White Gold

by Giles Milton

  The black guards kept a meticulous note of the slaves under their charge and were careful to record any mortality. These daily tallies have long since been lost, and the surviving records are frustratingly incomplete. The accounts of visiting ambassadors, padres and the captives themselves suggest that at any given time there were up to 5,000 slaves being held in Meknes. But the Arabic sources tell a more troubling story. The nineteenth-century Moroccan historian Ahmed ez-Zayyani studied the archives in the royal collection and reckoned that at any one time there were at least 25,000 white slaves in Meknes. If so, the city’s slave population was about the same as that of Algiers.

  The slave pens would quickly fill after the capture of one of the Spanish presidios, but the captives’ numbers would soon be thinned by disease and sickness. The plague was a regular visitor to the slave pen, reaping a rich harvest among men already suffering from dysentery and malnutrition. Mouette said that in one particularly bad year, it killed one in four of the French slaves, and he added that there was very little they could do to halt the mortality. “We doubled our usual daily prayers at that time, and for eight days said the whole rosary, instead of the third part repeated before.”

  So many slaves died from sickness, disease and sheer exhaustion that even Moulay Ismail began to grow seriously alarmed. When he consulted his kaids, they told him there was a good reason for the high mortality rate. In the captives’ own countries, they said, Christians “were much strengthen’d by drinking of wine and brandy.” They added that if Moulay Ismail wished to slow the death rate and encourage his slaves to work harder, “he need only order every one of them three or four glasses of wine.”

  The sultan took the kaids at their word. “He sent for the clerk of the Jews, whom he order’d to bring four great pitchers of wine … [and] distributed [it] among the captives.” When he returned to the works a little later in the day, “[he] was amazed to see that the Christians had done more in two hours … than in three parts of the day before.” Henceforth, he ordered the Jews to supply the Christian slaves with “one hundred weight of raisins, and the same of figs, in order that they might make brandy.” He even sanctioned the opening of a makeshift tavern in the slave pen, although he almost certainly failed to appreciate the irony of sick and dying men having access to eau-de-vie.

  Captain Pellow and his men continued to suffer from disease and malnutrition, yet they soon discovered that the poor food was not their main grievance. The real source of woe—and the subject of endless complaints—was their punishing daily routine. It was at the building works of Meknes palace, where they spent up to fifteen hours of every day, that the men discovered the full horror of life as a slave of Sultan Moulay Ismail.

  MEKNES HAD BEEN a provincial market town when Moulay Ismail acceded to the throne. It had never been an imperial capital, like the great cities of Fez, Rabat and Marrakesh, nor did it have an illustrious history. This was what made it so appealing to the new sultan. Moulay Ismail was acutely conscious of his place in history and wished to be remembered as the founder of a dynasty whose imperial capital was of a scale and grandeur that surpassed all others.

  The monumental construction program began shortly after he had secured the throne. “He demolished the houses which neighboured the kasbah,” wrote Ahmed ez-Zayyani, “and got the inhabitants to take away the rubble.” When this was complete, he ordered the entire eastern quarter of the town to be razed. The sultan was still not satisfied with the size of the area that had been cleared and demolished many of the other buildings that remained standing.

  The extraordinary assemblage of fortifications and palaces that began to arise from the rubble were of a size that astonished all who saw them. The walls alone were planned to stretch for many miles, for Moulay Ismail wished his various interlocking palaces and chambers to march in endless succession across the hills and valleys around Meknes. There were to be vast courtyards and colonnaded galleries, green-tiled mosques and pleasure gardens. He ordered the building of a huge Moorish harem, as well as stay-bles and armories, fountains, pools and follies. He instructed his engineers to raid the Roman ruins of Volubulis for marble columns and slabs of dressed stone. He also took all the most precious adornments from the once splendid al-Badi palace in Marrakesh, including cartloads of marble columns and exquisite jasper. Other precious stones were specially imported from Pisa and Genoa.

