Part 4

Having visited the several holy places in and about Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jericho, and the Jordan, he returned, in April, 1722, towards the seacoast; and in journeying by night through the valleys of Mount Ephraim, was attended for about an hour by an _ignis fatuus_, which assumed a variety of extraordinary appearances. Sometimes, says the traveller, it was globular, or else pointed, like the flame of a candle; afterward it would spread itself, and involve their whole company in its pale inoffensive light; then at once contract and suddenly disappear. But in less than a minute it would begin again to exert itself as before, running along from one place to another with great swiftness, like a train of gunpowder set on fire; or else it would spread and expand itself over two or three acres of the adjacent mountains, discovering every shrub and tree which grew upon them. The atmosphere from the beginning of the evening had been remarkably thick and hazy, and the dew, as they felt upon their bridles, was unusually clammy and unctuous. This curious meteor our traveller supposes to be of the same nature with those luminous bodies which skip about the masts and yards of ships at sea, and known among sailors by the name of _corpo santo_, as they were by that of Castor and Pollux among the ancients.

While the ship in which he had embarked was lying under Mount Carmel, about the middle of April, he beheld three extraordinary flights of storks, proceeding from Egypt towards the north-east, each of which took up more than three hours in passing, while it was at the same time upwards of half a mile in breadth![1] During cloudy weather, and when the winds happen, as they frequently do, to blow from different quarters at the same time, waterspouts are often seen upon the coast of Syria, particularly in the neighbourhood of Capes Latikea, Grego, and Carmel. Those which Dr. Shaw had an opportunity of observing seemed, he says, to be so many cylinders of water falling down from the clouds, though by the reflection, as he imagined, of the descending columns, as from the actual dropping of the water contained in them, they sometimes _appeared_, especially at a distance, to be sucked up from the sea. Before we return with our traveller to Barbary, it may be worth the while to notice a remark which he made upon the economy of silk-worms in Syria: there being some danger that, owing to the heat of the climate in the plains, the eggs should be hatched before nature has prepared their proper food, the inhabitants regularly send them, as soon as they are laid, to Conobine, or some other place on Mount Libanus, where their hatching is delayed by the cold until the mulberry buds are ready for them in the spring. In Europe, on the contrary, the mulberry leaves put forth before the eggs of the silk-worm feel the influence of the sun; and at Nice, where many silk-worms are bred, it is the custom, as Dr. Smollet informs us, in order to hasten the process of hatching, to enclose the eggs in small linen bags, which are worn by the women in their bosoms until the worms begin to appear.

Footnote 1:

Catesby, in his account of Carolina, gives a no less extraordinary description of the flights of pigeons:—“In Virginia I have seen the pigeons of passage fly in such continued trains, three days successively, that there was not the least interval in losing sight of them, but that some where or other in the air they were to be seen continuing their flight south. When they roost (which they do on one another’s backs), they often break down the limbs of oaks by their weight, and leave their dung some inches thick under the trees they roost upon.”—P. 23.

It should have been remarked, that previously to his visit to Syria he had sailed to the island of Cyprus, where he seems to have visited Limesol and the principal places on the coast; but of this part of his travels no detailed account remains. Setting sail from Acra, he traversed the Ægean, coasted along Peloponnesus, and passing between Malta and Sicily, without touching at either, arrived safe at Bona, in the kingdom of Algiers.

Thenceforward his excursions were confined to the coast of Barbary, and as these appear to have been undertaken at various intervals by way of relaxation and amusement, to vary a course of life in itself remarkably monotonous, he did not judge them worthy of being particularly described. He observes, however, in general, that in all the maritime towns of Africa and the Levant where there were British factories he was received with distinguished hospitality, enjoying, not only the use of the houses of the English residents, but likewise of their horses, janizaries, and servants. In the interior of Barbary, where there were no Europeans, the style of hospitality was different. Here there was a house set apart for the reception of strangers, in which they were lodged and entertained for one night at the public expense, having the attendance and protection of an officer appointed for the purpose. Occasionally, when neither towns nor villages appeared, they lodged more romantically in a cavern, beneath the shelf of a rock, under the arches of ancient cisterns, or in a grove of trees; and at other times threw themselves upon the bare sand, and made the sky their mantle. When they happened to fall in with an Arab encampment, or _douar_, as it is termed in Barbary, they were almost invariably entertained with hospitality, the master of the tent in which they lodged killing a kid or a goat, a lamb or a sheep, according to the number of his guests, and causing the half of it to be immediately seethed by his wife, while the remainder was cut into _kabobs_, or small pieces, and roasted for the travellers to take away with them next day. On these occasions, if his hosts were particularly obliging, and entertained him with “savoury” viands, our traveller would generally, he says, present the master of the tent with a knife, a couple of flints, or a small quantity of English gunpowder, and the _lallah_, or lady, with “a skein of thread, a large needle, or a pair of scissors.” An ordinary silk handkerchief of two shillings value, he adds, was a present for a princess.

