CHAPTERV.TANGIER.From Arzela to Tangier there are two roads, one by the interior and one by the beach. Not far from the former are the Druidical remains. I, however, preferred the shore-road, not to lose the sight of that splendid tumult of waters. We started a little before full-tide. Here there were no cliffs or rocks along the beach, but flat, open, sand; and in advance of the shore, at about a quarter of a mile, there was generally a bank, along which I walked the greater part of the day barefoot, having now and then to fly before the sudden sweep of a larger wave. I learnt the difference between walking with the foot that God had given us, and stumping in the cases constructed by man. Nothing could be more beautiful than the bank of foam seaward. The waves began breaking about a mile off, and there were generally three permanent cataracts, stretching as far as I could see, this way and that, but at times I could count seven or eight successive lines of surf, which, constantly rolling, appeared nevertheless permanent waterfalls: beyond, the sea was smooth, calm, and there was no wind. This was the coast in its mildest mood, and under its most favourable aspect. In the middle of the day the sea-breeze came in at about ten knots an hour, and swept before it with each wave sheets of foam, radiating with prismatic colours. The coast is strewed with fragments of ships and bones of sharks. The Arabs will sometimes burn large masses of timber merely to get the nails that may be in them. To the south it often happens that whales are wrecked on the coast.Within about five miles of Cape Spartel, I observed one of the most beautiful effects of the pattern figures of the sand, and I mention it as being within the reach of a ride from Tangier. There appeared to be a stream rising along the ground: it was the fine sand carried inland by the wind; and in this neighbourhood it has since been observed to me by persons who had themselves marked the change, that the sand was gaining upon the cultivated land. It is this, I imagine, that has led to the belief prevalent amongst the Europeans in this country, that the sand along the coast of Morocco has been thrown up by the sea; but the sand thus carried inward is but dust in the balance compared with that enormous stratum which constitutes the maritime border of the country, and which is battened down by a skin of rock. The edges of this mass of sand are worn by the waters, and a slight portion is blown inwards by the wind; but the mass itself has been the load of an ocean, and carried to where it now rests, from the interior of Africa itself.I may here mention the caves of Cape Spartel, which I subsequently visited. A couple of miles southward of the Cape there is a flat, projecting rock, about sixty feet high: it is composed of a hard and porous conglomerate, which forms excellent mill-stones; and it seems to have been used from all antiquity for that purpose. The summit bears towards the land the remains of Phœnician walls; the rock is in all directions burrowed for the mill-stones; they are cut about two and a half feet in diameter. They chisel them all round; then break off the part with wedges; and this scooping out has a most singular effect. The rock is so hard that parts are left standing only a few inches thick, and, like open trellis-work, over which you may scramble. Forty feet above the surf, and projecting over it, there are two large caves open to the sea, into which the waves dash with fury. These, though greatly extended by the scooping for the mill-stones, were natural caverns, and no doubt one of them must have been the cave of Hercules. Even within the last few years a considerable portion of the rock has fallen away. There is in one a dome, with a circular aperture in the centre. The rock is all pierced through like a large warren: it contains cavities filled up with sand and bones, like the Kirkdale caves of Yorkshire.It was dark when we reached Tangier: the gate of the city was already closed, though I had sent one of the soldiers in advance. The gate of the citadel was, however, opened for our admission. On issuing from the gate of the fortress, we came in sight of the city below us, shining like a congregation of glowworms. There was not a light to be seen—yet all was light, shaded, mellowed, and phosphoric. There were here no lamp-posts in the streets, and no windows in the houses, through which their lights could be seen: the white walls of the interior courts were illuminated with a blue reflected light, which produced an optical delusion; from the want of a direct ray to measure the distance, the lighted surfaces seemed remote, and the town swelled into magnificence of proportion. It was, indeed, but for a moment, for the sun soon corrected the error of the eye.I reached the door of Miss Duncan, who renders Tangier habitable for Europeans, in such a condition that, when it was opened and light brought, it was about to be closed against me as a mad santon, my scanty habiliments, a shirt and drawers, being torn with briars and disfigured with mud, while the arms and legs fared no better. Great was the surprise when from such a body proceeded an English appeal for shelter, and within an hour I was seated on a chair at a table, before a fire of sea-coal, with grate, fender, and fire-irons. On the table stood cruet-stand, knife and fork, Staffordshire plates, and Scotch broth. While marvelling at the sight, in rushed Hamed with a steaming dish—“Me know you like Moors’ kuscoussoo.”The journey from Rabat, a distance