but three hours too late. The General Admiral carried 1200 women and
children to the Greek ports, but the repetition was forbidden.

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

It was the most disastrous campaign of the whole war, for the troops
were slaughtered almost without resistance, killed by rolling down
boulders on them. Bewildered in the intricacies of the defiles,
without guides or provisions, and in small parties, they were
dispatched, for days after. The army which had set out 17,850 strong,
Egyptian and Turkish regulars, according to Dickson's official
information, beside several thousand irregulars, was reported by