No. 34.
Mr. Vidal to Mr. Hunter.
March 1, 1875. (Received April 7.)
Sir: I have the honor to inform the Department that, after a number of adventures, for which I was not prepared when I commenced my [Page 63] overland journey along the African coast, and which culminated in my being shipwrecked on the coast of Pamphylia, I came back to Tripoli on the 5th ultimo. 1 traveled on horseback all the way from Benghazy to Alexandria, and I can say that my journey was a complete success as far as the United States consul was concerned, but the man had much to complain of, though my health was invariably good. I was detained forty days in Egypt by a sham quarantine, purposely starved the greater part of that time, and then shipped off by force on board an Ottoman schooner of fifty-two tons, which brought me to Adalia, on the coast of Karamania, in the very nick of time to be shipwrecked. Were it not for a line opportunely thrown me by a Greek from the top of the walls of the city, to climb up from the wrecked vessel to terra firma, the results of my exploration would have been, lost to the Department. On that same day, the 21st of November, seventeen persons were drowned near the entrance to that port, and a great number of vessels lost on that coast, as well as in other parts of the Mediterranean. When I reached Malta, at last, I found my wife dangerously ill, in consequence of the terrible anxiety in which she was kept for several months, absolutely without any kind of information in regard to my whereabouts. While I was nursing her, who should arrive in the island but Sahmi Pasha, lately governor of Tripoli, on his way to Aleppo, of which he had just been appointed governor. He had about fifteen negro slave girls in his train, and I had, of course, to snatch a few moments from my wife’s bedside to hasten to the police headquarters and invite the Maltese authorities to do their duty. * * * * * * I will, for the present, confine myself to this statement, that the Pasha and his slaves were allowed to proceed on their way to Constantinople without any magistrate in Malta making a legal inquiry in regard to those negroes’ civil status, and that I was thus denied the occasion to prove my charges against Sahmi Pasha and the Malta police. Negro slavery exists as much this day in every province of the Ottoman Empire as it did a hundred years ago. When that social institution was legally recognized by the Ottoman government, the negro slave would become free the moment he would embrace the Mussulman religion. Such, at least, was the law. * * * * Nevertheless it was exceptional only that the child of a harbi (or non-Mussulman) woman was kept in slavery after the mother was converted to Mohammedanism. Nowadays, when slavery is an institution tolerated only in Turkey, and at which the Ottoman government may condescend to kindly blink, but which it cannot regulate, out of respect for European opinion, the general rule is to emancipate slaves’ children born in Turkey ) and that’s precisely the horrid feature of that state of things. If there may be two opposite opinions in regard to the respective advantages and disadvantages of slavery, as it was established in most of the European colonies of the New World, that is, of the keeping and rearing of the negro child in the same kind of bondage in which it was born, there never was, and can be, but one cry of condemnation against the horrid negro-slave traffic, the kidnapping of thousands and thousands of quiet and happy human beings, who are not Ottoman subjects, and whom the great powers of Christendom have taken under their official protection, and bringing them across immense sand-deserts and amidst horrible sufferings, which the statesmen of Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin cannot have a correct idea of, either to Egypt or Barbary, thence to be exported to Turkey. Therefore, the more numerous the cases of slave-emancipation in Turkey, and the more general the system, far the greater the slave-traffic in Africa to supply the deficiency. After [Page 64] all, the slave-owner in the Carolinas or Jamaica, for instance, was merely holding in a state of servitude a man who was an American or British subject, as the case might be, and of whom his government had, to a certain degree, the right to regulate the status. But the Ottoman slave-owner holds in bondage a foreigner violently kidnapped by pirates.
Now here is what I noticed in my journey in regard to negro slavery: When I left Dernah, there was in the offing a small vessel bound for Canea, the master of which was only waiting for my own departure to take a few negro slave girls on board and weigh anchor.
Less than a quarter of an hour after my rescue from the angry waves at Adalia, and even before I had changed my wet clothes, I was requested to take under my protection a runaway-negro slave and bring him to Malta with me.
On board the Ottoman steamer that conveyed me from Adalia to Beirut, I came across an officer of the Ottoman army, whose body-servant was a negro slave, bought, as the officer informed me, by him in this city of Tripoli, of Barbary.
The day before I left Alexandria, having ordered my janissary, L’Uneschi, to find for me one or two negro slave girls, he went out; and in less than an hour he came back with a slave-broker, who took me to a house where he was keeping two slaves, one twenty years old, and the other fourteen. The former could speak Arabic, but the latter understood no other language than one of the Soudan tongues. The prices asked were twenty napoleons for the older one, and fourteen for the younger. But, wishing to ascertain whether that article could be exported from Alexandria as easily as it is from Tripoli, I informed that man that I was on my way to Barbary, by way of Malta, and that I intended to leave on the next day by the English steamship Illyrian, of the Leyland line. Being a stranger, I did not want, I said, to have the annoyance of passing those slaves through the custom-house. “Very well,” said the broker, “pay me a supplement of five napoleons for the older one and nine for the other, and I will deliver them on board. You will pay me when I have put all the papers of sale and others in your hands on board the steamer. It will cost me more to take the younger one through the custom-house, as she does not speak Arabic, and is too young to be passed for your servant’s wife.” Having all the information I desired, I went away, not wishing to invest my money in that article.* * * * * *
I have, &c.,