of one hundred and twenty miles, had taken me a week of toil and fatigue. The difficulties, from the season of the year, were, however, the charm of the trip; the weather was mild and beautiful, but the roads—if they can be so called—were heavy and deep. This, comparatively speaking, would have mattered little, if we had been well mounted; our animals were, I think, the worst I ever journeyed with, and the charge the most exorbitant I ever paid. I could have bought them outright for one-third more than the sum I gave for the week’s hire. The charges for the soldiers were in proportion, and I found that this journey had cost me in time and in money, the same as posting from Calais to Naples. Each soldier received for his week’s journey, the price of an ox.Coming from the south, Tangier was a very different object than when I crossed the Straits to visit it, as a specimen of Barbary. In fact, it is a place equally foreign to both. The Moors designate it, “Infidel,” like the Giaour of the Turks. It is the only place where Europeans reside, and there is here a mixture of all classes, Brebers, Moors, Jews, and Europeans, living promiscuously together.On the cession of the place by the English, it became the property of the Sultan, who offered it to the Brebers, thinking by that means to fix them in the towns. Some hundred families accepted the offer, but their example has not been followed by the rest. They seem originally to have enjoyed a very free government, by their own municipal body, which consisted of twelve, and who each in turn was governor of the city for a month.The fortifications present a strange jumble of the structure of all ages, but the only chiselled remains that I saw were Roman, being capitals, and shafts of Corinthian columns.The town stands on a deep mass of the relics of former habitations. The Danish consulate has recently been rebuilt, and in some places they dug twenty feet below the present level. Twelve feet below the surface there were found Roman tombs, and eight feet below these, round black jars containing fragments of burnt bones similar to those which have been found in mounds in Denmark. I could see none of them, as they had been all sent to Denmark to the king. A portion of a fine Roman bridge still stands, leading from Tangier across the river, in the direction of the northern coast. It resembles the Flavian bridge at Rome, and is fifteen feet broad between the parapets: an old engraving of the city, when in possession of the English, represents the port crowded with vessels. It was in form nearly triangular, the apex being at the entrance three hundred and fifty fathoms from the base. Two moles were run out, one protecting it from the north-east, the other from the north-west: these were destroyed when we surrendered the place.From here you command a perfect view through the Straits. It is impossible not to be struck with its superiority over Gibraltar, while the moles existed. Here you are to windward: with easterly winds you may work through with the current’s aid, and with westerly winds you are far enough out of its draught to be able to get away to the westward. There is, however, a position close by, which is superior to it. It is a cove two miles to the westward, and at the point of the cape. It would require, indeed, some clearance out of the sand, and the addition of a breakwater at each of the horns: there is good anchorage before it, and nothing more to be feared than from the north. The coast of Spain terminating at Trafalgar breaks the sea from the north, and the northerly wind never blows home, as the various influences of the Straits change it here either into an east or a west wind. The Americans some years ago cast their eyes on this position, and wished to obtain it as their Mediterranean emporium, and they offered a large sum of money for it to the Government of Morocco.Above this cove is situated a house that has been constructed by an English gentleman. It had been several months untenanted, and though there is a road passing close behind it, nothing had been touched. There was on the steps of the door a child’s toy—a cart—just as it had been left weeks before; some of the panes of glass were broken, but this had been done by the pigeons. Garden implements were lying about. During two years that the proprietor has resided there, he had locked nothing up, and lost nothing. There are in the neighbourhood several villages, and no stipendiary magistrate, or rural police.There is here a restricted but agreeable society of the foreign agents, and a most imposing assemblage of flag-staffs—or rather masts—which are struck and housed in bad weather, and which exhibit fore and back stays, cross-trees, rigging, rattlings, halyards, &c., giving to the flat roofs of their habitations the appearance of decks, and making them look like so many vessels, wanting only their yards to be crossed, and their sails to be bent. In their nautical pretensions, they are, however, beaten by the English consul at Cadiz, who hoists a pendant, and whose porter pipes a guest up the stairs with a boatswain’s call.Amidst the consular masts with their floating standards and streaming pendants, which make the town look from without rather like a dockyard than a city, there is not one that bears the blue cross of St. Andrew. There was the agent of the young republic of the West at work trying to involve France and Morocco with a view to the settlement of the Oregon question against England, while the profound cabinet of the North is so heedless of