CHAPTER IV. Short Tour to the East

SHORT TOUR TO THE EAST

Giessen—Linz—Rowboat to Vienna—Steam down Danube and overland to Black Sea—Constantinople—Smyrna—Quarantines at Syra and Trieste—Adelsberg—Diligence from Milan to Boulogne—Home

In the spring of 1840 a passion for travel seized me as if I had been a migratory bird. While attending the lectures at King’s College I could see the sails of the lighters moving in sunshine on the Thames, and it required all my efforts to disregard the associations of travel which they aroused. On fine mornings I could not keep still in the house in Spring Gardens where I lived, but wandered in St. James’s Park. On these occasions I noticed that the weathercock on the Horse Guards seemed to point nearly always to the south-west. The explanation proved to be that the fit seized me with violence when a south-west wind was blowing. It was arranged by my father that I should accompany Dr. Allen Miller (1817-1870), subsequently a great chemist and for many years Treasurer of the Royal Society, to Giessen, where the more promising young chemists of those days gathered to avail themselves of the teaching of Liebig, then the foremost of the chemical Professors in Germany. My father gave me a liberal letter of credit, for, having been a banker himself, he was unwilling that my balance should ever run low; besides, he was always cautious in making ample provision for unexpected contingencies. So to Giessen I went, but soon finding that my chemical knowledge, and indeed my knowledge of German, was by no means sufficiently advanced for me to profit from Liebig’s teaching, I determined to throw that plan over, to make a dash and go as far as my money allowed, consistent with returning to England early in October in time for my first term at Cambridge. I had saturated myself since the age of nine with Byron’s poetry, which gave me a longing to see the East; besides, a new route Eastwards had been opened, between Czernavoda and Kustendji, the former lying on that long reach of the Lower Danube where it most nearly approaches the Black Sea, and Kustendji situated on the Black Sea itself. A calculation of the cost showed that my finances would suffice for this and more, so away I went. A steamer ran twice or thrice a week from Linz to Vienna, and once (I think) in a fortnight from Vienna down the Danube, and the times fitted nicely. But on arrival at Linz it proved that the steamer bound for Vienna was disabled and would not run for some days. This serious contretemps threatened to ruin my whole scheme, which required that I should reach Vienna in time for a particular steamer.

I had made friends with an elderly British officer at the hotel, who was in much the same plight as myself, for it was as important to him as to me, though for other reasons, to reach Vienna without delay. He told me that he had found a boatman who would take us all the way, some seventy miles down stream, for a moderate sum, and that he was willing to go if I would join him. I accepted his proposal, he having assured me that the boat would be adequately manned, and that the journey would be both easy and interesting. His power of German conversation was even less than mine, and either he had not understood aright or he had been cheated, for when we had entered the boat in the dark by help of the faint and flickering light of a lantern, and had been pushed off into the current of the swiftly flowing Danube, I perceived that the boatmen consisted only of one old man and a boy. It was impossible to return, so we made the best of it. One of us two, and it was more frequently myself, for my companion wanted both youth and muscle, had to work an oar almost continuously in order to give steerage-way to the boat.

We toiled through the night and the following morning, hardly resting at all till we reached Mölk, where provisions and fruit were bought and another boatman engaged, and we went onwards after brief delay. We arrived as near to Vienna as the police regulations allowed, very late at night; but by unexpected good fortune the officials allowed us to land and to sleep hard by, so I was in good time for the steamer, and after a short stay was off in her. I had some agreeable fellow-passengers, and it was a momentous voyage to me.

The first stoppage was at Pesth, where I was quite unprepared for the grandeur of its quays and buildings. Thenceforward we entered comparative barbarism. There was a considerable delay at the famous rapids of the “Iron Gates,” long since removed by blasting the rocks that gave them their name, and where the river ran strongly. I witnessed boats of no large size being towed up stream by the longest teams of men and horses that I have ever seen. If my memory does not play tricks, I counted no less than ninety-six horses hauling a single boat. I drove as far as time allowed among the Carpathians towards Mehadia, a then secluded watering-place, in the company of two Hungarians, with one of whom—a Kaunitz—I had struck up a travelling friendship, and who told me much about Hungary.

