^ LIBRARY ^ UNIVERSITY OF I CALIFORWA SAN WC«9 J S//Z t At -yo ZP < n I Ik: ore that has been extracted from it. The < reation of Yemen into a Turkish vilayet brought the frontiei of the empire almost to the gates of Aden ; and the native Arab tribes, who, on the occasion of my first visit, made ii unsafe to venture a hundred yards from the fortifica- tion, were "lad to seek OUI protection rather than fall under Turkish rule. The result has been a certain tension between ih'' Turkish authorities and British officials, arising out of tin 1 , newly bom propinquity ; and the fear lest our influence should spread into the interior, has induced the Ottoman THE OVERLAND .TOY-SIX YEABJ: 9 y to pr< hmen . I was at Mocha, it i -in per he Ima although it wai ed, had already be - ruttendeo, s i r lies under all 1 ese h : and from : g - populatic n thousand hat id down to a r ade of ¥ finding its mik from it by sea. - great pen received os with moc ;r the circumstances, was f to be ~:.\z; /-.'-- : - ii -•;. I'.'.'.i' '■ .::. •.'.-': '.- : .\.::. : : z i: .::,'s ::. . i- ket, which gave him to enlisl e in the wood c He imr . y loaded it, and took a shot : oppos! vas not whom it v. . ^ded. alarm and as t as \..~hJ.. :■ :..;■'. z~ r ,'.:i : : v, \:.--. : t~; v.t:-i 1-i ::v-i *.'. ;,-;>.'>! 1 and highly amused the ; vho I don't think would e been ifected even i:' . ^sequences had been The indifference of the human life wi rk- ably illustrated while • night our ship was surrounded by boi b wood, their crews keep: a most discordant din of screar An while 1 in the proc dischargir cargoes into us. The abundance of this article was a s existence in the interior; but as it hac come on camel's backs, it must have been an expens: moc!:/. One of these boats, with a couple of men in it. capsized, the boat turned over, and the men scrambled on to the keeL There must have been a stror. : j can as they speedily drifted out to sea, without any efforts being made IO EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. by their comrades to rescue them, though the accident took place at midday, in full view of everybody. I suppose our captain thought that it was the business of the natives to look after each other. We watched them with our glasses until they disappeared on the horizon ; but as the sea is very narrow at this part, it is to be hoped they drifted ashore on the opposite side. From Mocha, with our wood fuel and our rickety bottom, we steamed slowly round to Aden, where the ship was laid up for repairs, and I was kindly received as a guest by Cap- tain Staines, then commissioner at that place. Forty- six years has worked a great change at Aden, as at all the other places on the route. ' It had then been only two years in our possession, and was held like a post in an enemy's coun- try. Every morning and evening long strings of camels were to be seen passing into the camp from the interior with sup- plies, and returning again to the desert, every Arab who ac- companied them being compelled to have a pass, and none of them being permitted to sleep within the gates for fear of treachery. We have now reduced all these unruly tribes to subjection, and within a certain radius of Aden the petty sultans by whom they are governed have been placed under our pro- tection — notably the Sultan of Lahaj, whose village is a day's ride distant into the interior, and who can now be vis- ited with perfect security. We have annexed a small district adjoining the peninsula, and upon it, three miles from the fortifications, have established a town called Sheik Osman, which has a population of twelve thousand, composed of So- maulis, Hindoos, Abyssinians, and Arabs. Each of these nationalities has its own quarter, and perfect peace and or- der are maintained without the intervention of any European — there being no white man in the place. Aden itself has now a population of at least fifty thousand, and is a grow- ing commercial emporium, while large sums are about to be spent upon its fortifications. When I first visited it. the AN ASCENT OF ADAM'S PEAK. II resident population, outside the garrison, were to be counted by hundreds; and both at the "Camp" and the "Point," into which the settlement was divided, the residences were of the most flimsy description. To me, however, their quaint and unsubstantial character possessed all the charm of nov- elty ; and the conditions of existence generally were so strange and unlike anything to which I had been accustomed, that I enjoyed my week's stay immensely, and was quite sorry when the repairs of the ship were completed, and we were called upon to bid adieu to its hospitable society. The remainder of the voyage was only remarkable for our slow rate of speed, and we reached Ceylon without further incident, sixty days after leaving England. I read a very interesting article in BlackivoocVs Magazine not long since on sacred footprints, in which the writer sug- gested that many of them were originally coronation-stones, and in which he offered some ingenious suggestions as to the religious character which attaches to them among the various races in the different countries where they are found. They seem, indeed, to possess a peculiar fascination to the devo- tional mind among Oriental races ; and we not unfrequently find the same footprint invested with a traditional sanctity by the adherents of religions which have no relation to each other beyond one or two of those broad ideas which are more or less common to all worship. This is notably the case with the print on Adam's Peak, the Sripada of the Buddhists, the penitential mountain of our first parent of the Moham- medans. It was from here that Gautama is supposed to have stepped across the Bay of Bengal into Siam — a gigan- tic stride, but not so wonderful a performance as that attrib- uted to Adam, as described by a devout Mussulman to a friend of mine, when discussing the means by which he trans- ported himself to Ceylon, after his expulsion with his wife, according to Moslem traditions, from the Garden of Eden. It seems that poor Eve, after being separated from Adam 12 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. for two hundred years, and reunited with him on Mount Ar- arat, died before he left Arabia ; for her tomb, which is re- garded with great veneration by Moslems, is pointed out to the pious pilgrims on their way to Mecca, at Jeddah. Ac- cording to this tradition, it was at the former place that Adam knelt down to ask forgiveness upon that stone, which has been invested with the utmost sanctity from a period long anterior to Mohammed — the sacred Caaba of Mecca ; and there he had his penance imposed upon him. Then, travel- ling to the coast, Eve died, and was buried about a mile from Jeddah, in a tomb two hundred feet long ; for she was a tall woman. The human race seems steadily to have de- generated after her time, for Noah occupies a tomb which was pointed out to me near Zahleh, in the Lebanon, only one hundred and four feet long by ten wide. If Eve was two hundred feet high, her husband, to judge by the present proportions of the sexes, must have been a good deal taller, say twenty-five or thirty feet. Now the difficulty which my friend suggested to his Moslem disputant was — how, in those early clays, a man two hundred and twenty or two hundred and thirty feet high could find a sambook, or craft such as are now used in those seas, big enough to carry him on a long voyage ? "There was no difficulty at all about it," replied the Mos- lem ; "he went over to Ceylon in several sa?nbooks /" After performing such a wonderful feat as this, the fact that he should have been able to stand on the