Morocco as not to have even a consul there. Nay, Russia is positively so ignorant of the commonest facts connected with this country, that, when appealed to recently in an affair concerning it, she replied that she considered it as aportion of Turkey.The circumstances attending the appointment of the present American consul are curious. He had been consul here formerly, and on no good terms with the authorities. The Moors are very particular in seeing to whoever embarks from this place, and the foreign agents, of course, always give previous notice of their intention. The American consul on taking his departure, not only gave no such notice, but announced his intention of not doing so. The Pacha, therefore, sent orders to the Porte to prevent the embarkation of any one without permission. He was, consequently, stopped at the gate, on which he drew his sword, and a very violent scene occurred. An infraction of the law of nations in his inviolable person, &c.—protest, commotion—the learned consular body sign—all nations, all Christendom was attacked—and the farce would have been enough for a war, had it occurred in Turkey or Mexico. The United States had, however, as yet no mission of civilization in Morocco, and took no notice of the affair; but, upon the accession of Mr. Polk, the bearing of Morocco upon England and France was to have been reconsidered, and the discarded consul sent back without any previous settlement of the quarrel. When the news reached Morocco, the government was greatly troubled, and after enlisting the good services of the French agent, transmitted a statement of the case to the government of the United States, waving the right of the Emperor to refuse to admit their agent, and leaving it for the American government to judge whether such a person was fit to be the channel of intercourse between two friendly governments; and this representation was to be backed by the French minister at Washington.In the meantime, Mr. Carr arrived at Gibraltar. The Moorish government resolved to say to him, that they would receive him as a private person, but could not admit him as consul, as they had submitted the case to his government. But the part had been rehearsed also on the other side, and to better purpose. Mr. Carr came with two frigates. On the Pacha’s making his concerted speech, he was answered by the naval commander: “I don’t know anything about the matter. I have orders to bring here the consul of the United States; will you receive him or not, yes or no?” on which the caïd said, that he was ready to receive him, if the naval officer would give him a paper, saying that he constrained him to do so. This was the same functionary who had negotiated with the French, under the threat of having a pistol ball through his head, and signed the treaty of Tangier without ever having read it; this is the person, in whose hands are placed the foreign relations of Morocco; who has property transferred to France, and who is openly charged with giving bribes to foreign agents, and receiving bribes from foreign governments.There is a beautiful walk from the upper part of Tangier, along the crest of the hill to the cove, so coveted by the Americans. It retains the name it had when the English were here, of Marchand; the boys appropriate it for a game which is evidently the origin of billiards; it is played with two balls of iron, and a ring, which just admits them. The object is to pocket the ball through the ring; they play several on a side. Instead of cues they use a piece of wood, of the form of the old sacrificial knife, with which they impel the ball by a sweeping motion, drawing its edge along the ground.The ball is calledbola, the ringArabi. This game flourishes particularly at Tangier, where the boy population has profited by the liberal distribution of grape made by the French. The children in Morocco are distinguished for their games;—I have seen leap-frog performed in a manner which would not have disgraced an English clown in a pantomime. They are dexterous in the use of the single stick, and they have a mimic imitation of the powder game of the men, which resembles the French game calledbarre. They have blindman’s buff, and hunt the slipper, which must be Moorish; and hunt the slipper and blindman’s buff are combined in one, for they must strike the ground with a slipper, and having done so, must not leave the spot if the blinded man approaches them. At the entrance of all the towns we found, it being holiday time, whirligigs. No inconsiderable portion of Moorish art is expended on toys: there are drums of pottery-ware, a tube covered with parchment at one end, with the other open, such as were used amongst the Jews, and may be detected among the Egyptians.The habits of children are not to be neglected in the history of nations, for they are a primitive and original community transmitting their mariners to their successors, distinct from the nation of adults, and flowing as a pure source into the turbid stream, and age after age struggling against it.I must enumerate the peculiarities of this land before quitting it, although, indeed, every thing that exists in it is a peculiarity; for when they do things like other people, they have no more taken it from them than one man borrows from another the way to breathe.They have a form of room, tesselated and open court, vermilioned and cedar beams, lofty arch and thick-set column conjoined, carving of wood, fretting of walls, colouring in patterns and assortment of colours, doors, windows, brackets, stables, kitchens, store-houses, water-closets, and