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 BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Peasant Russia, Civil War:
e Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921
A People’s Tragedy:
e Russian Revolution, 1891–1924
Interpreting the Russian Revolution:
e Language and Symbols of 1917
(with Boris Kolonitskii)
Natasha’s Dance:
A Cultural History of Russia
e Whisperers:
Private Life in Stalin’s Russia

1
ORLANDO FIGES

Crimea

e Last Crusade

ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

2
 ALLEN LANE
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books
Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi –
110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg
2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published 2010
Copyright © Orlando Figes, 2010
e moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the
above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-1-84-614500-1

3
For Seren

4
 Contents
List of Plates
List of Illustrations
Note on Dates and Proper Names
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Maps
1. Religious Wars
2. Eastern Questions
3. e Russian Menace
4. e End of Peace in Europe
5. Phoney War
6. First Blood to the Turks
7. Alma
8. Sevastopol in the Autumn
9. Generals January and February
10. Cannon Fodder
11. e Fall of Sevastopol
12. Paris and the New Order
Epilogue: e Crimean War in Myth and Memory
Illustrations
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

5
 List of Plates
1. Easter at the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, c. 1900. G. Eric and
Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
2. Russian barracks for pilgrims, Jerusalem, by B. W. Kilburn, c.
1899. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division,
Washington, DC.
3. An artillery park on the shores of the Bosporus with the
Nusretiye Mosque in the background, 1855, by James Robertson.
National Army Museum, London. Photo: e Bridgeman Art Library.
4. Nicholas I, 1852, by Franz Kruger. Hermitage, St Petersburg.
Photo: e Bridgeman Art Library.
5. Russians Firing at a Statue, 1854, by Gustave Doré, from e Rare
and Extraordinary History of Holy Russia (Histoire pittoresque,
dramatique et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie).
6. ‘Now For It! A Set to between Pam, the Downing Street Pet, and
the Russian Spider’, from Punch, February 1855.
7. ‘Saint Nicholas of Russia’ by John Tenniel, from Punch, 18 March
1854.
8. Turkish troops on the Danube Front, 1854, by Carol Szathmari.
e Royal Collection © 2010, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
9. Group of Coldstream Guards at Scutari, 1854, by James
Robertson. Courtesy Keith Smith.
10. Cavalry camp on the plains of Balaklava, 1855, by Roger Fenton.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
11. Cossack Bay, Balaklava, 1855, by Roger Fenton. Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
12. e French base at Kamiesh Bay, 1855, by James Robertson.
Courtesy King’s Own Royal Regiment Museum, Lancaster (Acc. No.

6
KO0438/10).
13. French soldiers standing by a group of Zouaves in the Crimea,
1855, by Roger Fenton. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division, Washington, DC.
14. Tartars at work repairing a road in Balaklava, 1855, by Roger
Fenton. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division,
Washington, DC.
15. ‘How Jack Makes the Turk Useful at Balaclava’, 1855, by John
Leech, from Punch, 1855.
16. View of the Malakoff taken from the Mamelon Vert, 1855, by
James Robertson. Courtesy Manuscripts and Special Collections, e
University of Nottingham (Ref. Ne C 10884/2/19).
17. Interior of the Malakoff tower, Sevastopol, 1855, by James
Robertson. Courtesy Manuscripts and Special Collections, e
University of Nottingham (Ref. Ne C 10884/2/16).
18. Sevastopol, September 1855, by Léon-Eugène Méhédin. Photo: ©
Musée de l’Armée, Paris / Dist. RMN / Christian Moutarde.
19. View of Sevastopol from the Malakoff, 1855, by James Robertson.
Courtesy Manuscripts and Special Collections, e University of
Nottingham (Ref. Ne C 10884/2/7).
20. Sevastopol taken from the Redan, 1855, by James Robertson.
Courtesy Manuscripts and Special Collections, e University of
Nottingham (Ref. Ne C 10884/2/7).
21. e Guards (Crimean War) Memorial, 1885, by John Bell.
London Transport Museum, London.
22. Detail of the Guards (Crimean War) Memorial, including statues
of Florence Nightingale and Sidney Herbert, by John Bell. Photo: © e
Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
23. Queen Victoria’s First Visit to Her Wounded Soldiers, 1856, by
Jerry Barrett. Purchased with help from the National Heritage Memorial

7
Fund and e Art Fund, 1993. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
24. Calling the Roll aer an Engagement, Crimea, 1874, by Elizabeth
ompson, Lady Butler. e Royal Collection © 2010, Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II.
25. ree Crimean Invalids, 1855, by Joseph Cundall and Robert
Howlett. e Royal Collection © 2010, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
26. Company Sergeant Christy and Sergeant McGifford, Royal
Artillery, 1856, by Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett. National Army
Museum, London. Photo: e Bridgeman Art Library.
27. e Alma Bridge, Paris, during the ood of 1910. Photo: Roger-
Viollet/ Topfoto.
28. Alexandre Chauvelot’s Malakoff Tower built in 1856, lithograph,
1860, by Lévis. Photo © Ville de Malakoff, Archives Municipales.
29. Fragment of the panorama e Defence of Sevastopol, 1905, by
Franz Alekseevich Roubaud, reconstructed 1950s. Panorama Museum,
Sevastopol. Photo: Jaxpix/Alamy.
30. e Last Survivor of the Russians who fought at Balaclava,
Moscow, 1903, by Dr James Young. National Army Museum, London.
Photo: e Bridgeman Art Library.

8
 List of Illustrations
1. Byans memorial, Hericourt. Photo: Georges Simon/
MemorialGenWeb www.memorial-genweb.org
2. Hagia So a, Istanbul, Turkey, 1855, by James Robertson.
Courtesy Manuscripts and Special Collections, e University of
Nottingham. (Ref. Ne C 10884/2/38)
3. Eight-point star painted by the Fossatis over a whitewashed
mosaic panel, Hagia So a, Istanbul. Photo: P. Iskender, 1932 ©
Dumbarton Oaks, Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives,
Washington, D.C.
4. Louis-Napoléon, 1854. Photo: Roger-Viollet / Topfoto
5. Lord Palmerston, c.1860, by Mayer & Pierson. Photo: Hulton
Archive/Getty Images
6. Leo Tolstoy, 1854. Photo: RIA Novosti / Topfoto
7. Field Marshall Lord Raglan, 1855, by Roger Fenton. Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
8. Hugh Annesley, 1854. Reproduced by permission of e Deputy
Keeper of the Records, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
9. Crimean Winter, Crimean Summer, 1850s, by Henry Hope
Crealock © South Lanarkshire Council. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk
10. A cantinière wearing Zouave regiment dress, 1855, by Roger
Fenton. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Washington
11. Nikolai Pirogov, 1880. Photo: Science Photo Library
12. e Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855, by Roger Fenton.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
13. Men of the 68th Regiment in Winter Dress, 1855, by Roger
Fenton. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Washington, D.C.

9
 14. Tsar Alexander II, c.1870s, by Levitskii. Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
15. Maréchal Pélissier, 1855, by Roger Fenton. Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
16. e British Cemetery at Cathcart’s Hill, 1855, by Roger Fenton.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
17. François Rochebrune, c.1863, by Walery Rzewuski. Photo:
Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw
18. ‘Right Against Wrong’, from Punch, 8 April 1854
19. e Death of Admiral Nakhimov, 1856, by Vasily Timm. Photo:
RIA Novosti / Topfoto

10
 Note on Dates and Proper Names
DATES
From 1700 until 1918 Russia adhered to the Julian calendar, which
ran thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar in use in Western
Europe. To avoid confusion, all dates in this book are given according to
the Gregorian calendar.
PROPER NAMES
Russian names are spelled in this book according to the standard
(Library of Congress) system of transliteration, but common English
spellings of well-known Russian names (Tsar Alexander, for example)
are retained.

11
 Acknowledgements
e research for this book took place over many years and thanks are
due to a large number of people.
In the early stages of research Helen Rappaport helped me to
compile a working bibliography from the potentially endless list of
books, published memoirs, diaries and letters by participants in the
Crimean War. She also gave invaluable advice on the social history of the
war, sharing information from her own research for No Place for Ladies:
e Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War.
At the National Army Museum in London I am grateful to Alastair
Massie, whose own works, e National Army Museum Book of the
Crimean War: e Untold Stories and A Most Desperate Undertaking: e
British Army in the Crimea, 1854–56, were an inspiration to my own. I
gratefully acknowledge the permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth
II to make use of the materials from the Royal Archives, and am
thankful to Sophie Gordon for her advice on the photographs of the
Royal Collection at Windsor. In the Basbanlik Osmanlik Archive in
Istanbul, I was helped by Murat Siviloglu and Melek Maksudoglu, and in
the Russian State Military History Archive in Moscow by Luisa
Khabibulina.
Various people commented on all or sections of the dra – Norman
Stone, Sean Brady, Douglas Austin, Tony Margrave, Mike Hinton, Miles
Taylor, Dominic Lieven and Mark Mazower – and I am grateful to them
all. Douglas Austin and Tony Margrave, in particular, were a mine of
information on various military aspects. anks are also due to Mara
Kozelsky for allowing me to read the typescript of her then un nished
book on the Crimea, to Metin Kunt and Onur Önul for help on Turkish
matters, to Edmund Herzig on Armenian affairs, to Lucy Riall for advice
on Italy, to Joanna Bourke for her thoughts on military psychology, to

12
Antony Beevor for his help on the hussars, to Ross Belson for
background information on the resignation of Sidney Herbert, to Keith
Smith for his generous donation of the extraordinary photograph ‘Old
Scutari and Modern Üsküdar’ by James Robertson, and to Hugh Small,
whose book e Crimean War: Queen Victoria’s War with the Russian
Tsars made me change my mind on many things.
As always, I am indebted to my family, to my wife, Stephanie, and
our daughters, Lydia and Alice, who could never quite believe that I was
writing a war book but indulged my interests nonetheless; to my
wonderfully supportive agent, Deborah Rogers, and her superb team at
Rogers, Coleridge and White, especially Ruth McIntosh, who talks me
through my VAT returns, and to Melanie Jackson in New York; to
Cecilia Mackay for her thoughtful work on the illustrations; to Elizabeth
Stratford for the copy-editing; to Alan Gilliland for the excellent maps;
and above all to my two great editors, Simon Winder at Penguin and
Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan.