  Visitors to Meknes would later assert that Moulay Ismail was motivated by a desire to build a palace that was grander and more impressive than King Louis XIV’s Versailles. The two monarchs—who reigned contemporaneously—certainly had much in common. Both personally supervised their building works and both treated their laborers with contempt. But Meknes was already under construction when Moulay Ismail was first brought news of the splendors of Versailles, and his rambling panoply of Moorish pleasure palaces could not have been more different from Versailles.

  The French padre Nolasque Neant nevertheless insisted that the sultan had actually expressed the desire to outdo everything that the Sun King had achieved. One European visitor to Moulay Ismail’s court even had the nerve to tell the sultan that if he wished to imitate the king of France, he should not have his subjects and slaves killed in his presence. “This is true,” was the sultan’s ready answer, “but King Louis commands men, whereas I command beasts.” These “beasts” were forced to work on Moulay Ismail’s never-ending project, constructing walls, mixing mortar and heaving slabs of stone. Even though the sultan had thousands of slaves at his disposal, he was always short of manpower and had to issue a decree to the effect that every tribe in Morocco was obliged to furnish a fixed number of men and mules.

  The first of Moulay Ismail’s palaces to be finished was the Dar Kbira. This was completed in 1677, after three years’ labor, and was opened with an impressive nocturnal ceremony attended by all of the sultan’s kaids and governors. At the stroke of midnight, Moulay Ismail slaughtered a wolf at the main gateway, killing it with his own hands. Its head was chopped off and built into the center of the gate.

  The size and scale of the Dar Kbira was quite without precedent. “[It] makes a magnificent boundary for the city to the northwards,” wrote Father Busnot in 1714, “the greatness of its enclosure, the whiteness of its lofty walls, the height of [its] several turrets.” The first section of gardens were also laid out on an impressively grand scale. Moulay Ismail ordered his slaves to transport mature trees “of an extraordinary size” to decorate the Dar Kbira and also began planning a hanging garden in echo of the fabled Babylon.

  The Dar Kbira was huge, yet Moulay Ismail conceived it as merely the first in an elaborate series of palaces. To the southwest of his private quarters, he began laying the foundations of a truly vast city of pleasure, the Dar el Makhzen, which was to consist of no fewer than fifty adjoining palaces, each with its own mosque and bathhouse. This was to be surrounded by three sets of defensive walls, with the outer ring flanked by crenellated towers. There was to be a storehouse—the heri—large enough to contain a year’s harvest from the whole of Morocco. Moulay Ismail also ordered the construction of an enormous reservoir and boating lake, while the stables were intended to house up to 12,000 horses.

  Undaunted by the scale of his project, the sultan began laying plans for a sprawling diplomatic quarter, the Madinat el-Riyad, where his viziers and officers were to have their residences, and a vast military barracks housing 130,000 of his black troops. Most fabulous of all was to be the Dar al-Mansur palace, which was to stand over 150 feet high and be surmounted by twenty pavilions decorated with glazed green tiles.

  Moulay Ismail was the principal architect, engineer and consultant of his building project. He would appear every morning, long before dawn, and give instructions for that day’s work. He gave orders to the slave-drivers and watched in satisfaction as they thrashed their slaves in order to make them work harder. “The sultan Moulay Ismail busied himself in supervising the construction of his palaces,” wrote Ahmed ez-Zayyani. “As soon as
he had finished one, he would start on another.” As the walls of imperial Meknes began to fill the skyline, visitors were awed by the scale of the project. “Never,” wrote ez-Zayyani, “had such a similar palace been seen under any government, Arab or foreign, pagan or Muslim.” The ramparts alone stretched so far along the valley that it required 12,000 soldiers to guard them.

  The construction work had been under way for more than four decades by the time Captain Pellow and his men were brought to Meknes, yet there was no sign of any end to the project. Indeed, the sultan’s plans became ever more fantastical as the palace grew in size. Thomas Pellow had been astonished at the size of the place when first led inside the ramparts and no less shocked by the manner in which his British comrades were beaten and thrashed by their black slave-drivers. “At daybreak,” he wrote, “the guardians of the several dungeons where the Christian slaves are shut up at night, rouse them with curses and blows.” Captain Pellow and his men were marched under guard to the latest section of palace walls and spent the next fifteen hours toiling under the burning African sun. “Some are employed to carry large baskets of earth,” wrote Pellow. “Some drive waggons drawn by six bulls and two horses.” Skilled laborers were given more taxing work—they had to “saw, cut, cement, and erect marble pillars.” Those without skills were “set to the coarsest works, as tending horses, sweeping stables, carrying burthens [and] grinding with hand-mills.”

