summons louder than our
sticks on the gate, and, taking the hugest stone I could lift, threw
it with all my force repeatedly at the gate, and so aroused the guard,
who went to the governor and got the keys, which were kept under his
pillow. The next day we had an affair with Turkish justice which
illustrates the position of the consuls in Turkey so well that I tell
it fully. The dragoman and I had gone off to shoot rock-pigeons in
one of the caves by the seashore, leaving at home my breech-loading
hunting rifle, then a novelty in that part of the world. When we got
home at night the city was full of a report that some one in our
house had shot a Turkish boy through the body. I at once made an
investigation and found that the facts were that a boy coming to the
town, at a distance of about half a mile from the gate, had been hit
by a rifle ball which had struck him in the chest and gone out at the
back. No one had heard a shot, and the sentinel at our doors, set
nominally for honor, but really to watch the house, had not heard any
sound. The boy was in no danger, and he declared that the bullet had
struck him in the back and gone out by the chest. My Canea dragoman,
who was reading in the house all the time we were gone, had heard
nothing and knew nothing about it; but, on examining the rifle, I
found that some one had tried to wipe it out and had left a rag
sticking half way down, the barrel. This pointed to a solution, and an
investigation made the whole thing clear. The dragoman's man-servant
had taken the gun out on the balcony which looked out on the port,
and fired a shot at a white stone on the edge of the wall, in the
direction of the village where the boy was hit.

The _kaimakam_ of Retimo sent an express to Canea to ask Ismael what
he should do, and received reply to prosecute the affair with the
utmost vigor. He therefore summoned the entire household of the
dragoman, except him and myself, to the konak, to be examined. As they
were all under my protection I refused to send them, but offered to
make a strict investigation and tell him the result; but, knowing
the rigor of the Turkish law against a Christian who had wounded a
Mussulman, even unintentionally, I insisted on being the magistrate to
sit in the examination. The pasha declined my offer, and I forbade any
one in the house to go to the konak for examination. I then appeared
before the kaimakam and demanded the evidence on which my house
was accused. There was none except that of the surgeon, who was a
Catholic, and a bigoted enemy of the Greeks, and especially of the
dragoman, with whom he had had litigation. He declared that the shot
came from the direction of the town, while the boy maintained the
contrary; and as, in the direction from which the boy had come, there
was a Mussulman festival, with much firing of guns, I suggested
the possibility that the ball came, as the boy believed, from that
direction, and put the surgeon to a severe cross-examination. I asked
him if he had ever seen a gunshot wound before, and he admitted that
he had not. Thereupon I denounced him to the kaimakam, who had begun
to be frightened at the responsibility he had assumed, and the man
broke down and admitted that he might be mistaken, on which the
kaimakam withdrew the charge.

I knew perfectly well that the servant was guilty, but I knew, too,
that for accidental wounding he would have been punished by
indefinite confinement in a Turkish prison, as if he had shot the boy
intentionally. The refusal of the pasha to permit me to judge the
case, as I had a right to do, he being my protégé, left me only the
responsibility of the counsel for the prisoner, and I determined to
acquit him if possible. The bullet had, fortunately, gone through the
boy and could not be found; and, as the wound, though through the
lungs, was healing in a most satisfactory manner, and would leave no
effects, I had no scruples in preventing a conviction that would have
punished an involuntary offense by a terrible penalty, which all who
know anything of a Turkish prison can anticipate. The governor-general
was very angry, and the kaimakam was severely reprimanded, but they
could not help themselves. My position under the capitulations was
secure, but it made the hostility between the pasha and myself the
more bitter.

The accumulated oppressions of Ismael Pasha had finally the usual
effect on the Cretans, and they began to agitate for a petition to the
Sultan, a procedure which time had shown to be absolutely useless as
an appeal against the governor; and, while the agitation was in this
embryonic condition, I decided to go back to Rome and get my wife and
children. We were still in the state of siege by the cholera, and
there was still no communication with the Greek islands, so that I
accepted the offer made by my English colleague, the amiable and
gratefully remembered Charles H. Dickson, of whose qualities I shall
have to say more in the pages to come, of a passage on a Brixham
schooner to Zante. Sailing with a clean bill of health, we had to make
a fortnight's quarantine in the roadstead, and, taking passage on the
Italian postal steamer to Ancona, I was obliged, on landing, to make
another term of two weeks in the lazaretto, though we had again a
clean bill; and, on arriving on the Papal frontier by the diligence,
we had to undergo a suffocating fumigation, and all this in spite of
the fact that no one of the company I had traveled with had been at a
city where cholera had existed at any time within three months, or on
a steamer which had touched where the cholera was prevalent. At that
time there was no railway northward from Rome, and traveling was
conducted on the system of the sixteenth century, except for sea
travel.

