By this time, the Powers had learned how utterly mendacious all the
Turkish official reports were, and that the insurrection was further
than ever from being suppressed; and the Porte, dreading the effect
of the knowledge of the utter failure of the Imperial Commission
from which it had promised itself such immense results, developed
a new plan, in which the _douceurs_ of a _plébiscite_ were to be
administered by its armies, and a new assembly constituted, who
were to sit at Constantinople, and represent both the Mussulman and
Christian populations as an advisory council on the new measures
of reform which were to pacify the _conquered_ islanders. The most
curious of all the strange characteristics of this affair were the
persistence of the Turkish Government in misinforming Europe of the
position of the struggle, and the willingness of official Europe to be
misinformed. Now, at a moment when every corps of the Turkish army had
been defeated, the Porte, with a ludicrous gravity which would have
been comical in the extreme if one could have forgotten the misery
of starvation, of barbarism, death by cold and fire and sword, with
atrocities without name which were momentarily being perpetrated by its
authority on the helpless victims of its paternal tenderness, sent to
Crete its ablest diplomatic agent, Server Effendi, with the following
proclamation, nominally addressed to the Commissioner, but really to
the Powers, Server Effendi being actually the plenipotentiary, Mustapha
being in disgrace, but openly honored by an honor as delusive as the
victories by which he had secured it:
"It is needless to tell thee that we are deeply grieved at the
insurrection which has been fomented in Crete by ill-intentioned
people, at the evils which have resulted from it to the inhabitants,
and at the blood which a cruel necessity has forced to flow. If,
notwithstanding all their efforts, our Government have not been able
to prevent these misfortunes, if the paternal advice which they gave
to the misguided inhabitants, in order to bring them back to the line
of duty, have remained fruitless, the responsibility must wholly fall,
before God and the tribunal of public opinion, upon the instigators of
these calamities.
"The wise behavior, however, of the islanders who, understanding the
real state of things, remained faithful to us, and, on the other hand,
the bravery of which our Imperial army has given most signal proofs in
fighting against the insurgents, as well as the wise measures which
thou hastenedest to take, have powerfully contributed to restore peace
and security in all parts of the island, with the exception of such
as are infested by the presence of foreign brigands. Those islanders
who, giving way to culpable insinuations and deluded by false promises,
have some time followed these seditious agents, have hastened to profit
by the general amnesty granted beforehand, and have returned to their
duties. A committee has therefore been formed in our capital for the
purpose of examining and framing a future mode of administration of
the island for the new Governor, who is to be sent there as soon as
matters shall have reassumed their normal condition. Thus the committee
will have to look to the best means of repairing the ills sustained
by the country, to perfect the administration in conformity with the
legitimate and indispensable wants of the people, and to effect thus
that prosperity which results from the development of agriculture and
commerce; in a word, they will have to procure a general bettering of
the condition of the country. But for these measures relating to the
government of the island to succeed, and for the welfare and prosperity
to be realized, it has been deemed necessary to consult likewise some
of the principal people of the island, who enjoy the confidence of
the inhabitants. On the suggestion, therefore, of our Government, we
have approved of and instruct thee to proceed to the election, by
the inhabitants, of one or two notables, Mohammedans or not, taken
in each district, and to send here as soon as possible those who may
have been selected. Be careful to bring to the knowledge of the public
the present Imperial firman, and to be at the same time with the
inhabitants of the island the interpreter of the good intentions with
which we are animated towards them."
Server Effendi was really a most intelligent and (for a Turk) humane
administrator, and, had he not been crippled by the necessity of
keeping up the absurd pretence of an actual conquest achieved, might
have found some sortie from the difficulty, which would have arrested
the train of disasters which afterwards brought the Porte so near
to its final quietus. He made himself no delusions, and, I believe,
propagated none at Constantinople. In point of fact, no one of the
responsible governments there was now deceived; but the Sultan had
passed into a monomaniacal condition of fury on the subject of the
conquest of Crete, and no Grand Vizier could have remained in office
who proposed an abandonment of the war without conquest. The powers,
except England, counselled the Porte to yield a principality, and
it is probable that, if England had acceded, the Cretans would, at
that time, have accepted this solution of the question in spite of
the Hellenic influence. The policy of England has always seemed to me
mistaken to Turkey and faithless to the Cretans, for, in effect, all
the powers signatory of the protocol of February 20, 1830, were morally
bound to secure to the Cretans a similar condition to that of Samos.
