by The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer;His Mysterious Disappearance
The cyclists also became friendly with the American consul, J. Irving Manatt, a former professor of Greek archaeology who had left a comfortable post at the University of Nebraska in order to be closer to his beloved ruins, bringing along his wife and their five children. Unlike the Snowdens, however, he was no conversationalist. "As soon as one gets outside the range of his own life, that is, Greece and antiquities, he is not much good," Sachtleben lamented, adding, "He impresses me as a man not very well fitted for his position."
Athens being quite cosmopolitan, the cyclists quickly met a host of colorful characters, none more so than Serope A. Gürdjian, an Armenian American who had graduated from Bowdoin College fourteen years earlier. Charismatic and cerebral, he spoke fluent English, Turkish, and Persian, as well as several other languages. A trained photographer, he was especially drawn to their Kodak cameras, but he also admired their bicycles and was full of travel advice. The trio began to meet at cafés in the daytime and in their respective hotel rooms in the evenings to talk for hours on end.
One night, while playing host, Gürdjian delved into his trunk and pulled out photographs from his college days in Maine. He loved his adopted country, he explained, and could easily have found good work in Washington as a bureaucrat. But his heart was in his homeland, and in December 1878 he had set sail for Constantinople to found a college for Armenians. After that effort fell through, he reluctantly retreated to the United States. Four years later, he managed to return to Turkey, where he had pursued various mining projects until his recent removal to Athens.
At that point, the boys were in for a shock. "We found out that our Armenian friend had been one of the ringleaders of the July 15th rebellion in Constantinople," Sachtleben scrawled in his diary. Indeed, Gürdjian utterly despised Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the despot who had seized power fifteen years earlier and revoked constitutional reform. Declared the refugee: "I wish his damned carcass would rot in a place worse than hell." Recorded Sachtleben: "Gürdjian proudly declared that this was the first rebellion that had ever taken place in the capital of Turkey. Then, with a wicked twinkle in his small black eyes, he said it wouldn't be the last."
His true identity revealed, Gürdjian launched into a hateful tirade. "The Turk embodies all the lowest attributes in the human race," he ranted. "Selfish, brutal, and cruel he hesitates at nothing. If he thinks he can gain by committing a murder, he will do so." Sachtleben reflected: "I believe Gürdjian would have every Turk murdered, if he had his way." Still, the cyclist understood why his friend harbored such blind animosity, observing: "We at home in America little dream of the atrocities that are being enacted by the Turks against the defenseless Armenians."
According to Gürdjian, the Islamic faith as practiced by the Turks perpetuated both the "rotten hulk of the Ottoman empire" and the oppression of the Armenians. Fumed the rebel:
Nothing will ever improve as long as the Koran is taught as at present. The book itself is not bad but it is wrongly construed and interpreted. They consider everyone who does not profess Mohammadism an Infidel. "There is but one God and Mohammed was his prophet." This is their cry and has always been. Under the fanaticism infused into them from childhood they march to certain death with calmness. With this cry on their lips they feel composed to any fate, feeling sure of a reward in heaven.
One evening, as the young Americans sat in rapt silence, Gürdjian lit a cigarette and recounted his recent arrest in Constantinople:
I had rented a suite on the third floor and was giving lessons to a young Armenian named Grigor. The porter came up and told us some friends wished to see me. He had been instructed not to mention that they were three policemen, one officer and one secret detective waiting to seize me below.
"Who is it?" I asked.
"Some friends who cannot come up."
"Well I won't go out tonight. If any one wants to see me, let him come up."
So in a few moments, with a great rattling of swords, the five came in and told me to come along. I refused to go. They were going to take me by force when I jerked away and went into the next room and brought out my passport. "Do you see that?" I cried. "I am a citizen of the U.S. You have no right to take me out at such a time of night. Go to the U.S. Embassy and get an order from the Minister."
Unfazed, the officers seized the suspect and dragged him half-naked to the local police station. Continued Gürdjian:
I protested again and showed my passport a second time, again to no purpose. The officer said I must go to the head office. So I was marched through the streets with two soldiers on each side. I was brought before an officer who ate and drank, although the Koran forbids the drinking of wine. This officer asked after a long pause:
"Where do you come from?"
