We took station abreast of the squadron, saluting the Capitan Pasha, who on his side ordered his fleet to heave to—­a manoeuvre which was performed amid a fine confusion.  A steam launch at once came towards us.  It bore the second in command of the fleet, Osman Pasha, sent by the Capitan Pasha to request an interview with Admiral Lalande.  He consented and boarded the Turkish ship, taking me with him.

During our passage to the Capitan Pasha’s flag-ship, Osman Pasha led us below, closed all the cabin doors with an air of mystery, and with the help of a young Armenian dragoman he told us a long story, which I will sum up in a few words.  Constantinople, so he said, was being laid waste by fire and sword.  On the death of Sultan Mahmoud, Kosrew Pasha, who was no better than a Russian agent, had seized the reins of power.  He stuck at nothing, so long as he kept them.  The real Turks, the faithful Mussulmans, were losing their heads by the hundred; the head of the faith himself, the Sheik el Islam, had not been spared.  He refused to consecrate the new Sultan until he wore the venerated turban of Othman upon his head instead of the revolutionary fez, and for this he was strangled at midnight, with great pomp it is true, and amid the salvos of artillery due to his exalted rank (a poor consolation, I thought to myself!).  The lives of Osman Pasha himself and of his chief, the Capitan Pasha, hung by a thread.  Wherefore they had both resolved, instead of fighting against Mehemet Ali, as everybody believed they would, to make common cause with him, so as to unite all the Mussulman strength in one single alliance, and make one of those concentrated efforts which have been the dream of every period and every country which has been torn by revolution.  In plain English, the two chiefs in command were carrying the unconscious fleet into an act of defection which was intended to save their own heads.  They wanted the admiral’s approbation, which he refused.  Then they asked for a French warship to go with them as a sort of lifeboat, which he promised them, and above all, they begged that no word, glance, or gesture of ours, during the visit we were about to pay, might betray the secret confided to us.  We then boarded the Capitan Pasha’s flagship, where we had a reception that was truly oriental in its mingled pomp and duplicity—­we alone, amidst the crowd of courtiers, officers, and foreign representatives surrounding this commander-in-chief, about to turn traitor, being possessed of his secret.  Not to mention that as we went along the gun decks, we saw the Turkish gunners smoking their pipes beside the heaps of cartridges piled between the guns.  A highly oriental sight also, and far from tranquillizing!

By evening the Turkish fleet had disappeared over the horizon, and the only other recollection my memory holds of this period is that of a reconnaissance along the northern coast of the Dardanelles, and the peninsula between Gallipoli and the Gulf of Saron, which reconnaissance I made with several other officers, under colour of a sporting expedition in a Turkish boat called a sakoleve and with a view to an ultimate military occupation of the peninsula.  Mayhap the notes made during this expedition were of use when Gallipoli was occupied in 1854, at the beginning of the Crimean War.