But it must at the same time, be admitted that this policy was open,
consistent, and, so far as Turkey was concerned, loyal, while that of
France was double, disloyal to all her allies, wavering, and entirely
egotistic; and that of Russia was consistent only in its unfaltering
hostility to Turkey, and its willingness to favor any affair that
promised to weaken her empire. The tactics of Greece were of a nature
to make the chances of Crete more precarious than they need have been.
The policy of Crete for Greece, rather than Crete for her own good,
made confusion and jealousy in the conduct of the war much greater
than they need have been. What the Cretans wanted was a good leader,
arms, and bread. Greece sent them rival chiefs without subordination, a
rabble of volunteers, who quarrelled with the islanders, and weakened
the cause by deserting it as soon as they felt the strain of danger
and hardship; and if, after the first campaign, they were more wise in
enrolling men to go to Crete, they still allowed the jealousies and
hostilities of the leaders to go unchecked by any of those measures
which were in their power. But the radical fault of the Hellenes was
that they compromised the question by the introduction of the question
of annexation, and forced it into the field of international interests,
disguising the real causes and justification of the movement, and
making it impossible for England consistently with her declared policy
to entertain the complaints of the Cretans without also admitting
to consideration the pretensions of the Hellenes. If the latter had
not intruded their views on the _tapis_, the former might have been
heard; but, from the moment in which annexation to Greece became the
alternative of the reconquest of Crete, the English Government could
clearly not interfere against the Porte without upsetting its own
work, and if, in some minor respects, especially the question of the
principality, she had been more kind to Crete, no one could have found
fault with a policy which was, in its general tendency, obligatory on
her. Her great mistake was in not recognizing more clearly the utterly
irresponsible nature of the Turkish administration, and compelling the
Porte to redress the wrongs which even Dickson, philottoman as he was
to the last degree, could not ignore the reality of, before they had
passed into the arbitration of arms. I believe that, if Lord Lyons had
had the direction of affairs from the beginning, he would have composed
the difficulty without bloodshed, for he saw clearly and understood the
real merits of the question.
Server Effendi succeeded in naming deputies from nearly all the
districts of the island, and in compelling most of them to go to
Constantinople. One escaped, and came to my house to ask asylum. Of
course I was compelled to give it, and he remained for six weeks my
guest, when he escaped, disguised as a Russian sailor, on board a
Russian corvette, and went to Greece. The others were sent under guard
to the capital, where they also demanded protection from the Russian
Legation, declaring that they came against their own will, and that of
the Cretan people; and so in effect ended a farce, put on the stage
with all the appliances of the Turkish Government, and played with
their best actors.
The arrival of a new swift steamer from England, for the purpose of
running the blockade, gave a new _élan_ to the insurrection, and the
_Arkadi_ (formerly the _Dream_ of American blockade celebrity), was
from this time until her destruction in August of 1867 an element
of the first importance in the war. The former blockade-runner, the
_Panhellenion_, was a slow steamer, never making above nine miles per
hour, and her success in provisioning without a mishap the insurrection
for nearly a year, with a squadron of thirty ships to watch her, is
one of the most surprising instances of capacity on one side, or
incapacity on the other, in the history of marine warfare. The _Arkadi_
not only brought arms and supplies, but she carried away at almost
every trip numbers of non-combatants, and formed a safe and reliable
means of communication between Greece and Crete, by which messengers,
supplies of all kinds, and every requisite for the war were transported
with tolerable certainty. The warm weather enabled the insurgents to
re-enter the field in greater numbers, and it finally became evident
that the war was to be one which would only be finished by the
exhaustion of the resources either of Greece or Turkey.
