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OUTBREAK OF CHOLERA 13
Baffra and Samsiin crop now runs to millions sterling.
At buyers' warehouses in the town peasant growers
may receive gold for leaf across the counter at any
time. The office of the combined British and American
buyers alone often disburses, as one side of its
immense purchases, £5000 a day in glittering yellow
liras in this ready fashion ; there, also, the larger
cultivators may draw advances in gold against their
growing crops. To the infinite profit and satisfaction
of peasant farmers, leaf and gold are almost as easily
exchangeable as current coin.
One never goes far in a Turkish town— or in any
Turkish territory for the matter of that— without
meeting evidence of the hopeless racial differences
which beset the Ottoman Empire. So it happened
to me here as I sat in a cafe a few hours after coming
ashore.
A boy came towards me carrying a collectingbox
; he came smiling and diffident, yet with the
manner of having a cause that well might bespeak
support, and asked for a contribution in aid of the
Hellenic navy.
" No, monsieur," he added with Greek adroitness,
finding me without hostility, " for the navy of all
the Hellenic peoples."
Samson cannot claim direct descent from old
Greek Amisus, but its people are largely Ottoman
Greeks, and much of the trade and wealth of the
town is in their hands. And like all foreign Greeks,
they look to Greece and contribute money in her
aid, especially to her navy, with open-handed generosity,
hoping dimly for the reconstitution of the Greek
Empire with Constantinople for its capital. A year
or so earlier they had subscribed £12,000 for the
naval service, and now were preparing another
contribution.
During the earlier
part of the summer cholera had
visited Samson. It came with great suddenness ;
with men dropping in the streets in agony as if shot,
and not knowing at the time what had overtaken
them. The epidemic grew in violence ; traffic ceased