TANGIER.
“And with asphaltick slime broad as the gate
Deep to the roots of hell the gather’d beach
They fasten’d: and the _mole_ immense wrought on
Over the foaming deep high-arch’d: a bridge
Of length prodigious.”--_Paradise Lost_, x. 298–302.
Pepys was so intimately connected with the government of Tangier during
the twenty-two years it remained in the possession of the English, that
it seems necessary, in a memoir of him, to give some account of the
history of the place during that period.
Tangier is a seaport, on a small bay or inlet of the Straits of
Gibraltar, which affords the only good harbour for shipping on the
sea-board of Morocco, an extent of coast of about 900 miles. The town
was early coveted by the Portuguese, and in 1437 their army attacked
it, but were defeated beneath the walls. On this occasion Dom Fernando,
the King’s brother, was left behind as a hostage. A treaty of peace
was concluded, but the stipulations not being executed, the Moors threw
Dom Fernando into prison, where he died. The prince’s body was treated
with insult, and hung up by the heels over the city walls. A few years
later this unworthy conduct was revenged, for in 1463, the Portuguese
being successful in battle, Alonzo V. took the town from the Moors.
For two centuries the Portuguese kept possession, but about the period
of our Restoration they found the place somewhat of an encumbrance,
and were anxious to obtain a desirable alliance against their enemies
the Spaniards, by transferring it to another power. In November,
1660, Thomas Maynard, British Consul at Lisbon, writing to Sir Edward
Nicholas, says, that the King of Portugal would part with Tangier to
England on reasonable terms.[96]
[Illustration: Katherine of Braganza]
Shortly afterwards the Portuguese ambassador in London proposed the
Infanta Katharine, daughter of that Duke of Braganza who became King
of Portugal as Joam IV., as a wife for Charles II., offering at
the same time a portion of half a million pounds sterling (“almost
double what any King [of England] had ever received in money by any
marriage”),[97] and in addition a grant of a free trade in Brazil
and the East Indies, and the possession of Tangier and the Island of
Bombay. The ambassador observed that these two places “might reasonably
be valued above the portion in money.”[98] It was supposed that the
possession of Tangier would be of infinite benefit to England and
a security to her trade, and the Earl of Sandwich and Sir John Lawson
were consulted respecting the proposed acquisition. Lord Sandwich said
that if the town were walled and fortified with brass, it would yet
repay the cost, but he only knew it from the sea. Lawson had been in
it, and said that it was a place of that importance, that if it were
in the hands of Hollanders they would quickly make a mole, which could
easily be done. Then ships would ride securely in all weathers, and
we could keep the place against the world, and give the law to the
trade of the Mediterranean.[99] The Portuguese were delighted at the
prospect of a marriage between the Infanta and Charles, and after a few
hitches the treaty was concluded, but some murmurs were heard against
the delivery of Tangier into the hands of heretics. Dom Fernando de
Menezes, the Governor, entreated the Queen Regent to spare him the
grief of handing over the city to the enemies of the Catholic faith. He
was given to understand that, if he obeyed instructions, a marquisate
would be conferred upon him, but if he continued to resist he would be
dismissed. Upon this, Dom Fernando threw up his command.
Lord Sandwich was instructed to take possession of Tangier, and
then convey the Infanta and her portion to England. Although the
Queen Regent sent a governor whom she had chosen as one devoted to
her interest, and sure to obey her commands, yet Clarendon affirms
that he went to his government with a contrary resolution.[100] This
resolution, however, was frustrated by the action of the Moors. A few
days only before Lord Sandwich arrived, the Governor marched out of the
town with all the horse and half the foot of the garrison, and fell
into an ambush. The whole party were cut off, and the Governor and many
of his chief men were killed. The town was so weak that, when Lord
Sandwich arrived at this conjuncture, he was hailed as a deliverer from
the Moors. He conveyed the remainder of the garrison into Portugal, and
Henry, second Earl of Peterborough, with the English garrison, entered
the town on the 30th of January, 1662, as the first Governor from
England.