The position of Belgrade was imposing. It was then in Turkish occupation, and the Turks still wore turbans. The town being in quarantine, we were not allowed to land. The flat shores of Wallachia were most uninteresting and looked fever-haunted. The only human life visible for miles together was that of an occasional coast-guardsman perched in a crow’s nest on the top of a pole, to prevent smugglers from crossing the Danube unseen. At one place we cut through a shoal of water snakes crossing the river, with their heads out of water and their bodies wriggling horizontally. It was a sight upon which a horrible nightmare might have been founded.

At length we arrived at our journey’s end, where light waggons awaited us, which were drawn across the open country. I walked the greater part of the distance, and so reached the Black Sea at Kustendji. The steamer started in threatening weather, and particularly rough seas ensued. We rolled so badly and so briskly that a square chest containing seamen’s things, which stood on the deck, was toppled over. In the morning, the historical Symplegades were in sight, and certainly the superstitious Greeks might well have accredited them, as they did, with the power of shutting like jaws and crushing vessels that attempted to pass between them, for the apparent width of the intervening space changes rapidly with changing perspective. Then we steamed through the glorious Bosphorus, whose sides were far less built upon than now, past Therapia to Constantinople, or Stamboul, as it was commonly called.

I revelled in the glory of the place and in the picturesque and turbaned groups. The hotel kept by Miseri was then a small establishment, more like a pension. He had been courier to a connection of mine, and I was taken in and made very comfortable. The numerous acquaintances I picked up there and the stories I heard of the current rascalities gave an insight into a phase of humanity which I did not esteem but was glad to know about.

Though I am now inclined to twaddle about what was then so new, so strange and exhilarating to me, it would not interest readers who are probably familiar with far more graphic accounts of this capital of the East than I have skill to write. The sherbet, iced with snow from the neighbouring Mount Olympus, shares, I suppose, with similar sherbet at Granada, iced with snow from the Sierra Nevada, the honour of parentage to our very modern ice-creams. In my youth the only good ice-cream maker in London was Gunter in Berkeley Square, and the very existence of such a luxury as ice-cream had then, as I know, been recently scoffed at by the educated daughters of a clergyman in South Wales. After about six days’ stay in Constantinople, I had to move onwards, taking a steamer to Smyrna. Olympus stood grandly above the shores of the Sea of Marmora; then came the Hellespont, then the Troad, then Smyrna.

My allowance of time was drawing to a close, for I had to make ample allowance for long detention in quarantines, which were in those times an especial nuisance. They were put on or taken off with apparent caprice, sometimes it was said for purely commercial reasons. So I was able to allow only two or three days for seeing the environs of Smyrna, and then started in a steamer to the island of Syra, where I was placed for ten days in quarantine. My rooms were like those of a khan, wholly unfurnished, the guardian supplying bedding and food at moderate cost. He followed me as a prisoner under his charge, with a long stick wherewith to ward me from touching or being touched by any body or thing that was not in the same quarantine as myself. The quarantine buildings enclosed a large square. My rooms opened at the back into a cheerful covered balcony which looked on the sea. My neighbouring occupant was a lady, a near relative to Arthur Cayley, the great mathematician, whom I even then had learnt to revere, and whose pupil I became during one of my happy long vacations at Cambridge.

The laws of quarantine were curiously minute. Metal, such as a coin, was not supposed to be so deeply infected but that a simple washing would purify it; paper must be pricked and fumigated; but clothing had to undergo as much quarantine as the wearer, and even more, as will be seen later on. It was ruled that if any part of a cloth or fabric of fibres was touched by a person in quarantine, the whole of it became equally tainted. So I put to my guardian the case of touching one end of a very long rope, but could get no reasonable answer, any more than a child can when he puts searching questions. Violation of quarantine is a very serious offence. A soldier would shoot a person without mercy, and with the approbation of his superiors, if that appeared to be the only way of preventing it.

