On this bloody field over thirty thousand lay headless, armless,
legless, all cut and mangled, who gave knowledge to the world how dear
the Turk paid for his conquest of Transylvania and Wallachia--a conquest
that might have been averted if the three Christian armies had been
joined against the “cruel devouring Turk.” Among the slain were many
Englishmen, adventurers like the valiant Captain whom Smith names, men
who “left there their bodies in testimony of their minds.” And there,
“Smith among the slaughtered dead bodies, and many a gasping soule with
toils and wounds lay groaning among the rest, till being found by the
Pillagers he was able to live, and perceiving by his armor and habit,
his ransome might be better than his death, they led him prisoner
with many others.” The captives were taken to Axopolis and all sold as
slaves. Smith was bought by Bashaw Bogall, who forwarded him by way of
Adrianople to Constantinople, to be a slave to his mistress. So chained
by the necks in gangs of twenty they marched to the city of Constantine,
where Smith was delivered over to the mistress of the Bashaw, the young
Charatza Tragabigzanda.
III. CAPTIVITY AND WANDERING
Our hero never stirs without encountering a romantic adventure. Noble
ladies nearly always take pity on good-looking captains, and Smith was
far from ill-favored. The charming Charatza delighted to talk with her
slave, for she could speak Italian, and would feign herself too sick to
go to the bath, or to accompany the other women when they went to weep
over the graves, as their custom is once a week, in order to stay at
home to hear from Smith how it was that Bogall took him prisoner, as the
Bashaw had written her, and whether Smith was a Bohemian lord conquered
by the Bashaw's own hand, whose ransom could adorn her with the glory of
her lover's conquests. Great must have been her disgust with Bogall
when she heard that he had not captured this handsome prisoner, but had
bought him in the slave-market at Axopolis. Her compassion for her slave
increased, and the hero thought he saw in her eyes a tender interest.
But she had no use for such a slave, and fearing her mother would sell
him, she sent him to her brother, the Tymor Bashaw of Nalbrits in the
country of Cambria, a province of Tartaria (wherever that may be). If
all had gone on as Smith believed the kind lady intended, he might have
been a great Bashaw and a mighty man in the Ottoman Empire, and we might
never have heard of Pocahontas. In sending him to her brother, it was
her intention, for she told him so, that he should only sojourn in
Nalbrits long enough to learn the language, and what it was to be a
Turk, till time made her master of herself. Smith himself does not
dissent from this plan to metamorphose him into a Turk and the husband
of the beautiful Charatza Tragabigzanda. He had no doubt that he was
commended to the kindest treatment by her brother; but Tymor “diverted
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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