Life in Morocco and Glimpses Beyond | Page 6

than before. Even the ambassadors and
consuls of friendly powers were treated with indignities beyond belief.
Some were imprisoned on the flimsiest pretexts, all had to appear
before the monarch in the most abject manner, and many were
constrained to bribe the favourite wives of the ameers to secure their
requests. It is still the custom for the state reception to take place in an
open courtyard, the ambassador standing bareheaded before the
mounted Sultan under his Imperial parasol. As late as 1790 the brutal
Sultan El Yazeed, who emulated Ismáïl the Bloodthirsty, did not
hesitate to declare war on all Christendom except England, agreeing to
terms of peace on the basis of tribute. Cooperation between the Powers
was not then thought of, and one by one they struck their bargains as
they are doing again to-day.
Yet even at the most violent period of Moorish misrule it is a
remarkable fact that Europeans were allowed to settle and trade in the

Empire, in all probability as little molested there as they would have
been had they remained at home, by varying religious tests and
changing governments. It is almost impossible to conceive, without a
perusal of the literature of the period, the incongruity of the position.
Foreign slaves would be employed in gangs outside the dwellings of
free fellow-countrymen with whom they were forbidden to
communicate, while every returning pirate captain added to the number
of the captives, sometimes bringing friends and relatives of those who
lived in freedom as the Sultan's "guests," though he considered himself
"at war" with their Governments. So little did the Moors understand the
position of things abroad, that at one time they made war upon
Gibraltar, while expressing the warmest friendship for England, who
then possessed it. This was done by Mulai Abd Allah V., in 1756,
because, he said, the Governor had helped his rebel uncle at Arzîla, so
that the English, his so-called friends, did more harm than his
enemies--the Portuguese and Spaniards. "My father and I believe,"
wrote his son, Sidi Mohammed, to Admiral Pawkers, "that the king
your master has no knowledge of the behaviour towards us of the
Governor of Gibraltar, ... so Gibraltar shall be excluded from the peace
to which I am willing to consent between England and us, and with the
aid of the Almighty God, I will know how to avenge myself as I may
on the English of Gibraltar."
Previously Spain and Portugal had held the principal Moroccan
seaports, the twin towns of Rabat and Salli alone remaining always
Moorish, but these two in their turn set up a sort of independent
republic, nourished from the Berber tribes in the mountains to the south
of them. No Europeans live in Salli yet, for here the old fanaticism
slumbers still. So long as a port remained in foreign hands it was
completely cut off from the surrounding country, and played no part in
Moorish history, save as a base for periodical incursions. One by one
most of them fell again into the hands of their rightful owners, till they
had recovered all their Atlantic sea-board. On the Mediterranean, Ceuta,
which had belonged to Portugal, came under the rule of Spain when
those countries were united, and the Spaniards hold it still, as they do
less important positions further east.

The piracy days of the Moors have long passed, but they only ceased at
the last moment they could do so with grace, before the introduction of
steamships. There was not, at the best of times, much of the noble or
heroic in their raids, which generally took the nature of lying in wait
with well-armed, many-oared vessels, for unarmed, unwieldy
merchantmen which were becalmed, or were outpaced by sail and oar
together.
Early in the nineteenth century Algiers was forced to abandon piracy
before Lord Exmouth's guns, and soon after the Moors were given to
understand that it could no longer be permitted to them either, since the
Moorish "fleets"--if worthy the name--had grown so weak, and those of
the Nazarenes so strong, that the tables were turned. Yet for many years
more the nations of Europe continued the tribute wherewith the
rapacity of the Moors was appeased, and to the United States belongs
the honour of first refusing this disgraceful payment.
The manner in which the rovers of Salli and other ports were permitted
to flourish so long can be explained in no other way than by the
supposition that they were regarded as a sort of necessary nuisance, just
a hornet's-nest by the wayside, which it would be hopeless to destroy,
as they would merely swarm elsewhere. And then we must remember
that the Moors were not the only pirates of those days, and that
Europeans have to answer for the most terrible deeds