13
 Introduction
In the parish church of Witchampton in Dorset there is a memorial
to commemorate ve soldiers from this peaceful little village who fought
and died in the Crimean War. e inscription reads:
DIED IN THE SERVICE OF THEIR COUNTRY.
THEIR BODIES ARE IN THE CRIMEA.
MAY THEIR SOULS REST IN PEACE. MDCCCLIV
In the communal cemetery of Héricourt in south-eastern France,
there is a gravestone with the names of the nine men from the area who
died in the Crimea:

ILS SONT MORTS POUR LA PATRIE.

AMIS, NOUS NOUS REVERRONS UN JOUR
At the base of the memorial somebody has placed two cannonballs,
one with the name of the ‘Malakoff ’ (Malakhov) Bastion, captured by the
French during the siege of Sevastopol, the Russian naval base in the
Crimea, the other with the name ‘Sebastopol’. ousands of French and
British soldiers lie in unmarked and long-neglected graves in the
Crimea.
In Sevastopol itself there are hundreds of memorials, many of them
in the military cemetery (bratskoe kladbishche), one of three huge burial
grounds established by the Russians during the siege, where a staggering
127,583 men killed in the defence of the town lie buried. e officers
have individual graves with their names and regiments but the ordinary
soldiers are buried in mass graves of y or a hundred men. Among the
Russians there are soldiers who had come from Serbia, Bulgaria or
Greece, their co-religionists in the Eastern Church, in response to the
Tsar’s call for the Orthodox to defend their faith.

14
 e Héricourt Memorial
One small plaque, barely visible in the long grass where een sailors
lie underground, commemorates their ‘heroic sacri ce during the
defence of Sevastopol in 1854–5’:
THEY DIED FOR THEIR FATHERLAND,
FOR TSAR AND FOR GOD
Elsewhere in Sevastopol there are ‘eternal ames’ and monuments to
the unknown and uncounted soldiers who died ghting for the town. It
is estimated that a quarter of a million Russian soldiers, sailors and
civilians are buried in mass graves in Sevastopol’s three military
cemeteries.1

15
 Two world wars have obscured the huge scale and enormous human
cost of the Crimean War. Today it seems to us a relatively minor war; it is
almost forgotten, like the plaques and gravestones in those churchyards.
Even in the countries that took part in it (Russia, Britain, France,
Piedmont-Sardinia in Italy and the Ottoman Empire, including those
territories that would later make up Romania and Bulgaria) there are not
many people today who could say what the Crimean War was all about.
But for our ancestors before the First World War the Crimea was the
major con ict of the nineteenth century, the most important war of their
lifetimes, just as the world wars of the twentieth century are the
dominant historical landmarks of our lives.
e losses were immense – at least three-quarters of a million
soldiers killed in battle or lost through illness and disease, two-thirds of
them Russian. e French lost around 100,000 men, the British a small
fraction of that number, about 20,000, because they sent far fewer troops
(98,000 British soldiers and sailors were involved in the Crimea
compared to 310,000 French). But even so, for a small agricultural
community such as Witchampton the loss of ve able-bodied men was
felt as a heavy blow. In the parishes of Whitegate, Aghada and Farsid in
County Cork in Ireland, where the British army recruited heavily, almost
one-third of the male population died in the Crimean War.2
Nobody has counted the civilian casualties: victims of the shelling;
people starved to death in besieged towns; populations devastated by
disease spread by the armies; entire communities wiped out in the
massacres and organized campaigns of ethnic cleansing that
accompanied the ghting in the Caucasus, the Balkans and the Crimea.
is was the rst ‘total war’, a nineteenth-century version of the wars of
our own age, involving civilians and humanitarian crises.
It was also the earliest example of a truly modern war – fought with
new industrial technologies, modern ri es, steamships and railways,

16
novel forms of logistics and communication like the telegraph,
important innovations in military medicine, and war reporters and
photographers directly on the scene. Yet at the same time it was the last
war to be conducted by the old codes of chivalry, with ‘parliamentaries’
and truces in the ghting to clear the dead and wounded from the killing
elds. e early battles in the Crimea, on the River Alma and at
Balaklava, where the famous Charge of the Light Brigade took place,
were not so very different from the sort of ghting that went on during
the Napoleonic Wars. Yet the siege of Sevastopol, the longest and most
crucial phase of the Crimean War, was a precursor of the industrialized
trench warfare of 1914–18. During the eleven and a half months of the
siege, 120 kilometres of trenches were dug by the Russians, the British
and the French; 150 million gunshots and 5 million bombs and shells of
various calibre were exchanged between the two sides.3
e name of the Crimean War does not re ect its global scale and
huge signi cance for Europe, Russia and that area of the world –
stretching from the Balkans to Jerusalem, from Constantinople to the
Caucasus – that came to be de ned by the Eastern Question, the great
international problem posed by the disintegration of the Ottoman
Empire. Perhaps it would be better to adopt the Russian name for the
Crimean War, the ‘Eastern War’ (Vostochnaia voina), which at least has
the merit of connecting it to the Eastern Question, or even the ‘Turco-
Russian War’, the name for it in many Turkish sources, which places it in
the longer-term historical context of centuries of warfare between the
Russians and the Ottomans, although this omits the crucial factor of
Western intervention in the war.
e war began in 1853 between Ottoman and Russian forces in the
Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, the territory of
today’s Romania, and spread to the Caucasus, where the Turks and the
British encouraged and supported the struggle of the Muslim tribes

17
against Russia, and from there to other areas of the Black Sea. By 1854,
with the intervention of the British and the French on Turkey’s side and
the Austrians threatening to join this anti-Russian alliance, the Tsar
withdrew his forces from the principalities, and the ghting shied to
the Crimea. But there were several other theatres of the war in 1854–5:
in the Baltic Sea, where the Royal Navy planned to attack St Petersburg,
the Russian capital; on the White Sea, where it bombarded the
Solovetsky Monastery in July 1854; and even on the Paci c coastline of
Siberia.
e global scale of the ghting was matched by the diversity of
people it involved. Readers will nd here a broad canvas populated less
than they might have hoped (or feared) by military types and more by
kings and queens, princes, courtiers, diplomats, religious leaders, Polish
and Hungarian revolutionaries, doctors, nurses, journalists, artists and
photographers, pamphleteers and writers, none more central to the story
from the Russian perspective than Leo Tolstoy, who served as an officer
on three different fronts of the Crimean War (the Caucasus, the Danube
and the Crimea). Above all, through their own words in letters and
memoirs, the reader will nd here the viewpoint of the serving officers
and ordinary troops, from the British ‘Tommy’ to the French-Algerian
Zouaves and the Russian serf soldiers.
ere are many books in English on the Crimean War. But this is the
rst in any language to draw extensively from Russian, French and
Ottoman as well as British sources to illuminate the geo-political,
cultural and religious factors that shaped the involvement of each major
power in the con ict. Because of this concentration on the historical
context of the war, readers eages for the ghting to begin will need to be
patient in the early chapters (or even skip over them). What I hope
emerges from these pages is a new appreciation of the war’s importance
as a major turning point in the history of Europe, Russia and the Middle

18
East, the consequences of which are still felt today. ere is no room here
for the widespread British view that it was a ‘senseless’ and ‘unnecessary’
war – an idea going back to the public’s disappointment with the poorly
managed military campaign and its limited achievements at the time –
which has since had such a detrimental impact on the historical
literature. Long neglected and oen ridiculed as a serious subject by
scholars, the Crimean War has been le mainly in the hands of British
military historians, many of them amateur enthusiasts, who have
constantly retold the same stories (the Charge of the Light Brigade, the
bungling of the English commanders, Florence Nightingale) with little
real discussion of the war’s religious origins, the complex politics of the
Eastern Question, Christian–Muslim relations in the Black Sea region,
or the in uence of European Russophobia, without which it is difficult to
grasp the con ict’s true signi cance.
e Crimean War was a crucial watershed. It broke the old
conservative alliance between Russia and the Austrians that had upheld
the existing order on the European continent, allowing the emergence of
new nation states in Italy, Romania and Germany. It le the Russians
with a deep sense of resentment of the West, a feeling of betrayal that the
other Christian states had sided with the Turks, and with frustrated
ambitions in the Balkans that would continue to destabilize relations
between the powers in the 1870s and the crises leading to the outbreak
of the First World War. It was the rst major European con ict to involve
the Turks, if we discount their brief participation in the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It opened up the Muslim world of
the Ottoman Empire to Western armies and technologies, accelerated its
integration into the global capitalist economy, and sparked an Islamic
reaction against the West which continues to this day.
Each power entered the Crimean War with its own motives.
Nationalism and imperial rivalries combined with religious interests. For

19
the Turks, it was a question of ghting for their crumbling empire in
Europe, of defending their imperial sovereignty against Russia’s claims to
represent the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire, and of
averting the threat of an Islamic and nationalist revolution in the Turkish
capital. e British claimed they went to war to defend the Turks against
Russia’s bullying, but in fact they were more concerned to strike a blow
against the Russian Empire, which they feared as a rival in Asia, and to
use the war to advance their own free-trade and religious interests in the
Ottoman Empire. For the Emperor of the French, Napoleon III, the war
was an opportunity to restore France to a position of respect and
in uence abroad, if not to the glory of his uncle’s reign, and perhaps to
redraw the map of Europe as a family of liberal nation states along the
lines envisaged by Napoleon I – though the in uence of the Catholics on
his weak regime also pushed him towards war against the Russians on
religious grounds. For the British and the French, this was a crusade for
the defence of liberty and European civilization against the barbaric and
despotic menace of Russia, whose aggressive expansionism represented a
real threat, not just to the West but to the whole of Christendom. As for
the Tsar, Nicholas I, the man more than anyone responsible for the
Crimean War, he was partly driven by in ated pride and arrogance, a
result of having been tsar for twenty-seven years, partly by his sense of
how a great power such as Russia should behave towards its weaker
neighbours, and partly by a gross miscalculation about how the other
powers would respond to his actions; but above all he believed that he
was ghting a religious war, a crusade, to ful l Russia’s mission to defend
the Christians of the Ottoman Empire. e Tsar vowed to take on the
whole world in accordance with what he believed was his holy mission
to extend his empire of the Orthodox as far as Constantinople and
Jerusalem.

