Read CHAPTER XVIII - THROUGH ORIENTAL LANDS of Charles Carleton Coffin, War Correspondent, free online book, by William Elliot Griffis, on ReadCentral.com.

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.