Wanderings in North Africa

by traveler James Hamilton

What a Consul should be. — Turkish Oppression. — Official Corruption. — Universal Venality. — The Moslem hates the Christian.

On arriving in Benghazi I found a house prepared for me, by the kindness of one of my friends, who gave up to me the only waterproof rooms which, I believe, exist in the town. The sensation of sleeping within walls, after three months spent under canvas, was not the less agreeable from the circumstance that the rain poured down in torrents, and only ceased for short intervals during my ten days’ stay. The second day after my arrival there fell a deluge of rain, the effect of which was to wash down some thirty houses, while there was not perhaps one in the place which had not suffered more or less. This is owing to the houses being built with mud instead of lime, which might be had at a very small cost. In the Frank quarter some new houses were in process of building, and not being roofed in, were more liable to suffer than finished buildings. As I passed them the next day their interior literally presented mere heaps of ruins. Year after year the same devastation is produced by the same cause; the flat roofs, formed, as they are, of mats laid over beams, with a heavy superstructure of sea-weeds and mud, are never waterproof; yet such is the apathy, even of the European residents, that they make no attempt to secure dry quarters for the winter. One would think from their conduct that it had never rained here before, and that the visitation, instead of being as regular as the almanack, had taken all the world by surprise. In one house I found workmen repairing fallen walls; in another, I heard that the whole family had to sleep on the bales in the warehouse, which admitted the water in fewer places than the other rooms. The streets were in many places impassable from the ruins; and many houses were literally melted away, the beams and stones remaining imbedded in huge puddles of mud. It sometimes occurs, when the rains are more than usually heavy, that the houses are in so menacing a state that the whole town takes refuge in tents, where, though the ground be damp, there are certainly no walls which threaten to overwhelm them.

I had the pleasure of finding the newly-appointed English Vice-Consul, Mr. Werry, a gentleman well known to our officers who served in the Syrian expedition. I was glad to offer him personally my thanks for the ready politeness with which he had taken measures to insure my safety while in the interior. Though he had only been two months in Benghazi, he had already secured the good-will and confidence of the British subjects for whose interest he is placed there, as well as the respect of the Turkish authorities. During the ten days I stayed in Benghazi he gave me frequent opportunities of increasing my debt of gratitude to him. I regretted to leave behind me, in so dreary an exile, one whose official experience, whose activity, and familiar knowledge of all the Oriental languages, would enable him to render essential services to his Government in places of more importance. I do not by this mean to insinuate that the presence of a British Consul in Benghazi is of little utility, although the number of Europeans (they are nearly all British subjects) be very small. Unconnected with trade, our Vice-Consul holds an independent position, which those of other nations, fettered by their personal interests, cannot attain, and he is thus frequently able, in cases of gross injustice affecting the natives, to exercise a salutary influence with the governor. His house is the ready refuge of the ill-used slave and the oppressed Arab, and his exertions in their behalf, rarely unavailing for them, give a prestige to the name of Englishman, of which I more than once experienced the value.

This portion of the pachalic of Tripoli, in which I passed nearly six months, is, like so many countries belonging to the Turkish Empire, most bountifully endowed by nature with every source of wealth. Under former rulers it was flourishing and populous, but it has now become a waste; its scanty inhabitants are sunk in hopeless barbarism, and even their poverty is no defence against the grasping avarice of their governor—“Inter continuas rapinas, perpetuò inops.” I do not accuse the present Sultan or ministers in Constantinople, individually, of the tyranny and ignorance which render his rule a curse wherever it is acknowledged; but—after seeing the fields of Roumelia lying waste to the very gates of his residence, the cities of Asia Minor depopulated, its mineral wealth a sealed treasure, even the Arab glories of Syria faded, the palaces of Damascus crumbling, and its marts deserted—the traveller cannot but long to see a government changed whose oppression is less mischievous than its neglects, and which tacitly permits wrongs greater than those which it sanctions.[4] Well has it been said, that where the hoof of a Turkish horse has touched the ground, there the grass grows not.

During the last twenty-five years, since the fall of the Janissaries (which seemed to strengthen the central government while it weakened the empire), there has been much law-making, and many abuses have been abolished, as far as edicts can abolish deeply-rooted customs; but the old spirit still breathes in the new régime, and injustice and oppression are as frequent under the present Sultan as under his predecessors. It is, indeed, no longer a matter of indifference to the Grand Vizier, “whether the dog devours the swine or the swine the dog.” A wholesome fear of European opinion has succeeded to undisguised contempt; but the Turk of the people is still in his own eyes the first of human beings; his Sultan is still the suzerain before whom all kings bow, and at whose orders the French and English krals send their fleets and troops to chastise the rebellious Egyptian or Muscovite; and in the remoter provinces, which are beyond the immediate eye of the Elehi Beys, as they call the foreign ambassadors, the old system of peculation and robbery exists in full force.