"From America," I replied.
"Where were you born?"
"In Caesarea in Armenia."
Then I protested against this ill-treatment and again held up my passport and claimed the right of American citizenship. "Let's see that passport" said the piggish officer. Taking it, he threw it without a glance to one side and ordered me to be imprisoned.
Gürdjian was then dumped in a "cold and damp" dungeon "built entirely of stone about five square feet with an iron door. Here, without any covering, I had to pass my time in utter darkness. This gave me a bad cold and brought me the illness of which I am still suffering. In the morning my trouble was lightened. Mr. Hirsch [Solomon Hirsch, the U.S. minister] had learned of my predicament and demanded my immediate dismissal. This frightened the Sublime Porte and he hastily sent an order for my release."
The Americans became so attached to their Armenian friend, and he to them, that the trio decided to rent a large room together. Gürdjian and Sachtleben promptly went out and purchased, after some haggling, a little coal stove. From then on, the three dined in, and every evening they gathered around a pan of hot coals to read and discuss classical works such as Thomas Moore's Lalla-Rookh, an Oriental verse-romance. Their conversations touched on everything from the latest news to eternal questions such as "is there anything in man besides material substance?"
The men became quite comfortable in their cozy confines. On one occasion, the cyclists took turns cutting each other's hair. "The result was two handsome young fellows, of course," Sachtleben recorded. "Allen, however, made a miscue and cut my hair a little irregularly, so that I had to keep my cap on to obscure it." One day, when Allen's feet hurt so badly that he could barely walk, he nonchalantly employed what Sachtleben termed a "quack remedy": soaking his feet for hours in bovine intestines. "What miraculous powers that pot contained I didn't have faith to see," confessed Sachtleben. "Still, Allen said he felt better afterwards."
One night Gürdjian brought over an Armenian friend who spoke no English. The conversation turned to developments in American politics since Gürdjian's departure eight years earlier. Allen vividly recounted the infamous Haymarket affair of May 1886, when a demonstration in Chicago in favor of an eight-hour workday took a violent turn. Someone in the crowd hurled a bomb, and when the fumes and mayhem subsided, seven police officers lay dead on the street. Eight anarchists were arrested and tried, and four were eventually executed.
As Gürdjian began to translate Allen's remarks for his friend, the two Armenians suddenly burst into a shouting match and nearly came to blows. When they finally calmed down, a mystified Sachtleben asked Gürdjian what all the fuss had been about. "I'm afraid he's an anarchist," Gürdjian explained. Taken aback, Sachtleben turned to the man to ask, in French, if that was true. The Armenian glared back and retorted: "You have plenty of money, why haven't I?" A stunned Sachtleben confined his reaction to his diary: "You had better not come to America, my friend, or you, too, might decorate a scaffold someday."
The cyclists also met Basilios Georgiou (B. G.) Kapsambelis, whose family had made a fortune in the fabric industry. Sachtleben described their initial encounter:
I had no sooner sat down at a café with Gürdjian when a Greek gentleman, young and w
ell-dressed, came up to me and said "Excuse me, but do you teach how to ride a bicycle?" I laughed and replied that I was not in that business. He asked how long it would take me to teach him. I said I could teach any one who tried hard in 15 minutes. He asked me to come up to his house at 40 Socrates street in a quarter of an hour.
The American innocently agreed, without fully realizing what he was in for.
As soon as Sachtleben entered the residence, several servants ushered him into an elegant parlor. B. G. promptly appeared with his brother, a lawyer, and the siblings led their guest to a room containing two bicycles, one a safety, the other a high-wheeler. B. G. explained that the wheels had arrived from England two weeks earlier, but the brothers had yet to master the art of cycling. "They were in a pretty fix," Sachtleben concluded.