Now began a system of mismanagement worthy of the disorganized
condition of public affairs. A commission was appointed for the
purpose of carrying on the government of Tangier in London, and
constant meetings were held. None of the commissioners knew anything
of the place, and they were quite at the mercy of the governors
and deputy-governors who were sent out. Pepys was placed upon the
commission by the influence of Lord Sandwich, and John Creed was
appointed secretary.[101] Thomas Povey, the treasurer, got his accounts
into so great a muddle, that he thought it wise to surrender his office
to Pepys, on condition of receiving half the profits, which he did on
March 20, 1664–65. This treasurership and the contract for victualling
the garrison of Tangier were sources of considerable profit to our
Diarist. At one of the earliest meetings of the committee, the project
of forming a mole or breakwater was entertained. A contract for the
work to be done at 13_s._ the cubical yard was accepted, although, as
Pepys writes, none of the committee knew whether they gave too much
or too little (February 16, 1662–63); and he signed the contract with
very ill will on that score (March 30, 1663). When the accounts were
looked into on April 3, 1663, it was found that the charge for one
year’s work would be as much as _£_13,000. Two years after this, the
committee agreed to pay 4_s._ a yard more, and the whole amount spent
upon the mole was found to be _£_36,000 (March 30, 1665). The wind and
sea exerted a very destructive influence over this structure, although
it was very strongly built, and Colonel Norwood reported in 1668 that a
breach had been made in the mole which would cost a considerable sum to
repair. As Norwood was an enemy of a friend of his, Pepys at once jumps
to the conclusion that he must be a bad man (February 22, 1668–69).
The second Earl of Carnarvon said that wood was an excrescence of the
earth, provided by God for the payment of debts, and Sir W. Coventry,
in a conversation with Pepys, applied this saying to Tangier and its
governors. It is not always safe to take for granted all that our
Diarist says against the persons he writes about, but there must have
been some truth in the indictment he drew up against all those who
undertook the government of Tangier. When Lord Peterborough received
the place from the Portuguese, a book was given to him which contained
a secret account of all the conduit-heads and heads of watercourses
in and about the town. This book was always given from one governor
to another, but was not to be looked at by anyone else. When Lord
Peterborough left, he took the book away with him, and on being asked
for it always answered that he had mislaid it and could not recover it.
Colonel Kirke told Pepys in 1683 that the supply of water was greatly
reduced by the want of this information.[102] In 1666 Pepys had applied
the adjective “ignoble” to Lord Peterborough’s name, on account of his
lordship’s conduct in regard to money matters. On December 15, 1662,
Andrew Lord Rutherford and Earl of Teviot, Governor of Dunkirk until
its surrender to the French, was appointed Governor of Tangier in
succession to Lord Peterborough, who was recalled. He was a brave but
rash man, and made a practice of going out of the town into the country
without taking proper precautions. In May, 1664, he was surveying his
lines after an attack by the Moors, when he and nineteen officers were
killed by a party of the enemy in ambush. Pepys called him a cunning
man, and said that had he lived he would have undone the place; but in
1683, Dr. Lawrence told Pepys that his death was a great misfortune,
for he took every opportunity of making the place great, but without
neglecting himself.[103] John Lord Bellassis was the next governor, and
he was said to be corrupt in his command.
The deputy-governors were no better than their superiors. Of Colonel
Fitzgerald, Pepys writes, on October 20th, 1664, he is “a man of no
honour nor presence, nor little honesty, and endeavours to raise the
Irish and suppress the English interest there, and offend every body.”
Certainly, when he sees him on August 7th, 1668, he is pleased with him
and his discourse. Pepys’s opinion of Colonel Norwood we have already
seen; but none of the governors rose to the height of villany exhibited
by Colonel Kirke, whose name is condemned to everlasting infamy in the
pages of Macaulay.
The further history of Tangier, previous to its final destruction, can
be put into a few words. In January, 1668–69, Lord Sandwich proposed
that a paymaster should be appointed at Tangier, and suggested Sir
Charles Harbord for the post; but the Duke of York said that nothing
could be done without Pepys’s consent, in case the arrangement should
injure him in his office of treasurer. Our Diarist was much pleased at
this instance of the kindness of the Duke, and of the whole committee
towards him.[104]
Henry Sheres, who accompanied Lord Sandwich to Spain, and afterwards
became a great friend of Pepys, was paid _£_100, on January 18th,
1668–69, for drawing a plate of the Tangier fortifications. In the
same year (1669), the great engraver, Hollar, was sent to Tangier by
the King to take views of the town and fortifications. Some of these
he afterwards engraved, and the original drawings are in the British
Museum.
In 1673 a new commission was appointed, and Pepys and Povey were among
the commissioners.[105] Two years afterwards the vessel in which Henry
Teonge was chaplain anchored in Tangier Bay; and in the “Diary” which
he left behind him he gives a description of the town as it appeared to
him. The mole was not then finished, and he found the old high walls
much decayed in places. He mentions “a pitiful palizado, not so good as
an old park pale (for you may anywhere almost thrust it down with your
foot);” but in this palisade were twelve forts, well supplied with good
guns.