A change in administration at Athens had brought a more capable and
thoroughly national council into power, under the presidency of
Mr. Comoundouros, the ablest and clearest-headed statesman of the
Hellenic kingdom, who had discouraged an appeal to arms until the war
became a _fait accompli_, when he advocated a policy of aid to Crete
_coûte qu'il coûte_, and, on assuming power, made the insurrection
his chief care. The whole resources of Greece were devoted to it,
and the funds of the insurgent committee at Athens were fed directly
from the national treasury. There was, no doubt, scarcely any
disguise about the complicity; but public feeling in Greece was so
thoroughly enlisted that no government could have existed which did
not unmistakably favor the insurrection. Unfortunately for the success
of the Greek plans, the government did not impose on the Cretans an
effective organization and a supreme commander. It still based its
chief hope on European intervention, and counted on a limitation
of the struggle by their influence, instead of preparing to act in
the most complete independence. There was some excuse for this in a
statesman-for-the-moment, in the fact that intervention had already
begun by the overtures of Russia, acceded to at this date by France,
whose Emperor was at the juncture ready to come to an understanding
with the Czar on the basis of mutual concession; but Comoundouros
should have seen that the readiness of Greece to endure and prolong a
war with Turkey would be the best argument for the intervention the
former desired. Greek politics have always had the fault of being
based on sentimentality, and calculating too much on the sympathy of
Christendom and classical scholars, neither of which has ever played
a noteworthy part in modern Hellenic history, for even the genuine
philhellenism of 1821 would have accomplished nothing had it not been
that Turkey stood in the way of Russian combinations. The Greeks
seem never to comprehend that governments are purely political, and
never influenced by sentiment or religious affinities. They count
that Hellenism and Christianity must always be weighed in the Eastern
question, and in this case calculated on forcing the hand of the
Christian powers by these appliances; while if they had proved that
they were capable of conducting the war with energy and good system,
preparing themselves meanwhile for a war with Turkey, Europe must
have interfered, as a war between Greece and Turkey involved too
momentous questions to be risked for so small an affair as Crete, and
Christianity might have got the casting vote in deciding which side
interference should favor. If Russia had been sincere in her friendship
for Greece, she might have helped the question to a speedy ending by
giving the word to the Danubian provinces to rise; but she has never
desired a strong Hellenic kingdom, and this Comoundouros understood
clearly, and that any intervention voluntarily made by Russia would be
for her own interest purely, and that, holding as he did the initiative
in a movement of all the Christian races, he could, by the employment
of it, compel Russia to favor his plans or lose her prestige with them,
and to a great extent her moral influence. It was with this view that
he prepared movements in Epirus and Thessaly, while Montenegro became
agitated, and the seeds of the Cretan trouble seemed wafted over the
whole Turkish Empire.
Pending the question of intervention, the transport of families
waited the arrival of the American ship, of which no advices came. I
telegraphed to Admiral Goldsborough for news of her, and received reply
that he knew nothing of any orders for Crete. Subsequent information
showed that our Secretary of Legation at Constantinople, a Levantine,
and, like his class in general, devoted to the Turkish Government,
and a most rancorous and persistent assailant of both Mr. Morris and
myself in the journals of Europe and America (and whom the disgraceful
condition of our diplomatic service permitted to assail the acts of his
superior and the declared policy of his own government), acting in the
interests of the Turkish Government, had put himself in communication
with the naval authorities by the intermediation of officers attached
to the squadron in European waters, and instigated the revocation of
the decision of the Government, and, when finally the _Canandaigua_
arrived in the middle of March, she had orders to do nothing in any
way disagreeable to the Turkish authorities; and I soon found that
the state of feeling in the navy was anything but favorable to the
employment of our ships for humane purposes, I myself, as instigator
of their discomfort, being treated by the officers with a degree of
incivility which showed as little good-breeding as _esprit de patrie_,
and was manifested so openly as to encourage the local authorities in
their systematic persecution of me. With the exception of two or three
of the younger officers, the whole wardroom broadly expressed their
sympathies with the Turkish Government, so that, after having persuaded
Captain Strong, who sympathized somewhat with the awkwardness of my
position, to run down to Retimo with me to look into the condition of
the Christian families shut up in that town, I saw the _Canandaigua_
sail, with a heartfelt desire not to see one of my country's men-of-war
again while I was on the station. The Commissioner showed his
appreciation of our official servility by ostentatiously ignoring the
visit of Captain Strong, passing the _Canandaigua_ by without notice,
while he visited all the other foreign men-of-war in the harbor.