tomb-stones,—all unlike what is to be seen east or west, north or south. They have carpets like other people, but in their own style; they have mats, but the figure is Moorish; they have caps, the form is their own; they have shoes, again, as unlike Eastern slippers as European boots; they have towels (our name comes from them) but they are unlike ours; so they have pottery, embroidery, and even the use of the needle. Using the same letters as the Persians and the Turks, the Moors have an entirely distinct set of their own instruments of penmanship. They have one national dish. Unlike any thing else that is practised amongst men, so is their costume. It is a nation living under tents, and yet excelling all others in the composition of materials for fortresses and the structure of gigantic walls. It is a people that has combined nomade habits with the settled distribution of property. Jewelry is, again, their own; so are their toys and their children’s games, the head-dresses of the women, the plaiting of the hair, their cosmetics, the substances with which they wash; and if they have, in common with Easterns, the bath, it here, again, assumes a style that is Moorish.What is chiefly remarkable, is the absence of all things that are not in taste. There is no repetition of chintz patterns used for adornments of wall or floor; there is no glazed or glaring oil paint; there are no pictures or prints hung for ornament sake; no gilt and gaudy frames round these unsuited to the apartments in which they are placed. Upon their persons there are no repetitions of figures, no interminable variety of tints, and no false ones. Some centuries ago, I might have increased the list of the peculiarities of Morocco, such as the use of candles for giving light; of bells to call servants; of knockers to announce visitors; of straw hats to shade off the sun; of a different sort of meal in the morning and in the evening; tambourine and crochet work and lace, to occupy ladies’ fingers or adorn their persons; of patches for their cheeks; of that beautiful leather of various colours known by this country’s name, of inlaid leathern patterns; of vases of ancient figure.The Moors, with the art requisite to produce works admirable and exquisite, are in the rudest stage of early craft, and have no less avoided adopting from us any process or any improvement than they have been careful to exclude our corruptions of style and manners. They have not got our plough or our wheel, or our roads, or even the common pump: they have not got a turning lathe or a shuttle; though they have Moroccoleather, they have no tanning vats; they make the most exquisite silks without a throwing machine; and with the most admirable woollens they know not the manufacture of cloth. They have never drawn the metals from their rich mines; they still preserve the incantations and divinations of the earliest times; they have perfumes and incense, secrets and mysteries, yet in use in every house. Their maladies are their own—elephantiasis and biblical leprosy; the travelling scourge of plague visits them not, and yet they have a plague of their own. And, finally, they have an intoxicating drug differing from all other people; they have neither recourse to wine, spirits, nor opium; they have a plant, the produce of their own country, presenting to them, when so disposed, delusions and forgetfulness. Their permanency—as their peculiarities—may be compared to, but exceed, those of China. The Tartars are masters of Chinese, amounting in numbers to half the human race, to whom they have not given their religion; the same Tartars have not been able to subjugate fifteen millions of Moors, of the same religion. In the midst of the world of conquest, enterprise, commerce, and letters, they have repelled the invading arms of Christians and Mussulmans united; they have been overawed by no superiority of strength or display of science, and neither has fallacy of speech or temptation of gain seduced them into courses which their simple instinct told them might ultimately compromise their independence. The stranger from Europe is welcomed in every tent, and kindly treated by every Moor. The things of Europe are eschewed by the community. They are a people of thirty centuries, before whom we, with our institutions and our ideas, are as insects of yesterday. This people has outlived the Phœnicians. It has seen in its rise and passage, decline and fall, the star of Rome. It has shaken off, after having bent before, the Gothic yoke and the Vandal scourge; conquering, it converted Spain into a garden; beaten, it retired home. It arrested on its shores the following tide of invasion; it has kept out modern change—may it not yet be destined to survive and to see, too, to their end, the things even of our proud day?Elsewhere, the records of antiquity are to be sought in characters traced on marble or on brass; but here they are to be found in the living men;—not the traces of their early antiquity as that of the Chinese, becausetheyhave not changed, but of ours. Coming from a common source, flowing from a common fountain, the streams of our waters have been mingled and overcharged, and here we see what with us was in the beginning—the key to the legends of Mythology, the original of the pictures of Homer, the source of the metaphors of the prophets, the people of the old covenant reserved to our day, and the source of the religious practices accompanied by which Christianity appeared and settled itself in Europe.