top of Adam's Peak on one leg for a thousand years, and leave his footprint there deeply embedded in the rock, dwindles into insignifi- cance. Moslem traditions vary considerably in regard to the proceedings of our earliest ancestors, and I by no means pin my faith to this one. According to another, Ceylon itself was the Garden of Eden, and in that case Adam's post of penance was handy, while his enormous height would enable him to reach the top a great deal more easily than I did, and then Eve must have gone over in " several sambooks " to Jed- AN ASCENT OF ADAMS PEAK. 1 3 dah. Again, the most commonly accepted version of the origin of the Caaba is, that it was originally a white stone given by the angel Gabriel to Abraham, and has since been blackened by much kissing ; while others again say that Ha- gar rested there with Ishmael, when, after being turned out of house and home, they drank at Mecca at the sacred spring Zemzem. These are all fertile themes of discussion among Moslems, and the reader may take his choice of them. Meantime many pilgrims go annually to the top of Adam's Peak, which is about seven thousand five hundred feet above the sea-level, both Moslem and Buddhist — and must feel not a little indignant with each other at finding it appropriated by two such very different characters as Adam and Buddha. By far the greater number, however, are Bud- dhists. There are two paths of ascent : the one most commonly taken by pilgrims is from Ratnapoora, a place which owes its importance chiefly to its trade in precious stones. The sand-washings of the river which flows past it yield rubies, sapphires, amethysts, cat's-eyes, besides cinnamon stones and others of less value, and furnish a fair source of profit to the inhabitants. While watching the washers one day, I bought on the spot a cat's-eye from one man I saw find it, which, when polished, proved to have been a good bar- gain. As it is rather a fatiguing day's journey from Ratnapoora to the top of the Peak, I made an early start with a friend from the house of the hospitable judge who was at that time exercising his functions in this district, attended by our horse- keepers — as grooms are called in that country — and some natives, who acted as guides and carriers of the provisions we required for a three clays' trip. To say that our way led us through beautiful scenery is to use a platitude in connec- tion with the central and mountainous districts of Ceylon, where the luxuriance of tropical vegetation merges, as we reach higher altitudes, into the heavy forests peculiar to them 14 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. — where the villages are no longer embowered in groves of cocoanut- trees, or nestle beneath the broad leaves of the plantain, but where they are surrounded by coffee-bushes red with berry, and are shadowed by the feathery bamboo ; while the valley bottoms are terraced for the irrigation of rice, an- other variety of which, called hill-paddy, clothes the steep hillsides where these are not already occupied by forest. Now, these once heavily-timbered slopes are for the most part covered with coffee plantations up to a certain elevation, beyond which coffee gives place to tea and cinchona. But forty years have made a difference in this respect ; and when I ascended Adam's Peak, the villages became fewer and farther between as we increased our elevation, while our path often led us up the steep mountain-flank, through a dense jungle, as yet untouched by the hand of the foreign capital- ist. We passed the night at a native house in one of the higher villages, and leaving our horses there, on the follow- ing morning pursued our way on foot amid scenery which at every step became more grand and rugged, the path in places skirting the edge of dizzy precipices, at the base of which foamed brawling torrents. The way was often ren- dered dangerous by the roots of large trees, which, having become slippery by the morning mist, stretched across the narrow path, and one of these nearly cost me my life. The path at the spot was scarped on the precipitous hillside ; at least three hundred feet below roared a torrent of boiling water — when my foot slipped on a root, and I pitched over the sheer cliff. I heard the cry of my companion as I dis- appeared,, and had quite time to realize that all was over, when I was brought up suddenly by the spreading branches of a bush which was growing upon a projecting rock. There was no standing-ground anywhere, except the rock the bush grew upon. For some time I dared not move, fearing that something, might give way, as the bush seemed scarcely strong enough to bear my weight. Looking up, I saw my companion and the natives who were with us peering over AN ASCENT OF ADAM'S PEAK. 15 the edge above, and to their intense relief shouted that so far I was all right, but dared not move for fear the bush would give way. They, however, strongly urged my scram- bling on to the rock ; and this, with a heart thumping so loudly that I seemed to hear its palpitations, and a dizzy brain, I succeeded in doing. The natives, of whom there were five or six, then undid their long waist-cloths, and tying them to each other, and to a piece of cord, consisting of the united contributions of all the string of the party and the packages they were carrying, made a rope just long enough to reach me. Fastening this under my armpits, and holding on to it with the energy of despair, or perhaps I should rather say of hope, I was safely hauled to the top ; but my nerve was so shaken that, although not in the least hurt, it was some moments before I could go on. This adventure was not a very good preparation for what was in store for us when, not very far from the top, we reached the mauvais pas of the whole ascent. Here again we had a precipice with a torrent at the bottom of it on one side, and on the other an overhanging cliff — not metaphorically overhanging, but liter- ally its upper edge projected some distance beyond the ledge on which we stood ; it was not above forty feet high, and was scaled by an iron ladder. The agonizing moment came when we had mounted this ladder to the projecting edge, and had nothing between our backs and the torrent some hun- dreds of feet below, and then had to turn over the edge and take hold of a chain which lay over an expanse of bare, slop- ing rock, to the links of which it was necessary to cling firm- ly, while one hauled one's self on one's knees for twenty or thirty yards over the by no means smooth surface. My sen- sations, at the critical moment when I was clinging back- ward on to the ladder, remind me of a subsequent experience in a Cornish mine. I was some hundreds of feet clown in the bowels of the earth, crawling down a ladder similarly suspend- ed, and, feeling that the temperature was every moment get- ting warmer, I said to a miner who was accompanying me, l6 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. " It is getting very hot down here. How far do you think it is to the infernal regions ?" " I don't know exactly, sir," he promptly replied ; " but if you let go, you will be there in two minutes." Thus did he meanly take advantage of my precarious and helpless position to reflect upon my moral character ! which was the more aggravating as I afterwards discovered that the remark was not original. It was my companion's turn, after we had safely accom- plished this disagreeable feat of gymnastics, to pant with ner- vousness. And here let me remark that the Alpine Club did not exist in those days, and we were neither of us used to go about like flies on a wall. He was a missionary, in fact ; and he was so utterly demoralized