20
 Historians have tended to dismiss the religious motives of the war.
Few devote more than a paragraph or two to the dispute in the Holy
Land – the rivalry between the Catholics or Latins (backed by France)
and the Greeks (supported by Russia) over who should have control of
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the
Nativity in Bethlehem – even though it was the starting point (and for
the Tsar a sufficient cause) of the Crimean War. Until the religious wars
of our own age, it seemed implausible that a petty quarrel over some
churchwarden’s keys should entangle the great powers in a major war. In
some histories the Holy Lands dispute is used to illustrate the absurd
nature of this ‘silly’ and ‘unnecessary war’. In others, it appears as no
more than a trigger for the real cause of the war: the struggle of the
European powers for in uence in the Ottoman Empire. Wars are caused
by imperial rivalries, it is argued in these histories, by competition over
markets, or by the in uence of nationalist opinions at home. While all
this is true, it underestimates the importance of religion in the
nineteenth century (if the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the rise of
militant Islam have taught us anything, it is surely that religion plays a
vital role in fuelling wars). All the powers used religion as a means of
leverage in the Eastern Question, politics and faith were closely
intertwined in this imperial rivalry, and every nation, none more so than
Russia, went to war in the belief that God was on its side.

21
e Eastern Question’s con ict zone

22
23
 e Danube con ict zone

e Allied advance towards Sevastopol

24
e battle of the Alma

e Caucasus

25
e battle of Balaklava

26
27
e battle of Inkerman

e siege of Sevastopol

28
 1

Religious Wars
For weeks the pilgrims had been coming to Jerusalem for the Easter
festival. ey came from every corner of Eastern Europe and the Middle
East, from Egypt, Syria, Armenia, Anatolia, the Greek peninsula, but
most of all from Russia, travelling by sea to the port of Jaffa where they
hired camels or donkeys. By Good Friday, on 10 April 1846, there were
20,000 pilgrims in Jerusalem. ey rented any dwelling they could nd
or slept in family groups beneath the stars. To pay for their long journey
nearly all of them had brought some merchandise, a handmade cruci x
or ornament, strings of beads or pieces of embroidery, which they sold to
European tourists at the holy shrines. e square before the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre, the focus of their pilgrimage, was a busy
marketplace, with colourful displays of fruit and vegetables competing
for space with pilgrims’ wares and the smelly hides of goats and oxen le
out in the sun by the tanneries behind the church. Beggars, too, collected
here. ey frightened strangers into giving alms by threatening to touch
them with their leprous hands. Wealthy tourists had to be protected by
their Turkish guides, who hit the beggars with heavy sticks to clear a
path to the church doors.
In 1846 Easter fell on the same date in the Latin and Greek Orthodox
calendars, so the holy shrines were much more crowded than usual, and
the mood was very tense. e two religious communities had long been
arguing about who should have rst right to carry out their Good Friday
rituals on the altar of Calvary inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
the spot where the cross of Jesus was supposed to have been inserted in
the rock. During recent years the rivalry between the Latins and the
Greeks had reached such fever pitch that Mehmet Pasha, the Ottoman

29
governor of Jerusalem, had been forced to position soldiers inside and
outside the church to preserve order. But even this had not prevented
ghts from breaking out.
On this Good Friday the Latin priests arrived with their white linen
altar-cloth to nd that the Greeks had got there rst with their silk
embroidered cloth. e Catholics demanded to see the Greeks’ rman,
their decree from the Sultan in Constantinople, empowering them to
place their silk cloth on the altar rst. e Greeks demanded to see the
Latins’ rman allowing them to remove it. A ght broke out between the
priests, who were quickly joined by monks and pilgrims on either side.
Soon the whole church was a battle eld. e rival groups of worshippers
fought not only with their sts, but with cruci xes, candlesticks, chalices,
lamps and incense-burners, and even bits of wood which they tore from
the sacred shrines. e ghting continued with knives and pistols
smuggled into the Holy Sepulchre by worshippers of either side. By the
time the church was cleared by Mehmet Pasha’s guards, more than forty
people lay dead on the oor.1
‘See here what is done in the name of religion!’ wrote the English
social commentator Harriet Martineau, who travelled to the Holy Lands
of Palestine and Syria in 1846.
is Jerusalem is the most sacred place in the world, except Mekkeh, to the
Mohammedan: and to the Christian and the Jew, it is the most sacred place in the
world. What are they doing in this sanctuary of their common Father, as they all
declare it to be? Here are the Mohammedans eager to kill any Jew or Christian who
may enter the Mosque of Omar. ere are the Greeks and Latin Christians hating each
other, and ready to kill any Jew or Mohammedan who may enter the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre. And here are the Jews, pleading against their enemies, in the vengeful
language of their ancient prophets.2
e rivalry between the Christian Churches was intensi ed by the
rapid growth in the number of pilgrims to Palestine in the nineteenth
century. Railways and steamships made mass travel possible, opening up

30
the region to tour-groups of Catholics from France and Italy and to the
devout middle classes of Europe and America. e various Churches
vied with one another for in uence. ey set up missions to support
their pilgrims, competed over purchases of land, endowed bishoprics
and monasteries, and established schools to convert the Orthodox Arabs
(mainly Syrian and Lebanese), the largest but least educated Christian
community in the Holy Lands.
‘Within the last two years considerable presents have been sent to
Jerusalem to decorate the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by the Russian,
French, Neapolitan and Sardinian governments,’ reported William
Young, the British consul in Palestine and Syria, to Lord Palmerston at
the Foreign Office in 1839.
ere are many symptoms of increasing jealousy and inimical feeling among the
churches. e petty quarrels that have always existed between the Latin, Greek and
Armenian convents were of little moment so long as their differences were settled from
time to time by the one giving a larger bribe to the Turkish authorities than the other.
But that day passes by, for these countries are now no longer closed against European
intrigue in church matters.3
Between 1842 and 1847 there was a urry of activity in Jerusalem:
the Anglicans founded a bishopric; the Austrians set up a Franciscan
printing press; the French established a consulate in Jerusalem and
pumped money into schools and churches for the Catholics; Pope Pius
IX re-established a resident Latin patriarch, the rst since the Crusades
of the twelh century; the Greek patriarch returned from
Constantinople to tighten his hold on the Orthodox; and the Russians
sent an ecclesiastical mission, which led to the foundation of a Russian
compound with a hostel, hospital, chapel, school and marketplace to
support the large and growing number of Russian pilgrims.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Russian Orthodox
Church sent more pilgrims to Jerusalem than any other branch of the
Christian faith. Every year up to 15,000 Russian pilgrims would arrive in

31
Jerusalem for the Easter festival, some even making the long trek on foot
across Russia and the Caucasus, through Anatolia and Syria. For the
Russians, the holy shrines of Palestine were objects of intense and
passionate devotion: to make a pilgrimage to them was the highest
possible expression of their faith.
In some ways the Russians saw the Holy Lands as an extension of
their spiritual motherland. e idea of ‘Holy Russia’ was not contained
by any territorial boundaries; it was an empire of the Orthodox with
sacred shrines throughout the lands of Eastern Christianity and with the
Holy Sepulchre as its mother church. ‘Palestine’, wrote one Russian
theologian in the 1840s, ‘is our native land, in which we do not recognize
ourselves as foreigners.’4 Centuries of pilgrimage had laid the basis of this
claim, establishing a link between the Russian Church and the Holy
Places (connected with the life of Christ in Bethlehem, Jerusalem and
Nazareth) which many Russians counted more important – the basis of a
higher spiritual authority – than the temporal and political sovereignty
of the Ottomans in Palestine.
Nothing like this ardour could be found among the Catholics or
Protestants, for whom the Holy Places were objects of historical interest
and romantic sentiment rather than religious devotion. e travel writer
and historian Alexander Kinglake thought that ‘the closest likeness of a
pilgrim which the Latin Church could supply was oen a mere French
tourist with a journal and a theory and a plan of writing a book’.
European tourists were repelled by the intense passion of the Orthodox
pilgrims, whose strange rituals struck them as ‘barbaric’ and as
‘degrading superstitions’. Martineau refused to go to the Holy Sepulchre
to see the washing of the pilgrims’ feet on Good Friday. ‘I could not go to
witness mummeries done in the name of Christianity,’ she wrote,
‘compared with which the lowest fetishism on the banks of an African
river would have been inoffensive.’ For the same reason, she would not

