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.