It was “blowing great guns,”
and the sea was white with foam, when on the ninety-eighth
anniversary of Washington’s birthday into another
world, December 14th, 1867, the steamer Euphrates,
of the M. I. Company, left Marseilles. The iron
ship was staunch, though not overclean. On the
deck were boxed up eight carriages for Turks who had
been visiting Paris. The captain amused himself,
in hours which ought not to have been those of leisure,
with embroidery. After a run through the Sardinian
straits, they had clear sea room to Sicily. Stromboli
was quiet, but Vesuvius was lively. At Messina
they took on coal, oranges, five Americans, and one
Englishman. On learning Carleton’s plan
to travel eastward to San Francisco, the Queen’s
subject remarked, with surprise:
“There was a time when we Englishmen had the routes of travel
pretty much all to ourselves, but I’ll be hanged if you Americans haven’t
crowded us completely off the sidewalk. We can’t tie your shoe-strings.”
Greece was sighted at sunrise.
With Carleton’s mental picture of the great
naval victory of Navarino, by which the murderous Turk
was driven off the sea, rose boyhood’s remembrances
of the fashionable “Navarino bonnets,”
with their colossal flaring fronts, with beds of artificial
flowers set between brims and cheeks, making rivalry
of color amid vast ostentation of bows and ribbon.
With his glass, he could discern, at one point upon
the hillside, the hut of a hermit, who had discovered
that man cannot live upon history alone, but that
beans and potatoes are desirable. The practical
hermit cultivated a garden.
Arrival at Piraeus was at 2 A. M.
The party of passengers descended the ladder into
a boat, and there sat shivering in their shawls, where
they were likely to be left to historic meditation
until the custom-house opened, except for the well-known
fact that silver often conquers steel. One franc,
held up before the gaze of a highly important personage
possessed of a sword and much atmosphere of authority,
secured smiles and welcome to the sacred soil of Greece,
immunity from search, and direction to a cafe where
all was warm and comfortable, and from which, in due
time, hotel accommodations were secured.
In the city of Pericles, they saw
the play of “Antigone” in the theatre
of Herod Atticus. On visiting the Parthenon,
with its marvellous sculpture, which Turkish soldiers
had so often used as a target, they found that the
chief inhabitants of the ruin were crows. They
met the missionaries who were influential in the making
of the new Grecian nation. From Athens they went
to Constantinople, where Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, in Robert
College, was lighting the beacon of hope for the Christians
in the Turkish empire.
Leaving Europe at that end of it on
which the Turks have encamped during four centuries,
and where they are still blasting and devouring, Carleton
visited Africa, the old house of bondage. At
Alexandria his first greeting was a cry for bakshish.
Within half an hour after landing, most of his childhood’s
illusions were dispelled. A drenching rain fell.
The delta of the Nile had been turned into one vast
cotton field which looked like a mass of snow.
The clover was in bloom along the railway to Cairo.
In this land of the donkey and of the Arabian Nights
Entertainments, he received several practical lessons
in the art of comparative swindling, soon learning
that in roguery both Christians and the followers
of the prophet are one.
In studying his Bible amid the lands
which are its best commentary, Carleton concluded
that the crossing of the Red Sea by the fugitive slaves
from Egypt, over an “underground railway made
by the order of God himself,” “instead
of being in the domain of the miraculous, is under
natural law.” At Suez, one of the half-way
houses of the world, he was amused at the jollity
of the Mohammedans, who had just broken their long
lenten fast from tobacco and smoke, and who were very
happy in their own way.
In thirty hours after leaving Alexandria,
the party, now joined by Rev. E. B. Webb, had its
first view of Palestine, a sandy shore,
low, level as a Western prairie, tufted with palms,
green with olives, golden with orange orchards, and
away in the distance an outline of gray mountains.
Soon, in Jerusalem, he was among the donkeys, dogs,
pilgrims, and muleteers. Out on the Mount of Olives
and in starlit Bethlehem, by ancient Hebron, and then
down to low-lying Jericho and at the Dead Sea, he
was refreshing memory and imagination, shedding old
fancies and traditions, discriminating as never before
between figures of rhetoric and figures of rock and
reality, while feeding his faith and cheering his
spirit. Then from Jerusalem, after a twenty days’
stay, the party rode northward to Shechem, the home
of the Samaritan, and over the plain of Esdraelon.
There Carleton’s military eye revelled in the
scene, and he made mind-pictures of the battles fought
there during all the centuries. Then, after tarrying
at Nazareth and Beyrout, we find him, April 11th,
at Suez, on board a steamer for the East.
At Paris he had seen De Lesseps, amid
tumultuous applause, receive from Napoleon III. a
gold medal.
Now Carleton was on the steamship
Baroda, moving down the Red Sea, once thought
to be an arm of the Indian Ocean, but which we now
know to be only a portion of “the great rift
valley,” the longest and deepest
and widest trough on the earth’s surface, which
extends from the base of Mount Lebanon and the Sea
of Galilee, through the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea,
the dried up wadies, the Red Sea, and the chain of
lakes and Nyanzas discovered in recent years in the
heart of Africa, and extending nearly to Zanzibar.
