The post was personal and unpaid and was seemingly arranged by his elder brother Humphry, who for some years had been a doctor in the city and was then a medical officer with the Turkish forces fighting the Russians.
But events intervened and he went instead to support the same Consul who had been sent by the British Ambassador on a special mission to the Dardanelles to handle disputes in the British-funded Turkish irregular cavalry.
But before he could take it up, he was diverted to spend eight months working for the British representative on the International Commission the West European countries had forced on the Ottoman government following the massacre of Christians in Damascus in 1860.
There followed six months as Acting Consul in Damascus (where he received the Prince of Wales on his Middle Eastern tour), so that he reached Haifa only in summer 1862, destined to spend three years there.
He added some Arabic to the Turkish he had already learnt fluently (he also had French and Italian and later became fluent in Modern Greek), reported on political events and on the economy and had to deal with tricky issues arising from rebellious tribespeople.
It fell to Sandwith to help put them back on an even keel, working with successive French officials, whilst at the same time upholding Britain's interests and those of a large and somewhat disputatious British community.
He was able successfully to balance the various pressures and left with the respect of the French, the local British community, and the Foreign Office, which promoted him to Consul General in 1888 and posted him to Odessa.
He found he was no longer a political officer; southern Russia raised no special issues that affected Anglo-Russian relations, which the Ambassador handled in St Petersburg.
The only new issue was British concern about Russian ambitions in central Asia, and it fell to him and his team to submit frequent reports on military activities.
The one issue that greatly exercised him was official Russian policy and public attitudes towards the Jewish community, on which he sent highly critical reports to London.
During his time in Cyprus, he amassed a large collection of Cypriot antiquities, through his colleagues such as Luigi Palma di Cesnola, Robert Hamilton Lang and Demetrios Pierides who were conducting excavations throughout the island.
[3] He was early to recognise that Knossos must be an important site and tried, but failed, to persuade the British Museum to excavate there twenty years before Arthur Evans.
He suffered a further tragedy when, ten months after the death of his daughter, his second son and oldest surviving child died of disease serving with the Army in India.
He was active in local church affairs, for he never lost his faith; he followed world affairs and occasionally wrote to The Times; he pursued his charitable instincts, helping raise funds for refugees, selling some ancient Cretan antiquities for charity, and directing in his will that he had only a simple coffin and no tombstone, the £20-£25 thereby saved to be given to a hospital; he twice went on foreign trips with his surviving daughter, on the Nile in 1893 and to Crete and North Africa in 1895.
At a more personal level, he experienced the loneliness and isolation that was sometimes the lot of Levant consuls, as he did too the sudden transfers between posts, moved by the Foreign Office without prior consultation and usually without reference to the Ambassador.