that he roundly de- clared that nothing would induce him to make the descent of the same place. Now the prospect of imitating Adam, and staying permanently on the top of the peak called after him, was so appalling, that I proposed opening a bottle of brandy, which we had brought with us, and fortifying our nerves by taking a light repast there and then — a measure which was further recommended to us by the fact that the spot commanded an extensive and magnificent bird's-eye view of the whole southern portion of the island, with the sea dis- tinctly visible in the extreme distance, and thousands of feet below us the forests from which we had so abruptly ascended. We had one or two pretty steep places after this, but nothing comparable to the mauvats J>as, and reached the summit an hour or so before sunset. Here we found the solitary inhab- itant of a single hut to be a Buddhist, who was guardian of the sacred footprint, over which was a wooden erection some- thing like a light arbor, and which was secured to the rock by chains riveted into it. The print itself was about four feet long and nearly three wide, so far as I can recollect, and was so misshapen that it required some stretch of imagination to detect in it a resemblance to a human impression on a gigantic scale, more especially as the toes were almost unde- AN ASCENT OF ADAM'S PEAK. 1 7 fined. The whole area of the summit, which was almost cir- cular in shape, was not more than twenty yards in diameter ; and the sensation of being perched up at so great an eleva- tion on such a relatively minute point of rock was an alto- gether novel one. One felt as though a violent gale of wind might blow one off it into space ; and that there was some such danger was evident from the fact that the two flimsy erections upon it were fastened to the rock. We now congratulated ourselves on having brought up thick blankets ; for, accustomed as we had been for some time past to the heat of tropical plains, we felt the change to the sharp night air of such an elevation — the more especial- ly as the priest's hut was too filthy-looking for us to occupy, and we preferred taking shelter under its lee. We had no inducement, after a night on the hard rock, to sleep late ; and by getting up an hour before sunrise, I was fortunate enough to witness a spectacle which was well worth all the fatigues and perils of the ascent. As Adam's Peak rises from a comparatively low range of hills in the form of a perfect cone, it presents a far grander aspect than its rival Pedrotallagalla, which, although more than one thousand feet higher, neither stands out from its neighbors with the same solitary grandeur, nor does it fur- nish anything like the same extent of panoramic view, while it is easy of ascent on horseback. When I awoke to look about me, by the light of a moon a little past the full, in the early morning, I looked clown from this isolated summit upon a sea of mist which stretched to the horizon in all di- rections, completely concealing the landscape beneath me. Its white, compact, smooth surface almost gave it the ap- pearance of a field of snow, across which, in a deep black shadow, extended the conical form of the mountain I was on, its apex just touching the horizon, and producing a scenic effect as unique as it was imposing. While I was watching it, the sharpness of its outline gradually began to fade, the black shadow became by degrees less black, the white mist l8 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. more gray, and as the dawn slowly broke, the whole effect was changed as by the wand of a magician. Another conical shadow crept over the vast expanse on the opposite side of the mountain, which in its turn reached to the horizon, as the sun gently rose over the tremulous mist ; but the sun- shadow seemed to lack the cold mystery of the moon-shadow it had driven away, and scarcely gave one time to appreciate its own marvellous effects before the mist itself began slowly to rise, and to envelop us as in a winding-sheet. For half an hour or more we were in the clouds, and could see noth- ing ; then suddenly they rolled away, and revealed the mag- nificent panorama which had been the object of our pil- grimage. Even without the singular impression which has captivated the religious imagination of the devotees of two faiths, the peculiar conditions under which this remarkable mountain was exhibited to us were calculated to inspire a sentiment of awe, which would naturally be heightened in the minds of the ignorant and superstitious by the discovery on its summit of a resemblance to a giant's footprint. We heard that there was another and much easier way down, but it led in the wrong direction. Fortunately my companion, having taken counsel with himself during the sleepless hours of the night, had now screwed up his courage for the descent, which we accomplished without further ad- venture; and we reached the hut where we had left our horses in time to proceed on our journey the same day to visit some coffee plantations which had beeiuecently opened in the neighboring district of Saffragam. CHAPTER II. REVOLUTIONARY EPISODES IN ITALY IN THE YEAR 1 848, AND AN ADVENTURE IN GREECE. In the year 1846, my father, who was then Chief-Justice of Ceylon, came on a long leave to England. I was on the point of going up to Cambridge at the time, but when he announced that he intended to travel for a couple of years with my mother on the Continent, I represented so strongly the superior advantages, from an educational point of view, of European travel over ordinary scholastic training, and my arguments were so urgently backed by my mother, that I found myself, to my great delight, transferred from the quiet of a Warwickshire vicarage to the Champs Elysees in Paris ; and, after passing the winter there, spent the follow- ing year roaming over Germany, Switzerland, and the Tyrol, by rail in the few cases where railways existed, but more often by the delightful but now obsolete method of vctturino ; while, for a couple of months, fishing-rod in hand, we explored on foot the wild and then little known valleys of the Tyrol. I often wondered, while thus engaged, whether I was not more usefully and instructively employed than laboring pain- fully over the differential calculus; and whether the exe- crable patois of the peasants in the Italian valleys, which I took great pains in acquiring, was not likely to be of quite as much use to me in after-life as ancient Greek. Meantime, mutterings of the coming revolutionary storm had been heard all over Europe, and it was just bursting over Italy as we descended into that country at the close of 1847. Indeed, Italy has always proved an excellent field 20 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. for moss-gathering since the clay when, as I entered Rome for the first time, I passed cannon pointed down the streets, and found the whole town seething with revolution — to the year 1862, when, as the guest of a regiment of Piedmontese cavalry, I hunted brigands in the plains of the Basilicata and Capitanata. The incidents of my first visit are so long ago now, that I only remember their most salient features, but these are indelibly stamped upon my memory. I shall never forget joining a roaring mob one evening, bent I knew not upon what errand, and getting forced by the pressure of the crowd, and my own eagerness, into the front rank, just as we reached the Austrian Legation, and seeing the ladders passed to the front, and placed against the wall, and the arms torn down; then I remember, rather from love of excitement than any strong political sympathy, taking hold, with hun- dreds