  Being unskilled, the crews of the Francis, the George and the Southwark were therefore given the most back-breaking tasks. Mixing the lime mortar was one of the most arduous of their jobs, and many of the slaves left accounts of the dangers involved. According to Thomas Phelps, they first had to construct large wooden boxes that were open at the top. These were then filled with “earth powdered, and lime, and gravel well beat together.” The men next added water and mixed everything together until it had the consistency of thick soup. The liquid mortar was allowed to dry, “which then will acquire an incredible hardness, and is very lasting.” Once the wooden boxes had been removed, the mortar was either coated in white plaster, or faced with polished marble.

  Mixing the mortar was extremely hazardous. The slaves were frequently burned by the lime and suffered great pain when it got into sores and cracks in their skin. Father Busnot was appalled that the slaves were not allowed even the most rudimentary safety precautions and were “often burnt alive, as lately happen’d to six Englishmen and one Frenchman.” Their task was made all the more difficult by the fact that much of their work was undertaken on walls that were already thirty or forty feet high. Germain Mouette said that they were given neither scaffolds nor ladders and had to heave the mortar up by pulley and cord, “which burns and cuts the fingers of such as pull at it.” He said that “if those who work above cease but one moment pounding the earth that is between the planks, with heavy rammers, the overseers, who have quick ears, throw stones at them to continue their perpetual labour.”

  It was clear to Captain Pellow and his men that the building work would continue for as long as Moulay Ismail was alive. The sultan was rarely satisfied with the finished buildings and would often order his slaves to tear down the entire edifice. “The unsettled humour of the king of Morocco renders it [the palace] like unto the scenes in a theatre,” wrote Father Busnot, “which change almost at every act.” He said that “the slaves assur’d me that when a man had been ten years away, he cannot know them again, so great are the alterations that prince is daily making.” In one four-month period, Moulay Ismail forced his slaves to demolish twelve miles of palace walls and then ordered that the chunks of rubble be “beaten to powder.” Once this work was completed, he told the slaves to rebuild the walls in exactly the same position. When the sultan was asked why he was constantly demolishing his newly constructed buildings, he explained that he viewed his slaves as scheming vermin who needed to be kept occupied. “I have a bag full of rats,” he said, “[and] unless I keep that bag stirring, they would eat their way through.”

  The black slave-drivers were extremely cruel to the men under their charge. “[They] immediately punish the least stop or inad-vertancy,” wrote Thomas Pellow, “and often will not allow the poor creatures time to eat their bread.” The drivers worked in shifts and, at the end of each shift, would tell their replacement which of the slaves had been slack in their work. The new driver would then raise his cudgel and beat the hapless slaves, “which he always took care to bestow on those parts where he thought they would do most hurt.” Mouette said that most of the slave-drivers would strike at the head, “and, when he had broke it, counterfeited the charitable surgeon, applying some unslacked lime to stanch the bleeding.” If any slave was beaten so badly that he was no longer able to work, the slave-driver “had a dreadful way of enabling him, by redoubling the stripes, so that the new ones made him forget the old.”

  The slave-drivers often amused themselves by waking the men at night. “It frequently happens,” wrote Pellow, “[that] they are hurried away to some filthy work in the night time, with this call in Spanish, ‘Vamos a travacho cornutos,’ i.e., ‘Out to work, you cuckolds.’” The exhausted men were beaten from their beds and obliged to do another few hours of hard labor.