I was not long cutting all the ties that bound me to Rome, though I
left a few sincere friends there, and, drawing a bill on my brother
for my indebtedness to the kind and helpful banker, an Englishman
named Freeborn, to whose friendship I owed the solution of most of the
difficulties and all the indulgences I had enjoyed while in Rome, I
started on my return to Crete in the problematical condition of one
who emigrates to a foreign land through an unknown way. I had money
enough to get through if nothing occurred to delay me, and no more,
for, with the high rate of exchange on America, I felt distressed at
the burthen I was laying on my brother, though I had always been told
to consider myself as to be provided for while he had the means, and
by his will when he died. His death took place at this juncture, and,
curiously enough, the draft reached him in time to be accepted, but he
died before it was paid. His will made no mention whatever of me, but
left all his property to his wife during her lifetime, and to three
Seventh-day Baptist churches after her death.

In our consular service there was no allowance for traveling expenses,
or provision of any kind for the extraordinary expenses which might
fall on the consul from contingencies like mine. The salary at Crete,
which had been $1500 during the war, was reduced to $1000 at its
close, and in future I had only that and what my pen might bring
me. Arrived at Florence on our way to Ancona, we found the Italian
government being installed there; and our minister to Italy, Mr.
Marsh, knowing my circumstances, insisted on my taking a thousand
francs, though his own salary, which was, as in my case, his only
income, was always insufficient for his official and social position
at the capital. I accepted it, and it was ten years before I paid it
all back.

Looking back on this period of my life from a later and relatively
assured, though never prosperous condition, I can see that most of my
straits in life have been owing to my having accepted the miserable
and delusive advantage of an official position under my government. I
was not indolent, and asked for an appointment not to escape work,
but to be put in the way of work which I wanted to do; and when I was
disappointed in the appointment to Venice I should have set to work at
home. But my position was a difficult one. The arts were for the
war times suspended; I could not get into the army, my mother in an
extreme old age was a pensioner at my brother Charles's house, and my
sister-in-law refused to allow me to remain in my brother's house. I
had, at an earlier date, in obedience to my brother's urgings and in
deference to the Sabbatarian scruples, refused all offers to go into
business, as he regarded me as his heir, and had formally and at more
than one juncture assured me that my future was provided for and that
I need have no anxiety as to money.

My brother had urged my acceptance of the post at Rome, and all the
disasters of my subsequent life came from that error. My temperament
and the habit of my life had always prevented me from anticipating
trouble, and I never hesitated to go ahead in what lay before me,
trusting to the chapter of accidents to get through, incessant
activity keeping anxiety away. I have never flinched from a duty, if I
saw it, have never done an injustice to man or woman, intentionally,
and at more than one moment of my career have accepted the worse horn
of a dilemma rather than permit a wrong to happen to another; and if
I have been erratic and unstable it has not been from selfish or
perverse motives. I have always been what most people would call
visionary, and material objects of endeavor have not had the value
they ought to have had in my eyes. As I look back upon a career which
has brought me into contact with many people and many interests not my
own, I can honestly say that I have not been actuated in any important
transaction by my own interest to the disadvantage of that of other
people, though I have probably often insisted too much on my own way
of seeing things in undue disregard of the views of others. Confronted
with opportunities of enriching myself illicitly, I can honestly say
that they never offered the least temptation, for I have never cared
enough about money or what it brings to do anything solely for it;
and, if I have been honest, it has not been from the excellence of my
principles, but because I was born so.

But if I could have conceived what this Cretan venture was to bring
me to, I should have taken the steamer to America rather than to the
Levant. The few days we remained in Florence, then still crowded by
the advent of the court, with its satellites and accompaniments, gave
me an opportunity to know well one of the noblest of my countrymen of
that period of our history, Mr. George P. Marsh. It is difficult even
now, after the lapse of many years since I last saw him, to do justice
to the man as I came, then and in later years, to know him and compare
him with other Americans in public life. As a representative of our
country abroad, no one, not even Lowell, has stood for it so nobly
and unselfishly; Charles Francis Adams alone rivaling him in the
seriousness with which he gave himself to the Republic. Lowell was not
less patriotic, but he loved society and England; Marsh in those days
of trial loved nothing but his country, and with an intensity that was
ill-requited as it was immeasurable. He took a great interest in our
little Russie, whom he pronounced the most remarkable child for beauty
and intelligence he had ever seen, and his interest followed us in the
tragedy of our Cretan life.

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