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CONSTANTINOPLE AND ITS ENVIRONS. D
fond of amusing himself on his passage, like an European monarch, of old, with his
fool; and he sometimes prefers him, for his talent in this way, to the first post in the
empire. The Reis who most distinguished himself was the Delhi Abdallah. He had
a loud voice, shouting out his words—a rude humour, very coarse—and a faculty of
inventing new and extraordinary oaths and curses. After it was supposed that he had
exhausted all the forms of imprecation, the sultan laid a wager one day that he could
not invent a new one. To the great gratification of his master, he did so; and he was
so pleased with his ingenuity, that he raised him at once from the state of a boatman on
the Bosphorus to that of Capitan Pasha; and he who had never been on board a larger
vessel than a caique, now commanded the vast Turkish fleet. His first occupation was
that of bostandgee, or gardener, at the seraglio. Such are the incongruous pursuits and
rapid elevations of public men in Turkey.
Mixed with these light and elegant forms, are large, deep, and clumsy barges,
rowed with long heavy sweeps, and filled with people of all nations crowded together.
These are used for conveying persons to their residences in the villages along the shores
of the Bosphorus. In a country where there are neither roads nor carriages, these boats
are the only conveyance for the lower order of people. They are seen every evening
slowly emerging from the harbour, filled with Turks, Jews, Armenians, Arabs, Greeks,
and Franks, in all their variety of costumes, covered over with a cloud of tobacco-smoke
from their several chibouques, and making the harbour resound with the loud and discordant jargon of the several tongues.
Within these few years a new feature has been added to the moving picture of the
harbour. When steam-boats were adopted by all the nations of Europe, the tardy Turks
alone rejected them. The currents of the Bosphorus constantly running down from the
Black Sea with the velocity of four or five miles an hour, renders it extremely difficult
for ships to ascend, unless assisted by a strong wind, and even with this aid they hardly
stemmed the rapid stream. It was not uncommon to see lines of twenty or thirty men,
with long cords passed over their shoulders, slowly dragging up pondrous merchantmen
with a vast labour, which a single steamer would at once render unnecessary. It was
among the first reforms of the sultan to introduce any European inventions which could
assist human labour; and he not only encouraged the introduction of these boats, but
he erected an arsenal in the harbour for building them by his own subjects. This
spacious and novel ship-yard is under the superintendence of the laborious and patient
Armenians, who are the great mechanics of the Turkish empire. Here they not only
build the boats, but cast the machinery, which the stupid Moslems could not comprehend, till they saw their own sultan embark in the wonderful self-moving machine, that
issued from their own arsenal, and swiftly climbed the rapids of the Bosphorus against
both wind and tide.
A singular circumstance connected with the first introduction of steam-boats was the
subject of universal conversation. An immense crowd had collected, as well to see the
sultan, as the vessel in which he had embarked. When he stood upon the deck, a broad
flag was displayed floating over his head, with the sun, the emblem of the Turkish
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