  The guard of the French slaves had been known to punish the men by reducing their already scant rations and sometimes ordered them to clean the city’s sewers. “[He] made us empty all the privies,” wrote Mouette, “and remove all the dunghills in the town, carrying all the filth in wicker baskets, so that it ran through and fell on us.” After several days of such treatment, the French slaves were in a terrible condition. “Our hams [thighs] were all cut with the weight of our chains, and some of them, as well as mine, were a finger deep in the flesh.”

  Moulay Ismail visited the construction site on a daily basis. According to Simon Ockley, he was accompanied by three palace servants: “one … to carry his tobacco pipe (which has a bowl as big as a child’s head) … another carries his tobacco, and a third a brazen vessel of hot water.” The slaves trembled as this entourage approached, for they knew that anyone considered to be slacking would be given a sound thrashing. “His boys carried short brazil[wood] sticks,” wrote Pellow, “knotted cords for whipping, a change of clothes to shift when bloody, and a hatchet.”

  Moulay Ismail’s inspections were punctilious and extremely thorough. He would shout orders, proffer advice and suggest new projects to be undertaken. If the work was not proceeding satisfactorily, he had been known to clamber on to the walls and start mixing the mortar himself. He could not abide poor craftsmanship and did not hesitate to punish slaves whose work was of an inferior quality. On one occasion, he was inspecting bricks when he discovered that some were very thin. He called for the master mason and, after admonishing the man for his poor work, ordered his black guard to break fifty bricks over the mason’s head. When this was done, the blood-drenched slave was thrown into prison.

  On another occasion, the sultan quizzed one of his slaves about the quality of the mortar. When the trembling slave admitted that it was indeed inferior, Moulay Ismail “bid him hold his head fare to strike at; having strucken him, he knocked down all the rest with his own hands and broke their heads so miserably that the place was all bloody like a butcher’s stall.”

  The Spanish slaves suffered particularly harsh treatment. When one of their number walked past Moulay Ismail without removing his hat, the sultan “darted his spear at him.” It pierced deep into the man’s flesh and caused him considerable pain as he ripped the barbed tip out of his skin. The slave handed the spear back to the sultan, only to have it thrust repeatedly into his stomach.

  The most feared punishment was known as “tossing.” “The person whom the emperor orders to be thus punished,” wrote Pellow, “is seized upon by three or four strong negroes who, taking hold of his hams, throw him up with all their strength and, at the same time, turning him round, pitch him down head foremost.” The black guards who performed this punishment were “so dexterous by long
use that they can either break his neck the first toss, dislocate his shoulder, or let him fall with less hurt.” Pellow said that they would continue to toss the slave until the sultan ordered them to stop.

  The continual cruelty took a severe toll on the slaves in Meknes, yet they knew that any resistance was futile. When the Spanish captives had attempted to assassinate the sultan, it had very nearly ended in disaster. According to Pellow, one of their number stole a musket and fired at the sultan’s chest as he toured the building works. But his nerves got the better of him, and “the two balls he had charged his gun with flew into the pommel of the emperor’s saddle.” Moulay Ismail was incensed when he realized what had happened. The man was seized “[and] it was expected he would be put to a cruel death.” But the sultan—unpredictable as ever—was overcome by compassion. He asked the Spaniard “what he had done to deserve being used so, whether he was no more beloved, and people were tired with him.” Then, with unusual clemency, he “calmly sent him to the works among the rest of the Christians.”

  The sultan’s violent behavior was a source of continual grievance for the slaves toiling on Meknes palace, and they feared that their friends and families in Britain were ignorant of their plight. Thomas Goodman, one of the Francis’s crew, wrote a letter to his family in November 1716, informing them of the terrible treatment he was suffering at the hands of the Moroccan sultan.

  “I have undergone a great deal of hardship,” he wrote, “for we are kept to work night and day; and drove like so many sheep.” He said that the hard labor was almost unendurable, and added that “when we go out to work, we don’t know whether we shall come in alive or not, for they are very barbarous people and give nothing but bread and water.” After begging his family to pray for him and his comrades who were currently alive, he ended his letter by revealing his sense of despair and depression. “Nothing can be worse to me than to think how happy I have lived, and now live worse than a dog, and naked; not one rag of clothes to cover our nakedness.”