During his residence at Algiers, but in what year I have been unable to discover, he seems to have married the widow of Mr. Edward Holden, formerly consul of that place, who outlived him, and erected a monument to his memory. In 1723, the year after his return from Syria, a violent earthquake was felt at Algiers, which threw down a number of houses, and stopped the course of several fountains; but in the year following a still more violent shock was felt, which seems to have shaken the whole coast, while the air was clear and temperate, and the quick-silver standing at the greatest height. At such times the barometer, he observes, was not affected with any sudden alterations, nor was there any remarkable change in the air, which was neither more calm nor windy, hazy, nor serene, than at other times. During the same year, while sailing in an Algerine cruiser of fifty guns towards Cape Bona, he felt an earthquake at sea, which produced so prodigious a concussion in the ship, that at each shock a weight of twenty or thirty tons appeared to have fallen from a vast height upon the ballast. At this time they were five leagues to the south of the Seven Capes, and could not reach ground with a line of two hundred fathoms.

In the year 1727 he visited the kingdom of Tunis, which was not, he observes, divided, like Algiers, into provinces, governed each by a provincial bey, but was wholly under the immediate inspection of the bey, who annually made the circuit of his dominions with a flying camp, and collected the tribute. The seacoast, the Zeugitania of the ancients, was more thickly inhabited, and exhibited more contentment, prosperity, and other marks of good government than any portion of the neighbouring kingdom. Upon arriving at Biserta, Utica, and the ruins of Carthage, Dr. Shaw throws open the floodgates of his learning, in endeavouring to determine the extent of the encroachments made by the mud of the Bagrada upon the sea, the site of the little city which Cato rendered illustrious by his death, and the circumference and topography of Dido’s capital. Bochart, with a still greater luxuriance of quotation, had, by comparing the testimony of the ancients, determined its circumference to have been nearly forty-five miles; but according to Dr. Shaw, the peninsula upon which it stood does not much exceed thirty miles in circumference, and the city, he thinks, could never lay claim to above half that extent. However, as at the beginning of the Punic war the number of its inhabitants is said to have amounted to seven hundred thousand, while it was pronounced by Suidas the largest and most powerful city upon earth, I cannot believe it to have been no more than fifteen miles in circumference, an extent not at all answerable to the idea which the ancients have left us of its greatness. It seems probable, therefore, that our traveller’s survey was hastily and imperfectly performed.

Quitting these renowned ruins, he proceeded towards Tunis, coasting along the lake, formerly a deep and extensive port, which stretches out before the capital, and communicates by a narrow channel with the sea. The water in this large basin nowhere exceeds seven feet in depth, while the bottom for nearly a mile round the whole sweep of the shore is generally dry and noisome, the common sewers of Tunis discharging themselves into this great receptacle. At a distance, however, the prospect of the lake is not without beauty, its surface being frequently enlivened by large flocks of the flamingo, or phœnicopterus, the bird to which the Hindoo legislator compares a beautiful young woman. It is likewise celebrated for the number and size of its mullets, which are reckoned the sweetest in Barbary, and the roes of which, when pressed, dried, and salted, are called _botargo_, and considered a great delicacy.

The city of Tunis, situated upon an acclivity on the western shore of the lake, and commanding a fine view of the ruins of Carthage, and of the circumambient sea, as Livy expresses it, as far as the island Ægimurus, the modern Zembra, being surrounded by lakes and marshes, would be exceedingly insalubrious were not the effects of the miasmata in a great measure counteracted by the vast quantities of mastic, myrtle, rosemary, and other gummy and aromatic plants which grow in the neighbourhood, and being used as firewood to warm their baths and ovens, communicate a sensible fragrance to the air. Tunis, however, is absolutely destitute of water, having, as Leo Africanus observes, neither rivulet, fountain, nor well; and the inhabitants are consequently reduced to rely upon what they can catch in cisterns when it rains, or upon what is brought into the city from a brackish well in the vicinity in leathern bags, and sold about the streets as a precious article of traffic. The Tunisians, our traveller observes, are the most civilized people of Barbary, agreeable in their intercourse with strangers, and coveting rather than shunning, like other Mohammedans, all occasions of coming into contact with Christians. The population of the city at this period was said to exceed three hundred thousand; no doubt an extravagant exaggeration, as the circumference of the place did not much exceed three miles.

