collision, I arose and formally protested against the attempt to
disperse the assembly by force, and against any implied consent of
the consular body to the programme he had announced. The Italian, the
Russian, and one or two of the other consuls followed, supporting my
protest, and the pasha, disconcerted by the unexpected demonstration
against him, sat down again, and we renewed the discussion, when
Dickson said that what he had said was implied in the position, and
that as the assembly had done nothing to deserve persecution, it could
not be supposed that they would be subjected to it, and he regarded
the assurance of immunity as uncalled for. And so the conference broke
up, leaving me in the position of the defender of Cretan liberties,
but the troops were not sent out, and the report spread through the
island that the pasha and the consuls were at loggerheads.
The real reason for the insistence on the formal promise being made to
the consuls was that a list of the agitators indicated for arrest had
been found by the daughter of the Greek secretary of the pasha, in
which, amongst the names of the persons to be arrested, was her lover,
to whom she gave the list. It was possible even then that the Cretans
would have submitted but for the influence of two Greek agents in the
camp of the assembly. These were one Dr. Ioannides and a priest called
Parthenios Kelaïdes, a patriotic Cretan, but long resident in Greece.
These urged the assembly to extreme measures, and promised support
from Greece. When, later, hostilities broke out, Parthenios went into
the ranks and fought bravely, but Dr. Ioannides disappeared from the
scene. The next device of Ismael was to call the Mussulmans of the
interior into the fortresses, and when we protested against this as
dangerous and utterly uncalled for, the pasha sent a counter order;
but the bearers of it met the unfortunate Mussulmans by the way,
having abandoned everything, thrown their silkworms to the fowls, and
left their crops ungathered, and being ready to vent their hostility
on the innocent Christian population, whom they made responsible for
the disaster. The call to come in was then renewed, and the entire
Mussulman population gathered in the three fortresses of Canea,
Candia, and Retimo. A panic on the part of the Christians followed,
and all the vessels sailing for the Greek islands were crowded with
fugitives. The pasha called for troops from Constantinople, though no
violence had been even threatened, and several battalions of Turkish
regulars with eight thousand Egyptians arrived and disembarked. With
one of the battalions was a dervish fanatic, carrying a green banner,
who spread his praying carpet in every public place in Canea,
preaching extermination of the infidels. I took a witness and went to
the general in chief, Osman Pasha, and protested against this outrage,
and the dervish was at once shipped off to Constantinople.
The military chiefs were reasonable, and the Christian population
totally unprepared and averse to hostilities, but the plan at
Constantinople was, as we soon found, to provoke an insurrection in
order to justify a transfer of the island to Egypt. Later we had from
Constantinople all the details, but for the moment we could only
conjecture the Egyptian collusion in the plan by the presence of
Schahin Pasha, the general-in-chief of the Egyptian army, and minister
of war of the viceroy, and the very important part taken by him in the
ensuing negotiations. He came in great state and pomp, and immediately
assumed the lead in the negotiations with the islanders, which were
carried on in secret and through Derché. Ismael Pasha, who was
probably not in the Egyptian secret, had another plan of his own,
equally secret, and the two conflicted. Ismael, as we later learned,
intended to raise and subdue an insurrection, which he hoped to
do easily, and then, on the strength of his Greek blood and the
protection he had at Stamboul, to be named the Prince of Crete. The
Egyptian plan was, on the contrary, conciliatory, and depended mainly
on direct bribery and the promise of concessions to the Cretans. It
had been, as I learned from Constantinople, concocted between the
Turkish government, the Marquis de Moustier, the French ambassador,