The Book of Gallant Vagabonds

by Henry Beston

The angry phrase of the Dey, however, was quite natural. As master of a piratic kingdom cravenly humoured by the European powers, he had grown accustomed to obedience of the most servile kind from all Christians resident in his territories. If there is one supremely discreditable episode in the history of what is ironically called Western Christendom, it is surely this matter of the relations of the European powers and the Barbary pirates. Great European nations faint-heartedly directed their consuls to submit to incredible degradations,—the French consul in Bruce’s time had been loaded with fetters and harnessed to a cart for venturing to protest at some exaction, and another consul with gouty feet threatened with the bastinado—many thousands of unhappy European sailors were allowed to pass into the living death of Moorish slavery, and the cut-throat authors of these outrages timidly flattered and paid. The bare historical account does not tell the story; the reality of it is a ship’s crew of weary, thirsty and cruelly-beaten men standing fettered in the white glare of the Algerian sun, hearing “Christian dog” hurled at them like a stone meant to wound.

With the arrival of his British Majesty’s new consul, Mr. James Bruce of Stirlingshire, a brave spirit had appeared in this world of fatuous pusillanimity. The tall, composed Scot was decidedly not the man who would submit to degradation or any filthy foolery. When he had to fight, he fought, whether the case in hand was the rescue of some poor tar from his Moorish chains, or the protection of some minor official of the consulate. His composure and good humour,—there is a kind of good humour secretly rooted in the quality of courage—discomfited his pirate neighbours, for they knew that he knew that his life was in danger. The ferocious old shark of a Dey, being thus put out, had then addressed his complaint to the “Vizir” of England.

History does not record what Mr. Pitt did or said on this occasion, but it does mention that the tall consul who annoyed the Dey of Algiers by looking him squarely in the eye decided to waste no more time among these uninteresting sea jackals and slavers. He had taken the post of Algiers, not because he sought the haven of political office, but because he hoped to make his position a passport to North Africa. There were Roman ruins about, in Bruce’s own words “the large and magnificent remains of ruined architecture ... of exquisite elegance and perfection” and Bruce was a true son of a century that went in for ruins and elegance.

Now comes his resignation from the post at Algiers and his appearance in a new rôle. He will roam the coast in the character of an itinerant Christian physician, a dervish of the art of healing. At Algiers he had prevailed upon the naval surgeon attached to the Consulate to teach him a little eighteenth century medicine, and had been quite successful with his “purgings, vomitings and bleedings.” This quasi-knowledge was to be of the greatest use to him in after life. “I flatter myself,” said he, “no offence, I hope, I did not occasion a greater mortality among the Mohametans and Pagans abroad than may be attributed to some of my brother physicians among their fellow Christians.” When the parson of the Consulate left, he took on the marrying and baptising.

In 1765, the year of his resignation from his post at Algiers, this paragon of consuls was thirty-five years old. He had some resources of his own, he was alone in life, and he had seen just enough of the world to make him wish to see more. A thirst for travel, like appetite, grows with indulgence. The mental fire driving him to his future of extraordinary adventure was an intellectual curiosity, and as one reads his own account of his vagabondage, one feels that he was far more interested in the human world than in the natural. He wanted to see people and events, and he went to strange countries because events and people there would be supremely worth while. This point of view again is decidedly of the eighteenth century. Just now, however, Roman ruins are on his mind, and he is gathering together an expedition.

A notion suddenly checks him. The Dey has resented his demeanour, and may possibly take revenge by refusing him an authorisation to go about in his dominions. And now a great surprise, for presently an obsequious official comes from the Dey bringing passes and an authorisation whose like had never before been issued to a foreigner, and a pair of “presents.” The presents are two grinning, good-natured young Irishmen, who stand in the courtyard clad in the scanty rags tossed to Christian slaves, and with the usual chains upon their legs. These young Celts, deserters from the Royal Navy to the Spanish service, had been captured and enslaved by the Algerians.

What can such an excess of benevolence mean? Little by little the story comes to Bruce’s ears; the old Dey has secretly admired his courage all the while.

The autumn of the year finds the antiquarian “dervish,” sketch-book in “hand, wandering off into the interior of the Barbary States”; he explores the dry, treeless mountain land of North Africa searching for temples and ruins, he ventures to the edge of the desert and sketches the Roman columns of some dead city overwhelmed by time, silence and sand. One pictures the antiquarian expedition led by this composed Olympian Scot, with a rich sense of humour lying half hid in a keenly intelligent eye, the cavalcade consisting of the Irish sailors, a young Italian architectural draughtsman, one Luigi Balugani, and Moorish attendants.

A classical column or a Roman shrine, suddenly seen through village palms, brings all to a halt, quiet descends, pencils flourish busily, measurements are taken; then follows the papery snap of a closing sketch-book, a stir of hoofs, a variety of equine snorts, and off goes the sometime consul of the eighteenth century in search of more antique “magnificence.”