University of Virginia Library

80. LETTER LXXX.

Corfu.—Called on one of the officers of the tenth
this morning, and found lying on his table two books
upon Corfu. They were from the circulating library
of the town, much thumbed, and contained the most
unqualified strictures on the English administration in
the islands. In one of them, by a Count or Colonel
Boig de St. Vincent, a Frenchman, the Corfiotes
were taunted with their slavish submission, and called
upon to shake off the yoke of British dominion in the
most inflammatory language. Such books in Italy or
France would be burnt by the hangman, and prohibited
on penalty of death. Here, with a haughty consciousness
of superiority, which must be galling
enough to an Ionian who is capable of feeling, they
circulate uncensured in two languages, and the officers
of the abused government read them for their amusement,
and return them coolly to go their rounds
among the people. They have twenty-five hundred
troops upon the island, and they trouble themselves
little about what is thought of them. They confess
that their government is excessively unpopular, the
officers are excluded from the native society, and the
soldiers are scowled upon in the streets.

The body of St. Spiridion was carried through the
streets of Corfu to-day, sitting bolt upright in a sedan-chair,
and accompanied by the whole population. He
is the great saint of the Greek church, and such is his
influence, that the English government thought proper,
under Sir Frederick Adam's administration, to
compel the officers to walk in the procession. The
saint was dried at his death, and makes a neat, black
mummy, sans eyes and nose, but otherwise quite perfect.
He was carried to-day by four men in a very
splendid sedan, shaking from side to side with the motion,
preceded by one of the bands of music from the
English regiments. Sick children were thrown under
the feet of the bearers, half dead people brought to
the doors as he passed, and every species of disgusting
mummery practised. The show lasted about four
hours, and was, on the whole, attended with more
marks of superstition than anything I found in Italy.
I was told that the better educated Christians of the
Greek church, disbelieve the saint's miracles. The
whole body of the Corfiote ecclesiastics were in the
procession, however.

I passed the first watch in the hammock-nettings tonight,
enjoying inexpressibly the phenomena of this
brilliant climate. The stars seem burning like lamps
in the absolute clearness of the atmosphere. Meteors
shoot constantly with a slow liquid course, over the
sky. The air comes off from the land laden with the
breath of the wild thyme, and the water around the
ship is another deep blue heaven, motionless with its
studded constellations. The frigate seems suspended
between them.

We have little idea, while conning an irksome
school-task, how strongly the “unwilling lore” is
rooting itself in the imagination, The frigate lies
perhaps a half mile from the most interesting scenes
of the Odyssey. I have been recalling from the long
neglected stores of memory, the beautiful descriptions
of the court of King Alcinous, and of the meeting of
his matchless daughter with Ulysses. The whole
web of the poet's fable has gradually unwound, and
the lamps ashore, and the outline of the hills, in the
deceiving dimness of night, have entered into the delusion
with the facility of a dream. Every scene in
Homer may be traced to this day, the blind old poet's
topography was so admirable. It was over the point
of land sloping down to the right, that the Princess
Nausicaa, went with her handmaids to wash her bridal
robes in the running streams, The description still
guides the traveller to the spot where the damsels of
the royal maid spread the linen on the grass, and commenced
the sports that waked Ulysses from his slumbers
in the bed of leaves.

Ashore with one of the officers this morning, amusing
ourselves with trying on dresses in a Greek tailor's
shop. It quite puts one out of conceit with these
miserable European fashions. The easy and flowing
juktanilla, the unembarrassed leggins, the open sleeve
of the collarless jacket leaving the throat exposed,
and the handsome close-binding girdle from it, seems
to me the very dress dictated by reason and nature.
The richest suit in the shop, a superb red velvet,
wrought with gold, was priced at one hundred and
forty dollars. The more sober colors were much
cheaper. A dress lasts several years.

We made our farewell visits to the officers of the
English regiments, who had overwhelmed us with hospitality
during our stay, and went on board to get under
way with the noon breeze. We were accompanied
to the ship, not as the hero of Homer, when he
left the same port, by three damsels of the royal train,
bearing, “one a tunic, another a rich casket, and a
third bread and wine” for his voyage, but by Mrs.
Thompson and Mrs. Wilson, soldiers' wives, and
washerwomen, with baskets of hurriedly dried linen,
pinned, every bundle, with a neat bill in shillings and
half-pence

Ulysses slept all the way from Corcyra to Ithaca.
He lost a great deal of fine scenery. The passage
between Corfu and Albania is beautiful. We ran
past the southern cape of the island with a free wind,
and are now off the Paxian Isles, where, according to
Plutarch, Emilanus, the rhetorician, voyaging by
night, “heard a voice louder than human, announcing
the death of Pan.” A “schoolboy midshipman” is
breaking the same silence with “on deck, all hands!
on deck, all of you!”

Off the mouth of the Alpheus. If he still chases
Arethusa under the sea, and she makes straight for
Sicily, her bed is beneath our keel. The moon is
pouring her broad light over the ocean, the shadows
of the rigging on the deck lie in clear and definite
lines, the sailors of the watch sit around upon the
guns in silence, and the ship, with her clouds of
snowy sail spread aloft, is stealing through the water
with the noiseless motion of a swan. Even the gallant
man-of-war seems steeped in the spirit of the
scene. The hour wants but an “Ionian Myrrha” to
fill the last void of the heart.

