University of Virginia Library

97. LETTER XCVII

I had slept on shore, and it was rather late before I
remembered that it was Friday (the moslem Sunday),
and that Sultan Mahmoud was to go in state to
mosque at twelve. I hurried down the precipitous
street of Pera, and, as usual, escaping barely with my
life from the Christian-hating dogs of Tophana, embarked
in a caique, and made all speed up the Bosphorus.
There is no word in Turkish for faster, but
I was urging on my caikjees by a wave of the hand
and the sight of a bishlik (about the value of a quarter
of a dollar), when suddenly a broadside was fired from
the three-decker, Mahmoudier, the largest ship in the
world, and to the rigging of every man-of-war in the
fleet through which I was passing, mounted, simultaneously,
hundreds of blood-red flags, filling the air
about us like a shower of tulips and roses. Imagine
twenty ships-of-war, with yards manned, and scarce a
line in their rigging to be seen for the flaunting of
colors! The jar of the guns, thundering in every direction
close over us, almost lifted our light boat out
of the water, and the smoke rendered our pilotage between
the ships and among their extending cables
rather doubtful. The white cloud lifted after a few
minutes, and, with the last gun, down went the flags
all together, announcing that the “Brother of the
Sun” had left his palace.

He had but crossed to the mosque of the small village
on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, and was
already at his prayers when I arrived. His body-guard
was drawn up before the door, in their villanous European
dress, and, as their arms were stacked, I presumed
it would be some time before the sultan reappeared,
and improved the interval in examining the
handja-bashes, or state-caiques, lying at the landing.
I have arrived at my present notions of equipage by
three degrees. The pope's carriages at Rome, rather
astonished me. The emperor of Austria's sleighs diminished
the pope in my admiration, and the sultan's
caiques, in their turn, “pale the fires” of the emperor
of Austria. The handja-bash is built something like
the ancient galley, very high at the prow and stern,
carries some fifty oars, and has a roof over her poop,

supported by four columns, and loaded with the most
sumptuous ornaments, the whole gilt brilliantly. The
prow is curved over, and wreathed into every possible
device that would not affect the necessary lines of the
model; her crew are dressed in the beautiful costume
of the country, rich and flowing, and with the costly
and bright-colored carpets hanging over her side, and
the flashing of the sun on her ornaments of gold, she
is really the most splendid object of state equipage
(if I may be allowed the misnomer) in the world.

I was still examining the principal barge, when the
troops stood to their arms, and preparation was made
for the passing out of the sultan. Thirty or forty of
his highest military officers formed themselves into
two lines from the door of the mosque to the landing,
and behind them were drawn up single files of soldiers.
I took advantage of the respect paid to the rank of
Commodore Patterson, and obtained an excellent position,
with him, at the side of the caique. First issued
from the door two Georgian slaves, bearing censers,
from which they waved the smoke on either side,
and the sultan immediately followed, supported by the
capitan-pacha, the seraskier, and Haleil Pacha (who
is to marry the Sultana Esmeh). He walked slowly
down to the landing, smiling and talking gayly with
the seraskier, and, bowing to the commodore in passing,
stepped into his barge, seated himself on a raised
sofa, while his attendants coiled their legs on the carpet
below, and turned his prow across the Bosphorus.

I have, perhaps, never set my eyes on a handsomer
man than Sultan Mahmoud. His figure is tall,
straight, and manly, his air unembarrassed and dignified,
and his step indicative of the well-known firmness
of his character. A superb beard of jetty blackness,
with a curling mustache, conceals all the lower part of
his face; the decided and bold lines of his mouth just
marking themselves when he speaks. It is said he
both paints and dies his beard, but a manlier brown
upon a cheek, or a richer gloss upon a beard, I never
saw. His eye is described by writers as having a
doomed darkness of expression, and it is certainly one
that would well become a chief of bandits — large,
steady, and overhung with an eyebrow like a thunder-cloud.
He looks the monarch. The child of a seraglio
(where mothers are chosen for beauty alone)
could scarce escape being handsome. The blood of
Circassian upon Circassian is in his veins, and the
wonder is, not that he is the handsomest man in his
empire, but that he is not the greatest slave. Our
“mother's humor,” they say, predominates in our
mixtures. Sultan Mahmoud, however, was marked
by nature for a throne.

I accompanied Mr. Goodell and Mr. Dwight, American
missionaries at Constantinople, to visit a Lancasterian
school established with their assistance in the
Turkish barracks. The building stands on the ascent
of one of the lovely valleys that open into the Bosphorus,
some three miles from the city, on the European
side. We were received by the colonel of the
regiment, a young man of fine appearance, with the
diamond crescent and star glittering on the breast of
his military frock, and after the inevitable compliment
of pipes and coffee, the drum was beat and the soldiers
called to school.