of others, of the ropes which were attached to them, and dragging them in triumph to the Piazza del Popolo, where a certain Ciceroachio, who was a great tribune of the people in those days, and a wood-merchant, had a couple of carts loaded with wood standing ready ; and I remember their contents being tumultuously upset, and heaped into a pile, and the Austrian arms being dragged on the top of them, and a lady— I think the Princess Pamphili Doria, who was passing in a carriage at the time— being compelled to descend, and being handed a flaming torch, with which she was requested to light the bonfire, which blazed up amid the frantic demonstrations of delight of a yelling crowd, who formed round it a huge ring, joining hands, dancing and capering like demons, in all of which I took an active part, getting home utterly exhausted, and feeling that somehow or other I had deserved well of my country. And I remember upon another occasion being roused from my sleep, about one or two in the morning, by the murmur of many voices, and looking out of my window and seeino- a dense crowd moving beneath, and rushing into my clothes and joining it— for even in those early days I had a certain REVOLUTIONARY EPISODES IN ITALY. 21 moss-gathering instinct — and being borne along I knew not whither, and finding myself at last one of a shrieking, howl- ing mob at the doors of the Propaganda, against which heavy blows were being directed by improvised battering-rams; and I remember the doors crashing in, and the mob crash- ing in after them, to find empty cells and deserted corridors, for the monks had sought safety in flight. And I remember standing on the steps of St. Peter's while Pope Pio Nono gave his blessing to the volunteers that were leaving for Lombardy to fight against the Austrians, and seeing the tears roll clown his cheeks — as I supposed, because he hated so much to have to do it. These are events which are calcu- lated to leave a lasting impression on the youthful imagina- tion. Unfortunately, in those days newspaper correspond- ence was in its infancy, and posterity will have but a com- paratively meagre record of the exciting scenes and stirring events of the great revolutionary year. If it was disagreeable to the pope to bless the Italian patriots in their struggle against Austria, it was still more hateful to the King of Naples to have to grant a constitu- tion to his subjects, and swear to keep it upon crossed swords, which I saw him do with great solemnity in a church, after a revolution which had lasted three days, and in which at length the troops refused to fire upon the people. It was true that he had no intention of keeping his oath, and broke it shortly afterwards, but the moment was none the less hu- miliating; and his face was an interesting study. Some idea of the confusion which reigned in all parts of Italy about this time may be gathered from an incident which happened to my father and myself at Leghorn on the day of our ar- rival in that town. It had been more or less in a chronic state of revolution for some weeks past. The grand duke still reigned in Florence, but he had lost control of Leghorn, which was practically in the hands of the facchini and the scum of the population. Considering themselves the mas- ters of the situation, the porters who carried our luggage from 2 2 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. the quay to the hotel made such an exorbitant charge that we refused to pay it. They accordingly summoned us be- fore the magistrate. After hearing the case, that worthy de- cided that the charge was reasonable, and that we must pay it. With the instinct of resisting extortion to the last, which is characteristic of the Briton, we persisted in our refusal notwithstanding this judgment; upon which the magistrate said that in that case it would be his painful duty to commit us to prison. We replied that we were travelling for infor- mation — moss-gathering, in fact; that we were much inter- ested in Italian prisons; that we could not have a better opportunity of examining into their management and inter- nal economy than by being committed to one; and that we were quite ready to go, provided that he would take the con- sequences. And we reminded him that we had still a British minister at Florence. It will be seen from this that we were of that class of tourists who are a perfect pest to un- happy diplomats. We were conscious of this at the time, but reconciled ourselves to it by the reflection that a great principle was at stake. Moreover, we had a suspicion, which proved well founded, that matters would never be allowed to reach that point. Our refusal to satisfy the demands of the facchini completely nonplussed the poor judge: he now appealed to them to moderate their claim, but this they sternly refused to do; upon which, after a few moments' sombre reflection, he thrust his hand into his pocket, and, to our intense astonishment, paid them the full -amount of their extortionate charge himself. We suggested to the hotel- keeper, who had accompanied us to the court, that the dis- pensation of justice on these principles must be an expen- sive operation ; but he said that, on the contrary, it simpli- fied justice very much, for the judge always gave judgment in favor of the mob, knowing very well that, if he did not, he would be stabbed on his way home the same evening, and that few ever thought of resisting any demand which was backed by an institution then existing at Leghorn simi- REVOLUTIONARY EPISODES IN ITALY. 23 lar to the Camorra at Naples. The course we had taken had left him no other alternative but to satisfy the claim out of his own pocket. So we gave the amount to our host, and told him at once to reimburse the unhappy functionary. We had scarcely reached the hotel before we had the sat- isfaction of seeing our facchini friends receive a lesson which our late experiences with them enabled us keenly to appre- ciate. A boat approached the quay containing two young Englishmen. Not only was their nationality unmistakable, but they appeared — what they afterwards turned out to be — university men in the prime of " biceps." On the boat touch- ing the quay, it was boarded by half a dozen facchini, each one attempting to grab something, were it only an umbrella, for which to claim payment. In vain did the travellers struggle to select two, which was more than enough for all their requirements. Each porter obstinately clung to what he had seized, and refused to part with it. One of them at last sprang on shore, followed by a young Englishman, who, finding he could not regain possession of his property, in- continently knocked his man down. This was the signal for a general assault upon the travellers, who, from the beau- tifully scientific way in which they handled their fists, must have been pupils of some great master in the noble art of self-defence. In less time than it takes to write it, six por- ters were lying in a heap on the quay: they were so taken by surprise they had not even time to draw their knives, and so demoralized that those who were not too much stunned to do so crawled off, leaving the two travellers to carry their own baggage triumphantly into the hotel. I think, however, it is better to be in a town which is com- pletely in the hands of the mob, than in one which is half held by the people and half by the government. This hap- pened to us at Messina. The Mole and fort at the end were held by the Neapolitan troops, but the town was in the hands of the populace. It was difficult to land except at night, be- cause during the day even a foreign flag ran the risk of be- 24 