From Arzela to Tangier there are two roads, one by the interior and one by the beach. Not far from the former are the Druidical remains. I, however, preferred the shore-road, not to lose the sight of that splendid tumult of waters. We started a little before full-tide. Here there were no cliffs or rocks along the beach, but flat, open, sand; and in advance of the shore, at about a quarter of a mile, there was generally a bank, along which I walked the greater part of the day barefoot, having now and then to fly before the sudden sweep of a larger wave. I learnt the difference between walking with the foot that God had given us, and stumping in the cases constructed by man. Nothing could be more beautiful than the bank of foam seaward. The waves began breaking about a mile off, and there were generally three permanent cataracts, stretching as far as I could see, this way and that, but at times I could count seven or eight successive lines of surf, which, constantly rolling, appeared nevertheless permanent waterfalls: beyond, the sea was smooth, calm, and there was no wind. This was the coast in its mildest mood, and under its most favourable aspect. In the middle of the day the sea-breeze came in at about ten knots an hour, and swept before it with each wave sheets of foam, radiating with prismatic colours. The coast is strewed with fragments of ships and bones of sharks. The Arabs will sometimes burn large masses of timber merely to get the nails that may be in them. To the south it often happens that whales are wrecked on the coast.
Within about five miles of Cape Spartel, I observed one of the most beautiful effects of the pattern figures of the sand, and I mention it as being within the reach of a ride from Tangier. There appeared to be a stream rising along the ground: it was the fine sand carried inland by the wind; and in this neighbourhood it has since been observed to me by persons who had themselves marked the change, that the sand was gaining upon the cultivated land. It is this, I imagine, that has led to the belief prevalent amongst the Europeans in this country, that the sand along the coast of Morocco has been thrown up by the sea; but the sand thus carried inward is but dust in the balance compared with that enormous stratum which constitutes the maritime border of the country, and which is battened down by a skin of rock. The edges of this mass of sand are worn by the waters, and a slight portion is blown inwards by the wind; but the mass itself has been the load of an ocean, and carried to where it now rests, from the interior of Africa itself.
I may here mention the caves of Cape Spartel, which I subsequently visited. A couple of miles southward of the Cape there is a flat, projecting rock, about sixty feet high: it is composed of a hard and porous conglomerate, which forms excellent mill-stones; and it seems to have been used from all antiquity for that purpose. The summit bears towards the land the remains of Phœnician walls; the rock is in all directions burrowed for the mill-stones; they are cut about two and a half feet in diameter. They chisel them all round; then break off the part with wedges; and this scooping out has a most singular effect. The rock is so hard that parts are left standing only a few inches thick, and, like open trellis-work, over which you may scramble. Forty feet above the surf, and projecting over it, there are two large caves open to the sea, into which the waves dash with fury. These, though greatly extended by the scooping for the mill-stones, were natural caverns, and no doubt one of them must have been the cave of Hercules. Even within the last few years a considerable portion of the rock has fallen away. There is in one a dome, with a circular aperture in the centre. The rock is all pierced through like a large warren: it contains cavities filled up with sand and bones, like the Kirkdale caves of Yorkshire.
It was dark when we reached Tangier: the gate of the city was already closed, though I had sent one of the soldiers in advance. The gate of the citadel was, however, opened for our admission. On issuing from the gate of the fortress, we came in sight of the city below us, shining like a congregation of glowworms. There was not a light to be seen—yet all was light, shaded, mellowed, and phosphoric. There were here no lamp-posts in the streets, and no windows in the houses, through which their lights could be seen: the white walls of the interior courts were illuminated with a blue reflected light, which produced an optical delusion; from the want of a direct ray to measure the distance, the lighted surfaces seemed remote, and the town swelled into magnificence of proportion. It was, indeed, but for a moment, for the sun soon corrected the error of the eye.
I reached the door of Miss Duncan, who renders Tangier habitable for Europeans, in such a condition that, when it was opened and light brought, it was about to be closed against me as a mad santon, my scanty habiliments, a shirt and drawers, being torn with briars and disfigured with mud, while the arms and legs fared no better. Great was the surprise when from such a body proceeded an English appeal for shelter, and within an hour I was seated on a chair at a table, before a fire of sea-coal, with grate, fender, and fire-irons. On the table stood cruet-stand, knife and fork, Staffordshire plates, and Scotch broth. While marvelling at the sight, in rushed Hamed with a steaming dish—“Me know you like Moors’ kuscoussoo.”
