‘There has been a great lack of rain throughout Morocco. The usual fall is between thirty and fifty inches; this winter since September only three and a-half inches have fallen. The country is parched in the South, all the crops have failed, and cattle are dying. In this province the crops still look green, and a little rain fell last night, but water will be as dear as beer in England if we have not a good downfall. We fear there will be famine in the land.’
These fears were realised, and Sir John writes to his sister that he had suggested to the British Government that his visit to the Court in the spring should be postponed, ‘as minds of Moorish Government will be preoccupied and my preaching and praying would be of no avail.’
In June he writes again:—
This country is in a very sad state. Robert[55] says the people are dying of starvation round Mogador, and cattle and sheep by the thousands. I see no prospect of warding off the famine, and fear that misery will prevail for many years in the Southern districts, as there will be no cattle to till the land. Sultan is said to be distributing grain. Wheat and other provisions are imported from England and other foreign countries. Bread here is dearer than in England, though the crops in this district are good. Robert has appealed to the British public through the Times and Lord Mayor, but John Bull has doled out his sovereigns so liberally for Indians, Chinese, Bulgarians, and Turks, that I fear there will be very little for the Moor.
We have got up subscriptions here for the Mogador poor.
The famine was followed in the autumn of 1878 by an outbreak of disease, and in a letter, written in October on his return from leave, he says:—
Good health at Tangier; but cholera—or, if not cholera, some dire disease—is mowing down the population in the interior. At Dar-el-Baida, a small town with about 6,000 population, the deaths amounted to 103 a day! but the disease is moving South, not North. The rains and cool weather will I hope check the evil.
Great misery in the interior. There are reports that the starving people eat their dead. This I think is an exaggeration, but they are eating the arum[56] root, which when not properly prepared produces symptoms like cholera.
The closing of the port of Gibraltar against all articles of trade from Morocco had produced great distress amongst the poorer classes, and the arbitrary measures taken by the sanitary authorities at Gibraltar and the Spanish ports served to add to the miseries of the population of Morocco. In addition to these calamities, during Sir John’s absence the terrors of some of the European Representatives led to the introduction of futile and mischievous quarantine regulations at Tangier itself, which Sir John on his return at once combated.
‘There is good health in Tangier,’ he writes in October, ‘but I expect we shall have cholera before the spring. My colleagues during my absence had run amuck and established a cordon outside the town, stopping passengers and traffic, fumigating skins, clapping poor folk into quarantine exposed to the night air, and other follies. As I said to them, “Why do you introduce cordons in Morocco when you don’t have them in other countries? It is only a source of bribery and corruption. The rich get through and the poor starve outside. It is a measure which only trammels traffic and promotes distress.”