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"Scrofer, or some such name, on board a Cephaloniate Mistice, Dec. 31, 1823. You had better send my friend George Drake, and a body of Suliotes, to escort us by land or by the canals, with all convenient speed. Gamba and our Bombard are taken into Patras, I suppose, and we must take a turn at the Turks to get them out.
This shocking tragedy had been perpetrated in the October of 1798; and, in less than two years from that date, namely, on the 2d of June, 1800, commenced the eleventh war of the Suliotes; being their third with Ali, and the last which, from their own guileless simplicity, meeting with the craft of the most perfidious amongst princes, they were ever destined to wage.
Three days after the conversation related in the preceding chapter, Byron was officially placed in the command of about three thousand men, destined for the attack on Lepanto; but the Suliotes remained refractory, and refused to quit their quarters; his Lordship, however, employed an argument which proved effectual.
Leigh with good accounts of her own and Ada's health, he took a long ride with Gamba and a few of the remaining Suliotes, and after being violently heated, and then drenched in a heavy shower, persisted in returning home in a boat, remarking with a laugh, in answer to a remonstrance, "I should make a pretty soldier if I were to care for such a trifle."
Indeed, it may be said that in his circumstances it was impracticable; for although the Suliotes repented of their insubordination, they yet had an objection to the service, and said "they would not fight against stone walls." All thought of the expedition was in consequence abandoned, and the destinies of poor Byron were hastening to their consummation. He began to complain!
The Turks had shut themselves up in a church; into this, by night, the Suliotes threw a number of hives, full of bees, whose insufferable stings soon brought the haughty Moslems into the proper surrendering mood. These eight wars naturally had no other ultimate effect than to extend the military power, experience, and renown, of the Suliotes.
Interrogate my actions, they will speak more fully than a detailed apology. "My position with regard to the Suliotes allowed no half-and-half measures. Having once broken with them, I was obliged either to drive them from my country or to exterminate them.
After that loss, all harmony of plan went to wreck amongst the Suliotes; and at length, about the middle of December, 1803, this immortal little independent state of Suli solemnly renounced by treaty to Ali Pacha its sacred territory, its thrice famous little towns, and those unconquerable positions among the crests of wooded inaccessible mountains which had baffled all the armies of the crescent, led by the most eminent of the Ottoman Pachas, and not seldom amounting to twenty, twenty-five, and in one instance even to more than thirty thousand men.
The whole garrison stepped forward as one man, and demanded the post of honor and of death. 'I will only take the Thermopylae number, said their leader; and he selected the three hundred from his true and trusty Suliotes. In the dead of night this devoted band marched out in six divisions, which were placed, in profound silence, around the Turkish camp.
But so furious was the reception given to the Turks, so deadly and so uniform their defeat, that panic seized on the whole army, who declared unanimously to Ali that they would no more attempt to contend with the Suliotes "Who," said they, "neither sit nor sleep, but are born only for the destruction of men."
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