White Gold

by Giles Milton

  The first part of the route, from Meknes to Marrakesh, followed a well-trodden trail. The caravan made brief stops at several villages before halting outside the walls of Marrakesh. The merchants and camel drivers replenished their supplies and water casks, while waiting for newcomers to arrive. The caravan then set off in a southwesterly direction, reaching the coastal port of Santa Cruz within nine days. Hereafter, it swung inland, pausing briefly at the shrine of Sidi Ahmed ou Moûsa, a famous holy man.

  The barren valleys that encircled the shrine presaged the beginnings of the desert. Berber villages gave way to nomadic encampments and there was a dramatic change in the landscape. “The oasis of Oued Noun,” noted Pellow, “is the last that way where the inhabitants live in houses.” A few days later, he sighted his first sand dune, marking the gateway to the Sahara. The caravan had picked up many more merchants and camels on the way and now consisted of no fewer than 30,000 men, with double that number of camels. Even by the standards of the time this was a vast undertaking, requiring a great deal of organization. There was no safety in numbers on a long desert crossing. Indeed, a large caravan could quickly deplete the scant supplies of water that it hoped to find en route. There was also a great danger that stragglers would be picked off by lawless desert Bedouin.

  The men set off southward, aware that they were now about to enter the most arduous stage of the expedition. It was 500 desolate miles from Oued Noun to Chingit, the caravan’s destination, and the landscape was one of scrub and sand. The dunes were constantly shifting, eradicating any recognizable feature, and there was no well-trodden trail. In such a bleak environment, where years could pass without rainfall, the water holes were indeed few and far between. It took great skill and experience to locate the rare springs of palatable, if brackish, water.

  Pellow was surprised to discover that the guide hired to lead the caravan was blind. He told Pellow that he used his nose to lead them from water hole to water hole, sniffing the sand to determine their exact position. Pellow was sceptical of the man’s powers and grew seriously alarmed when six days passed without his finding any water. On the seventh day, Pellow and his companions paused to drink from their water skins, but “to our very great astonishment found them … quite empty, the excessive heat of the sun having exhaled the water through the pores of the leather.” They now had only their emergency rations, which would sustain them for just a few more days. Thereafter, they would be doomed to a thirsty death in the desert.

  The men complained to their guide, who was unfazed by their anxiety, asking one of them to scoop up a handful of sand and hold it to his nose. “After he had sniffed upon it for some short time, he pleasingly told [us] we should, before two days’ end, reach other springs and have water enough.” The great caravan staggered on for another two days under the insufferable heat of the sun. “In the morning of the second day … he [the guide] desired that another handful of the sand of that place might be taken up and held to his nose.”

  The sceptics now decided to test the guide in order to see whether or not he had the skills that he claimed. One of them had retained a small bag of sand from two days previously and now presented this to the blind man. “After he had snuffed on it for a much longer time than at first,” wrote Pellow, “he told him that either the army was again marching back, or that he had most grossly and basely imposed on him.” When informed that it was sand from two days earlier, he was angry that the men had not trusted his abilities. He demanded that they scoop up some sand from where they were now standing and “after just putting his nose to it, [he said] that we should, about four o’clock that afternoon, have water sufficient.” The caravan pressed onward until they sighted a distant speck of green in the desert. “At last,” wrote Pellow, “we got up to these so very much longed after wells … [and] drank our fill.” Their arrival came in the nick of time, for the water skins were completely dry.

  This method of finding water intrigued Pellow and he quizzed his guide about his “wonderful and surprising knowledge in smelling to the sand.” The man replied that he had traversed the desert thirty times and, “finding his sight gradually declining, he had, by often making the experiment … attained to this so wonderful knowledge.” Such skills were, in fact, by no means unique to this particular guide. They had been in use for centuries among the nomadic tribes of the Sahara; the medieval Arab traveler Ibn Batouta and the sixteenth-century adventurer Leo Africanus both mention similar techniques.

