| October 11. Thursday. Up betimes, to walk, particularly
on the stages at the stockade. I ventured within, a little way, to see
a boat making by the Moors, and some of our carpenters, lent them. I would
not venture too near, for I had. been a good prize, and I see their sentries
mighty close intent upon me.
22 Monday. We dined with Killigrew most delicately, his being
the finest ship... After dinner and a glass or two, Mr. Sheres, Dr. Lawrence,
and I away, he giving us guns, contrary to a late order against salutes.
Having set them on shore at the Mole, I went in the boat round the bay.
Saw very plainly the ruins of old Tangier, and the river of Tangier; Moors
gathering drift-wood. Saw the manner of their huts near the water-side.
To Malabar Point: turned to go to my Lord, who dined on board the Grafton;
but he ~ going off before we got to him, I to the Mole, and saw several
more of Sheres’s mines blown up with good execution, even to wonder, with
so little quantity of powder. Coming back on the water, I first see how
blue the remote hills will look about the sun’s going down, as I have seen
them painted, but never believed them natural.
October 23 Tuesday … While walking this morning up and down
the Mole and town with my Lord and the Governor, Roberts, the town apothecary
came to Kirke, and told him of bad wine now selling to the soldiers at
three-pence or three-halfpence a quart, so sour that it would kill the
men. Kirke moved my Lord, and he yielded, that it should be staved. Of
his own accord, Kirke went to see it done; presently came to us again,
and brought in his hand a bottle of white wine, calling it vinegar, and
gave it my Lord to taste, as also I and others did.
I was troubled to see the owner, Mr. Cranborow, a modest man that
keeps a house of entertainment, come silently, with tears in his eyes,
begging my Lord to excuse it... Kirke, in sight of my Lord, all the
while ranted, and called him dog; and that all the merchants in the town
were rogues like him, that would poison the men. My Lord calmly bade the
man dispose otherwise of what he had, and not sell it to the soldiers.
“Nay,” says Kirke, “he must then gather it up from the ground, for I have
staved it!” The man (whether he had any not staved, I know not) withdrew
weeping, and without any complaint, to the making my heart ache.
Captain Pursell told me, he knew very well the wine Kirke staved,
and stood on the man’s chest in the cellar, when the wine about the room
was too high for him to stand on the ground. The wine was better than my
Lord hath at his own table: but that the man is undone, there being as
much as cost him five hundred dollars; and that all the good the Governor
did in it was, to make all his soldiers that could come thither drunk.
… Du Pas tells me of Kirke’s having banished the Jews, without,
or rather contrary to, express orders from England, only because of their
denying him, or standing in the way of, his private profits. He made a
poor Jew and his wife, that came out of Spain to avoid the Inquisition,
be carried back, swearing they should be burned; and they were carried
to the Inquisition and burned: He says, he hath certainly been told that
Kirke used to receive money on both sides, in cases of difference in law,
and he that gave most should carry the cause. When the Recorder hath sometimes
told him such or such a thing was not according to the law of England,
he hath said openly in court, ~ "But it was then according to the law of
Tangier.”
24. Wednesday. A great cold in my throat, that I could hardly
speak or swallow... Notice brought us, at dinner, of Mr. Sheres’s mine
to be blown up; so, some to the top of the house to see it; but I down
to the watergate, and see it blow up. The stones flew to a wonder-ful distance,
endangering all the small vessels in the harbour. Going down to the Mole,
I see the effects of the blow, which were very great…
November. Speaking with Kirke about want of water, he owned
that, this dry year, if it had not been for Fountain Fort, where our only
supply of water is, (of which, if the Moors knew, they might prevent us,)
the place could not have subsisted. He added, that at my Lord Peterborough’s
receiving the place from the King of Portugal, a book was given him, with
other things always given from one governor to another, to be never looked
into by any other, that did give a secret account of all conduit-heads
and heads of water-courses in and about the town; of which this place was
the fullest in the world, every house having a particular well or two,
now dry, and lost by losing the know-ledge whither to go to the conduit-head
to remedy it. My Lord Peterborough having taken the book away with him,
on being asked for it, hath always answered, he hath mislaid and cannot
recover it. Another pretty instance of the fate this place hath always
met with.
It is plain, and Mr. Sheres bid me observe, that the wind
here consumes the stone walls of the town and Mole, where it comes, more
than the sea. Strange how the wind shall eat holes in the walls, as deep
in the very stones as my body is thick, and yet leave the mortar it is
plastered with without, quite good! I find-ing some crannies only
for the air to get to the stones.
Everything runs to corruption here. The timber in Pole Fort,
being now taking up, towards destroying the Fort, proves more rotten than
it would in another place in a great deal longer time. The like is proved
by the stone pillars along the Mole by the water-side, to fasten ships
by, being eaten almost quite away with the wind merely and spray of the
sea. The like by my knife and steel seal rusting in my pocket, and, I fear,
my watch.
At the same time, in the whole place, nothing but vice of
all sorts, swearing, cursing, drinking, &c. the women as much as the
men. Captain Silver, a sober officer of my Lord’s, belonging to the Ordnance,
said, he was quite ashamed of what he had heard in their houses; worse,
a thousand times, than in the worst place in London he was ever in. Dr.
Balaam, their Recorder theretofore, left his servant his estate, with caution
that if ever he married a woman of Tangier, or that ever had been there,
he should lose it all. I have a copy of his will.
Letter to James Houblon: Our work advances so fast, that now
I doubt a little of having anything from England before our coming away,
being in full hopes of finishing all in a month, if the Moors in the fields
just without our gates, and, by the help of their hills, in full view of
all we are doing, will give us leave; which we do not expect, nor are in
much pain about it, our military men thinking them-selves secured, with
the help of our fleet, against all the force of Barbary. What they do,
it is supposed, they will reserve to the moment of retreat out of the town,
when, on springing our mines, and thereby overthrowing our walls, it will
be flung open.
The inhabitants are daily shipping themselves off; many families
already on board, and one ship gone with the sick and cripples. To-day
embark the Portugueses, having full satisfaction in ready money, for all
their proprieties. In eight days we pretend to have removed the whole of
the town’s-people. Then begins the destruction of the town; that is to
say, the diswalling houses, whose materials (the wooden part at least)
will be applied to the mines.
At no time there needed any more than the walking once round
it by day-light to convince any man (no better-sighted than I) of the impossibility
of our ever making it, under our circumstances of government, either tenable
by, or useful to, the crown of England. |
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