138 The National Geographic Magazine 



Aidonia, the Summer Residence on the Spartello Headland of Ion Perdicaris 

 The scene of his capture by Raisuli. The house faces the sea, which is obscured in this picture 



was that on coming here on the steamer 

 last spring I was told on board ship that 

 there was a family in New York called 

 Tangier Smith; that the founder of this 

 family had been one of the English offi- 

 cials at Tangier during the English occu- 

 pation of those 22 years, and that the 

 family had always been known as Tangier 

 Smith ; that the official in question re- 

 turning to England had secured a grant 

 of land in Long Island from King 

 Charles, and had thus helped form one of 

 our oldest settlements in colonial times. 

 I was wondering whether my informant 

 was not inventing all this for the sake of 

 telling a good story ; but when I went to 

 one of the hotels in New York the very 

 next name to mine on the register was 

 Mrs. Tangier Smith. 



Up to about 1839 the naval power of 

 the Sultan was supposed to be equal to 

 repelling any aggression by any of the 

 greater maritime powers, and some of 

 the minor European states actually paid 

 an annual indemnity to the Sultan of Mo- 

 rocco in order to protect their flags from 

 aggression by the Salee rovers. 



The Sultan fitted out these pirate ships 

 to go forth and capture vessels and bring 

 them into port and hold the crews for 

 ransom. If they were not ransomed the 

 crews were sent up in the interior to 

 work in gangs. 



The suppression of the rovers was 

 largely due to the attitude taken by the 

 United States, together with other powers 

 like France and England, and to men like 

 Decatur and Stockton. 