  The men rested for a few days at the water hole before continuing on their way. Autumn was by now well advanced, yet the sun still beat down relentlessly on the great caravan. For days on end, the horizon brought no relief except for the flicker of silver mirages. But these long desert crossings always held unexpected surprises, and Pellow’s was to prove no exception. “One day, as I was riding … my camel happened with one of his feet to hit against something which sounded very hollow.” Pellow jumped down, intrigued to know what object lay beneath the sand. “It is a human corpse,” explained his guide, “which hath for some time lain buried in the sands, till through the excessive heat thereof, it is dried to a kecks [mummy].”

  The men later discovered a second mummy, suggesting that they had stumbled upon the ghastly remains of a caravan that had perished in the desert. Pellow, appalled, “with the point of my sword soon found [it], and digged it up in a little time.” The corpse looked as if it had lain there for centuries. “It was as hard as a stock-fish,” he wrote, “[and] had all its limbs and flesh (though shrivelled) entire, all the teeth firm in the gums.” He put his nose to the skin, expecting it to stink, but was surprised to discover that it had no odor at all. “As to its being in any way nauseous,” he wrote, “a man might, without offence, have even carried it in his bosom.”

  After five months spent crossing the desert, the caravan was finally nearing its goal. The presence of nomads was the first sign that they were approaching Chingit. Soon after, the merchants in the vanguard spotted a vast number of tents in the desert. They had at long last reached the remote but fertile oasis.

  This settlement lay more than 1,500 miles from Meknes, yet it was firmly under the sultan’s control. During his reign, Moulay Ismail had dispatched several military expeditions to the area, forcing the nomadic tribes to submit to his authority. Chingit was an important staging post—the point at which two of the great Saharan caravan routes converged. It also lay within easy reach of the River Senegal—erroneously known as the Wadnil or Upper Nile. Moulay Ismail had intended Chingit to become a marshalling depot—a place where African slaves could be assembled and branded before being marched northward to Meknes.

  The sultan was not alone in exploiting the River Senegal; the French had shipped large numbers of slaves from this part of Africa to their plantations in the Caribbean. According to one of France’s commercial agents, Jean Barbot, the Senegalese were “tall, upright, well-built, well-proportioned and loose-limbed” and were much prized for their fine features. “Their noses are somewhat flattened, their lips are thick, their teeth as white as ivory and well set, [and] their hair either curled or long and lank.” The women had particularly enticed Barbot, just as they had Moulay Ismail, being “well shaped, tall and loose limbed,” and seeming “lively and wanton and eager to be amused.” Barbot was gratified to discover that they spent much of their time completely naked and said that “all of them have a warm temperament and enjoy sexual pleasures.”

  The English, too, had long been exploiting this stretch of African coastline. The establishment of the Royal African Company in 1672 had led to an explosion in the number of slave-gathering expeditions to Guinea. It had also encouraged English traders to sail farther south along the coastline of Africa, establishing forts and slave pens wherever there was the possibility of acquiring large numbers of captives. The exact tally of slaves being shipped across the Atlantic each year is impossible to calculate, but it is known that one short stretch of the Gold Coast had no fewer than forty-three slave stations.
One of these, Cape Coast Castle, had dungeons that could accommodate more than 1,500 slaves at any given time.

  The trade in black slaves had been given further impetus in 1713, when the Treaty of Utrecht conferred upon Britain the infamous Assiento license. This permitted her slave dealers to supply 144,000 black Africans to Spanish America, in addition to the vast numbers that were already being sold into forced labor on the cotton farms and plantations of North America and the Caribbean. There are numerous surviving accounts of the hellish nature of the long Atlantic crossing. Chained, half starved and still suffering from the forced march from the interior of Africa to the coastal slave stations, the captives faced months of squalor in insufferably hot, claustrophobic and unsanitary conditions. For many, being bought by a Moroccan slave dealer would have been infinitely preferable to being sold into slavery in North America.