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. ing fired upon from the Mole. However, we succeeded in doing so without mishap — though we had not been long on shore before we began to repent of our curiosity, and to wish ourselves at sea again. We had hardly taken up our quarters at a hotel before a Neapolitan man-of-war entered the harbor and began to bombard us — one ball entering the wall so near our window that by making a long arm one could touch it, which illus- trates the folly of going to a hotel on the quay of a town which is liable to bombardment. We found all the streets by which the enemy were likely to attempt an assault de- fended by sandbag batteries,.in many of which cannon had been already placed. While the work of fortification was being pushed forward energetically, at one point I came upon a party of Messinese in despair at being unable to haul a gun up to a battery which had been erected on the hillside behind the town, when their difficulty was solved by a party of British tars, apparently on shore for a spree, who laid hold with a will, and in a few moments had placed the gun in position. Pushing my explorations rashly in the direction of the Mole, I heard a shot fired and a bullet whistle past me, and had just time to throw myself flat behind a low wall to escape the volley which followed. I had strayed uncon- sciously on to the neutral ground between the fort and the town, and had crossed unobserved an open space which in- tervened between the wall under which I was lying and the nearest street, which was barricaded. I had not approached the wall from this direction ; but this, I observed, was the nearest shelter, and I calculated that it was at least a hun- dred and fifty yards back to the town — an unpleasantly long distance to run the gauntlet of a heavy fire. So I lay still for at least a quarter of an hour pondering. At the end of that time I saw a sympathetic citizen waving to me from the fort in an opposite direction. Indeed, I now perceived that I was an object of interest to a good many of the towns- people, who had discovered my unpleasant position, and REVOLUTIONARY EPISODES IN ITALY. 25 were watching me from sundry safe corners. As the friendly signaller indicated that I was to keep along the wall in the opposite direction from which I had come, although it seemed to slant somewhat towards the enemy, I followed it on my hands and knees to a point where it turned off straight towards the fort : here I perceived a ditch turning towards the town, in which, by lying fiat on the bottom and wriggling along snake-fashion, I thought I could escape observation. It took me a long while to accomplish this operation, and as the ditch was muddy in places, dirtied me considerably. At last I thought I was at long enough range to risk a rush across the open for the remaining distance, and this I ac- complished successfully, a harmless bullet or two being sent after me by the garrison, who were not expecting my appear- ance in this direction, and who still supposed me crouched behind the wall. I was warmly welcomed by my rescuer, who was by this time surrounded by a small group of spec- tators, by whom I was accompanied back to the hotel, a sort of mild hero, their interest being increased by the fact that I was a sympathetic Englishman. We afterwards went on to Catania and Syracuse, and at the latter place were present at the peaceable transfer of the town from the royal to the popular authorities. All the offi- cials, finding further resistance hopeless, handed over their functions in the most amiable way to those appointed by the people, and the small garrison vacated their premises to the national guard without firing a shot. Indeed, wherever there were sentries posted, they were relieved with all due military ceremony by the new troops; and the royal soldiery, together with the civilians, were embarked in a transport which had been sent to convey them away. So complete was the popular success at one time throughout the kingdom that it was difficult to believe that in a few months the country would lapse into a worse condition, if possible, than that from which it had emerged, and have to wait for another twelve years for its deliverance. 2 26 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. If, in presenting my moss to my readers, I am compelled to have recourse to personal narrative, it is because at this distance of time I can thereby best illustrate the political and social conditions of the country in which I happened to be at the time. Here is a little bit of Greek moss char- acteristic of the year 1848 in Athens. The newly constructed little country which had just before been erected into an in- dependent monarchy, felt a ripple of the wave of revolu- tionary sentiment which swept over Europe in that eventful year. In order to overawe the population of the capital, King Otho had quartered in it a regiment of Mainotes — a reckless, dare-devil set of men recruited in the most lawless province in his kingdom, imperfectly disciplined, and still more imperfectly educated in any moral code. One morn- ing at six o'clock I went with my sketch-book to the tomb of Socrates, intending to take a sketch of the Acropolis from the neighborhood of that lonely spot before breakfast. I had not been above a quarter of an hour at work when a burly figure approached me, and addressed me in Greek. I was sufficiently fresh from school to be able to make out that he asked me what o'clock it was. I looked at my watch and told him, when he put out his hand as though to take it. I instinctively sprang back; upon which he laughed, threw back his big cloak and displayed the uniform of a Mainote soldier, at the same time drawing his bayonet. He did all this with rather a good-natured air, as though not wishing to resort to violence unless it was absolutely necessary; at the same time he stooped, picked up a rather expensive many- bladed knife, with which I had been cutting my pencil, and put it in his pocket. In the meantime I had folded my camp-stool, which was one of those used by sketchers, with a sort of walking-stick end, and which, in default of a better weapon of self-defence, I thought might be turned to account. I expected every moment to be attacked for the sake of my watch, which he told me to give up, but which I had deter- mined to make a struggle for; on my pretending not to un- AN ADVENTURE IN GREECE. 2^ derstand him, he stood watching me, while I put up my drawing things with as much sangfroid as I could assume, with the view of beating a retreat. When I walked off. he walked behind me in most unpleasantly close proximity. I did not like to take to ignominious flight for fear of precipi- tating matters, as I could not feel sure of outstripping him ; but, on the other hand, he trod so closely on my heels that I felt a constant premonitory shiver clown my back of six inches of his horrible bayonet running into it. I certainly never had a walk so full of discomfort in my life. Nor could I account for his conduct. He had got my knife, and evi- dently wanted my watch ; then why did he not use his bayonet and take it ? As I was thus unpleasantly ruminat- ing, I perceived in the distance the king's coachman exer- cising a pair of his majesty's horses in a break. I knew it from afar, for it was the only turnout of the kind in Athens. I hesitated no longer, but started off for it at my best pace across country. I need not have been in such a hurry, for the soldier did not follow me, but continued calmly to walk towards the town. On reaching the break I eagerly explained to the coachman, who was a German, what had happened. He told me at once to jump up beside him, and