From this city our traveller continued his journey towards the east, and passing by Rhodes, the ancient Ades, Solyman, and Masourah, arrived at the sanctuary of Sidi Daoud, situated among the ruins of the ancient Nishna. Here he was shown the tomb of the saint, which was found upon examination to be nothing but a Roman prætorium, the pavement of which was adorned with the most elegant mosaics in the world; the general design being as bold and free as that of a picture, while the various figures, which consisted of horses, birds, fishes, and trees, were executed with the most delicate symmetry, and in a variety of brilliant colours so judiciously intermingled and contrasted as to produce an admirable effect. He next fixes at Lowhareah, the site of the ancient Aquilaria, where, during the civil wars, the troops of Cairo were landed, and cut to pieces by Sabura. The remaining ruins were insignificant; but the immense quarries from whence, according to Strabo, the materials for the building of Carthage, Utica, and other neighbouring cities were obtained, still remain open, and are supposed to have furnished Virgil with the original hint of his “Nympharum Domus,” &c., in the first book of the Æneid, though Addison rather supposes that the Bay of Naples is entitled to this honour. Be this as it may, from the sea to the village of Lowhareah, a distance of about half a mile, the interjacent mountain, from the level of the sea to the height of twenty or thirty feet, according to the disposition of the strata, is hollowed out, while enormous pillars are left standing at regular distances to support the superincumbent mass, through which small shafts or apertures were bored at intervals for the admission of fresh air. However, that the reader may perceive the justness of the doctor’s illustration, I will continue the description in his own words, and then subjoin the passage of Virgil referred to: “Moreover, as this mountain is shaded all over with trees, as the arches here described (the openings to the quarry) lie open to the sea, having a large cliff on each side, with the island Ægimurus placed over-against them; as there are likewise some fountains perpetually draining from the rocks, and seats very convenient for the weary labourer to rest upon: from such a concurrence of circumstances, so exactly corresponding to the cave which Virgil places somewhere in this gulf, we have little room to doubt of the following description being literally true, notwithstanding some commentators may have thought it fictitious, or applicable to another place.”

Est in secessu longo locus. Insula portum Efficit objectu laterum, quibus omnis ab alto Frangitur, inque sinus scindit sese unda reductos. Hinc atque hinc vastæ rupes, geminique minantur In Cœlum scopuli: quorum sub vertice latè Æquora tuta silent. Tum sylvis scœna coruscis Desuper, horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra. Fronte sub adversa scopulis pendentibus antrum: Intus aquæ dulces; vivoque sedilia saxo; Nympharum domus. Hic fessas non vincula naves Ulla tenent: unco non adligat anchora morsa.

From Cape Bon, the Promontorium Mercurii of the ancients, which projects into the sea a little to the north of Aquilaria, the inhabitants assured our traveller that they could, in clear weather, discern the mountains of Sicily, more than sixty miles distant. Following the bend of the shore, and passing by the sites or ruins of several ancient places, he proceeded through a rugged road, delightfully shaded with olive trees, to Hamamet, or the “City of Wild Pigeons,” so called from the prodigious number of those birds which breed in the neighbouring cliffs. At Seloome, a small hemispherical hill, he entered the ancient province of Bizacium, once renowned for its fertility, probably erroneously, as the soil is dry, sandy, and of no great depth, though admirably adapted to the olive tree, which flourishes in great perfection all along the coast. The interior is not at all more fertile. Our traveller’s whole employment during this journey was determining the sites of ancient cities, and illustrating other points of geography; but he observed nothing very striking or picturesque until he reached the shores of the Lesser Syrtis, all along which there runs a succession of small flat islands, banks of sand, and oozy shallows, into which the inhabitants wade out for a mile or two from the shore, fixing up numerous hurdles of reeds in various windings and directions as they go, and thus taking immense quantities of fish. Owing to the violent east wind which blew during his whole journey along this coast, he was prevented from observing the flux and reflux of the tide here, from which some authors have derived its name—(“à σύρω ^{TN}, _traho_, quod in accessu et recessu arenam et cœnum ad se trahit et congerit.”—_Eustathius_)—though he was informed that at the island of Jerby, the eastern boundary of the Syrtis, the sea rises upwards of six feet above its usual height, a circumstance which has likewise been observed in the Gulf of Venice.

This was the boundary of his travels along the coast, from which he now turned towards the interior, and arrived upon the shores of the Lake of Marko, the Palus Tritonis of the ancients. This lake is about sixty miles in length, and in some places about eighteen in breadth; but it is not one unbroken sheet of water, being interspersed with numerous islands, one of which, though uninhabitable, is large, and covered with date trees. The inhabitants, who have a tradition for every thing, say that the Egyptians, in one of their expeditions into this country, encamped some time upon this island, and scattering about the stones of the dates which they had eaten, thus sowed the palm groves, which at present abound there; and hence, perhaps, the lake itself acquired the name of the “Plains of Pharaoh.” To direct the marches of the caravans across this shallow lake, a number of trunks of palm-trees are fixed up at certain distances, without which travelling would be extremely difficult and dangerous, as the opposite shores are nearly as level as the sea, and even the date trees which grow upon them are too low to be discovered at more than sixteen miles distance. At Tozer, on the western bank, a great traffic in dates is carried on with the merchants of the interior, who bring slaves from the banks of the Niger to be exchanged for fruit.

