After working for some weeks as an assistant clerk in the Foreign Office I was ordered to proceed, in the first place, to Alexandria, where I was to remain for some time to assist Colonel Hodges, then our Agent and Consul-General in Egypt—as there was a press of work in consequence of the question with Mehemet Ali—and was told that Lord Palmerston desired to know when I should be ready to start. I replied, ‘To-day.’ This pleased Lord Palmerston, but I was given three days in which to prepare, and told that, if I had not a carriage of my own, I was to buy one at Calais and post with all speed through France to Marseilles in order to catch the mail-packet thence to Alexandria. At the Foreign Office I was given £100 to pay all expenses.
Posting down to Dover, I crossed to Calais, and there bought, second-hand, a light britzska, in which I deposited the two huge bags of dispatches, of which I was in charge for the admiral at Malta and our agent in Egypt. As bearer of dispatches I had the preference over other travellers for fresh horses, and travelled very rapidly, day and night, arriving at Marseilles several hours before the packet left. After selling the carriage I had bought at Calais, I took a bath and had dinner at an hotel.
During dinner, I was waited on by two Maltese. Having finished, I requested that my bill should be brought; upon which, one of the waiters observed to the other sotto voce in Arabic, ‘We will not present a bill; let us charge him fifteen francs, and we will divide the five which remain over and above the charge for bath and dinner.’ Knowing Arabic, I understood the plot; so when they told me I had fifteen francs to pay, I replied that I wished to see the landlord before leaving. He was summoned and I then related to him what had passed between these rogues of waiters. Upon which he demanded very angrily what they meant, and one of them, very much flurried, replied foolishly that they had not supposed the gentleman knew Maltese! The landlord dismissed the two waiters from his service then and there, and I paid him his bill of ten francs.
It is remarkable that though Malta has been occupied by a great number of nations—Phœnicians, Romans, Arabs, Franks and English—Arabic is still the language of the inhabitants.
Before arriving at Alexandria, I learnt that the plague was in Egypt, and, having heard so many dread stories about this disease and the dangers incurred from contagion, I landed with my hair standing on end from terror, fearing I should be plague-stricken and die—as I had heard might happen—after a few hours’ illness.
There was much contention at that time between medical men at Alexandria regarding the contagion from plague. The chief Italian doctor—whose name I have forgotten—who was said to be very clever, mounted a donkey covered with oil-skin, the doctor wearing also clothing of a supposed non-contagion-bearing texture. He visited the plague patients, but carried an ivory wand with which he touched their ‘buboes.’
The other chief medical man was Dr. Lorimer, an Englishman, who did not believe in great danger from contagion but rather in the risk of infection from visiting, or living in, unhealthy quarters of the town where there were no sanitary arrangements.
These two doctors were on friendly terms, and when they met in the streets during their visits to plague patients, some banter generally passed. The Italian doctor was wont to salute Dr. Lorimer with ‘Tu creparai’ (Thou wilt die), and the latter returned the gloomy salutation with a ‘tu quoque.’ The Italian died of the plague whilst I was at Alexandria, but Dr. Lorimer kept in good health and was unremitting in his attendance on the sick, doing many acts of charity. He told me, in support of his theory of infection rather than contagion, that there were several houses in Alexandria of a better class, but situated in an unhealthy part of the town, whose tenants, even when observing the strictest quarantine, had caught the plague, whilst there were whole streets in a healthy quarter where no cases ever occurred.
Some years before, in Morocco, I had experience of the danger of going into dwellings where there is disease.
When the cholera morbus visited Tangier in 1836, Mr. Bell—at that time Consul under my father, and who had been surgeon on board Lord Yarborough’s yacht Falcon—devoted his spare time after office hours to attending, gratis, upon cholera patients and had much success: I sometimes accompanied him to interpret when he could not find an assistant who spoke Arabic, and on one occasion he requested me to aid him in giving directions to a poor Moor whose son was attacked with cholera. I accompanied Dr. Bell without fear, but when he requested me to lift the dying man, already looking like a livid corpse, to enable him to pour some liquid down his throat, I shuddered, and, trembling, held the man in my arms till the dose was administered. The patient died shortly after.