  Neither the English nor the French slave dealers were particularly choosy about the slaves they bought or seized. Moulay Ismail had been rather more discerning, demanding infants and young children who could be brought up to be ruthless and loyal. These slave-soldiers had fought in scores of battles during the course of his reign, and many thousands had been killed in intertribal warfare. The successive sieges of Fez had further depleted the black army, leaving Sultan Moulay Abdallah in very real need of fresh recruits.

  “We marched thrice to the Wadnil,” wrote Pellow, “and all such as made any the least resistance we brought under subjection with the sword.” Having neither weapons nor armor, the tribesmen who lived on these riverbanks were powerless to resist and it was easy for the Moroccan soldiers to hold chieftains to ransom. “[They] were either obliged to bring in the tyrant’s exorbitant demands,” wrote Pellow, “or to suffer the severe plundering of the army.” He added that the merchants with whom he had traveled were utterly ruthless, “stripping the poor negroes of all they had, killing many of them, and bringing off their children into the bargain.”

  Pellow had a stroke of good fortune during his first trip to the river. It coincided with a French slave-gathering expedition, and he was delighted to see a French trading vessel riding at anchor in the middle of the river. Being “about eight tons,” wrote Pellow, “and manned by twelve sailors,” this was far larger than the flat-bottomed slave boats that the French were accustomed to send upstream, and it offered Pellow the tantalizing possibility of a passage back to Europe. But his dream of being rescued was to prove extremely short-lived. As soon as the Moroccan soldiers spied the French vessel, they determined to ransack it.

  Pellow was aghast as he watched them put their plan into action. “The Moors swam off to [the vessel],” he wrote, “boarded it and hauled to the shore.” They captured the twelve crew members who might have saved Pellow, then proceeded to gut the ship of her cargo. She was a veritable treasure trove—one section of her hold was laden with elephant tusks while another was crowded with black slaves. These were taken to Chingit, and the vessel was then set on fire. The French on St. Louis Island were being sent the unambiguous message that the blacks of Senegal were an exclusively Moroccan preserve.

  Stationed at Chingit for much of the winter, Pellow was forced to undertake three voyages to the River Senegal, during which “we got together a very great booty, as gold, ivory [and] blacks.” How many slaves were captured is not recorded, although Pellow says they were “to the value of some millions of English pounds sterling.” The haul was clearly sizable—just as it had been in the days of Moulay Ismail—making a significant contribution to the black slave trade, in which an estimated 15 million Africans were sold into slavery.

  When there were no more slaves to be had, the great caravan prepared to leave Chingit. There was a flurry of activity as camels were made ready and the slaves sorted into groups. The return journey was to be even more hazardous than the outward desert crossing; it was essential that such a large caravan keep up a brisk pace to avoid running out of supplies. There was a brief discussion among the leaders about what to do with the twelve French captives. It was decided to take them back to Meknes, for they were certain to please Sultan Moulay Abdallah. In the event, four died during the long traverse of the desert and only eight half-starved survivors made it to the imperial capital.

  The sight of so many slaves on the move was a tempting sight for the desert Bedouin, and the caravan came under attack on several occasions. Pellow served in one of the armed groups charged with defending the camel train and received a head wound in one clash. But the decisive action of his men saw off the Bedouin; “after this skirmish,” he wrote, “we travelled on unmolested.”

  After months on the move, the caravan finally stumbled toward Kasbah Tadla in the winter of 1732. This fortress, halfway between Marrakesh and Meknes, was at the time playing host to the sultan. “[We] found Moulay Abdallah waiting our coming,” wrote Pellow, “diverting his time in plundering the country and murdering his subjects.”

  The leaders of the caravan expected him to be delighted with their haul, for they had brought back large numbers of child slaves from Senegal. But they had seriously misjudged the sultan, who was heir to all the caprices of his late father and no less cruel. He inexplicably accused the leaders of neglecting their duty and ordered eighteen of them to be summarily executed. “When the tyrant was glutted with blood,” wrote Pellow, “we marched with him at our head to Meknes.” The child slaves were taken away for instruction; the French captives were incarcerated in the slave pens; and “the caravan was separated and sent home to their respective habitations.”