as the plain happened to be tolerably level, put his horses into a gallop across it, so as to cut off the soldier. The latter no sooner saw himself pursued than he took to his heels ; but we over- took him before he could reach the town. He did not at- tempt to deny the theft, overawed by the royal equipage, but at once gave up his plunder. "Now," I said to my good-natured Jehu, "let us insist upon his accompanying us to the police ; the man deserves punishment." "Rest satisfied with having got your property back," he replied. " In the first place, he would not consent to come, and I doubt whether we could make him ; and, in the secoud, it is not my business to mix myself up in such an affair." So, to my great disgust, we let him walk off. 28 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. I then asked the coachman why he had been satisfied with taking my knife; he knew I had a watch, and if he had searched me he would have found that I had money. I was unable to account for his forbearance. " I will show you how to account for it," he replied, with which enigmatical response I was obliged for the moment to be satisfied. A few moments later we passed a piece of a ruined wall, behind which three or four soldiers were standing. "Do you see those men?" said the coachman; "they are his comrades. They saw you go out alone to a solitary place — a thing you should never do again while you are in Athens — and they sent one of their number after you, so as to prevent your escaping them by going back some other way; but this was the place where you were to have been robbed on your return, and the plunder equally divided. The thief could not resist pocketing the knife on his own account; but he saw no reason why he should incur all the risk of committing a murder, if he could not keep all the spoil to himself afterwards." As I felt sure I could recognize the man, I called on the British consul to consult him as to the expediency of prose- cuting the matter further. But he took very much the same view of it as the king's coachman. " If you get the man punished," he said — "which, as you are a foreigner, you will very probably be able to do — you will have to leave Athens the next day, for your life will not be safe — and the punishment will be light, for these troops are kept here for the express purpose of intimidating the population, and as soon as you are gone he will be released. If you are bent upon going to solitary spots alone, take a pistol with you; you might have shot that man and noth- ing would have been said." The present Sir Aubrey Paul, who was travelling with us at the time, and who was about my own age, was delighted when he heard of this advice. AN ADVENTURE IN GREECE. 29 "Let us devote ourselves," he said, "to the pleasing sport of trying to get robbed, and of shooting Mainote soldiers. We shall be conferring a benefit upon the inhabitants, and amusing ourselves." So we armed ourselves with our re- volvers, and at all hours of the day and night used to prowl about in the most secluded localities, in the hope of finding sport. We were very young and silly in those days ; and though we often encountered Mainote soldiers, both alone and in company, a merciful Providence deprived us of any valid excuse for shooting any of them. But if Athens was in a lawless condition at this time, we had experiences illustrating the reverse of the picture in other parts of the country. My father chartered a native schooner at the Piraeus, and had her nicely cleaned out, her hold partially filled with white sand, over which were spread carpets ; in fact, we fitted her out as a yacht with such hum- ble appliances as were at our disposal, and started for a cruise amid the Isles of Greece, our party consisting of four gentlemen and two ladies. After the first day, however, the weather and the accom- modation combined proved too much for the ladies. The cook, I remember, always would make the salad in his old straw-hat. So we put into the exquisite land-locked little harbor of Poros, the memory of which still rests upon my mind like a dream, to consider in calm water what should be done — for we men did not at all like the idea of aban- doning our cruise. We had happened to cast anchor just off an extensive orange-grove ; and when we landed with the ladies to explore its beauties, they became completely fas- cinated by the ideal charm of its position. There was a delightful wooden summer-house — in fact, almost a summer cottage, except that it had only trellis walls, over which crept heavy vines ; and there was a gurgling brook of crystal water rippling past it, and wide-spreading umbrageous trees, besides oranges and lemons, and a lovely view over the Bay and the Island of Poros opposite — for this orange-garden was on the mainland. 30 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. "Can't you land us here, and leave us?" exclaimed the younger and the fairer of the ladies. "It will be quite, too awfully quite, delicious!" I don't think those were the words she used, but they would have been had she spoken seven-and-thirty years later. Ah me! she is seven-and- thirty years older now, and has gathered moss of all sorts. We had a most willing and intelligent Greek dragoman, by name Demetri — all Greek dragomans are Demetris — and he assured us that he could guarantee the safety of the ladies, if we liked to leave them under his charge. It seemed rather a rash thing to do; but that was a matter for the considera- tion of the person responsible for them — and he was willing to take the risk, as were the ladies themselves; so we landed them, bag and baggage. We made a beautiful bower of bliss for them under the orange-trees, with canvas and car- pets and shawls, and landed mattresses and cooking uten- sils, and everything needful for a week's camping. Demetri, with the assistance of a boy, undertQok not merely to pro- tect them, but to procure supplies, cook for them, and wait upon them generally; and so, with a parting injunction to these deserted fair ones to betake themselves to the summer- house in case of rain, we sailed away without having seen a human being during the whole process of their installation on shore. We visited Hydra, and Paros, and Naxos, and sundry other islands, landing at quiet coves where there were no inconvenient officials to ask for our passports, and make us pay port-dues — shooting and fishing and bathing; and so to Argos, from whence we made an excursion to Tiryns and Mycenae ; and so back to Poros, feeling rather nervous and guilty as we approached that port, and specu- lated upon the possible chances of mishap which might have occurred to the ladies during our week's absence. Our fears were set at rest as we neared our anchorage, and perceived a great waving of pocket-handkerchiefs; but lo! we dis- cerned also the waving of a hat! This was the more re- markable as the Greek costume was at that time almost AN ADVENTURE IN GREECE. 