32
go to the ceremony of the Holy Fire on Easter Saturday, when thousands
of Orthodox worshippers squeezed into the Holy Sepulchre to light their
torches from the miraculous ames that appeared from the tomb of
Christ. Rival groups of Orthodox – Greeks, Bulgarians, Moldavians,
Serbians and Russians – would jostle with each other to light their
candles rst; ghts would start; and sometimes worshippers were
crushed to death or suffocated in the smoke. Baron Curzon, who
witnessed one such scene in 1834, described the ceremony as a ‘scene of
disorder and profanation’ in which the pilgrims, ‘almost in a state of
nudity, danced about with frantic gestures, yelling and screaming as if
they were possessed’.5
It is hardly surprising that a Unitarian such as Martineau or an
Anglican like Curzon should have been so hostile to such rituals:
demonstrations of religious emotion had long been effaced from the
Protestant Church. Like many tourists in the Holy Land, they sensed that
they had less in common with the Orthodox pilgrims, whose wild
behaviour seemed barely Christian at all, than with the relatively secular
Muslims, whose strict reserve and dignity were more in sympathy with
their own private forms of quiet prayer. Attitudes like theirs were to
in uence the formation of Western policies towards Russia in the
diplomatic disputes about the Holy Land which would eventually lead to
the Crimean War.
Unaware of and indifferent to the importance of the Holy Lands to
Russia’s spiritual identity, European commentators saw only a growing
Russian menace to the interests of the Western Churches there. In the
early 1840s, Young, now the British consul, sent regular reports to the
Foreign Office about the steady build-up of ‘Russian agents’ in Jerusalem
– their aim being, in his view, to prepare a ‘Russian conquest of the Holy
Lands’ through sponsored pilgrimage and purchases of land for
Orthodox churches and monasteries. is was certainly a time when the

33
Russian ecclesiastical mission was exerting its in uence on the Greek,
Armenian and Arab Orthodox communities by nancing churches,
schools and hostels in Palestine and Syria (an activism resisted by the
Foreign Ministry in St Petersburg, which rightly feared that such
activities might antagonize the Western powers). Young’s reports about
Russia’s conquest plans were increasingly hysterical. ‘e pilgrims of
Russia have been heard to speak openly of the period being at hand
when this country will be under the Russian government,’ he wrote to
Palmerston in 1840. ‘e Russians could in one night during Easter arm
10,000 pilgrims within the walls of Jerusalem. e convents in the city
are spacious and, at a tri ing expense, might be converted into
fortresses.’ British fears of this ‘Russian plan’ accelerated Anglican
initiatives, eventually leading to the foundation of the rst Anglican
church in Jerusalem in 1845.6
But it was the French who were most alarmed by the growing
Russian presence in the Holy Lands. According to French Catholics,
France had a long historical connection to Palestine going back to the
Crusades. In French Catholic opinion, this conferred on France, Europe’s
‘ rst Catholic nation’, a special mission to protect the faith in the Holy
Lands, despite the marked decline of Latin pilgrimage in recent years.
‘We have a heritage to conserve there, an interest to defend,’ declared the
Catholic provincial press. ‘Centuries will pass before the Russians shed a
fraction of the blood that the French spilled in the Crusades for the Holy
Places. e Russians took no part in the Crusades… . e primacy of
France among the Christian nations is so well established in the Orient
that the Turks call Christian Europe Frankistan, the country of the
French.’7
To counteract the growing Russian presence and cement their role as
the main protector of the Catholics in Palestine, the French set up a
consulate in Jerusalem in 1843 (an outraged Muslim crowd, hostile to

34
the in uence of the Western powers, soon tore the godless tricolour
from its mast). At Latin services in the Holy Sepulchre and the Church
of the Nativity in Bethlehem the French consul began to appear in full
dress uniform with a large train of officials. For the midnight Christmas
Mass in Bethlehem he was accompanied by a large force of infantry
furnished by Mehmet Pasha but paid for by France.8
Fights between the Latins and the Orthodox were as common at the
Church of the Nativity as they were at the Holy Sepulchre. For years they
had squabbled about whether Latin monks should have a key to the
main church (of which the Greeks were the guardians) so that they could
pass through it to the Chapel of the Manger, which belonged to the
Catholics; whether they should have a key to the Grotto of the Nativity,
an ancient cave beneath the church thought to be the place where Christ
was born; and whether they should be allowed to put into the marble
oor of the Grotto, on the supposed location of the Nativity, a silver star
adorned with the arms of France and inscribed in Latin: ‘Here Jesus
Christ was born of the Virgin Mary’. e star had been placed there by
the French in the eighteenth century, but had always been resented as a
‘badge of conquest’ by the Greeks. In 1847 the silver star was stolen; the
tools used to wrench it from the marble oor were abandoned at the site.
e Latins immediately accused the Greeks of carrying out the crime.
Only recently the Greeks had built a wall to prevent the Latin priests
from accessing the Grotto, and this had ended in a brawl between the
Latin and Greek priests. Aer the removal of the silver star, the French
launched a diplomatic protest to the Porte, the Ottoman government in
Constantinople, citing a long-neglected treaty of 1740 which they
claimed secured the rights of the Catholics to the Grotto for the upkeep
of the silver star. But the Greeks had rival claims based on custom and
concessions by the Porte.9 is small con ict over a church key was in

35
fact the start of a diplomatic crisis over the control of the Holy Places
that would have profound consequences.
Along with the keys to the church at Bethlehem, the French claimed
for the Catholics a right to repair the roof of the Holy Sepulchre, also
based on the treaty of 1740. e roof was in urgent need of attention.
Most of the lead on one side had been stripped off (the Greeks and the
Latins each accusing the other side of having done this). Rain came
through the roof and birds ew freely in the church. Under Turkish law,
whoever owned the roof of a house was the owner of that house. So the
right to carry out the repairs was ercely disputed by the Latins and the
Greeks on the grounds that it would establish them in the eyes of the
Turks as the legitimate protectors of the Holy Sepulchre. Against the
French, Russia backed the counterclaims of the Orthodox, appealing to
the 1774 Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, signed by the Turks aer their defeat
by Russia in the war of 1768–74. According to the Russians, the Treaty of
Kuchuk Kainarji had given them a right to represent the interests of the
Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire. is was a long way from the truth.
e language of the treaty was ambiguous and easily distorted by
translations into various languages (the Russians signed the treaty in
Russian and Italian, the Turks in Turkish and Italian, and then it was
translated by the Russians into French for diplomatic purposes).10 But
Russian pressure on the Porte ensured that the Latins would not get their
way. e Turks temporized and fudged the issue with conciliatory noises
to both sides.
e con ict deepened in May 1851, when Louis-Napoleon appointed
his close friend the Marquis Charles de La Valette as ambassador in the
Turkish capital. Two and a half years aer his election as President of
France, Napoleon was still struggling to assert his power over the
National Assembly. To strengthen his position he had made a series of
concessions to Catholic opinion: in 1849 French troops had returned the

36
Pope to Rome aer he had been forced out of the Vatican by
revolutionary crowds; and the Falloux Law of 1850 had opened the way
to an increase in the number of Catholic-run schools. e appointment
of La Valette was another major concession to clerical opinion. e
Marquis was a zealous Catholic, a leading gure in the shadowy ‘clerical
party’ which was widely viewed as pulling the hidden strings of France’s
foreign policy. e in uence of this clerical faction was particularly
strong on France’s policies towards the Holy Places, where it called for a
rm stand against the Orthodox menace. La Valette went well beyond
his remit when he took up his position as ambassador. On his way to
Constantinople he made an unscheduled stop in Rome to persuade the
Pope to support the French claims for the Catholics in the Holy Lands.
Installed in Constantinople, he made a point of using aggressive
language in his dealings with the Porte – a tactic, he explained, to ‘make
the Sultan and his ministers recoil and capitulate’ to French interests. e
Catholic press rallied behind La Valette, especially the in uential Journal
des débats, whose editor was a close friend of his. La Valette, in turn, fed
the press with quotations that in amed the situation and enraged the
Tsar, Nicholas I.11
In August 1851 the French formed a joint commission with the
Turks to discuss the issue of religious rights. e commission dragged on
inconclusively as the Turks carefully weighed up the competing Greek
and Latin claims. Before its work could be completed, La Valette
proclaimed that the Latin right was ‘clearly established’, meaning that
there was no need for the negotiations to go on. He talked of France
‘being justi ed in a recourse to extreme measures’ to support the Latin
right, and boasted of ‘her superior naval forces in the Mediterranean’ as a
means of enforcing French interests.
It is doubtful whether La Valette had the approval of Napoleon for
such an explicit threat of war. Napoleon was not particularly interested

37
in religion. He was ignorant about the details of the Holy Lands dispute,
and basically defensive in the Middle East. But it is possible and perhaps
even likely that Napoleon was happy for La Valette to provoke a crisis
with Russia. He was keen to explore anything that would come between
the three powers (Britain, Russia, Austria) that had isolated France from
the Concert of Europe and subjected it to the ‘galling treaties’ of the 1815
settlement following the defeat of his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte. Louis-
Napoleon had reasonable grounds for hoping that a new system of
alliances might emerge from the dispute in the Holy Lands: Austria was
a Catholic country, and might be persuaded to side with France against
Orthodox Russia, while Britain had its own imperial interests to defend
against the Russians in the Near East. Whatever lay behind it, La Valette’s
premeditated act of aggression infuriated the Tsar, who warned the
Sultan that any recognition of the Latin claims would violate existing
treaties between the Porte and Russia, forcing him to break off
diplomatic relations with the Ottomans. is sudden turn of events
alerted Britain, which had previously encouraged France to reach a
compromise, but now had to prepare for the possibility of war.12
e war would not actually begin for another two years, but when it
did the con agration it unleashed was fuelled by the religious passions
that had been building over centuries.
*
More than any other power, the Russian Empire had religion at its
heart. e tsarist system organized its subjects through their
confessional status; it understood its boundaries and international
commitments almost entirely in terms of faith.
In the founding ideology of the tsarist state, which gained new force
through Russian nationalism in the nineteeth century, Moscow was the
last remaining capital of Othodoxy, the ‘ird Rome’, following the fall of
Constantinople, the centre of Byzantium, to the Turks in 1453.

