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,