3 1 universal, and a stove-pipe hat did not form part of it ; so we pulled ashore full of curiosity, and were introduced by the ladies to a gentleman in irreproachable Western cos- tume — the proprietor of the garden, in fact. His residence was about two miles distant, and he had been much sur- prised, on visiting his garden the day after our departure, to find it occupied by two errant damsels, protected only by a dragoman. Fortunately he had spent some years of his life, in civilized Europe, and had now returned to his native land with a fortune; so he could appreciate a lady when he saw one — even in unlawful occupation of his garden. So far from resenting it, he was perfectly enchanted with an act of trespass which had provided him such guests, and he had danced attendance upon them from morning till night dur- ing all the time of our absence. He had invited them to his residence, where he had a wife and family; but was evidently so much relieved at his invitation being declined that it is probable that he kept the whole affair a secret, as he seemed to enjoy the monopoly of his self-imposed service. The result was that the camp was supplied with every deli- cacy which the resources of the country could supply in the way of comestibles, and numerous articles of furniture were added to the slender stock of those we had left behind ; so that, in spite of the waving of pocket-handkerchiefs, I believe our reappearance, which was to put an end to this romantic sojourn among the Greek orange-groves, was viewed with re- gret rather than otherwise. CHAPTER III. MY FIRST EXPERIENCES IN DIPLOMACY. From Greece we went to Egypt and spent a month on the Nile, finally riding across the desert to Suez by the route then supposed to have been the track of the Israelites — a theory which subsequent investigation has entirely exploded. By this time all idea of Cambridge had been given up, and I returned to Ceylon as my father's private secretary. Here I spent three years, devoting my time largely to sport as well as to law, my avocations and amusements enabling me to travel over the island pretty thoroughly. My residence here was further enlivened by the excitement incident on what was called a rebellion in the Kandyan Province — a very trumpery affair, to which I shall have occasion to refer later — and by an expedition which I made on the invitation of Jung Bahadoor, who spent a few days in Ceylon, and whom I subsequently accompanied to Nepaul. This visit into a little known and most interesting country, and the trip through India which I afterwards made with the present Duke of Westminster, the Hon. Mr. Leveson Gower, and the Hon. Captain, now Admiral Egerton, formed the subject of a book which I published a year later in England. Meantime I had got called to the Ceylon bar, and had some curious le- gal experiences, not the least of which was that at the age of twenty-two I had been engaged in twenty-three murder cases. This success, and the desire I had to bring out my book, induced me to return to England for the purpose of being called to the English bar. While I was engaged in this very uninteresting operation, my journey to Nepaul was pub- MY FIRST EXPERIENCES IN DIPLOMACY. 33 lished by Murray, with such satisfactory results that I be- came bitten with a mania for authorship. The difficulty was to find something to write about ; this I solved by decid- ing to go to some- out-of-the-way place, and do something that nobody else had done. Unfortunately, I had only the long vacation at my disposal. The only part of Europe within reach, fulfilling the required conditions, seemed to me to be Russian Lapland, for I heard from an Archangel mer- chant that the Kem and other rivers in that region swarmed with guileless salmon who had never been offered a fly, and that it would be easy to cross over to Spitzbergen and get a shot at some white bears ; besides, too, it appeared proba- ble that I should come across other uncommon varieties of game. I propounded this scheme to my friend Mr. Oswald Smith, who agreed to accompany me ; and, well equipped with the necessary tackle, we started one day in August, 1852, for the shores of the White Sea. On our arrival at St. Pe- tersburg we found, to our dismay, that we had to deposit the whole value of our equipment in cash before we were al- lowed to bring our guns and rods into the country, and then only on the express condition that we should leave Russia by our port of entry. This disgusted us so much that we packed our whole sporting apparatus back to England with- out entering them at all, and thus found ourselves stranded in Russia, and unable to carry out the object of our journey. We therefore bent our steps southward, visited Moscow, the great fair at Nijni Novgorod, went down the Volga, through the country of the Don Cossacks, across the Sea of Azof, and all over the Crimea, finally leaving Russia at Odessa, and returning home by way of the Danube. As it turned out, I owed the Russian authorities at St. Petersburg a debt of the deepest gratitude for the journey thus forced upon us in default of a better, as the book which I wrote describing it, and especially the Crimea, appeared at the moment that war was declared by England against Russia, and a military ex- 2* 34 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. pedition, which should have for its objective point the Tauric peninsula, had been decided upon. Thus it happened that in the early part of the year 1854 I was startled one morning by the clattering of a mounted orderly, who reined up at the door of my modest lodging in Half-Moon Street, and impressed my worthy landlady with a notion of my importance which she had not hitherto enter- tained, by handing her a letter which required an immediate answer. I found it to contain a request from Lord Raglan's chief of the staff that I should repair at once to the Horse Guards. As may be imagined, I lost no time in obeying the summons. I was ushered into a room containing a long table covered with maps, and round which were standing sev- eral officers of rank, among whom the only two that I re- member w$re Lord de Ros and Sir John Burgoyne. The commander-in-chief himself was not present. The Crimea was at that time almost a terra incognita in England, and travellers who had ever been actually inside the forbidden precincts of Sebastopol itself were rare. It so happened that we had spent two or three hours with- in the walls of that celebrated fortress, and I was now sum- moned to tell the chiefs of the expedition all I knew about it. Sir John Burgoyne told me that he had just been exam- ining a Pole, who had given him an account of the serious character of the fortifications on the land side which did not altogether tally with other information he had received, and he begged me to give him the result of my observations. I assured him that if any such fortifications on the land side existed, they must have been erected since my visit. We had entered the town from Balaclava, and I must certainly have remembered passing through them. I was therefore prepared most positively to assert that, in October, 1852, there was no more impediment to an army, which should ef- fect a landing at Balaclava, from marching into Sebastopol, than there would be for an army to march into Brighton from the downs behind it; and I felt sure that my travelling MY FIRST EXPERIENCES IN DIPLOMACY. 