Much has been written in praise of the new organisation of the Turkish Government, and the Tanzimat, as the regulations for the service are called; but the good which this contains is for the most part evaded or neglected. The most real result of the reform has been to introduce a number of new functionaries, or, in other words, to increase the points of contact between the governors and the governed, whereby more frequent opportunities of peculation are given to the former. The sanitary regulations, so ridiculous in the way they are enforced and the way they are neglected, are one instance of this; another is the prohibition of presents from inferiors to superiors, which all employés take an oath to observe; yet it would not be easy to find ten per cent. of the higher officers who are insensible to, or unwilling to accept such an argument. In trifling things they are, of course, careful to wear the mask of austere virtue, as Izzet Pacha, the Governor of Tripoli, lately recalled on the complaints of the French Government, showed, when he was here in summer. A merchant of the place sent him a basket of grapes, when they were still scarce, and he returned them, saying, that, according to his oath, he must either pay for or refuse them. Yet this is the man who, after keeping an Arab sheikh in prison for many months, released him on receiving 150,000 piastres, about £1500; and whose sons, youths of eighteen and twenty years, established in their father’s pachalic a trade in all the produce of the country, which amounted to a virtual monopoly. The European merchants sent a remonstrance on this subject to Constantinople, and they received an answer, in the advancement of the elder of these enterprising young tradesmen to the dignity of Mirabi, or pacha of one tail.

After the last harvest the cultivators of the soil complained that the tithe in kind due to Government was taken in such a way as to amount to nearly one-half of the entire produce. This had been contrived by Izzet Pacha’s son and some of the local authorities; the tenth only being carried to the public account, and the remainder divided among themselves. Many representations to this effect were made to the French consular agent, who, after obtaining satisfactory evidence of their truth, reported the case to his superior in Tripoli. Not long afterwards, on some dispute with the Pacha, the Consul brought this up as a proof of the malversation of the subordinates, on which the other pretended great indignation, and insisted that he and the Consul should send to Benghazi for information. The books were, of course, in good order; the witnesses, on whose testimony the Consul had relied, were by threats reduced to silence; the charge could not be substantiated (the Bey who was judge being himself the chief delinquent); and the upshot of the inquiry was, that the Vice-Consul had to make apologies for the slander, while he and every Frank in the place knew the truth of the accusation, and could point out the magazines where the grain thus extorted was deposited. Many weeks had not passed after this when ships belonging to the Pacha’s son arrived in the port, and openly loaded with this very corn on his account.

When a pacha acts thus, we cannot wonder if his subordinates imitate so good an example; and the director of the customs may be praised for the honesty which consigns about three-fourths of their produce to the treasury. An Arab said to me one day, on this subject, “The Pacha eats, the Bey eats, and the Gumruckdjy (director of customs) eats,” each buying his superior’s silence with a share of his own peculations; the friends who protect his interests at Constantinople coming in for their share of the pacha’s profits. A Turk is, in fact, capable of learning many things; he may be civilisé—a Frank word, now adopted in Turkish; he may cease to be what La Jeune Turquie calls a fanatic; he will indulge in deep potations, or abstain from fasting in Ramadhan; but he will never learn not to eat (Italicè magnare) when he can. His appetite and digestion, in this sense, are truly ostrich-like. On inquiring into the truth of the Bey’s statement that there are 1200 houses in Benghazi, I learned that there are, in fact, 1400, the two hundred which are suppressed in the official account being “eaten” by the Bey and the Sheikh-el-belid.

An amusing instance of the ruses to which a scrupulous man, who has the fear of his oath before his eyes, will resort, was related to me by one who was in the town at the time it occurred. An Armenian addressed himself to a Pacha in Anadoly, for the decision of a lawsuit in his favour; and, after stating his case, produced a bag well filled with the usual arguments, which he offered to his Excellency. On this the great man, who had listened to his statement with the blandest smiles, drew himself up, frowning in anger, and only answered, “Infidel, be off!” The poor Armenian, astonished at the reception of his well-meant offering, begged and prayed, and seemed to weigh the bag in his hands, that the Pacha might see how heavy it was—all Spanish dollars; but the only answer he obtained was a fresh order to be off, with the surly addition, “He is an infidel who gives, and an infidel who takes”—disobedience to the Sultan’s laws being rebellion, and rebellion, according to Turkish doctrine, infidelity. Disappointed and crest-fallen, the poor Armenian withdrew from the presence, and was not a little surprised to find himself the object of the congratulations of the attendants and cavasses in the anteroom. “It is useless,” he said, “to ask me for backshish; for the Pacha has rejected my suit, and that, too, with hard words.” “What answer is this?” said they; “did you not hear his words—‘the infidel gives and the infidel takes?’ Go to the steward; is not he also an Armenian?”

One of the greatest blots on the Turkish constitution has not been touched by the Tanzimat: it is that provision of the Moslem law which excludes the reception of evidence given by persons of other religions against a Moslem. Twenty witnesses may depose to the murder of a Christian or Jew by a Turk; but, as was too clearly shown in the case of Sir Lawrence Jones, if there be not among them at least two Moslemin, their testimony is unavailing; while to obtain Moslem witnesses to prove an outrage on a Christian is impossible.[5] An Arab was wantonly beating a Maltese boy, a few days ago, in the bazaar, when a respectable Moslem came to his assistance; a third then came up, and apostrophised the boy’s defender, saying, “Are you a Moslem? and do you take the part of a Christian against a believer?” He spoke what all the spectators felt. Until this odious distinction be abolished, there can be no security either for the life or property of Christian rayahs or foreigners, excepting in the energy and privileges of the consuls; and the representatives of the great powers seem at present disposed to yield the greater part of their own rights and the immunities of their fellow-subjects. These were wisely considered essential to the welfare or consideration of foreigners among a people who, though little less than barbarians, look with the most profound contempt upon a Frank; and those who renounce their enjoyment are, I fear, too precipitate in their favourable judgment of the real state of the Turkish Empire.