Ottoman naval officer Sami (Çölgeçen) was sentenced to death by the
regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1897 because of his ties to the Young
Turk movement, but exiled to Tripoli, Libya, instead. Soon after, though
his rank was reinstated and he served in Tripoli (Lebanon), Iskenderun
and Haifa.
However, another death sentence was imposed on him in 1902, but, again,
the sentence was converted to exile, this time in Fezzan, a remote Ottoman
outpost in southwestern Libya where he remained for five years before
escaping across the Sahara Desert to the Gulf of Guinea and from there
by ship to Liverpool and, eventually Istanbul.
Judging from Sami Bey's description of the journey from arrest to arrival
in Libya and Fezzan, he may have preferred hanging. Herewith, his
description as recorded in an interview with an Izmir newspaper as he
returned to Turkey in September 1908:
For the complete story, see the English translation of Sami
Bey's book "How I Crossed the Great Sahara Desert" on
the Academia.edu website.
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