38
According to this ideology, it was part of Russia’s divine mission in the
world to liberate the Orthodox from the Islamic empire of the Ottomans
and restore Constantinople as the seat of Eastern Christianity. e
Russian Empire was conceived as an Orthodox crusade. From the defeat
of the Mongol khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the sixteenth century
to the conquest of the Crimea, the Caucasus and Siberia in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia’s imperial identity was
practically de ned by the con ict between Christian settlers and Tatar
nomads on the Eurasian steppe. is religious boundary was always
more important than any ethnic one in the de nition of the Russian
national consciousness: the Russian was Orthodox and the foreigner was
of a different faith.
Religion was at the heart of Russia’s wars against the Turks, who by
the middle of the nineteenth century had 10 million Orthodox subjects
(Greeks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Moldavians, Wallachians and Serbs) in
their European territories and something in the region of another 3 to 4
million Christians (Armenians, Georgians and a small number of
Abkhazians) in the Caucasus and Anatolia.13
On the northern borders of the Ottoman Empire a defensive line of
fortresses stretched from Belgrade in the Balkans to Kars in the
Caucasus. is was the line along which all of Turkey’s wars with Russia
had been fought since the latter half of the seventeenth century (in
1686–99, 1710–11, 1735–9, 1768–74, 1787–92, 1806–12 and 1828–9).
e Crimean War and the later Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8 were no
exceptions to the rule. e borderlands defended by these fortresses
were religious battlegrounds, the fault-line between Orthodoxy and
Islam.
Two regions, in particular, were vital in these Russo-Turkish wars:
the Danube delta (encompassing the principalities of Moldavia and
Wallachia) and the Black Sea northern coast (including the Crimean

39
peninsula). ey were to become the two main theatres of the Crimean
War.
With its wide rivers and pestilent marshes, the Danube delta was a
crucial buffer zone protecting Constantinople from a land attack by the
Russians. Danubian food supplies were essential for the Turkish
fortresses, as they were for any Russian army attacking the Ottoman
capital, so the allegiance of the peasant population was a vital factor in
these wars. e Russians appealed to the Orthodox religion of the
peasantry in an attempt to get them on their side for a war of liberation
against Muslim rule, while the Turks themselves adopted scorched-earth
policies. Hunger and disease repeatedly defeated the advancing Russians,
as they marched into the Danubian lands whose crops had been
destroyed by the retreating Turks. Any attack on the Turkish capital
would thus depend on the Russians setting up a sea route – through the
Black Sea – to bring supplies to the attacking troops.
But the Black Sea northern coast and the Crimea were also used by
the Ottomans as a buffer zone against Russia. Rather than colonize the
area, the Ottomans relied on their vassals there, the Turkic-speaking
Tatar tribes of the Crimean khanate, to protect the borders of Islam
against Christian invaders. Ruled by the Giray dynasty, the direct
descendants of Genghiz Khan himself, the Crimean khanate was the last
surviving outpost of the Golden Horde. From the eenth to the
eighteenth century its army of horsemen had the run of the southern
steppes between Russia and the Black Sea coast. Raiding into Muscovy,
the Tatars provided a regular supply of Slavic slaves for sale in the sex-
markets and rowing-galleys of Constantinople. e tsars of Russia and
the kings of Poland paid tribute to the khan to keep his men away.14
From the end of the seventeenth century, when it gained possession
of Ukraine, Russia began a century-long struggle to wrench these buffer
zones from Ottoman control. e warm-water ports of the Black Sea, so

40
essential for the development of Russian trade and naval power, were the
strategic objects in this war, but religious interests were never far behind.
us, aer the defeat of the Ottomans by Russia and its allies in 1699,
Peter the Great demanded from the Turks a guarantee of the Greek
rights at the Holy Sepulchre and free access for all Russians to the Holy
Lands. e struggle for the Danubian principalities (Moldavia and
Wallachia) was also in part a religious war. In the Russo-Turkish con ict
of 1710–11 Peter ordered Russian troops to cross the River Pruth and
invade the principalities in the hope of provoking an uprising by their
Christian population against the Turks. e uprising did not materialize.
But the idea that Russia could appeal to its co-religionists in the
Ottoman Empire to undermine the Turks remained at the centre of
tsarist policy for the next two hundred years.
e policy took formal shape in the reign of Catherine the Great
(1762–96). Aer their decisive defeat of the Ottomans in the war of
1768–74, during which they had reoccupied the principalities, the
Russians demanded relatively little from the Turks in terms of territory,
before withdrawing from the principalities. e resulting Treaty of
Kuchuk Kainarji granted them only a small stretch of the Black Sea
coastline between the Dnieper and Bug rivers (including the port of
Kherson), the Kabarda region of the Causasus, and the Crimean ports of
Kerch and Enikale, where the Sea of Azov joins the Black Sea, although
the treaty forced the Ottomans to surrender their sovereignty over the
Crimean khanate and give independence to the Tatars. e treaty also
gave Russian shipping free passage through the Dardanelles, the narrow
Turkish Straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. But if the
Russians did not gain a lot of territory, they gained substantial rights to
interfere in Ottoman affairs for the protection of the Orthodox. Kuchuk
Kainarji restored the principalities to their former status under Ottoman
sovereignty, but the Russians assumed the right of protection over the

41
Orthodox population. e treaty also granted Russia permission to build
an Orthodox church in Constantinople – a treaty right the Russians took
to mean a broader right to represent the sultan’s Orthodox subjects. It
allowed the Christian merchants of the Ottoman Empire (Greeks,
Armenians, Moldavians and Wallachians) to sail their ships in Turkish
waters with a Russian ag, an important concession that allowed the
Russians to advance their commercial and religious interests at the same
time. ese religious claims had some interesting pragmatic
rami cations. Since the Russians could not annex the Danubian
principalities without incurring the opposition of the great powers, they
looked instead to win concessions from the Porte that would turn the
principalities into semi-autonomous regions under Russian in uence.
Shared religious loyalties would, in time, they hoped, lead to alliances
with the Moldavians and Wallachians which would weaken Ottoman
authority and ensure Russian domination over south-east Europe should
the Ottoman Empire collapse.
Encouraged by victory against Turkey, Catherine also pursued a
policy of collaboration with the Greeks, whose religious interests she
claimed Russia had a treaty right and obligation to protect. Catherine
sent military agents into Greece, trained Greek officers in her military
schools, invited Greek traders and seamen to settle in her new towns on
the Black Sea coast, and encouraged Greeks in their belief that Russia
would support their movement for national liberation from the Turks.
More than any other Russian ruler, Catherine identi ed with the Greek
cause. Under the growing in uence of her most senior military
commander, statesman and court favourite Prince Grigory Potemkin,
Catherine even dreamed of re-creating the old Byzantine Empire on the
ruins of the Ottoman. e French philosopher Voltaire, with whom the
Empress corresponded, addressed her as ‘votre majesté impériale de
l’église grecque’, while Baron Friedrich Grimm, her favourite German

42
correspondent, referred to her as ‘l’Impératrice des Grecs’. Catherine
conceived this Hellenic empire as a vast Orthodox imperium protected
by Russia, whose Slavonic tongue had once been the lingua franca of the
Byzantine Empire, according (erroneously) to the rst great historian of
Russia, Vasily Tatishchev. e Empress gave the name of Constantine –
aer both the rst and the nal emperor of Byzantium – to her second
grandson. To commemorate his birth in 1779, she had minted special
silver coins with the image of the great St Sophia church (Hagia Sophia)
in Constantinople, cruelly converted into a mosque since the Ottoman
conquest. Instead of a minaret, the coin showed an Orthodox cross on
the cupola of the former Byzantine basilica. To educate her grandson to
become the ruler of this resurrected Eastern Empire, the Russian
Empress brought nurses from Naxos to teach him Greek, a language
which he spoke with great facility as an adult.15
It was always unclear how serious she was about this ‘Greek Project’.
In the form that it was drawn up by Count Bezborodko, her private
secretary and virtual Foreign Minister, in 1780, the project involved
nothing less than the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, the division of
their Balkan territories between Russia and Austria, and the ‘re-
establishment of the ancient Greek empire’ with Constantinople as its
capital. Catherine discussed the project with the Austrian Emperor
Joseph II in 1781. ey agreed on its desirability in an exchange of letters
over the next year. But whether they intended to carry out the plan
remains uncertain. Some historians have concluded that the Greek
project was no more than a piece of neoclassical iconography, or political
theatre, like the ‘Potemkin villages’, which played no real part in Russia’s
foreign policy. But even if there was no concrete plan for immediate
action, it does at least seem fairly clear that the project formed a part of
Catherine’s general aims for the Russian Empire as a Black Sea power
linked through trade and religion to the Orthodox world of the eastern

43
Mediterranean, including Jerusalem. In the words of Catherine’s
favourite poet, Gavril Derzhavin, who was also one of Russia’s most
important statesmen in her reign, the aim of the Greek project was
To advance through a Crusade,
To purify the Jordan River,
To liberate the Holy Sepulchre,
To return Athens to the Athenians,
Constantinople – to Constantine
And re-establish Japheth’s Holy Land.*
‘Ode on the Capture of Izmail’
It was certainly more than political theatre when Catherine and
Joseph, accompanied by a large international entourage, toured the Black
Sea ports. e Empress visited the building sites of new Russian towns
and military bases, passing under archways erected by Potemkin in her
honour and inscribed with the words ‘e Road to Byzantium’.16 Her
journey was a statement of intent.
Catherine believed that Russia had to turn towards the south if it was
to be a great power. It was not enough for it to export furs and timber
through the Baltic ports, as in the days of medieval Muscovy. To
compete with the European powers it had to develop trading outlets for
the agricultural produce of its fertile southern lands and build up a naval
presence in the warm-water ports of the Black Sea from which its ships
could gain entry to the Mediterranean. Because of the odd geography of
Russia, the Black Sea was crucial, not just to the military defence of the
Russian Empire on its southern frontier with the Muslim world, but also
to its viability as a power on the European continent. Without the Black
Sea, Russia had no access to Europe by the sea, except via the Baltic,
which could easily be blocked by the other northern powers in the event
of a European con ict (as indeed it would be by the British during the
Crimean War).