The journey from Rabat, a distance of one hundred and twenty miles, had taken me a week of toil and fatigue. The difficulties, from the season of the year, were, however, the charm of the trip; the weather was mild and beautiful, but the roads—if they can be so called—were heavy and deep. This, comparatively speaking, would have mattered little, if we had been well mounted; our animals were, I think, the worst I ever journeyed with, and the charge the most exorbitant I ever paid. I could have bought them outright for one-third more than the sum I gave for the week’s hire. The charges for the soldiers were in proportion, and I found that this journey had cost me in time and in money, the same as posting from Calais to Naples. Each soldier received for his week’s journey, the price of an ox.
Coming from the south, Tangier was a very different object than when I crossed the Straits to visit it, as a specimen of Barbary. In fact, it is a place equally foreign to both. The Moors designate it, “Infidel,” like the Giaour of the Turks. It is the only place where Europeans reside, and there is here a mixture of all classes, Brebers, Moors, Jews, and Europeans, living promiscuously together.
On the cession of the place by the English, it became the property of the Sultan, who offered it to the Brebers, thinking by that means to fix them in the towns. Some hundred families accepted the offer, but their example has not been followed by the rest. They seem originally to have enjoyed a very free government, by their own municipal body, which consisted of twelve, and who each in turn was governor of the city for a month.
The fortifications present a strange jumble of the structure of all ages, but the only chiselled remains that I saw were Roman, being capitals, and shafts of Corinthian columns.
The town stands on a deep mass of the relics of former habitations. The Danish consulate has recently been rebuilt, and in some places they dug twenty feet below the present level. Twelve feet below the surface there were found Roman tombs, and eight feet below these, round black jars containing fragments of burnt bones similar to those which have been found in mounds in Denmark. I could see none of them, as they had been all sent to Denmark to the king. A portion of a fine Roman bridge still stands, leading from Tangier across the river, in the direction of the northern coast. It resembles the Flavian bridge at Rome, and is fifteen feet broad between the parapets: an old engraving of the city, when in possession of the English, represents the port crowded with vessels. It was in form nearly triangular, the apex being at the entrance three hundred and fifty fathoms from the base. Two moles were run out, one protecting it from the north-east, the other from the north-west: these were destroyed when we surrendered the place.
From here you command a perfect view through the Straits. It is impossible not to be struck with its superiority over Gibraltar, while the moles existed. Here you are to windward: with easterly winds you may work through with the current’s aid, and with westerly winds you are far enough out of its draught to be able to get away to the westward. There is, however, a position close by, which is superior to it. It is a cove two miles to the westward, and at the point of the cape. It would require, indeed, some clearance out of the sand, and the addition of a breakwater at each of the horns: there is good anchorage before it, and nothing more to be feared than from the north. The coast of Spain terminating at Trafalgar breaks the sea from the north, and the northerly wind never blows home, as the various influences of the Straits change it here either into an east or a west wind. The Americans some years ago cast their eyes on this position, and wished to obtain it as their Mediterranean emporium, and they offered a large sum of money for it to the Government of Morocco.
Above this cove is situated a house that has been constructed by an English gentleman. It had been several months untenanted, and though there is a road passing close behind it, nothing had been touched. There was on the steps of the door a child’s toy—a cart—just as it had been left weeks before; some of the panes of glass were broken, but this had been done by the pigeons. Garden implements were lying about. During two years that the proprietor has resided there, he had locked nothing up, and lost nothing. There are in the neighbourhood several villages, and no stipendiary magistrate, or rural police.
There is here a restricted but agreeable society of the foreign agents, and a most imposing assemblage of flag-staffs—or rather masts—which are struck and housed in bad weather, and which exhibit fore and back stays, cross-trees, rigging, rattlings, halyards, &c., giving to the flat roofs of their habitations the appearance of decks, and making them look like so many vessels, wanting only their yards to be crossed, and their sails to be bent. In their nautical pretensions, they are, however, beaten by the English consul at Cadiz, who hoists a pendant, and whose porter pipes a guest up the stairs with a boatswain’s call.