While the American was examining the pristine wheels, a servant handed him a glass of cognac. After taking a few reluctant sips, Sachtleben announced that he would be happy to teach the brothers how to ride the safety. He volunteered his own mount to serve as the second steed. The brothers acceded, and off the trio went to the seashore. "In a half-hour both rode quite well," Sachtleben recorded, adding that the brothers "expressed their heartfelt thanks."
One evening the Kapsambelis family invited the Americans to their seaside mansion in Piraeus. Recorded Sachtleben:
Our dinner consisted of beef, ham sausage with salad, a soft boiled egg and dessert of fine rice pudding. Besides we had bottled beer, red wine, and cigarettes. We passed a very pleasant hour at the table and then were ushered into the sitting-room and treated to music. Their eldest sister and brother played a duet on the piano accompanied by another brother on the violin. The trio played very well indeed and reminded me of home.
Vying with Gürdjian for the attention of the American cyclists, if not their affection, was a German expatriate named Anton von Godrich. Formerly an army officer with impeccable bourgeois credentials, he had abandoned a diplomatic career to indulge in his favorite pastime: riding his beloved high-wheeler. Four years earlier he had chosen Athens as his base, and two years earlier he had founded the city's first cycling club. At present, he was earning pocket money by advising a major cycle manufacturer in Dresden while producing a steady stream of articles for German cycling magazines.
This man, too, they had met on the streets, after Godrich spotted the Americans clutching their one functional wheel. Sachtleben recorded the episode: "He came up, shook us by the hand and proceeded to rattle away at me in German. I understood all, but Allen, only a sentence now and then. He was short (fully 3 inches shorter than us) and stout. He was evidently a cyclist judging by his dress. Looked as if he was a strong rider."
He was indeed. The year before, Godrich had propelled his high-wheeler over common roads some three hundred miles in a single day—a new world record. He also loved to tour foreign lands on his big wheel. In fact, he was something of a globetrotter himself, having cycled all over Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor. Godrich boasted that he knew useful phrases in a dozen languages, and he planned to cycle in virtually every country over the next few years.
Sachtleben quickly sized up the diminutive German, however, as a hopeless curmudgeon who "clung to his big wheel, when the whole world was turning to the safety." The American was also put off by Godrich's obsession with clubs and all their rigmarole, so patently out of tune with the new independent spirit of cycling. "He proudly said he was a member of the General Union of Velocipedists, the largest cycling organization in the world," Sachtleben noted. "When we told him that we didn't care two cents for any kind of Union his countenance fell."
Despite their common passion for bicycle touring, their philosophies were as disparate as their chosen vehicles. "This fellow, German-like in his thoroughness, started to do every country on a bicycle," Sachtleben related. "From what I could glean, he was not going in a direct line but jumping around here and there. He had been at it three years and was still unknown in London, the greatest place for cycling in the world. His trip will consume a dozen years at that rate."
Even Godrich's admirable policy of learning phrases in the local lingo wherever he roamed had little appeal for Sachtleben. "What good all the petty languages of Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and Asia will do for him I don't see," the American huffed. "These countries play such an insignificant part in the world's affairs that I am even in doubt sometimes whether it pays to travel through them."
What irked Sachtleben most about the German, however, was his massive ego. After professing surprise that the Americans had not read about him, Godrich proceeded to monopolize their conversation. "We couldn't mention a town or city or country where he had not been," Sachtleben grumbled. "Otherwise it was impossible if he had not seen it. When we politely informed him that we were on the same arduous enterprise [going around the world], he could not have been more astonished."
In Sachtleben's estimation, Godrich was an insufferable know-it-all, a species foreign to the average American, who is "subjected to such sharp competition in all lines that he soon finds out he can be perfect only in one, and even that with difficulty." That Godrich happened to be German was something of a letdown to Sachtleben. "Being to a certain degree German myself," he wrote in his diary, "I had always thought the Germans were a modest, unassuming people. This chap knocked my belief sky high." Upon further reflection, Sachtleben conceded: "Perhaps I myself am a bit troubled with a little of this same failing. If so, I shall endeavor to keep my mouth shut unless my experience is desired."