44
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 Newport was reached, after an all-night journey, at about two
o’clock in the morning. The canoeists went straight to the freight-
house to inspect the canoes. They were all there, resting on the
heads of a long row of barrels, and were apparently all right. The
varnish of the Dawn and the Sunshine was scratched in a few
places, and the canvas canoe had a very small hole punched
through her deck, as if she had been too intimate with a nail in the
course of her journey. The boys were, however, well satisfied with
the appearance of the boats, and so walked up to the hotel to get
dinner and a supply of sandwiches, bread, and eggs for their supper.
Dinner was all ready, for, under the name of breakfast, it was
waiting for the passengers of the train, which made a stop of half an
hour at Newport. A band was playing on the deck of a steamer which
was just about to start down the lake, and the boys displayed
appetites, as they sat near the open window looking out on the
beautiful landscape, which rather astonished the waiter.
A good, quiet place for launching the canoes was found, which
was both shady and out of sight of the hotel. It was easy enough to
carry the three empty canoes down to the shore; but the Sunshine,
with her heavy cargo, proved too great a load, and about half-way
between the freight-house and the shore she had to be laid on the
ground and partly emptied. Here Joe, who tried to carry the spars
and paddles of four canoes on his shoulder, found that there is
nothing more exasperating than a load of sticks of different sizes. No
matter how firmly he tried to hold them together, they would spread
apart at every imaginable angle. Before he had gone three rods he
looked like some new kind of porcupine with gigantic quills sticking
out all over him. Then he began to drop things, and, stooping to pick
them up, managed to trip himself and fall with a tremendous clatter.
He picked himself up and made sixteen journeys between the spot
where he fell and the shore of the lake, carrying only one spar at a
time, and grasping that with both hands. His companions sat down
on the grass and laughed to see the deliberate way in which he
made his successive journeys, but Joe, with a perfectly serious face,
said that he was going to get the better of those spars, no matter
how much trouble it might cost him, and that he was not going to
allow them to get together and play tricks on him again.

“SHE’S HALF FULL OF WATER.”

It was tiresome stooping over, packing the canoes, but finally they
were all in order, and the Commodore gave the order to launch
them. The lake was perfectly calm, and the little fleet started under
paddle for a long, sandy point that jutted out into the lake some three
miles from Newport. The Sunshine and the Dawn paddled side by
side, and the two other canoes followed close behind them.
“Boys, isn’t this perfectly elegant?” exclaimed Harry, laying down
his paddle when the fleet was about a mile from the shore and
bathing his hot head with water from the lake. “Did you ever see
anything so lovely as this blue water?”
“Yes,” said Charley; “the water’s all right outside of the canoes, but
I’d rather have a little less inside of mine.”
“What do you mean,” asked Harry. “Is she leaking?”
“She’s half full of water, that’s all,” replied Charley, beginning to
bail vigorously with his hat.
“Halloo!” cried Joe, suddenly. “Here’s the water up to the top of my
cushions.”
“We’d better paddle on and get ashore as soon as possible,” said
Harry. “My boat is leaking a little too.”
 Charley bailed steadily for ten minutes, and somewhat reduced
the amount of water in his canoe. The moment he began paddling,
however, the leak increased. He paddled with his utmost strength,
knowing that if he did not soon reach land he would be swamped;
but the water-logged canoe was very heavy, and he could not drive
her rapidly through the water. His companions kept near him, and
advised him to drop his paddle and to bail, but he knew that the
water was coming in faster than he could bail it out, and so he
wasted no time in the effort. It soon became evident that his canoe
would never keep afloat to reach the sand-spit for which he had
been steering, so he turned aside and paddled for a little clump of
rushes, where he knew the water must be shallow. Suddenly he
stopped paddling, and almost at the same moment his canoe sunk
under him, and he sprung up to swim clear of her.
 Chapter III.
LUCKILY the water was only four feet deep, as Charley found when
he tried to touch bottom; so he stopped swimming, and, with the
water nearly up to his shoulders, stood still and began to think what
to do next.
The canoes—including the sunken Midnight—were a good mile
from the shore, and although the sandy shoal on which Charley was
standing was firm and hard it was of small extent, and the water all
around it was too deep to be waded.
“You’ll have to get into one of our canoes,” said Harry.
“How am I going to do it without capsizing her?” replied Charley.
“I don’t believe it can be done,” said Harry, as he looked first at the
Sunshine and then at the Twilight; “but then you’ve got to do it
somehow. You can’t swim a whole mile, can you?”
“Of course I can’t, but then it wouldn’t do me any good to spill one
of you fellows by trying to climb out of the water into a canoe that’s
as full now as she ought to be. Besides, I’m not going to desert the
Midnight.”
“I thought the Midnight had deserted you,” said Joe. “If my canoe
should go to the bottom of the lake without giving me any warning, I
shouldn’t think it a bit rude to leave her there.”
“Don’t talk nonsense!” exclaimed Charley; “but come here and
help me get my canoe afloat again. We can do it, I think, if we go to
work the right way.”
 Charley found no difficulty in getting hold of the painter of his
canoe with the help of his paddle. Giving the end of the painter to
Joe, he took the Dawn’s painter, and by ducking down under the
water succeeded after two or three attempts in reeving it through the
stern-post of the sunken canoe, and giving one end to Harry and the
other to Tom. Then, taking the bow painter from Joe, he grasped it
firmly with both hands, and at a given signal all the boys, except Joe,
made a desperate effort to bring the wreck to the surface.
They could not do it. They managed to raise her off the bottom,
but Harry and Tom in their canoes could not lift to any advantage,
and so were forced to let her settle down again.
“I’ve got to unload her,” said Charley, gloomily. “I think we can get
her up if there is nothing in her except water. Anyhow we’ve got to
try.”
It was tiresome work to get the water-soaked stores and canned
provisions out of the canoe, and Charley had to duck his head under
the water at least a dozen times before the heaviest part of the
Midnight’s cargo could be brought up and passed into the other
canoes. His comrades wanted to jump overboard and help him, but
he convinced them that they would have great difficulty in climbing
back into their canoes, and that in all probability they would capsize
themselves in so doing. “He’s right!” cried Joe. “Commodore, please
make an order that hereafter only one canoe shall be wrecked at a
time. We must keep some dry stores in the fleet.”
When the Midnight was partly unloaded a new and successful
effort was made to raise her. As soon as she reached the surface
Charley rolled her over, bottom upward, and in this position the small
amount of air imprisoned under her kept her afloat.
The cause of the leak was quickly discovered. There was a hole
through her canvas bottom nearly an inch in diameter, made by
some blow she had received while on the way to the lake. The
wonder was, not that she sunk when she did, but that she had
floated long enough to be paddled a mile. It is probable that the
ballast-bag, which was close by the hole, had partly stopped the leak
at first, but had afterward been slightly moved, thus permitting the
water to rush freely in.
The surface of painted canvas dries very quickly in the hot sun,
and it was not long before the bottom of the Midnight was dry
enough to be temporarily patched. Harry lighted his spirit-lamp and
melted a little of the lump of rosin and tallow which had been
provided for mending leaks. This was spread over a patch of new
canvas: the patch was then placed over the hole, and more of the
melted rosin and tallow smeared over it. In about fifteen minutes the
patch was dry enough to be serviceable, and Charley righted the
canoe, hailed her out, and by throwing himself across the cockpit,
and then carefully turning himself so as to get his legs into it, found
himself once more afloat and ready to paddle.
The canoe still leaked, but the leak could be kept under without
difficulty by occasional bailing, and in the course of half an hour the
sand-spit for which the fleet had started was reached. It was part of a
large island with steep, rocky shores and a beautiful little sandy
beach. It was just the place for a camp; and though the boys had
expected to camp some miles farther north, the sinking of Charley’s
canoe had so delayed them that it was already nearly six o’clock,
and they therefore decided to paddle no farther that day.