The nine or ten days’ rest in quarantine at Syra was by no means ungrateful. I made myself occupation, and they passed pleasantly. The process of giving “pratique” was amusing. We were drawn up in a row, and the medical officer walked up and down sternly scrutinising us. Then he gave the order of “Put out your tongues,” which we all did simultaneously, and he passed along the line at two paces distance from it, looking at our tongues. Then he added, “Do exactly as I do,” whereupon he clapped himself sharply under the left armpit with his right hand, and under the right armpit with the left hand. Similarly on the left and right groins. This was to prove that none of the glandular swellings that give the name of “bubonic” plague were there, otherwise the pain of the performance would have been intolerable. Then, with a sudden change from a stern aspect, he put on a most friendly and courteous smile, and stepping forwards he shook each of us cordially by the hand, and we were freed. A couple of days had to pass before the next steamer started for Trieste, which I occupied in rambling about the island, living for one day almost wholly on figs—which was unwise, because too much of them affects the kidneys.

I started with the steamer, had a few, but memorable, hours at Athens, lay for two days in quarantine off Ancona, and was landed in the quarantine at Trieste. What Turkey was to Greece in respect of quarantine, that Greece was to Turkey.

There was a curious custom at Trieste of “making Spoglio,” as they phrased it. When three or four days of the normal length of quarantine had still to run, it was permissible to strip and leave all clothes behind, to bathe, to put on new clothes, and to be free. The process is based on the assumption that the well-washed human body, if in apparent health after say a week’s seclusion, may justly be considered free from infection, whereas the clothes worn by it must remain still longer in quarantine. What happened was this. We were inspected by the doctor, and then directed to the edge of a covered quay, opposite to which was another quay where old-clothes men displayed their wares; a strip of sea water, perhaps 4 or 5 feet deep and 20 wide, separated the two quays. A bargain had to be made with one of the old-clothes men by shouting across the water. I was to leave everything I had on me, excepting coin or other metal, and papers which were about to be fumigated, in exchange for the offered clothes. When the bargain was concluded, I stripped, plunged in, and emerged on the opposite quay stark naked, to be newly clothed and to receive freedom. The clothes-man got my old things in due time—that was his affair. The new clothes were thin, and the trousers were made of a sort of calico and deficient in the fashionable cut of my old ones; but as it was not then late in the year the thinness mattered little in those latitudes, and I did not care about the rest.

I occupied two of the days I had saved by making Spoglio, in visiting the wonderful caves of Adelsberg. A view over the Adriatic when driving up the mountain-side on the way to that place, remains still in my mind as one of the three or four most glorious views that I have had the privilege to see. The long walk underground at Adelsberg, the black and vicious stream that ran through it, looking like a river of death, and the fantastic stalactites and stalagmites were indeed astonishing. I bought two of the curious creatures called Proteus, that live in these underground waters. They have no real eyes, but sightless dots in the place of them; their colour is that of the buried portion of stems of celery (etiolated, as it is commonly called), and they have both gills and lungs. They were the first living creatures of their kind brought to England. I gave them to King’s College; one soon died, the other lived and was yearly lectured on, as I heard, until fate in the form of a cat ended him.

I went from Trieste by steamer to Venice, and thence by diligence to Milan, whence I travelled by diligence to Geneva, with the bottle containing the two Proteus under my thin coat, for fear of the water freezing while crossing the Alps. At Geneva I had a few evening hours to spare, which I spent at the theatre, and thence on by diligence to Boulogne. It took me either seven days and eight nights, or conversely, to reach Boulogne from Milan, and it was of course tiring to sit up and be shaken in a diligence during that long time. My legs began to swell before I reached Boulogne, but the two or three hours of lying down in the Channel steamer quite restored them.

So I reached my home in Leamington safely and in good time, and my dear kind father took my escapade humorously. He was pleased with it rather than otherwise, for I had much to tell and had obviously gained a great deal of experience. This little expedition proved to be an important factor in moulding my after-life. It vastly widened my views of humanity and civilisation, and it confirmed aspirations for travel which were afterwards indulged.