Cape Leucas on the lee—the scene of Sappho's leap.
We have coursed down the long shore of ancient Leucadia,
and the precipice to which lovers came from all
parts of Greece for an oblivious plunge is shining in
the sun, scarce a mile from the ship. The beautiful
Grecian here sung her last song, and broke her lyre
and died. The leap was not always so tragical, there
are two lovers, at least, on record (Maces of Buthrotum,
and Cephalos son of Deioneos), who survived the
fall, and were cured effectually by salt water. It was
a common resource in the days of Sappho, and Strabo
says that they were accustomed to check their descent
by tying birds and feathers to their arms. Females,
he says, were generally killed by the rapidity
of the fall, their frames being too slight to bear the
shock; but the men seldom failed to come safe to
shore. The sex has not lost its advantages since the
days of Phaon.

We have caught a glimpse of Ithaca through the
isles, the land

and which Ulysses loved, non quia larga, sed quia sua
—the most natural of reasons. We lose Childe Harold's
track here. He turned to the left into the gulf
of Lepanto. We shall find him again at Athens.
Missolonghi, where he died, lies about twenty or thirty
miles on our lee, and it is one, of several places in the
gulf, that I regret to pass so near, unvisited.

Entering the bay of Navarino. A picturesque and
precipitous rock, filled with caves, nearly shuts the
mouth of this ample harbor. We ran so close to it,
that it might have been touched from the deck with a
tandem whip. On a wild crag to the left, a small,
white marble monument, with the earth still fresh
about it, marks the grave of some victim of the late
naval battle. The town and fortress, miserable heaps
of dirty stone, lie in the curve of the southern shore.
A French brig-of-war is at anchor in the port, and
broad, barren hills, stretching far away on every side,
complete the scene before us. We run up the harbor,
and tack to stand out again, without going ashore.
Not a soul is to be seen, and the bay seems the very
sanctuary of silence. It is difficult to conceive, that
but a year or two ago, the combined fleets of Europe,
were thundering among these silent hills, and hundreds
of human beings lying in their blood, whose
bones are now whitening in the sea beneath. Our pilot
was in the fight, on board an English frigate. He
has pointed out to us the position of the different
fleets, and among other particulars, he tells me, that
when the Turkish ships were boarded, Greek sailors
were found chained to the guns, who had been compelled,
at the muzzle of the pistol, to fight against the
cause of their country. Many of them must thus
have perished in the vessels that were sunk.

Navarino was the scene of a great deal of fighting,
during the late Greek revolution. It was invested,
while in possession of the Turks, by two thousand
Pelopennesians and a band of Ionians, and the
garrison were reduced to such a state of starvation, as
to eat their slippers. They surrendared at last, under
promise that their lives should be spared; but the
news of the massacre of the Greek patriarchs and
clergy, at Adrianople, was received at the moment,
and the exasperated troops put their prisoners to death,
without mercy.

The peaceful aspect of the place is better suited to
its poetical associations. Navarino was the ancient
Pylos, and it is here that Homer brings Telemachus
in search of his father. He finds old Nestor and his
sons sacrificing on the seashore to Neptune, with nine
altars, and at each five hundred men. I should think
the modern town contained scarce a twentieth of this
number.

Rounding the little fortified town of Modon, under
full sail. It seems to be built on the level of the water,
and nothing but its high wall and its towers are
seen from the sea. This, too, has been a much contested
place, and remained in possession of the Turks
till after the formation of the provisional government
under Mavrocordato. It forms the southwestern point
of the Morea, and is a town of great antiquity. King
Philip gained his first battle over the Athenians here,
some thousands of years ago; and the brave old Miualis
beat the Egyptian fleet in the same bay, without
doubt in a manner quite as deserving of as long a remembrance.
It is like a city of the dead—we can not
even see a sentinel on the wall.

Passed an hour in the mizen-chains with “the Corsair”
in my hand, and “Coran's Bay” opening on the
lee. With what exquisite pleasure one reads, when
he can look off from the page, and study the scene of
the poet's fiction:—

It is a small, deep bay, with a fortified town, on the
western shore, crowned on the very edge of the sea,
with a single, tall tower. A small aperture near the
top, helps to realize the Corsair's imprisonment, and
his beautiful interview with Gulnare:—

The Pirate's Isle is said to have been Poros, and
the original of the Corsair himself, a certain Hugh
Crevelier, who filled the ægean with terror, not many
years ago.

Made the Cape St. Angelo, the southern point of
the Peloponnesus, and soon after the island of Cythera,
near which Venus rose from the foam of the sea.
We are now running northerly, along the coast of ancient
Sparta. It is a mountainous country, bare and
rocky, and looks as rude and hardy as the character of
its ancient sons. I have been passing the glass in vain
along the coast, to find a tree. A small hermitage
stands on the desolate extremity of the Cape, and a
Greek monk, the pilot tells me, has lived there many
years, who comes from his cell, and stands on the
rock with his arms outspread to bless the passing ship.
I looked for him in vain.

A French man-of-war bore down upon us a few
minutes ago, and saluted the commodore. He ran so
close, that we could see the features of his officers on
the poop. It is a noble sight at sea, a fine ship passing,
with all her canvass spread, with the added rapidity
of your own course and hers. The peal of the
guns in the midst of the solitary ocean, had a singular
effect. The echo came back from the naked shores
of Sparta, with a warlike sound, that might have stirred
old Leonidas in his grave. The smoke rolled
away on the wind, and the noble ship hoisted her royals
once more, and went on her way. We are making
for Napoli di Romania, with a summer breeze,
and hope to drop anchor beneath its fortress, at sunset.