Frontispiece. A SAINT HOUSE. THE PASSING OF MOROCCO BY FREDERICK MOORE AUTHOR OF ‘THE BALKAN TRAIL’ WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAP BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN, AND COMPANY 1908 TO CHARLES TOWNSEND COPELAND...

For several years I had been watching Morocco as a man who follows the profession of ‘Special Correspondent’ always watches a place that promises exciting ‘copy.’ For many years trouble had been brewing there. On the Algerian frontier tribes were almost constantly at odds with the French; in the towns the Moors would now and then assault and sometimes kill a European; round about Tangier a brigand named Raisuli repeatedly captured Englishmen and other foreigners for the sake of ransom; and among

It was in August, 1907, one Tuesday morning, that I landed from a P. & O. steamer at Gibraltar. I had not been there before but I knew what to expect. From a distance of many miles we had seen the Rock towering above the town and dwarfing the big, smoking men-of-war that lay at anchor at its base. Ashore was to be seen ‘Tommy Atkins,’ just as one sees him in England, walking round with a little cane or standing stiff with bayonet fixed before a tall kennel, beside him, as if for protecti

I did not stop long on this occasion at Tangier, because, from a newspaper point of view, Casablanca was a place of more immediate interest. The night before I sailed there arrived an old Harvard friend travelling for pleasure, and he proposed to accompany me. Johnny Weare was a young man to all appearances accustomed to good living, and friends of an evening—easy to acquire at Tangier—advised him to take a supply of food. But I unwisely protested and dissuaded John, and we went down laden with

Though at times unpleasant, it is always interesting to come upon the scene of a recent battle. Casablanca had been a battlefield of unusual order. The fight that had taken place was not large or momentous, but it had peculiarities of its own, and it left some curious wreckage. Windowless Moorish houses with low arched doors now lay open, the corners knocked off or vast holes rent in the side, and any man might enter. Several ‘Saint Houses’ were also shattered, and a mosque near the Water Port h

It was to see the war balloon go up that I planned with a youthful wag of a Scot to rise at five o’clock one morning and walk out to the French lines before breakfast. He came to the roof and got me up, and we passed through the ruined streets, over the fallen bricks and mortar, to the outer gate, the Bab-el-Sok . Arriving in the open, the balloon appeared to us already, to our surprise, high in the air; and on the straight road that divided the French camp we noticed a thick, lifting cloud of b

On the next excursion with the French I happened to see the shooting of six prisoners. We set out from camp as usual at early morning and moved up the coast for a distance of eight miles, with the object of examining a well which in former dry seasons supplied Casablanca with water and was now no doubt supplying the Arabs round about. By marching in close formation and keeping always down in the slopes between hills we managed to get to the well and to swing a troop of Goumiers round it without

‘At eight a.m. yesterday the French columns opened battle in the Settat Pass. The enemy offered a stubborn resistance, but was finally repulsed, after a fight lasting until midnight. Settat was occupied and Muley Rechid’s camp destroyed. ‘There were several casualties on the French side.... The enemy’s losses were very heavy. The fight has produced a great impression among the tribes.’ The Arab losses under the fire of the French 75-millimètre guns and the fusillade of the Foreign Legion and the

The French Army is an interesting institution at this moment, when it is known that the Navy of France ranks only as that of a second-class Power and it is thought her military organisation is little better. I am not in a position to make comparisons, knowing little of the great armies of Europe, nor is the detachment of troops in Morocco, numbering at this writing hardly 8,000 men, a sufficient proportion of the army of France to allow one to form much of an opinion. But some observations that

To see Morocco from another side—for we had looked upon the country so far only from behind French guns—we started up the coast on a little ‘Scorpion’ steamer, billed to stop at Rabat. But this unfriendly city is not to be approached every day in the year, even by so small a craft as ours, with its captain from Gibraltar knowing all the Moorish ports. A heavy sea, threatening to roll on against the shores for many days, decided the skipper to postpone his stop and to push on north to Tangier; an

Two years ago Tangier and the surrounding districts were governed by one Mulai Hamid ben Raisul, better known as Raisuli, a villainous blackguard who was finally deposed through the interference of the foreign legations. To-day this same Raisuli enjoys the interest on £15,000 (£5,000 having been given him in cash) and the protection ordinarily accorded to a British subject; and these favours are his because he deprived of liberty for seven months Kaid Sir Harry Maclean, a British subject in the

Luck with me seems to run in spells. Once on a campaign in the Balkans I had the good fortune to be on hand at everything; massacre, assassination, nor dynamite attack could escape me; I was always on the spot or just at a safe distance off. In Morocco things went consistently the other way. Beginning with the Casablanca affair when I was in America, everything of a newspaper value happened while I was somewhere else. The day the Sultan entered Rabat after his long march from the interior, I sai

At the time that the Krupp Company were mounting heavy-calibre guns at Rabat other German contractors proposed to cut the bar of the Bu Regreg and open the port to foreign trade. But the people of both Rabat and Sali protested, saying that this would let in more Nasrani and that the half-dozen already there, who bought their rugs and sold them goods from Manchester and Hamburg, were quite enough. Up to the time the French gunboats appeared—preceded by the news of their effective work at Casablan

Across the river from Rabat and across a stretch of sand half-a-mile wide, a low line of white battlements, showing but a single gate, keeps the famous city of Salli, the headquarters of the Moroccan pirates, who in their day made themselves feared as far as the shores of England. Every one remembers that it was to Salli Robinson Crusoe was taken and held in slavery for many months, finally escaping in a small boat belonging to his Moorish master. For years the corsairs were the scourge of Chris

We were up on the Kasbah, the high rocky citadel that rises nearly two hundred feet straight above the notorious bar of the Bu Regreg, taking in a splendid view of the river’s winding course together with the city of Salli. When a caravan of unusual size twisted out of Salli’s double gate and came across the sands to the water’s edge, where a score of ferry boats nosed the bank, their owners began jumping about like madmen, frantic for the promised trade that could not escape them. On market day

The principal cause of the Moorish revolution, which threatens to terminate the reign of Abdul Aziz, was his tendency—up to a few months ago—to defy the religious prejudices which a long line of terrible predecessors had carefully nurtured in his people. The incident of the mosque of Mulai Idris at Fez was his culminating offence. To the uttermost corners of the Empire went the news that the young Sultan had defiled the most holy tomb of the country through causing to be taken by force from its

It is generally put down to the weakness of Abdul Aziz that Morocco has come to its present pass, and there is no doubt that had the youthful Sultan possessed a little more of firmness he would not have come now to be a mere dependent of the French. But Morocco has long been doomed. Even in the days of the former Sultan, who ruled the Moors as they understood and gave them a government the likes of which they say they wish they had to-day, the tribes were constantly at war with one another and w

Not very many of the European residents of Morocco are fond of the French invaders. Even, in many instances, Frenchmen hate them. They condemn consistently the disorders that the armies of France—the Spanish are not very active—have brought to Morocco; and still more they lament the influx of other Europeans, generally, as they point out, of the worst sort; dishonest speculators, adventurers and ‘dive’ keepers, unfortunately the usual vanguard of Western civilisation. Frenchmen of the old days a