484 



NA TURE 



[September ii, 1890 



works in Spain have never been improved upon ; they fostered 

 literature and the arts of peace, and introduced a system of 

 agriculture far superior to what existed before their arrival. 



Commerce, discouraged by the Romans, was highly honoured 

 by the Arabs, and during their rule the Mediterranean recovered 

 the trade which it possessed in the time of the Phoenicians and 

 Carthaginians ; it penetrated into the Indian Archipelago and 

 China ; it travelled westward to the Niger, and to the east as 

 far as Madagascar, and the great trade route of the Mediterranean 

 was once more developed. 



The power and prosperity of the Arabs culminated in the 

 ninth century, when Sicily fell to their arms ; it was not, however, 

 very long before their empire began to be undermined by dissen- 

 sions ; the temporal and spiritual authority of the Ommiade 

 Khalifs, which extended from Sind to Spain, and from the Oxus 

 to Yemen, was overthrown by the Abbasides in the year 132 of 

 the Hedjira, A.D. 750. Seven years later Spain detached itself 

 from the Abbasside empire ; a new Caliphate was established at 

 Cordova, and hereditary monarchies began to spring up in other 

 Mohammedan countries. 



The Carlovingian empire gave an impulse to the maritime 

 power of the south of Europe, and in the Adriatic the fleets of 

 Venice and Ragusa monopolized the traffic of the Levant. The 

 merchants of the latter noble little republic penetrated even to 

 our own shores, and Shakespeare has made the Argosy or 

 Ragusie a household word in our language. 



During the eleventh century the Christian Powers were no 

 longer content to resist the Mohammedans : they began to turn 

 their arms against them. If the latter ravaged some of the 

 fairest parts of Europe, the Christians began to take brilliant 

 revenge. 



The Mohammedans were driven out of Corsica, Sardinia, 

 Sicily, and the Balearic Islands, but it was not till 1492 that they 

 had finally to abandon Europe, after the conquest of Granada by 

 Ferdinand and Isabella. 



About the middle of the eleventh century an event took place 

 which profoundly modified the condition of the Mohammedan 

 world. The Caliph Mostansir let loose a horde of nomad Arabs, 

 who, starting from Egypt, spread over the whole of North Africa, 

 carrying destruction and blood wherever they passed, thus laying 

 the foundation for the subsequent state of anarchy which rendered 

 possible the interference of the Turks. 



English commercial intercourse with the Mediterranean was 

 not unknown even from the time of the Crusades, but it does not 

 appear to have been carried on by means of our own vessels till 

 the beginning of the sixteenth century. In 1522 it was so great 

 that Henry VIII. appointed a Cretan merchant, Censio de 

 Balthazari, to be "Master, governor, protector, and consul of 

 all and singular the merchants and others his lieges and subjects 

 within the port, island, and country of Crete or Candia." This 

 is the very first English consul known to history, but the first of 

 English birth was my own predecessor in office. Master John 

 Tipton, who, after having acted at Algiers during several years 

 in an unofficial character, probably elected by the merchants 

 themselves to protect their interests, was duly appointed consul 

 by Sir William Harebone, ambassador at Constantinople in 1585, 

 and received just such an exequatur from the Porte as has been 

 issued to every consul since by the Government of the country in 

 which he resides. 



Piracy has always been the scourge of the Mediterranean, but 

 we are too apt to associate its horrors entirely with the Moors 

 and Turks. The evil had existed from the earliest ages ; even 

 before the Roman conquest of Dalmatia the Illyrians were the 

 general enemies of the Adriatic ; Africa under the Vandal reign 

 was a nest of the fiercest pirates ; the Venetian chronicles are 

 full of complaints of the ravages of the Corsairs of Ancona, and 

 there is no other name but piracy for such acts of the Genoese 

 as the unprovoked pillage of Tripoli by Andrea Doria in 1535. 

 To form a just idea of the Corsairs of the past it is well to 

 remember that commerce and piracy were often synonymous 

 terms, even among the English, up to the reign of Elizabeth. 

 Listen to the description given by the pious Cavendish of his 

 ■commercial circumnavigation of the globe : — " It hath pleased 

 Almighty God to suffer me to circumpass the whole globe of the 

 world. ... I navigated along the coast of Chili, Peru, and 

 New Spain, where I made great spoils. All the villages and 

 towns that ever I landed at I burned and spoiled, and had I not 

 been discovered upon the coast I had taken a great quantity of 

 treasure," and so he concludes, " The Lord be praised for all his 



NO. 1089, VOL. 42] 



Sir William Monson, when called upon by James I. to propose 

 a scheme for an attack on Algiers, recommended that all the 

 maritime Powers of Europe should contribute towards the 

 expense, and participate in the gains by the sale of Moors and 

 Turks as slaves. 



