The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II | Page 2

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