Passing by Great Britain’s garrisons, lighthouses,
and coaling stations, which guard her pathway to India,
Bombay was reached April 27th.
In the interior, in the distressing
hot weather of India, Carleton found this the land
of punkas, tatties, and odors both sweet and otherwise.
He was impressed with the amount of jewelry seen, not
in the bazaars, but on the persons of the women.
“Through all ages India has swallowed up silver,
and the absorption is as great as ever to-day.”
He was amused at the little men’s big heads,
covered with a hundred and fifty feet, or more, of
turban material, which made so many of them look like
exaggerated tulips. He noticed the phenomena of
religion, the trees smeared with paint, the Buddhist
caves, the Parsee Towers of Silence, the phallic emblems
of nature-worship. Evidently he was not converted
to cremation, for he wrote, “The earth is our
mother, and it is sweeter to lie on her bosom amid
blooming flowers or beneath bending elms and sighing
pines in God’s Acre.” He noticed how rapidly the railways were breaking
down caste. “The locomotive, like a ploughshare turning the sward of the
prairies, is cutting up a faith whose roots run down deep into bygone ages....
The engine does not turn out for obstructions, such as in former days impeded
the car of progress.”
Though caste was stronger than the
instincts of humanity, this relic of the brutishness
of conquest was not allowed to have sway in railway
carriages.
Carleton sums up his impressions of
the religions of India in this sentence: “The
world by wisdom knew not God.” He found
his preconceived ideas of central India all wrong.
Instead of jungles, were plateaus, forest-covered
mountains, groves, and bamboo. With the thermometer
at 105 deg. in the shade, the woodwork shrunk
so that the drivers of the dak or ox-cart wound the
spokes of the wheels with straw and kept them wet,
so that Carleton noticed them “watering their
carriage as well as horses.” Whether it
was his head that swelled or his hat which shrunk,
he found the latter two sizes too small at night.
In India, between June and October, little business
is done. The demand for cotton, caused by the
American war, had set India farmers to growing the
bolls over vast areas, but the cost of carriage to
the seaboard was so great that new roads had to be
built.
“Sahib Coffin” at the
garrison towns was amused at both the young British
officers, with their airs, and at the old veterans,
who were as dignified as mastiffs. Living
in the central land of the world’s fairy tales,
he enjoyed these legends which “give perfume
to literature, science, and art.” At Allahabad,
in the middle of the fort, he saw a pillar forty-two
feet high, erected by King Asoka, 250 B. C., bearing
an inscription commanding kindness to animals.
In one part of India, at the golden pagoda of Benares,
he found the monkeys worshipped as gods, or at least
honored as divine servants, while in the North they
were pests and thieves, the enemy of the farmer.
Among other hospitalities enjoyed,
was a dinner with an American, Mr. C. L. Brown, who
represented the Tudor Ice Company, of Boston, and who
sold solidified water from Wenham Lake. The piece
that clinked in the glass of Carleton, “sparkling
and bright in its liquid light,” had been harvested
in 1865, three years before. He described it as
a “piece of imprisoned cold, fragment of a bygone
winter,” which called up “bright pictures
of boys and girls with their rosy cheeks and flashing
skates, a breeze of old associations.” At Benares, various root ideas of Hindoo
holiness were illustrated, including the linga worship and the passion for
motherhood in that strange phallic cult which, from India to Japan, has survived
all later forms of religion. In Calcutta, Old India had already been forgotten
in the newer and more Christian India. He visited especially the American Union
Mission Home, where Miss Louise Hook and Miss Britton were training the girls of
India to nobler ideals and possibilities of life. After seeing the school,
Carleton wrote: “Theirs is a great work. Educate the women of India, and we
withdraw two hundred millions from gross idolatry. This mighty moral leverage
obtained, the whole substratum of society will be raised to a higher level. The
mothers of America fought the late war through to its glorious end. They
sustained the army by their labor, their sympathy, their heroic devotion. The
mothers of India are keeping the idols on their pedestals.”
Personal accidents in India were minor
and amusing, mostly. Crossing the Bay of Bengal
on the Clan Alpine, one of England’s opium
steamers bound to China, a boiler blew up. The
“priming” of the iron, the life of the
metal, having been burned out in passing from fresh
to salt water, was the cause of the trouble.
Nineteen persons, eighteen natives and a Scotsman,
were killed or badly scalded. Carleton rushed
out from his stateroom, amid clouds of steam that made
his path nearly invisible, and was happy in finding
his wife safe on deck at the stern. At sunset
the Christian was given the rites of burial. The
dead Hindoos, not being used to religious attentions
paid to corpses, were heaved into the sea, and the
voyage continued. This was not the first or the
last time that Carleton experienced the sensation of
being blown up while on a steamboat.