The insurrection flamed up anew, however, and negotiations were broken off, though the deportations were stopped.  Mustapha, finding it impossible to force his way into Sphakia from the west, ordered the fleet round, and transported the army entire to Franco Castelli on the southern shore, and bribed the chief of the district to allow him to pass to Askyphó without resistance.  In this great plain, which is the stronghold of eastern Sphakia, as Omalos of western, he encamped to negotiate and try a last effort at conciliation.  The next day one of the captains of the section bordering on Askyphó came to me for advice as to accepting Mustapha’s propositions.  I told him I could not advise him to fight or make peace, but I translated Mr. Seward’s dispatch, and assured him that when the ship arrived I would send it at once to the relief of the families.  On his return, resistance was decided on, and all the men of the vicinity gathered to attack the Turks.  The pass of Askyphó could have been easily blocked, and the army compelled to surrender, being scantily provisioned, but some spy in the Cretan councils warned the pasha, and he broke up his camp at midnight and crowned the heights at the head of the ravine, so that his army was able to pass, though with terrible losses.

It was the most disastrous campaign of the whole war, for the troops were slaughtered almost without resistance, killed by rolling down boulders on them.  Bewildered in the intricacies of the defiles, without guides or provisions, and in small parties, they were dispatched, for days after.  The army which had set out 17,850 strong, Egyptian and Turkish regulars, according to Dickson’s official information, beside several thousand irregulars, was reported by Mustapha, after its return and reorganization, as amounting to 6000 men.  We saw them as they defiled past Suda coming in, and the commander of one of the Italian ships took the trouble to count some of the battalions, one of which, consisting of 900 men when it set out, returned with only 300.  The losses were certainly not less than 10,000 men, not counting the irregulars.

CHAPTER XXII

DIPLOMACY

What had become evident, even at Constantinople, was that Mustapha and his influence, as well as the policy of repression by cruelty and devastation, had failed.  Barbarities continued, and were met by active resistance on a small scale wherever the Turks attempted to penetrate.  Small Turkish detachments were beaten here and there, but no general plan of operation appeared to offer a chance of ultimate success to either party.  The Porte, therefore, sent its best diplomatic agent, Server Effendi, with a magniloquent and mendacious proclamation and a summons for the election of a deputation of Cretans of both religions, to meet at Constantinople to receive the promises of the well-intentioned Turkish government for their pacification and contentment.