The rescue happily concluded, the Pasha organized a movement against Lakus, Theriso, Keramia, strong points where the Christians had assembled in considerable numbers and from whence they might harry the plains of CanÉa, carrying off flocks and occasionally prisoners. This expedition consisted of twelve thousand men. While the organization was going on, the Christians came down to the number of several hundred, and took possession of the direct road to Theriso, and attacked the block-house on the hill of Malaxa overlooking the plain, and three miles from CanÉa. The attack on the block-house necessarily failed from the want of artillery, and the Commissioner succeeded in reinforcing the garrison strongly after a sharp repulse in which the reinforcements were driven back nearly to the plain country, as I myself was able to perceive, watching the skirmish through a telescope. The day after, two battalions were ordered to clear the road to Theriso, held by the insurgents, and were assisted by a battery of artillery, taking the Cretans in flank from the block-house of Malaxa, firing across an impassable ravine. The attack lasted the whole afternoon, and, watching the affair through my glass, I could perceive that neither the direct nor the flank movement produced the least impression on the insurgents, who maintained their position till nightfall, when the troops were withdrawn to the plain. The next day the attack was renewed with five thousand men and a considerable force of irregulars. The Cretans fell back from their position of the day before to the ridges and ravines which cut up the plateau of Keramia, where they received the attack of the troops, and, always retreating but contesting every inequality of ground, they fell back to the precipitous spurs of the White or Sphakian Mountains on the further side of the plain, where they made good their position during the remainder of the day. The losses on either side we were never able to ascertain, though the Cretans admitted a loss of seven killed and thirty or forty wounded, among the former being a son of Manosouyanaki, the chief captain of the district, who commanded the defence. The troops returned at night, having occupied the whole day in making an advance of about three miles, but the official report the next day declared that the movement had been perfectly successful, without the loss of a man killed or wounded. The expedition against Lakus, proceeding westward, turned that position, which the Cretans abandoned without contest, and retreated across the almost impassable ravine which separates the hill of Lakus from the central chain of mountains, to Zurba, a village situated on a bold bastion, which could only be attacked successfully from the higher mountains, and which they had fortified in a rude manner as depot and hospital. The number of Cretans at Zurba amounted to six hundred, the attacking force as many thousand, with two batteries of artillery; but after two days' bombardment, during part of which time I counted (Zurba being only nine miles in a straight line from my house) thirty shots per minute, and three assaults, the Turks were obliged to abandon the attack and move on to Theriso. This village, an ancient stronghold of Crete, which, with the ravine leading to it, has been the scene of many disasters to the Turkish troops in the different insurrections, is situated in a valley surrounded on all sides but one by abrupt hills, and could easily have been held by five hundred well-disciplined and resolute men against the whole Turkish army. The Cretans lacked not resolution, but unfortunately for their discipline the news arrived at this moment that the Panhellenion blockade-runner had landed her first cargo of arms and supplies on the north side of the island, on learning which nearly the whole force stationed for the protection of Theriso went to assist in the debarkation of the cargo. Mustapha took this moment for the attack on Theriso, which he occupied without opposition, and evacuated with equal celerity on receiving warning of the return of the Cretans, armed with the rifles of the Greek national guard and reinforced by a body of Hellenic volunteers. The Cretans, following their usual policy, however, gathered on his flanks and harassed his retreat, for it virtually became such, until he reached the positions attained in the previous attack by Keramia, where he encamped to reorganize the movement onward through the Rhizo[F] against the Apokorona.

In a campaign of seven days, he had destroyed nearly a score of villages, most of them undefended; had utterly destroyed all hope of compromise or conciliation; and, though he had penetrated the strongest outposts of the insurgents, had attained no other result than the temporary possession of the position of Lakus, the village being a mass of ruins, as a base of operations in case of a new attack on Theriso or an expedition against Omalo, amid the western peaks of the White Mountains. He had anticipated great moral effects from his mountain artillery, but the Cretans learned to despise it. With their old-fashioned firearms, they had managed to harass the Turkish troops to such an extent that they looked to the days when they should fight with rifles with enthusiasm and resolution. Then every burned village left an additional number of men who, having lost all their property, had no interest in peace; so that every advantage he had gained had only increased the force opposed to him. I urged this consideration as strongly as possible on the Commissioner in several visits, which was all the better reason in his mind to make him insist on his policy. He had expected that his name would induce immediate submission, or, at least, that in a single battle he would make so decided an impression that the favorable terms he was then prepared to offer would be at once accepted, but, till the military power of the Cretans was completely broken, the Porte was determined to make no concessions of any kind. The insurgents, on the other hand, were already under the influence of Hellenic enthusiasts, and receiving munitions of all kinds by the blockade-runners, and the drift of their counsels was toward war. It was clear now that the Porte had made a most disastrous blunder, in fact an unbroken series of blunders in all its measures. It should not have entertained the project of transference in the beginning; in the second place, having decided on the transfer, it should have carried it out logically, and not by a bastard popular vote enforced by the presence of an Egyptian army; and finally, having decided to send the Commissioner, it should have sent him at once, instead of keeping him and the answer to the petition waiting for three months. Its whole course was irritating and unjust. It had had no excuse for the employment of force, and was warned by the consular corps, without exception, of the previous dishonest, tyrannical, and impolitic conduct of Ismael Pasha. If it had a consistent policy in the whole matter, it could only have been to provoke an insurrection in Crete when all the other provinces were unable to rise, and so disarm by a crushing suppression the enemy most dreaded of all its subject provinces.