After the discovery of America and the expulsion of the Moors 

 from Spain, piracy developed to an extraordinary extent. The 

 audacity of the Barbary corsairs seems incredible at the present 

 day ; they landed on the shores and islands of the Mediterranean, 

 and even extended their ravages to Great Britain, carrying off all 

 the inhabitants whom they could seize into the most wretched 

 slavery. The most formidable of these piratical States was 

 Algiers, a military oligarchy, consisting of a body of janissaries, 

 recruited by adventurers from the Levant, the outcasts of the 

 Mohammedan world, criminals and renegades from every nation 

 in Europe. They elected their own ruler or Dey, who exercised 

 despotic sway, tempered by frequent assassination ; they oppressed 

 without mercy the natives of the country, accumulated vast 

 riches, had immense numbers of Christian slaves, and kept all 

 Europe in a state bordering on subjection by the terror which 

 they inspired. Nothing is sadder or more inexplicable than the 

 shameful manner in which this state of things was accepted by 

 civilized nations. Many futile attempts were made during suc- 

 cessive centuries to humble their arrogance, but it only increased 

 by every manifestation of the powerlessness of Europe to restrain 

 it. It was reserved for our own countryman. Lord Exmouth, by 

 his brilliant victory in 1816, for ever to put an end to piracy and 

 Christian slavery in the Mediterranean. His work, however, 

 was left incomplete, for though he destroyed the navy of the 

 Algerines, and so rendered them powerless for evil on the seas, 

 they were far from being humbled ; they continued to slight their 

 treaties and to subject even the agents of powerful nations to 

 contumely and injustice. The French took the only means pos- 

 sible to destroy this nest of ruffians, by the almost unresisted 

 occupation of Algiers and the deportation of its Turkish 

 aristocracy. 



They found the whole country in the possession of a hostile 

 people, some of whom had never been subdued since the fall of 

 the Roman Empire, and the world owes France no small debt of 

 gratitude for having transformed what was a savage and almost 

 uncultivated country into one of the richest as well as the most 

 beautiful in the basin of the Mediterranean. 



What has been accomplished in Algeria is being effected in 

 Tunisia. The treaty of the Kasr-es-Saeed, which established a 

 French Protectorate there, and the military occupation of the 

 Regency, were about as high-handed and unjustifiable acts as are 

 recorded in history ; but there can be no possible doubt regard- 

 ing the important work of civilization and improvement that has 

 resulted from them. European courts of justice have been esta- 

 blished all over the country ; the exports and imports have 

 increased from twenty-three to fifty-one millions of francs, the 

 revenue from six to nineteen millions, without the imposition of 

 a single new tax, and nearly half a million per annum is being 

 spent on education. 



Sooner or later the same thing must happen in the rest of 

 North Africa, though at present international jealousies retard 

 this desirable consummation. It seems hard to condemn such 

 fair countries to continued barbarism, in the interest of tyrants 

 who misgovern and oppress their people. The day cannot be 

 far off when the whole southern shores of the Mediterranean 

 will enjoy the same prosperity and civilization as the northern 

 coast, and when the deserts, which are the result of misgovern- 

 ment and neglect, will assume the fertility arising from security 

 and industry, and will again blossom as the rose. 



It cannot be said that any part of the Mediterranean basin is 

 still unknown, if we except the empire of Morocco. But even 

 that country has been traversed in almost every direction during 

 the past twenty years, and its geography and natural history 

 have been illustrated by men of the greatest eminence ; such as 

 Gerhard Rohlfs, Monsieur Tissot, Sir Joseph Hooker, the 

 Vicomte de Foucauld, Joseph Thomson, and numerous other 

 travellers. The least known portion, at least on the Mediter- 

 ranean coast, is the Riff country, the inhospitality of whose 

 inhabitants has given the word " ruffian " to the English language. 

 Even that has been penetrated by De Foucauld disguised as a 

 Jew, and the record of his exploration is one of the most brilliant 

 contributions to the geography of the country which has hitherto 

 been made. 



Although, therefore, but little remains to be done in the way 

 of actual exploration, there are many by-ways of travel com- 



