Chapter 18: Through Oriental Lands

It was “blowing great guns,” and the sea was white with foam, when on the ninety-eighth anniversary of Washington’s birthday into another world, December 14th, 1867, the steamer Euphrates, of the M. I. Company, left Marseilles. The iron ship was staunch, though not overclean. On the deck were boxed up eight carriages for Turks who had been visiting Paris. The captain amused himself, in hours which ought not to have been those of leisure, with embroidery. After a run through the Sardinian straits, they had clear sea room to Sicily. Stromboli was quiet, but Vesuvius was lively. At Messina they took on coal, oranges, five Americans, and one Englishman. On learning Carleton’s plan to travel eastward to San Francisco, the Queen’s subject remarked, with surprise:

“There was a time when we Englishmen had the routes of travel pretty much all to ourselves, but I’ll be hanged if you Americans haven’t crowded us completely off the sidewalk. We can’t tie your shoe-strings.”

Greece was sighted at sunrise. With Carleton’s mental picture of the great naval victory of Navarino, by which the murderous Turk was driven off the sea, rose boyhood’s remembrances of the fashionable “Navarino bonnets,” with their colossal flaring fronts, with beds of artificial flowers set between brims and cheeks, making rivalry of color amid vast ostentation of bows and ribbon. With his glass, he could discern, at one point upon the hillside, the hut of a hermit, who had discovered that man cannot live upon history alone, but that beans and potatoes are desirable. The practical hermit cultivated a garden.

Arrival at Piræus was at 2 A. M. The party of passengers descended the ladder into a boat, and there sat shivering in their shawls, where they were likely to be left to historic meditation until the custom-house opened, except for the well-known fact that silver often conquers steel. One franc, held up before the gaze of a highly important personage possessed of a sword and much atmosphere of authority, secured smiles and welcome to the sacred soil of Greece, immunity from search, and direction to a café where all was warm and comfortable, and from which, in due time, hotel accommodations were secured.

In the city of Pericles, they saw the play of “Antigone” in the theatre of Herod Atticus. On visiting the Parthenon, with its marvellous sculpture, which Turkish soldiers had so often used as a target, they found that the chief inhabitants of the ruin were crows. They met the missionaries who were influential in the making of the new Grecian nation. From Athens they went to Constantinople, where Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, in Robert College, was lighting the beacon of hope for the Christians in the Turkish empire.

Leaving Europe at that end of it on which the Turks have encamped during four centuries, and where they are still blasting and devouring, Carleton visited Africa, the old house of bondage. At Alexandria his first greeting was a cry for bakshish. Within half an hour after landing, most of his childhood’s illusions were dispelled. A drenching rain fell. The delta of the Nile had been turned into one vast cotton field which looked like a mass of snow. The clover was in bloom along the railway to Cairo. In this land of the donkey and of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, he received several practical lessons in the art of comparative swindling, soon learning that in roguery both Christians and the followers of the prophet are one.