Amidst the consular masts with their floating standards and streaming pendants, which make the town look from without rather like a dockyard than a city, there is not one that bears the blue cross of St. Andrew. There was the agent of the young republic of the West at work trying to involve France and Morocco with a view to the settlement of the Oregon question against England, while the profound cabinet of the North is so heedless of Morocco as not to have even a consul there. Nay, Russia is positively so ignorant of the commonest facts connected with this country, that, when appealed to recently in an affair concerning it, she replied that she considered it as aportion of Turkey.
The circumstances attending the appointment of the present American consul are curious. He had been consul here formerly, and on no good terms with the authorities. The Moors are very particular in seeing to whoever embarks from this place, and the foreign agents, of course, always give previous notice of their intention. The American consul on taking his departure, not only gave no such notice, but announced his intention of not doing so. The Pacha, therefore, sent orders to the Porte to prevent the embarkation of any one without permission. He was, consequently, stopped at the gate, on which he drew his sword, and a very violent scene occurred. An infraction of the law of nations in his inviolable person, &c.—protest, commotion—the learned consular body sign—all nations, all Christendom was attacked—and the farce would have been enough for a war, had it occurred in Turkey or Mexico. The United States had, however, as yet no mission of civilization in Morocco, and took no notice of the affair; but, upon the accession of Mr. Polk, the bearing of Morocco upon England and France was to have been reconsidered, and the discarded consul sent back without any previous settlement of the quarrel. When the news reached Morocco, the government was greatly troubled, and after enlisting the good services of the French agent, transmitted a statement of the case to the government of the United States, waving the right of the Emperor to refuse to admit their agent, and leaving it for the American government to judge whether such a person was fit to be the channel of intercourse between two friendly governments; and this representation was to be backed by the French minister at Washington.
In the meantime, Mr. Carr arrived at Gibraltar. The Moorish government resolved to say to him, that they would receive him as a private person, but could not admit him as consul, as they had submitted the case to his government. But the part had been rehearsed also on the other side, and to better purpose. Mr. Carr came with two frigates. On the Pacha’s making his concerted speech, he was answered by the naval commander: “I don’t know anything about the matter. I have orders to bring here the consul of the United States; will you receive him or not, yes or no?” on which the caïd said, that he was ready to receive him, if the naval officer would give him a paper, saying that he constrained him to do so. This was the same functionary who had negotiated with the French, under the threat of having a pistol ball through his head, and signed the treaty of Tangier without ever having read it; this is the person, in whose hands are placed the foreign relations of Morocco; who has property transferred to France, and who is openly charged with giving bribes to foreign agents, and receiving bribes from foreign governments.
There is a beautiful walk from the upper part of Tangier, along the crest of the hill to the cove, so coveted by the Americans. It retains the name it had when the English were here, of Marchand; the boys appropriate it for a game which is evidently the origin of billiards; it is played with two balls of iron, and a ring, which just admits them. The object is to pocket the ball through the ring; they play several on a side. Instead of cues they use a piece of wood, of the form of the old sacrificial knife, with which they impel the ball by a sweeping motion, drawing its edge along the ground.
The ball is calledbola, the ringArabi. This game flourishes particularly at Tangier, where the boy population has profited by the liberal distribution of grape made by the French. The children in Morocco are distinguished for their games;—I have seen leap-frog performed in a manner which would not have disgraced an English clown in a pantomime. They are dexterous in the use of the single stick, and they have a mimic imitation of the powder game of the men, which resembles the French game calledbarre. They have blindman’s buff, and hunt the slipper, which must be Moorish; and hunt the slipper and blindman’s buff are combined in one, for they must strike the ground with a slipper, and having done so, must not leave the spot if the blinded man approaches them. At the entrance of all the towns we found, it being holiday time, whirligigs. No inconsiderable portion of Moorish art is expended on toys: there are drums of pottery-ware, a tube covered with parchment at one end, with the other open, such as were used amongst the Jews, and may be detected among the Egyptians.
The habits of children are not to be neglected in the history of nations, for they are a primitive and original community transmitting their mariners to their successors, distinct from the nation of adults, and flowing as a pure source into the turbid stream, and age after age struggling against it.
I must enumerate the peculiarities of this land before quitting it, although, indeed, every thing that exists in it is a peculiarity; for when they do things like other people, they have no more taken it from them than one man borrows from another the way to breathe.