The sultan has an army of boys. Nine tenths of
those I have seen are under twenty. They marched
in, in single file, and facing about, held up their hands
at the word of command, while a subaltern looked
that each had performed the morning ablution. They
were healthy-looking lads, mostly from the interior
provinces, whence they are driven down like cattle to
fill the ranks of their sovereign. Duller-looking subjects
for an idea it has not been my fortune to see.

The Turkish alphabet hung over the teacher's desk
(the colonel is the schoolmaster, and takes the greatest
interest in his occupation), and the front seats are
faced with a long box covered with sand, in which the
beginners write with their fingers. It is fitted with a
slide that erases the clumsy imitation when completed,
and seemed to me an ingenious economy of ink and
paper. (I would suggest to the minds of the benevolent,
a school on the same principle for beginners in
poetry. It would save the critics much murder, and
tend to the suppression of suicide.) The classes having
filed into their seats, the school opened with a
prayer by the colonel. The higher benches then
commenced writing, on slates and paper, sentences
dictated from the desk, and I was somewhat surprised
at the neatness and beauty of the characters.

We passed afterward into another room where arithmetic
and geography were taught, and then mounted
to an apartment on the second story occupied by students
in military drawing. The proficiency of all
was most creditable, considering the brief period during
which the schools have been in operation — something
less than a year. Prejudiced as the Turks are against
European innovation, this advanced step toward improvement
tells well. Our estimable and useful missionaries
appear, from the respect everywhere shown
them, to be in high esteem, and with the sultan's energetic
disposition for reform, they hope everything in
the way of an enlightened change in the moral condition
of the people.

Went to the chapel of the dancing dervishes. It is
a beautiful marble building, with a court-yard ornamented
with a small cemetery shaded with cypresses,
and a fountain enclosed in a handsome edifice, and
defended by gilt gratings from the street of the suburb
of Pera, in which it stands. They dance here twice
a week. We arrived before the hour, and were detained
at the door by a soldier on guard, who would
not permit us to enter without taking off our boots — a
matter, about which, between straps and their very
muddy condition, we had some debate. The dervishes
began to arrive before the question was settled, and
one of them, a fine-looking old man, inviting us to
enter, Mr. H. explained the difficulty. “Go in,” said
he, “go in!” and turning to the more scrupulous
mussulman with the musket, as he pushed us within
the door, “stupid fellow!” said he, “if you had been
less obstinate, they would have given you a bakshish”
(Turkish for a fee). He should have said less religious
— for the poor fellow looked horror-struck as our
dirty boots profaned the clean white Persian matting
of the sacred floor. One would think, “the nearer
the church the farther from God,” were as true here
as it is said to be in some more civilized countries.

It was a pretty, octagonal interior, with a gallery,
the mihrab or niche indicating the direction of the
prophet's tomb, standing obliquely from the front
of the building. Hundreds of small lamps hung in
the area, just out of the reach of the dervishes' tall
caps, and all around between the gallery; a part of
the floor was raised, matted, and divided from the
body of the church by a balustrade. It would have
made an exceedingly pretty ball-room.

None but the dervishes entered within the paling,
and they soon began to enter, each advancing first
toward the mihrab, and going through fifteen or twenty
minutes' prostrations and prayers. Their dress is
very humble. A high, white felt-cap, without a rim,
like a sugar-loaf enlarged a little at the smaller end,
protects the head, and a long dress of dirt-colored
cloth, reaching quite to the heels and bound at the
waist with a girdle, completes the costume. They
look like men who have made up their minds to seem
religious, and though said to be a set of very good fellows,
they have a Mawworm expression of face generally,
which was very repulsive. I must except the
chief of the sect, however, who entered when all the
rest had seated themselves on the floor, and after a

brief genuflection or two, took possession of a rich
Angora carpet placed for him near the mihrab. He
was a small old man, distinguished in his dress only
by the addition of a green band to his cap (the sign
of his pilgrimage to Mecca) and the entire absence of
the sanctimonious look. Still he was serious, and
there was no mark in his clear, intelligent eye and
amiable features, of any hesitancy or want of sincerity
in his devotion. He is said to be a learned man, and
he is certainly a very prepossessing one, though he
would be taken up as a beggar in any city in the United
States. It is a thing one learns in “dangling
about the world,” by the way, to form opinions of
men quite independently of their dress.