Proceeding to the west from the Lake of Marko, our traveller next traversed a barren and dreary waste, the haunt of robbers and murderers; and as he passed along he saw upon the ground the blood of a Turkish gentleman, who, he afterward learned, had been murdered two days before. Immediately after he had left this ominous spot, five of the assassins, mounted upon black horses, and closely muffled in their burnooses, or loose cloaks, suddenly made their appearance; but observing that his companions were numerous and well armed, they met them peaceably, and gave them the _salaam_. Continuing his journey westward, without meeting with any further adventures, he returned to Algiers.

Dr. Shaw seems, after this expedition into Tunis, to have remained quiet for several years, occasionally making excursions into the interior, and proceeding westward, in 1730, as far as the river Mulloviah. Having already travelled over the whole of these provinces, from the sea to the desert, when following the track of Leo Africanus, it will be unnecessary to pursue the footsteps of Dr. Shaw. He remarked, however, during his excursions among the ridges of Mount Atlas, an extraordinary race of mountaineers, with light complexions and yellow hair, which seems to have escaped the researches of Leo and all other travellers. These people he with great probability supposes to be descended from the Vandals, who, in the time of Procopius, were said to be dispersed among the native tribes, though it is more probable that they took possession of these fastnesses, of which the rude inhabitants were never able to dispossess them. In the city of Kosantina he observed a second Tarpeian rock, from which, since the foundation of the city, such criminals as might be condemned to capital punishment have been precipitated into the river Ampsaga, which dashes along at its base.

In his inquiries into the natural history of these countries, our traveller bestowed particular attention upon the palm and the lotus-tree, the latter of which, though greatly celebrated in ancient authors, is still comparatively little known. From the descriptions of Herodotus, Theophrastus, and Pliny, he infers the identity of the lotus of the ancients with the seedra of the Arabs, which is a shrub of common occurrence in the Jereed, and other parts of Barbary; and has, he observes, the leaves, prickles, flower, and fruit of the ziziphus or jubeb; except that in the lotus the fruit is round, smaller, and more luscious; while the branches, like those of the paliurus, are neither so crooked nor so much jointed. The lotus fruit, which greatly resembles gingerbread in taste, is still in great repute, and is sold in all the markets of the southern provinces of Barbary. Among the beasts of burden in use at Algiers is the _kumrah_, an animal produced between the ass and the cow, and having the single hoof of the former, with the tail and head of the latter, though without horns.

The prodigious clouds of locusts which sometimes infest the southern shores of the Mediterranean, and the tremendous devastations which they commit, have been described by many travellers; but by no one, I think, has a more vigorous picture of their movements and appearance been given than by Dr. Shaw in the following passage:—“Those,” says he, “which I saw in 1724 and 1725 were much bigger than our common grasshoppers, and had brown spotted wings, with legs and bodies of a bright yellow. Their first appearance was towards the latter end of March, the wind having been for some time from the south. In the middle of April their numbers were so vastly increased, that in the heat of the day they formed themselves into large and numerous swarms, flew in the air like a succession of clouds; and, as the prophet Joel expresses it, they darkened the sun. When the wind blew briskly, so that these swarms were crowded by others, or thrown one upon another, we had a lively idea of that comparison of the Psalmist, of being tossed up and down as the locust. In the month of May, when the ovaries of those insects were ripe and turgid, each of these swarms began gradually to disappear, and retired into the Metijiah and other adjacent plains, where they deposited their eggs. These were no sooner hatched in June than each of the broods collected itself into a compact body, of a furlong or more in square; and, marching afterward directly forwards towards the sea, they let nothing escape them, eating up every thing that was green and juicy; not only the lesser kinds of vegetables, but the vine likewise, the fig-tree, the pomegranate, the palm, and the apple-tree; even all the trees of the field; in doing which they kept their ranks like men of war, climbing over, as they advanced, every tree or wall that was in their way; nay, they entered into our very houses and bed-chambers, like so many thieves. The inhabitants, to stop their progress, made a variety of pits and trenches all over their fields and gardens, which they filled with water; or else they heaped up therein heath, stubble, and such-like combustible matter, which were severally set on fire at the approach of the locusts. But this was all to no purpose; for the trenches were quickly filled up, and the fires extinguished by infinite swarms succeeding one another; while the front was regardless of danger; and the rear pressed on so close that a retreat was altogether impossible. A day or two after one of these broods was in motion, others were already hatched to march and glean after them, gnawing off the very bark and the young branches of such trees as had before escaped with the loss only of their fruit and foliage. So justly have they been compared by the prophet Joel to a great army; who further observes, that ‘the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness.’