66 THE ATLANTIC EOLLEKS. ch. ni. 



and knowing that the bar at the river's mouth allows, 

 except at spring tide, the passage only of ships of small 

 tonnage, it seemed scarcely credible that the European 

 Powers should so long have allowed such a nest of hornets 

 to flourish at their very gates. When one reads that up 

 to the middle of the last century it was not a very rare 

 thing for the ' Sallee rovers' to lie under Lundy Island, and 

 cut out Bristol merchantmen, one asks what the British 

 navy was about, that the malefactors and their ships were 

 not swept from the sea, and Sallee itself utterly destroyed. 

 The false humanity that caused in our time such bitter 

 lamentations over the chastisement of Bornean pirates had 

 not been yet invented. 



We lay for the greater part of the day within some 

 two or three miles of the shore, but the Atlantic rollers 

 were too heavy to allow a nearer approach, or permit the 

 landing of cargo. This happens too frequently to excite 

 remark; and these great waves, originating in the passage 

 of cyclones in the mid-Atlantic, often arrive so suddenly 

 in the calmest weather as to create a serious danger for 

 the seaman. At the least it is prudent to keep up a 

 sufficient pressure of steam in the boiler to make it easy 

 to gain the ofSng on the shortest notice ; and we heard 

 of several cases where the coast steamers had called in 

 succession at all the Atlantic ports of Marocco without 

 being able to communicate with any one of them, and 

 cargo and passengers had been carried on to the Canary 

 Islands with the uncertain prospect of being landed on 

 the return voyage. P'ogs offer another serious impediment 

 to navigation on this coast. During the summer the 

 low country for a distance of eight or ten miles from the 

 shore is not rarely covered during the morning with a 

 thick mist that clears away before mid-day. At such times 

 ships dare not approach the sandy coasts, and, when the 

 sky clears, the scarcity of landmarks makes it extremely 

 difficult for the seaman to ascertain his exact position. 

 As the same difficulty prevented us from touching Rabat 

 on our return voyage, we can add nothing to what has 