Still, for all his flaws, Godrich was nothing if not friendly. The day after their initial encounter, he called on the Americans at their apartment and insisted that they visit his clubhouse for an evening of entertainment. "It consisted of two small rooms in Northern Athens," Sachtleben reported,
decorated in German fashion as nearly all the members are Germans. Greek wine, German songs and music constituted the program. We drank but little wine and smoked no cigars. Four Greek ladies, two old and two young, were present. The gentlemen had no regard for them, smoking before them with perfect nonchalance. These girls remind one of wooden posts put up for ornament. They are stiff, ill at ease, and never utter a word or smile unless in a whisper between themselves. They would be termed wall-flowers in America.
Against their wishes, the Americans soon found themselves the center of attention—and forced to defend their choice of wheel. "Godrich had imbued all the members with a love for the high wheel," Sachtleben recounted. One "thick-skulled German" even insisted: "There's more fun in the high wheeler. It is more difficult to learn and when you fall, you fall harder." Sachtleben resisted the urge to snicker. To him, it was obvious which pattern represented the machine of the future. When fully loaded, the German's big wheel weighed a hefty seventy pounds, nearly as much as the two Minnehahas, with gear, put together. And while the German strapped his bulky luggage to his handlebars, the Americans' luggage was "neatly packed away between our knees in the frame of the machine." Still, "the German had the audacity to tell us point-blank that his machine was superior. It was amusing."
Compounding their discomfort, Godrich disparaged their plans to cycle through Asia Minor come springtime. "You can never go where I have been in Turkey," he insisted. "I had to obtain special permission from the bandits, who let me pass safely." The German's misgivings were grave and numerous. "Godrich gave us the most frightful description of the road we were going to follow. We listened as politely as possible while he chattered away. In the first place, the season was bad. The mud would be a foot deep. We would have to swim swollen streams and fight brigands. We would lose our way and a dozen other objections. He concluded that we simply could not do it." Gloated Sachtleben: "It remains to be seen if his 'impossible' is the same as that Italian word."
Finally, at midnight, the beleaguered Americans made their escape. They would keep their vow never to return to that clubhouse. Still, Godrich would have the last laugh. That spring, after the Americans left Athens, he would fir
e off numerous letters to European cycling journals denouncing the Americans as frauds. Read one litany: "During their stay in Athens they were rarely seen on a bicycle, nor did they associate with the local cyclists. In fact, they spoke quite snidely about amateur sport, stating it was useless to be a member of an association." Godrich charged that the Americans were riding simply to promote their cushion tires and absurdly light bicycles. "They speak quite boldly about cycling around the world," he seethed, "but mostly they travel by train and ship. Showmen like these are an insult to true sportsmen and a menace to cycling."
After that unpleasant evening, Sachtleben and Allen chose to ignore Godrich altogether. But they could not so easily dismiss his dire warnings about the road through Turkey. They appealed to Gürdjian, who knew the area well. Alas, he affirmed that the territory was utterly lawless, adding that the Russians had just expelled a fresh wave of desperate Circassians who were now stalking travelers along all the major routes of Turkey. Fearing that they might "strike Turkey at the worst possible moment," the cyclists began to consider a safer and shorter route through Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Baghdad.
Either way, they would need new, sturdier bicycles. In fact, they were ready to dump Walters. It had taken him two weeks to send a new axle, and when it finally arrived, they had to pay extra postage. Then they discovered that it was too short. They had to track down a blacksmith who could make the necessary washers. "I have determined to go on my own resources hereafter and not depend on Walters for one single thing," vowed an exasperated Sachtleben. "He does not slight on purpose but has the constitutional failing of never tending to affairs promptly."
The tourists decided that Allen should travel back to London by train to settle matters with Walters. At the same time, Allen was to seek more favorable terms with both the journal and the Eastman company. Recounted Sachtleben: "We drew up two contracts in the most lawyer-like manner to present to the P.I.P. editor and to Walters. If Walters failed to sign, we intended to drop him and his bicycle altogether. And if P.I.P. would not pay our expenses we also intended to drop them and take to another paper. Besides this, our arrangement with Walker (of the Eastman Film company) would necessarily have to be altered."