At first everything went well. The Grand Vizir, when the litigants appeared before him at the Divan, treated Ashby and his supporters with the utmost indulgence, looking upon them, “as my Druggerman told me, with the same smiling countenance as when he was Chimacham,” and even declining to take notice of an aggravating circumstance brought forward by the plaintiff--namely, that the English factors who had accompanied Ashby to Constantinople had tried on the way to rescue him by force of arms and had actually come to blows with the Turks at Magnesia. Ignoring this charge--which, in itself, might have supplied material for very serious trouble--Kara Mustafa referred the case for trial to the Stamboli Effendi, or Chief Justice of Constantinople, precisely as we desired. On the eve of the trial an attempt was made to settle the dispute out of court. Our friend Hussein Aga undertook the part of arbiter and, after estimating the goods in question by the advice of Turkish and Jewish merchants, he condemned Ashby to pay the Venetian 1600 Lion dollars. But as Ashby would not abide by the arbitration, the matter went before the Judge.
And now, to all the other illegalities mentioned, our countrymen added an offence of a truly shocking nature. Ashby and his abettors, from the Ambassador down, had by this time come to see that a sale of pledged goods to which the owner’s consent could not be proved was indefensible in Turkish law. They, therefore, thought fit to deny the sale, and to affirm that the goods were _in esse_--an attitude to which they were prompted by the knowledge that the goods could easily be got back from those who had bought them. In vain did Pizzamano produce his copy of the sale, signed and sealed by the English Consul. Mr. Ashby, backed by the Ambassador’s Dragoman and all the Englishmen present, stoutly denied the authenticity of the document. Pizzamano then produced two Turkish witnesses who had assisted at the sale. But these witnesses, not being professional rogues, found themselves unable to answer some questions on matters of detail put to them by the Judge, and the bad impression which their inadequate replies produced was deepened by the vehemence and apparent sincerity with which the English persisted in affirming that the goods had not been sold and would be restored on payment of the debt. The Stamboli Effendi, confounded by this mendacious unanimity, departed from the ordinary Turkish maxim of considering the word of two True Believers worth more than that of a crowd of Infidels, and gave sentence that both litigants should return to Smyrna, the one to receive his money and the other his goods.