They have a form of room, tesselated and open court, vermilioned and cedar beams, lofty arch and thick-set column conjoined, carving of wood, fretting of walls, colouring in patterns and assortment of colours, doors, windows, brackets, stables, kitchens, store-houses, water-closets, and tomb-stones,—all unlike what is to be seen east or west, north or south. They have carpets like other people, but in their own style; they have mats, but the figure is Moorish; they have caps, the form is their own; they have shoes, again, as unlike Eastern slippers as European boots; they have towels (our name comes from them) but they are unlike ours; so they have pottery, embroidery, and even the use of the needle. Using the same letters as the Persians and the Turks, the Moors have an entirely distinct set of their own instruments of penmanship. They have one national dish. Unlike any thing else that is practised amongst men, so is their costume. It is a nation living under tents, and yet excelling all others in the composition of materials for fortresses and the structure of gigantic walls. It is a people that has combined nomade habits with the settled distribution of property. Jewelry is, again, their own; so are their toys and their children’s games, the head-dresses of the women, the plaiting of the hair, their cosmetics, the substances with which they wash; and if they have, in common with Easterns, the bath, it here, again, assumes a style that is Moorish.
What is chiefly remarkable, is the absence of all things that are not in taste. There is no repetition of chintz patterns used for adornments of wall or floor; there is no glazed or glaring oil paint; there are no pictures or prints hung for ornament sake; no gilt and gaudy frames round these unsuited to the apartments in which they are placed. Upon their persons there are no repetitions of figures, no interminable variety of tints, and no false ones. Some centuries ago, I might have increased the list of the peculiarities of Morocco, such as the use of candles for giving light; of bells to call servants; of knockers to announce visitors; of straw hats to shade off the sun; of a different sort of meal in the morning and in the evening; tambourine and crochet work and lace, to occupy ladies’ fingers or adorn their persons; of patches for their cheeks; of that beautiful leather of various colours known by this country’s name, of inlaid leathern patterns; of vases of ancient figure.
The Moors, with the art requisite to produce works admirable and exquisite, are in the rudest stage of early craft, and have no less avoided adopting from us any process or any improvement than they have been careful to exclude our corruptions of style and manners. They have not got our plough or our wheel, or our roads, or even the common pump: they have not got a turning lathe or a shuttle; though they have Moroccoleather, they have no tanning vats; they make the most exquisite silks without a throwing machine; and with the most admirable woollens they know not the manufacture of cloth. They have never drawn the metals from their rich mines; they still preserve the incantations and divinations of the earliest times; they have perfumes and incense, secrets and mysteries, yet in use in every house. Their maladies are their own—elephantiasis and biblical leprosy; the travelling scourge of plague visits them not, and yet they have a plague of their own. And, finally, they have an intoxicating drug differing from all other people; they have neither recourse to wine, spirits, nor opium; they have a plant, the produce of their own country, presenting to them, when so disposed, delusions and forgetfulness. Their permanency—as their peculiarities—may be compared to, but exceed, those of China. The Tartars are masters of Chinese, amounting in numbers to half the human race, to whom they have not given their religion; the same Tartars have not been able to subjugate fifteen millions of Moors, of the same religion. In the midst of the world of conquest, enterprise, commerce, and letters, they have repelled the invading arms of Christians and Mussulmans united; they have been overawed by no superiority of strength or display of science, and neither has fallacy of speech or temptation of gain seduced them into courses which their simple instinct told them might ultimately compromise their independence. The stranger from Europe is welcomed in every tent, and kindly treated by every Moor. The things of Europe are eschewed by the community. They are a people of thirty centuries, before whom we, with our institutions and our ideas, are as insects of yesterday. This people has outlived the Phœnicians. It has seen in its rise and passage, decline and fall, the star of Rome. It has shaken off, after having bent before, the Gothic yoke and the Vandal scourge; conquering, it converted Spain into a garden; beaten, it retired home. It arrested on its shores the following tide of invasion; it has kept out modern change—may it not yet be destined to survive and to see, too, to their end, the things even of our proud day?
Elsewhere, the records of antiquity are to be sought in characters traced on marble or on brass; but here they are to be found in the living men;—not the traces of their early antiquity as that of the Chinese, becausetheyhave not changed, but of ours. Coming from a common source, flowing from a common fountain, the streams of our waters have been mingled and overcharged, and here we see what with us was in the beginning—the key to the legends of Mythology, the original of the pictures of Homer, the source of the metaphors of the prophets, the people of the old covenant reserved to our day, and the source of the religious practices accompanied by which Christianity appeared and settled itself in Europe.