After sitting a while in quaker meditation, the
brotherhood rose one by one (there were ten of them
I think), and marched round the room with their toes
turned in, to the music of a drum and a Persian flute,
played invisibly in some part of the gallery. As they
passed the carpet of the cross-legged chief, they twisted
dexterously and made three salaams, and then
raising their arms, which they held out straight during
the whole dance, they commenced twirling on one
foot, using the other after the manner of a paddle to
keep up the motion. I forgot to mention that they
laid aside their outer dresses before commencing the
dance. They remained in dirty white tunics reaching
to the floor, and very full at the bottom, so that with
the regular motion of their whirl, the wind blew them
out into a circle, like what the girls in our country
call “making cheeses.” They twisted with surprising
exactness and rapidity, keeping clear of each other,
and maintaining their places with the regularity of
machines. I have seen a great deal of waltzing, but I
think the dancing dervishes for precision and spirit,
might give a lesson even to the Germans.

We left them twisting. They had been going for
half an hour, and it began to look very like perpetual
motion. Unless their brains are addled, their devotion,
during this dizzy performance at least, must be
quite suspended. A man who could think of his
Maker, while revolving so fast that his nose is indistinct,
must have some power of abstraction.

The frigate was visited to-day by the sultan's cabinet.
The seraskier pacha came alongside first in his
state caique, and embraced the commodore as he
stepped upon the deck, with great cordiality. He is a
short, fat old man, with a snow-white beard, and so
bow-legged as to be quite deformed. He wore the
red Fez cap of the army, with a long blue frock-coat,
the collar so tight as nearly to choke him, and the
body not shaped to the figure, but made to fall around
him like a sack. The red, bloated skin of his neck
fell over, so as almost to cover the gold with which the
collar was embroidered. He was formerly capitan
pacha, or admiral-in-chief of the fleet, and though a
good-humored, merry-looking old man, has shown
himself, both in his former and present capacity, to be
wily, cold, and a butcher in cruelty. He possesses
unlimited influence over the sultan, and though nominally
subordinate to the grand vizier, is really the
second if not the first person in the empire. He was
originally a Georgian slave.

The seraskier was still talking with the commodore
in the gang-way, when the present capitan pacha
mounted the ladder, and the old man, who is understood
to be at feud with his successor, turned abruptly
away and walked aft. The capitan pacha is a tall,
slender man, of precisely that look and manner which
we call gentlemanly. His beard grows untrimmed in
the Turkish fashion, and is slightly touched with gray.
His eye is anxious, but resolute, and he looks like a
man of resource and ability. His history is as singular
as that of most other great men in Turkey. He
was a slave of Mohammed Ali, the rebellious pacha
of Egypt. Being intrusted by his master with a brig
and cargo for Leghorn, he sold vessel and lading,
lived like a gentleman in Italy for some years with the
proceeds, and as the best security against the retribution
of his old master, offered his services to the sultan,
with whom Ali was just commencing hostilities. Naval
talent was in request, and he soon arrived at his
present dignity. He is said to be the only officer in
the fleet who knows anything of his profession.

Haleil Pacha arrived last. The sultan's future son-in-law
is a man of perhaps thirty-five. He is light-complexioned,
stout, round-faced, and looks, like a
respectable grocer, “well to do in the world.” He
has commanded the artillery long enough to have acquired
a certain air of ease and command, and carries
the promise of good fortune in his confident features.
He is to be married almost immediately. He, too,
was a Georgian, sent as a present to the sultan.

The three dignitaries made the rounds of the ship
and then entered the cabin, where the pianoforte (a
novelty to the seraskier and Haleil Pacha, and to most
of the attendant officers) and the commodore's agreeable
society and champagne, promised to detain them
the remainder of the day. They were like children
with a holyday. I was engaged to dine on shore, and
left them on board.

In a country where there is no education and no
rank, except in the possession of present power, it is
not surprising that men should rise from the lowest
class to the highest offices, or that they should fill
those offices to the satisfaction of the sultan. Yet it
is curious to hear their histories. An English physician,
who is frequently called into the seraglio, and
whose practice among all the families in power gives
him the best means of information, has entertained
me not a little with these secrets. I shall make use
of them when I have more leisure, merely mentioning
here, in connexion with the above accounts, that the
present grand vizier was a boatman on the Bosphorus,
and the commander of the sultan's body-guard, a
shoemaker! The latter still employs all his leisure
in making slippers, which he presents to the sultan
and his friends, not at all ashamed of his former vocation.
So far, indeed, are any of these mushroom officers
from blushing at their origin, that it is common
to prefix the name of their profession to the title of
pacha, and they are addressed by it as a proper name.
This is one respect in which their European education
will refine them to their disadvantage.