A STAMPEDE IN CAMP.
 The canoes were hauled out on the beach, and unloaded and
shored up with their rudders, backboards, and a few pieces of drift-
wood so as to stand on an even keel. Then came the work of rigging
shelters over them for the night. Harry’s canoe-tent was supported
by four small upright sticks resting on the deck and fitting into cross-
pieces sewed into the roof of the tent. The sides and ends buttoned
down to the gunwale and deck of the canoe, and two curtains, one
on each side, which could be rolled up like carriage-curtains in fair
weather and buttoned down in rainy weather, served both as the
doors and windows of the tent. The shelters rigged by the other boys
were much less complete. The two masts of each canoe were
stepped, the paddle was lashed between them, and a rubber blanket
was hung over the paddle, with its edges reaching nearly to the
ground. The blankets and the bags which served as pillows were
then arranged, and the canoes were ready for the night.
It was a warm and clear night, and a breeze which came up from
the south at sunset blew the mosquitoes away. Harry found his tent,
with the curtains rolled up, cool and pleasant; but his fellow-
canoeists found themselves fairly suffocating under their rubber
blankets, and were compelled to throw them aside.
Toward morning, when the day was just beginning to dawn, the
canoeists were suddenly awakened by a rush of many heavy,
trampling feet which shook the ground. It was enough to startle any
one, and the boys sprung up in such a hurry that Harry struck his
head against the roof of his tent, knocked it down, upset the canoe,
and could not at first decide whether he was taking part in a railway
collision or whether an earthquake of the very best quality had
happened. The cause of the disturbance was a herd of horses
trotting down to the water’s edge to drink. There were at least twenty
of them, and had the canoes happened to be in their path they might
have stumbled over them in the faint morning light; in which case the
boys would have had the experience of being shipwrecked on dry
land.
A gentle southerly breeze wrinkled the water while breakfast was
cooking, and the Commodore ordered that the masts and sails
should be got ready for use. It was impossible to make an early start,
for Charley’s blankets had to be dried in the sun, and the hole in his
canoe had to be repaired with a new patch in a thorough and
workmanlike way. It was, therefore, ten o’clock before the canoes
were ready to be launched; and in the mean time the wind had
increased so much that the boys decided to use only their main-
sails.
The moment the sails drew the canoes shot off at a pace which
filled the young canoeists with delight. The canoes were in good trim
for sailing, as they were not overloaded; and while they were skirting
the west shore of the island the water was quite smooth. Each canoe
carried a bag partly filled with sand for ballast, and every one except
Joe had lashed his ballast-bag to the keelson. This was a precaution
which Joe had forgotten to take, and before long he had good
reason to regret his error.
As soon as the northern end of the island was passed the canoes
came to a part of the lake where there was quite a heavy sea. The
Dawn and the Twilight were steered by the paddle, which passed
through a row-lock provided for the purpose; and Joe and Tom found
little difficulty in keeping their canoes directly before the wind. The
two other canoes were steered with rudders, and occasionally, when
their bows dipped, their rudders were thrown nearly out of the water,
in consequence of which they steered wildly. All the canoes showed
a tendency to roll a good deal, and now and then a little water would
wash over the deck. It was fine sport running down the lake with
such a breeze, and the boys enjoyed it immensely.
The wind continued to rise, and the lake became covered with
white-caps. “Commodore,” said Charley Smith, “I don’t mean to
show any disrespect to my commanding officer, but it seems to me
this is getting a little risky.”
“How is it risky?” asked Harry. “You’re a sailor and know twice as
much about boats as I do, if I am Commodore.”
“It’s risky in two or three ways. For instance, if the wind blows like
this much longer a following sea will swamp some one of us.”
 “Oh! we’re going fast enough to keep out of the way of the sea,”
cried Joe.
“Just notice how your canoe comes almost to a dead stop every
time she sinks between two seas, and you won’t feel quite so sure
that you’re running faster than the sea is.”
The boys saw that Charley was right. The canoes were so light
that they lost their headway between the seas, and it was evident
that they were in danger of being overtaken by a following sea.
“Tell us two or three more dangers, just to cheer us up, won’t
you?” asked Joe, who was in high spirits with the excitement of the
sail.
“There’s the danger of rolling our booms under, and there is a
great deal of danger that Harry’s canoe and mine will broach-to
when our rudders are out of water.”
“What will happen if they do broach-to?”
“They’ll capsize, that’s all,” replied Charley.
“What had we better do?” asked Harry. “There’s no use in
capsizing ourselves in the middle of the lake.”
“My advice is that we haul on the port tack, and run over to the
west shore. The moment we get this wind and sea on the quarter we
shall be all right—though, to be sure, we’ve got more sail up than we
ought to have.”
The canoes were quite near together, with the exception of the
Twilight, which was outsailing the others; but even she was still near
enough to be hailed. Harry hailed her, and ordered the fleet to steer
for a cove on the west shore. As soon as the wind was brought on
the port quarter the canoes increased their speed; and although the
Twilight made more leeway than the others, she drew ahead of them
very fast. The wind was now precisely what the canoes wanted to
bring out their sailing qualities. The Sunshine soon showed that she
was the most weatherly, as the Twilight was the least weatherly, of
the fleet. The Midnight kept up very fairly with the Sunshine; and the
Dawn, with her small lateen-sail, skimmed over the water so fast that
it was evident that if she could have carried the big balance-lug of
the Sunshine she would easily have beaten her.
The canoes were no longer in danger of being swamped; but the
wind continuing to rise, the boys found that they were carrying more
sail than was safe. They did not want to take in their sails and
paddle, and though all of the sails except the Dawn’s lateen could be
reefed, nobody wanted to be the first to propose to reef; and Harry,
in his excitement, forgot all about reefing. The wind, which had been
blowing very steadily, now began to blow in gusts, and the boys had
to lean far out to windward to keep their canoes right side up.
“We can’t keep on this way much longer without coming to grief,”
Charley cried at the top of his lungs, so that Harry, who was some
distance to windward, could hear him.
“What do you say?” replied Harry.
“We’ve got too much sail on,” yelled Charley.
“Of course we’ll sail on. This is perfectly gorgeous!” was Harry’s
answer.
“He don’t hear,” said Charley. “I say, Joe, you’d better take in your
main-sail, and set the dandy in its place. You’ll spill yourself
presently.”
“The dandy’s stowed down below, where I can’t get at it. I guess I
can hold her up till we get across.”
Tom was by this time far out of hailing distance, and was
apparently getting on very well. Charley did not doubt that he could
manage his own canoe well enough, but he was very uneasy about
Harry and Joe, who did not seem to realize that they were carrying
sail altogether too recklessly. The fleet was nearly two miles from the
shore, and a capsize in the heavy sea that was running would have
been no joke.
Charley turned part way around in his canoe to see if his life-belt
was in handy reach. As he did so he saw that the water a quarter of
a mile to windward was black with a fierce squall that was
approaching. He instantly brought his canoe up to the wind, so that
the squall would strike him on the port bow, and called out to Harry
and Joe to follow his example. Harry did not hear him, and Joe,
instead of promptly following Charley’s advice, stopped to wonder
what he was trying to do. The squall explained the matter almost
immediately. It struck the Sunshine and the Dawn, and instantly
capsized them, and then rushed on to overtake Tom, and to
convince him that Lake Memphremagog is not a good place for
inexperienced canoeists who want to carry sail recklessly in squally
weather.
 Chapter IV.
FROM the books they had read Harry and Joe had learned exactly
what to do in case of capsizing under sail, and had often discussed
the matter. “When I capsize,” Harry would say, “I shall pull the masts
out of her, and she’ll then right of her own accord. Then I shall
unship the rudder, put my hands on the stern-post, and raise myself
up so that I can straddle the deck, and gradually work my way along
until I can get into the cockpit. After that I shall bail her out, step the
masts, and sail on again.” Nothing could be easier than to describe
this plan while sitting in a comfortable room on shore, but to carry it
out in a rough sea was a different affair.
Harry was not at all frightened when he found himself in the water,
and he instantly swum clear of the canoe, to avoid becoming
entangled in her rigging. He then proceeded to unship the masts and
the rudder, and when this was done tried to climb in over the stern.
He found that it was quite impossible. No sooner would he get
astride of the stern than the canoe would roll and throw him into the
water again. After half a dozen attempts he gave it up, and
swimming to the side of the canoe managed to throw himself across
the cockpit. This was the way in which Charley Smith had climbed
into his canoe the day before, and to Harry’s great surprise—for no
such method of climbing into a canoe had been mentioned in any of
the books he had read—it proved successful.
Of course the deck of the canoe was now level with the water,
which washed in and out of her with every sea that struck her. Harry
seized the empty tin can which he used as a bailer, and which was
made fast to one of the timbers of the canoe with a line, to prevent it
from floating away, but he could not make any headway in bailing
her out. The water washed into her just as fast as he could throw it
out again, and he began to think that he should have to paddle the
canoe ashore full of water. This would have been hard work, for with
so much water in her she was tremendously heavy and unwieldy;
but, after getting her head up to the wind with his paddle, he found
that less water washed into her, and after long and steady work he
succeeded in bailing most of it out.
Meanwhile Charley, whose help Harry had declined, because he
felt so sure that he could get out of his difficulty by following the plan
that he had learned from books on canoeing, was trying to help Joe.
At first Joe thought it was a good joke to be capsized. His Lord Ross
lateen-sail, with its boom and yard, had floated clear of the canoe of
its own accord, and, as the only spar left standing was a mast about
two feet high, she ought to have righted. But Joe had forgotten to
lash his sand-bag to the keelson, and the result was that whenever
he touched the canoe she would roll completely over and come up
on the other side. Joe could neither climb in over the stern nor throw
himself across the deck, and every attempt he made resulted in
securing for him a fresh ducking. Charley tried to help him by holding
on to the capsized canoe, but he could not keep it right side up; and
as Joe soon began to show signs of becoming exhausted Charley
was about to insist that he should hang on to the stern of the
Midnight, and allow himself to be towed ashore, when Tom in the
Twilight arrived on the scene.
 NOT SO EASY AS IT LOOKS.