The finale of the Theriso campaign was marked by the appearance of the great Deus ex machin of the insurrection, the Russian frigate Grand Admiral, and the commencement of the real moral intervention of Russia in the already complicated affair. The Russian commander, Boutakoff, was too fit a selection for the rÔle which events compelled (or permitted) him to play to have been intentionally chosen by any government. In the three years subsequent to his arrival, I saw him often, and knew as much of his opinions and feelings as it is permitted an outsider to know of a Russian official, and both his acts and language have always confirmed my impression that the Russian Government did not influence the turn events took, and anticipated only a speedy and disastrous end to the insurrection, while entertaining the most cordial sympathy and good wishes for a more prosperous end than any sane man would have expected. In fact, with the exception of the boldest of the insurgents and some harebrained Greeks, no one in the island anticipated anything but ruin from the movement. Captain Boutakoff was a devout and liberal Christian, a type of all that is most chivalric, patriotic, and compassionate in manhood, large-brained, prudent, and, if zealous enough to merit all the honors then and since conferred on him by his sovereign, he was never capable of any patriotic vice worse than the most profound reticence. To know him as I knew him was to conceive a better opinion of his country. I am morally certain that Boutakoff never said or did anything to encourage in any way the hopes of the Cretans, or lead them to indulge in dreams of European intervention in their favor. His position was that of a humane observer, and with all the sympathy which existed between him and myself, and the mutual confidence in our personal intercourse, I could find in his language and acts no trace of arriÈre-pensÉe in favor of any other interest than the real good of the Cretans. My own strong sympathy with the unhappy islanders made me the ally and co-operator with whoever gave them any help, and placed me, I have good reason to believe, high in the confidence of the Russian authorities in Crete and Constantinople; and, with no political interest in the matter other than Cretan, I am free to confess that, while I believed Russian policy in Crete to be the good of Crete, I was willing to aid in carrying out any plans that policy might point out. If, then, these plans had pointed out the secret encouragement of the insurrection as desirable, I am certain that I should have been influenced in that direction. It will be seen before I have finished that I am no apologist for the Russian conduct of this affair when it had become a matter of European interest and action; but I must do the Russian Government the justice to declare that it is in no wise responsible for the disaster and carnage which the war brought on, and that it was not until several months that it openly gave the revolt moral encouragement (as a means of weakening the Turkish empire?)

The Imperial Commissioner having concentrated and reorganized his troops at Bondapoulo, a village of the plain of Keramia, transferred his base of operations to Kalyves, on the sea and at the mouth of the river which drains the Apokorona, and as soon as the change was effected commenced his march toward Krapi, the main pass of Sphakia. The troops were first opposed at Stylos, the first of the natural positions of which the country affords so many, and were repulsed in a first attack. The vanguard were of Egyptians, who were in this campaign systematically put foremost and encouraged in every brutality and ferocity, in the hope apparently of making them good troops, their natural temper being unfavorable to that end. Though the result of this treatment certainly did show that nobody is so brutal and devilish as a coward, and the fellahs eminently distinguished themselves in devastation and killing of defenceless people, they never succeeded in exciting any other feeling than hatred and contempt in the Cretan. At Stylos, as in other places, they were beaten with ease, and it was only on the following day, when the Cretan positions were flanked and the irregulars sent forward, that the insurgents evacuated their strong positions. In this affair the Egyptian general, Ismael Pasha, urging his troops to retrieve their disgrace at Vrysis, was mortally wounded. The troops attacked the position of Campos, which was abandoned by all combatants, the remaining inhabitants being put to death, and the insurgents relinquished all the country as far as VafÉ to the Turks, who ravaged it in the most thorough manner, with the extreme of barbarity and atrocity to all the Christian inhabitants who were unfortunate enough to fall into their hands. In the neighborhood of KephalÁ there are numerous grottoes, partly natural and partly excavated, as places of refuge from immemorial times, some of them celebrated in the traditions of the island for the sieges they had maintained. Into these many of the Christians retreated, taking with them their effects. In one of these about two hundred villagers, mostly old men, women, and children, had taken refuge, and, refusing to surrender, were stifled in the cave.[G] A woman came, one day, to my house to obtain protection and charity, having been brought a prisoner to CanÉa, and narrated to me the circumstances of her capture. She was, she told me, on her way from her village to a larger one in the Apokorona to purchase bread, and was in the company of eleven men, all Christians and unarmed, going with the same intention. They were stopped in the road by a party of Seliniote irregulars, who deliberately beheaded the men and piled their heads in the path, taking her with them to headquarters to extort from her information as to the places of concealment of her compatriots. Giving no desired indications, she was about to be beheaded, when two Egyptians whom she had sheltered and fed after the defeat of Vrysis recognized her, and, stating her kindness to the Pasha, she was released and sent to CanÉa.

The consequence of this severity was not what Mustapha Pasha expected it to be, to intimidate the Cretans into submission, but to drive them into the high mountains, where hundreds perished from hunger and cold. As children as well as adults of both sexes were welcome game to the fanaticism called out by the first taste of Christian blood, and no partial submission was accepted, the cruelty being the means to an end quite characteristic of Turkish policy and the nature of the Albanian, who years before had earned the title of the "butcher of Crete"; and as the submitted had no power to induce the submission of the more resolute insurgents, there was no possible safety to any portion of the population except in the mountains, where a large proportion of the weakest died, leaving the men unencumbered for vengeance. Every step of the Turkish authorities was a blunder. Submission being useless unless complete, and complete submission out of the power of any one to enforce, there remained only complete insurrection, and this the commissioner succeeded in exciting, with a renewal of all the old religious animosity, and a desperation natural to men to whom surrender brought no protection, and submission no guarantee.