In 1680, Tangier was besieged by the Emperor of Morocco, and Charles
II. applied to Parliament for money, so that the place might be
properly defended. The House of Commons expressed their dislike of
the management of the garrison, which they suspected to be a nursery
for a Popish army. Sir William Jones said: “Tangier may be of great
importance to trade, but I am afraid hath not been so managed as to be
any security to the Protestant religion;” and William Harbord, M.P. for
Thetford, added: “When we are assured we shall have a good Protestant
governor and garrison in Tangier, I shall heartily give my vote for
money for it.”[106]
A most unworthy action was at this time perpetrated by the Government.
Not having the support of Parliament, they were unable to defend
the place with an adequate force; and they chose the one man in
England whose brilliant career rivals those of the grand worthies of
Elizabeth’s reign to fight a losing game.
The Earl of Ossory, son of the Duke of Ormond, was appointed Governor
and General of the Forces; but, before he could embark, he fell ill
from brooding over the treatment he had received, and soon after died.
Lord Sunderland said in council that “Tangier must necessarily be lost;
but that it was fit Lord Ossory should be sent, that they might give
some account of it to the world.”
The Earl left his wife at their daughter’s house, and came up to
London. Here he made a confidant of John Evelyn, who records in his
“Diary” his opinion of the transaction. It was not only “an hazardous
adventure, but, in most men’s opinion, an impossibility, seeing there
was not to be above 3 or 400 horse, and 4000 foot for the garrison
and all, both to defend the town, form a camp, repulse the enemy, and
fortify what ground they should get in. This touch’d my Lord deeply
that he should be so little consider’d as to put him on a business in
which he should probably not only lose his reputation, but be charged
with all the miscarriages and ill success.”[107] It was on this man
that Ormond pronounced the beautiful eulogy, “I would not exchange my
dead son for any living son in Christendom!”
In August, 1683, Lord Dartmouth was constituted Captain-General of his
Majesty’s Forces in Africa, and Governor of Tangier, being sent with a
fleet of about twenty sail to demolish and blow up the works, destroy
the harbour, and bring home the garrison; but his instructions were
secret. Pepys received the King’s command to accompany Lord Dartmouth,
but without being informed of the object of the expedition. In a letter
to Evelyn, Pepys tells him, “What our work is I am not solicitous to
learn nor forward to make griefs at, it being handled by our masters
as a secret.” When they get to sea, Lord Dartmouth tells Pepys the
object of the voyage, which the latter says he never suspected, having
written the contrary to Mr. Houblon.[108] On September 17th they landed
at Tangier, having been about a month on their voyage. All the doings
on board ship, and the business transacted on shore, are related with
all Pepys’s vivid power of description in his “Tangier Journal.” The
writer, however, has become more sedate, and only once “the old man”
appears, when he remarks on the pleasure he had in “again seeing fine
Mrs. Kirke,”[109] the wife of the Governor. We are told that “the
tyranny and vice of Kirke is stupendous,”[110] and the “Journal” is
full of the various instances of his enormities. Macaulay, however,
with that power of characterization which he so eminently possessed,
has compressed them all into his picture of the leader of “Kirke’s
lambs.”
Pepys was now for the first time in the town with the government of
which he had been so long connected, and he was astonished at its
uselessness. Day by day he finds out new disadvantages; and he says
that the King was kept in ignorance of them, in order that successive
governors might reap the benefits of their position. He complains that
even Mr. Sheres was silent for his own profit, as he might have made
known the evils of the place ten years before.[111]
In a letter to Mr. Houblon, he gives his opinion that “at no time there
needed any more than the walking once round it by daylight to convince
any man (no better-sighted than I) of the impossibility of our ever
making it, under our circumstances of government, either tenable by, or
useful to, the crown of England.” He adds: “Therefore it seems to me a
matter much more unaccountable how the King was led to the reception,
and, afterwards, to so long and chargeable a maintaining, than, at this
day, to the deserting and extinguishing it.”[112]
On the other side Mr. Charles Russell wrote to Pepys from Cadiz,
deprecating the destruction of Tangier, and pointing out the advantages
of possessing it.[113] Sheres also showed Pepys a paper containing
the ordinary objections made against the mole, “improved the most he
could, to justify the King’s destroying it,” and added that he could
answer them all.[114]
When the work of destruction was begun, it was found that the masonry
had been so well constructed that it formed a protection as strong as
solid rock. The mining was undertaken piecemeal, and it took six months
to blow up the whole structure. The rubbish of the mole and the walls
was thrown into the harbour, so as to choke it up completely. Still the
ruined mole stands, and on one side the accumulated sand has formed a
dangerous reef.