Tom had seen the Dawn and the Sunshine capsize, and was far
enough to leeward to have time to take in his sail before the squall
reached him. It therefore did him no harm, and he paddled up
against the wind to help his friends. It took him some time to reach
the Dawn, for it blew so hard that when one blade of the paddle was
in the water he could hardly force the other blade against the wind.
Before the cruise was over he learned that by turning one blade at
right angles to the other—for the two blades of a paddle are joined
together by a ferrule in the middle—he could paddle against a head-
wind with much less labor.
The Twilight, being an undecked “Rice Lake” canoe, could easily
carry two persons, and, with the help of Charley and Tom, Joe
climbed into her. Charley then picked up the floating sail of the
Dawn, made her painter fast to his own stern, and started under
paddle for the shore. It was not a light task to tow the water-logged
canoe, but both the sea and the wind helped him, and he landed by
the time that the other boys had got the camp-fire started and the
coffee nearly ready.
“Well,” said Harry, “I’ve learned how to get into a canoe to-day. If
I’d stuck to the rule and tried to get in over the stern I should be out
in the lake yet.”
 “I’m going to write to the London Field and get it to print my new
rule about capsizing,” said Joe.
“What’s that?” asked Charley. “To turn somersaults in the water?
That was what you were doing all the time until Tom came up.”
“That was for exercise, and had nothing to do with my rule, which
is, ‘Always have a fellow in a “Rice Lake” canoe to pick you up.’”
“All your trouble came from forgetting to lash your ballast-bag,”
remarked Harry. “I hope it will teach you a lesson.”
“That’s a proper remark for a Commodore who wants to enforce
discipline,” cried Charley; “but I insist that the trouble came from
carrying too much sail.”
“The sail would have been all right if it hadn’t been for the wind,”
replied Harry.
“And the wind wouldn’t have done us any harm if we hadn’t been
on the lake,” added Joe.
“Boys, attention!” cried Harry. “Captain Charles Smith is hereby
appointed sailing-master of this fleet, and will be obeyed and
respected accordingly, or, at any rate, as much as he can make us
obey and respect him. Anyhow, it will be his duty to tell us how much
sail to carry, and how to manage the canoes under sail.”
“This is the second day of the cruise,” remarked Joe an hour later,
as he crept into his blankets, “and I have been wet but once. There
is something wrong about it, for on our other cruises I was always
wet through once every day. However, I’ll hope for the best.”
In the middle of the night Joe had reason to feel more satisfied. It
began to rain. As his rubber blanket was wet, and in that state
seemed hotter than ever, Joe could not sleep under the shelter of it,
and, as on the previous night, went to sleep with nothing over him
but his woollen blanket. His head was underneath the deck, and as
the rain began to fall very gently, it did not awaken him until his
blanket was thoroughly wet.
He roused himself and sat up. He was startled to see a figure
wrapped in a rubber blanket sitting on his deck. “Who’s there?” he
asked, suddenly. “Sing out, or I’ll shoot!”
“You can’t shoot with a jack-knife or a tin bailer, so I’m not much
afraid of you,” was the reply.
“Oh, it’s you, Tom, is it?” said Joe, much relieved. “What in the
world are you doing there?”
“My canoe’s half full of water, so I came out into the rain to get
dry.”
“Couldn’t you keep the rain out of the canoe with the rubber
blanket?”
“The canoe is fourteen feet long, and hasn’t any deck, and the
blanket is six feet long. I had the blanket hung over the paddle, but of
course the rain came in at the ends of the canoe.”
“Well, I’m pretty wet, for I didn’t cover my canoe at all. What’ll we
do?”
“Sit here till it lets up, I suppose,” replied Tom. “It must stop raining
some time.”
“I’ve got a better plan than that. Is your rubber blanket dry inside?
Mine isn’t.”
“Yes, it’s dry enough.”
“Let’s put it on the ground to lie on, and use my rubber blanket for
a tent. We can put it over a ridge-pole about two feet from the
ground, and stake the edges down.”
“What will we do for blankets? It’s too cold to sleep without them.”
“We can each borrow one from Harry and Charley. They’ve got
two apiece, and can spare one of them.”
Joe’s plan was evidently the only one to be adopted; and so the
two boys pitched their little rubber tent, borrowed two blankets, and
crept under shelter. They were decidedly wet, but they lay close
together and managed to keep warm. In the morning they woke up
rested and comfortable, to find a bright sun shining and their clothes
dried by the heat of their bodies. Neither had taken the slightest cold,
although they had run what was undoubtedly a serious risk, in spite
of the fact that one does not easily take cold when camping out.
As they were enjoying their breakfast the canoeists naturally
talked over the events of the previous day and night. Harry had been
kept perfectly dry by his canoe-tent—one side of which he had left
open, so as to have plenty of fresh air; and Charley had also been
well protected from the rain by his rubber blanket, hung in the usual
way over the paddle, although he had been far too warm to be
comfortable.
“I’m tired of suffocating under that rubber blanket of mine, and I’ve
invented a new way of covering the canoe at night, which will leave
me a little air to breathe. I’ll explain it to you when we camp to-night,
Joe.”
“I’m glad to hear it, for I’ve made up my mind that I’d rather be
rained on than take a Turkish bath all night long under that
suffocating blanket.”
“Will your new plan work on my canoe?” asked Tom.
“No; nothing will keep that ‘Rice Lake’ bathtub of yours dry in a
rain, unless you deck her over.”
“That’s what I’m going to do when we get to Magog. I’ll buy some
canvas and deck over the ends of my canoe. Sleeping in her in the
rain as she is now is like sleeping in a cistern with the water running
into it.”
“Now that we’ve had a chance to try our sails, which rig do you like
best, Sailing-master?” asked Harry.
“That lateen-rig that Joe has,” replied Charley. “He can set his sail
and take it in while the rest of us are trying to find our halyards. Did
you see how the whole concern—spars and sail—floated free of the
canoe of their own accord the moment she capsized?”
“That’s so; but then my big balance-lug holds more wind than
Joe’s sail.”
“It held too much yesterday. It’s a first-rate rig for racing, but it isn’t
anything like as handy as the lateen for cruising; neither is my
standing-lug. I tried to get it down in a hurry yesterday, and the
halyards jammed, and I couldn’t get it down for two or three
minutes.”
“I can get my leg-of mutton in easy enough,” remarked Tom, “but I
can’t get the mast out of the step unless the water’s perfectly
smooth, and I don’t believe I could then without going ashore.”
“Now, Commodore,” said Charley, “if you’ll give the order to start,
I’ll give the order to carry all sail. The breeze is light and the water is
smooth, and we ought to run down to the end of the lake by noon.”
The little fleet made a beautiful appearance as it cruised down the
lake under full sail. The breeze was westerly, which fact enabled the
canoes to carry their after-sails—technically known as “dandies”—to
much advantage. When running directly before the wind the “dandy”
is sometimes a dangerous sail, as it is apt to make the canoe
broach-to; but with a wind from any other direction than dead aft it is
a very useful sail.
The canoes sailed faster than they had sailed the day before,
because there was no rough sea to check their headway. They
reached Magog at noon, went to the hotel for a good dinner, bought
some canvas with which to deck Tom’s canoe, and then looked at
the dam which crosses the Magog River a few rods from the lake,
and wondered how they were ever to get through the rapids below it.
There was a place where the canoes could be lowered one by one
over the breast of the dam and launched in a little eddy immediately
below. The rapids, which extended from below the dam for nearly a
quarter of a mile, were, however, very uninviting to a timid canoeist.
The water did not seem to be more than three or four feet deep, but
it was very swift, and full of rocks. “You boys can’t never run them
rapids in them boats,” said a man who came to look at the canoes.
“You’ll have to get a cart and haul round ’em.”
The boys did not like to be daunted by their first rapid, and, as
there did not seem to be much risk of drowning, they decided to take
the chances of getting the canoes through it safely. Harry gave the
order to lash everything fast in the canoes that could be washed
overboard, and he prepared to lead the way in the Sunshine.
It was magnificent sport shooting down the rapid like an arrow.
The canoes drove through two or three waves which washed the
decks, though the canoe-aprons of the Dawn, Sunshine, and
Midnight kept the water from getting into the cockpits. Harry’s and
Charley’s canoes each struck once on the same rock while in the
rapid, but in each case only the keel struck the rock, and the current
dragged the canoes safely over it. When the fleet was reunited in the
smooth water below the rapid the boys expressed their enthusiasm
by all talking at once at the top of their lungs. Every one was
delighted with the way his canoe had acted, and with the skill with
which he had avoided this or that rock, or had discovered the best
channel just at the right moment. In their excitement they let the
canoes float gently down the stream, until they suddenly discovered
another rapid at the beginning of a sharp bend in the river just ahead
of them.
It was nothing like as fierce in appearance as the first rapid, and
as Harry led the way the others followed close after him, one behind
the other, fancying that they could run the rapid without the least
trouble. Half-way down Harry’s canoe struck on a rock, swung
broadside to the current, and hung there. Tom was so close behind
him that he could not alter his course, and so ran straight into the
Sunshine with a terrible crash. The Dawn and the Twilight instantly
followed, and as the four canoes thus piled together keeled over and
spilled their occupants into the river, it began to look as if the rapid
had determined to make the irreverent young canoeists respect it.
 Chapter V.
WHEN the boys were compelled to jump overboard they could see
that the water was only about two feet deep; but they did not know
whether they could stand up against the fierce current. They found
that they could, although they had to move slowly to avoid being
swept off their feet. Harry’s canoe was easily pushed off the rock on
which it had run, and the moment it was out of the way the other
canoes were free. Each canoeist seized the stern of his own canoe,
and let it drag him down the rest of the rapid, which fortunately was a
short one. While performing this feat the knees of the canoeists were
scraped over the rocks, and they received several unpleasant
bruises; but they thought it was impossible to get into their canoes in
swift water, and so had no choice except to float down hanging on to
the sterns of the canoes.
Reaching the smooth water, they swum and pushed the canoes
before them toward the shore. Here they found a great bank of
sawdust that had floated down the river from the mill at Magog, and
it was so soft and elastic that they determined to sleep on it that
night, instead of sleeping in their canoes, since the sky was perfectly
clear and there was no danger of rain.
The canoes were hauled out on the bank, so that the stores could
be readily taken out of them. The canvas canoe did not seem to be
in the least injured either by the rock on which she had struck or by
the collision with the other canoes. Harry’s canoe had sustained a
little damage where one of the planks had been ground against the
rock on which she had hung so long, but it was not enough to cause