  SULTAN MOULAY ABDALLAH’S ever-strengthening grip on power encouraged him to widen his offensive against his European enemies. Although he concluded treaties with both the English and the Dutch, his Salé corsairs frequently acted in breach of these agreements, and the sultan connived at their actions. In October 1732 the British ship Eagle was towed into Salé harbor. Her passengers and crew—which included seventy Portuguese—were sent as slaves to Meknes. Other ships were also taken and the number of British captives in Morocco was soon well into three figures again.

  The British government once again dispatched an emissary, John Leonard Sollicoffre, to the sultan’s court. He was accompanied by a Jewish interpreter from London, Salom Namias. The two men found Moulay Abdallah in ill humor and in no mood to negotiate over the freeing of his slaves. When Namias persisted in calling for their release, the sultan grew angry. “Take away Mr. Jew,” he said to his guards, “and burn him directly” Namias begged for his life, but the sultan reiterated his command that he should be burned. “[This] they instantly did,” wrote Pellow, “laying him flat on his belly, heaping in a most cruel manner the wood upon him alive, and in a little time he, with grievous shrieks, and no doubt in very great agonies, expired.”

  Sollicoffre’s mission proved a failure—and a costly one at that. He spent more than £1,300 on his voyage to the court, but did not succeed in releasing a single slave. Worse still, the sultan’s show of defiance encouraged Salé’s corsairs to redouble their attacks. They seized four more British vessels—along with many from other European nations—and sent their crews to Meknes. When Pellow met one batch of British captives on their arrival in the city, he asked whether any of the men came from Cornwall. “They told me, yes, there was one coming up named George Davies, of Flushing.” Pellow immediately recognized Davies and greeted him warmly. But Davies saw nothing familiar in Pellow’s sun-blackened features and asked who he was. “‘Why,‘said I, ‘you and I were once schoolfellows together at the church town of Milar.’” Davies looked at him again and realized it was indeed Thomas Pellow, “who I have of a long time heard was in his childhood carried with his uncle into Barbary.” Pellow confirmed that this was undoubtedly true and told Davies that “I was very glad to see him again, though very sorry it should be in that part of the world under such unhappy circumstances.”

  The capture of George Davies and his men aroused such protest in London that Sollicoffre was sent straight back to Morocco, where he mana
ged to secure another meeting with Sultan Moulay Abdallah. On this occasion, he found the sultan in a more obliging mood, promising to release all 136 slaves—at a price of 350 crowns per head—although refusing to free any of the Spanish and Portuguese men captured aboard British ships. Sollicoffre handed over the money before the sultan could change his mind and hurried the released captives aboard his vessel.

  He was quietly pleased that he had successfully completed his mission, but soon found that not everyone in Britain shared his sense of achievement. “His Majesty was very glad to hear that you had procured the release of the English captives,” wrote the Duke of Newcastle in a letter to Sollicoffre, “ … but was greatly displeased with your having agreed to pay so extravagant a price for them.”

  Sollicoffre was accused of “great misconduct” in paying the ransom and found himself returning home in disgrace. Distraught at the criticism and sick with fever, he died a few months later.

  ON A MOONLESS spring night in 1737, Thomas Pellow crept out of his Meknes barracks. Darting through shadows and keeping close to the city walls, he slipped out through the gates of the imperial capital. It was approaching midnight and the city was sound asleep. Pellow was making his escape.

  He was now thirty-three years of age and had been in captivity for more than two decades. His wife and daughter had died almost nine years earlier, and the peaceful time he had spent at Kasbah Temsna was little more than a distant memory. Fearful of being sent on yet another dangerous campaign, Pellow decided that now—or never—was the time to make his break for freedom.