On the 5th of March, 1683–84, Lord Dartmouth and Pepys sailed out of
Tangier Bay, and abandoned the place to the Moors. Shortly afterwards
the Emperor of Morocco (Muly Ismael) wrote to Captain Cloudesley
Shovel: “God be praised! you have quitted Tangier, and left it to us
to whom it did belong. From henceforward we shall manure it, for it
is the best part of our dominions. As for the captives, you may do
with them as you please, heaving them into the sea, or destroying them
otherways.” To which Shovel replied: “If they are to be disowned
because they are poor, the Lord help them! Your Majesty tells us we may
throw them overboard if we please. All this we very well know; but we
are Christians, and they bear the form of men, which is reason enough
for us not to do it. As to Tangier, our master kept it twenty-one
years; and, in spite of all your force, he could, if he had pleased,
have continued it to the world’s end; for he levelled your walls,
filled up your harbour, and demolished your houses, in the face of your
Alcade and his army; and when he had done, he left your barren country
without the loss of a man, for your own people to starve in.”[115]
According to Pepys’s account Tangier was a sink of corruption, and
England was well rid of the encumbrance. He describes the inhabitants
as given up to all kinds of vice, “swearing, cursing and drinking,”
the women being as bad as the men; and he says that a certain captain
belonging to the Ordnance told him that “he was quite ashamed of what
he had heard in their houses; worse a thousand times than in the worst
place in London he was ever in.” Dr. Balaam, a former Recorder, had so
poor an opinion of the people of the place, that he left his estate to
a servant, with the caution that if he married a woman of Tangier, or
one that ever had been there, he should lose it all.[116]
Yet Tangier was positively outdone in iniquity by Bombay, which
Sir John Wyborne calls “a cursed place.”[117] These were the two
acquisitions so highly rated when Charles II. married the Infanta of
Portugal.
In spite of all disadvantages, one of the greatest being that ships of
any size are forced to lie out far from shore, Tangier is still a place
of some importance as the port of North Morocco. The description of the
town given by Sir Joseph Hooker[118] answers in most particulars to
that written by Teonge two centuries before. It stands on the western
side of a shallow bay, on rocky ground that rises steeply from the
shore, and the cubical blocks of whitewashed masonry, with scarcely
an opening to represent a window, which rise one above the other on
the steep slope of a recess in the hills, give the place a singular
appearance from the sea. On the summit of the hill is a massive gaunt
castle of forbidding aspect, and the zigzag walls which encompass
the city on all sides are pierced by three gates which are closed at
nightfall.
FOOTNOTES:
[96] Lister’s “Life of Clarendon,” vol. iii. p. 113.
[97] Clarendon’s Life, 1827, vol. i. p. 495.
[98] _Ibid._ p. 491.
[99] Clarendon’s Life, 1827, vol. i. p. 494.
[100] Clarendon’s Life, 1827, vol. ii. p. 161.
[101] “Diary,” Dec. 1, 1662. In Lord Braybrooke’s “Life of Pepys” it is
incorrectly stated that Pepys was secretary.
[102] “Tangier Diary” (Smith, vol. i. p. 444).
[103] “Tangier Diary” (Smith, vol. i. p. 444).
[104] “Diary,” Jan. 4, 1668–69.
[105] Sir Joseph Williamson’s “Letters” (Camden Soc.), vol. i. p. 149.
[106] Smith, vol. i. p. 390 (note).
[107] Evelyn’s “Diary,” July 26, 1680.
[108] Smith, vol. i. p. 331.
[109] P. 374.
[110] P. 403.
[111] Smith, vol. i. p. 403.
[112] P. 419.
[113] P. 385.
[114] Smith, vol. i. p. 383.
[115] Ockley’s “Account of South-West Barbary,” quoted in Smith’s
“Life, &c., of Pepys,” vol. ii. p. 130 (note).
[116] Smith, vol. i. p. 446.
[117] Vol. ii. pp. 99–100.
[118] “Journal of a Tour in Marocco,” by Sir Joseph D. Hooker and John
Ball. London, 1878, p. 5.
[Illustration: Decoration]
[Illustration: Decoration]