35 companion, Mr. Oswald Smith, would, if further evidence were required, confirm this statement. At the same time, I had, without any pretension to a knowledge of military tac- tics, amused myself, as soon as a hostile invasion of Russia was determined upon, in forming quite another plan of cam- paign, which consisted in a combined attack upon the Isth- mus of Perekop, by way of the Gulf of Perekop on the west and the Sea of Azof on the east. The capture of the small fort there would have cut off the whole of the Crimea, to which very few troops had yet been transported. It would have been impossible for Russia to reinforce Sebastopol, either by sea or land, and the fall of that fortress, provided that the Allies could have maintained their position at Pere- kop, would simply have been a question of time. We should have stood upon the defensive against Russia at a position of great natural strength, instead of on the offensive against her, at the point where, as it afterwards turned out, the genius of Todleben made her impregnable for a year. The capture of Kertch and Theodosia would have given us command of the resources of the Crimea ; and the defeat of the garrison of Sebastopol, had it ventured out to attack us, would not only have sealed the fate of that garrison, but would have given us the whole peninsula, which we should have held as a permanent guarantee ; and then if Russia still refused to come to terms, we should, by leaving a suffi- ciently strong force to defend Perekop, have been free to transfer the scene of our operations to the Caucasus and the provinces beyond it. I ventured, after giving Sir John Bur- goyne all the information in my power as to the defences of Sebastopol, the apparent strength of its garrison, and so forth, to point to Perekop as a weak spot ; but, of course, could only do this with the greatest diffidence. So far as I can remember, he listened without making any remark] at all events, I soon felt so much impressed with a sense of my own presumption in volunteering a plan of campaign, that I confined myself to a mere hint of it ; but I have often won- 36 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. dered, if the whole thing had to be done over again, whether it would be attempted the same way as before. The immediate prospect of a war in the East had the ef- fect of utterly unsettling my mind, so far as my legal studies were concerned. I had determined in my first enthusiasm to come to the Scotch bar as well as the English, and was in- deed ultimately called to both ; but the world at large seemed such a much bigger oyster to open than my neighbor's pock- ets, that I never even went to the expense of buying a wig and gown, while the absurdity of perpetually paying for din- ners at Lincoln's Inn that I never ate, induced me at last to disbar myself. Meantime I was extremely anxious to take part in the Crimean campaign in some capacity or other, and should have accepted an offer of the late Mr. Delane to go out as Times correspondent, had not Lord Clarendon kindly held out hopes that he would send me out when an opportunity offered. It was while anxiously awaiting this that Lord Elgin proposed that I should accompany him to Washington on special diplomatic service as secretary, and as the mission seemed likely to be of short duration, I gladly accepted the offer, in the hope that I might be back in time to find employment in the East before the war was over. The mission to which I was now attached arose out of the unsatisfactory nature of the commercial relations existing between Canada and the United States, and the futile at- tempts, lasting over a period of seven years, which had been from time to time made to put them upon a better footing, and which finally determined the English government to send the Earl of Elgin, then Governor-General of Canada, to Washington, with instructions to negotiate a treaty of com- mercial reciprocity between the two countries. Our party, on leaving England, consisted only of Lord Elgin ; Mr. Hincks, then Prime - Minister of Canada, afterwards Sir Francis Hincks; Captain Hamilton, A. D. C; and myself; but at New York we were joined by the Hon. Colonel Bruce, and one or two Canadians, whose advice and assistance in the commercial questions to be treated were of value. MY FIRST EXPERIENCES IN DIPLOMACY. 37 We happened to arrive at Washington on a day which, as it afterwards turned out, was pregnant with fate to the desti- nies of the republic, for upon the same night the celebrated Nebraska Bill was carried in Congress, the effect of which was to open an extensive territory to slavery, and to intensi- fy the burning question which was to find its final solution seven years later in a bloody civil war. We found the excitement so great upon our arrival in Washington in the afternoon that, after a hurried meal, we went to the Capitol to see the vote taken. I shall never forget the scene presented by the House. The galleries were crammed with spectators, largely composed of ladies, and the vacant spaces on the floor of the House crowded with visitors. The final vote was taken amid great enthusi- asm, a hundred guns being fired in celebration of an event which, to those endowed with foresight, could not be called auspicious. I remember a few nights afterwards meeting a certain Senator Toombs at a large dinner given by one of the most prominent members of Congress — who has since filled the office of secretary of state — in Lord Elgin's honor. It was a grand banquet, at which all the guests were men, with the exception ot the wife of our host. He himself belonged to the Republican, or, as it was then more generally called, the Whig party. Notwithstanding the divergence of politi- cal opinion among many of those present, the merits of the all-absorbing measure, and its probable effects upon the des- tinies of the nation, were being discussed freely. Senator Toombs, a violent Democrat, was a large, pompous man, with a tendency, not uncommon among American politicians, to " orate " rather than to converse in society. He waited for a pause in the discussion, and then, addressing Lord Elgin in stentorian tones, remarked, apropos of the engrossing topic: " Yes, my lord, we are about to relume the torch of liberty upon the altar of slavery." Upon which our hostess, with a winning smile, and in the most silvery accents imaginable, said, 38 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. " Oh, I am so glad to hear you say that again, senator ; for I told my husband you had made use of exactly the same expression to me yesterday, and he said you would not have talked such nonsense to anybody but a woman." The shout of laughter which greeted this sally abashed even the worthy senator, which was the more gratifying to those present as to do so was an achievement not easily ac- complished. When the war broke out, Senator Toombs was among the fiercest and most uncompromising partisans of the South. He was one of the members of Jefferson Davis's cabinet, and I believe only succeeded with some difficulty, at the con- clusion of hostilities, in making his escape from the South. He remained to the last a prominent political figure, and only died quite recently. It was the height of the season when we were at Washing- ton, and our arrival imparted a new impetus to the festivi- ties, and gave rise to the taunt, after the treaty was conclud- ed, by those who were opposed to it, that "it had been float- ed through on champagne." Without altogether admitting this, there can be no doubt that, in the hands of a skilful diplomatist, that beverage is not without its value. Looking through an old journal, I find the following specimen entry : '"May 26. — Luncheon at 2 p.m. at Senator F.'s. Sat between a Whig and a Democratic senator, who alternately poured abolitionism and the divine origin of slavery into the ear they commanded. I am getting perfectly stunned with harangues upon political questions I don't understand, and confused with the nomenclature appropriate to each. Besides Whigs and Democrats, there are Hard Shells and Soft Shells, and Free-Soilers, and Disunionists, and Feder- als, to say nothing of filibusters, pollywogs, and a host of other nicknames. One of my neighbors, discoursing on one of these varied issues, told me that he went the whole hog. He was the least favorable specimen of a senator I have seen, and I felt inclined to tell him that he looked the animal MY FIRST EXPERIENCES IN DIPLOMACY. 39 he went, but smiled appreciatively instead. There were, however, some interesting men present — among them Col- onel Fremont, a spare, wiry man with a keen gray