From the town sallied out (in 1578) the army under Don Sebastian, who met his fate fighting the infidel at Alcazar el Kebir, near a long bridge over a marshy stream known as Wad-el-Mhassen. The battle still is called amongst the Moors “The Three Kings’ Fight,” for besides Don Sebastian fell two Moorish kings. With Don Sebastian there fell the flower of the nobility of Portugal, and by his death the crown passed quickly to Phillip II. (the Prudent) of Spain, who knew far better than to embark in expeditions into Africa. The battle was memorable, for Abdel-Malik, King of Fez, died of exhaustion on the field, and Don Sebastian, rather than survive disgrace, plunged, as did Argentine at Bannockburn, into the thickest of the fight, and fell or disappeared, for though his faithful servant, Resende, claimed to have seen his body, so much doubt existed of his death that the strange sect known as Sebastianists arose in Portugal. Their tenet was that Don Sebastian was still alive, but kept in durance by the Moors, and in remote and old-world villages believers linger even to the present day. I myself saw a sort of pterodactyle, years ago in Portugal, a strange old man dressed in black clothes, and wrapped, in heat and cold alike, in a thick cloak. The people of the village called him mad, but, looking at the thing impartially, madness and faith are the same thing, the only difference being as to the mountain which the believer wishes to remove.
Lala Mamouna, the female saint who guards Larache from pestilence and famine, sudden death, and the few simple ailments which Arabs suffer from, has her white crenelated sanctuary on a hill which overlooks the sea, and to her tomb women who wish for children to carry on the misery of life, repair, and pray or chatter with each other, and no doubt the saint is just as tolerant of scandal as are the wise old men who sun their stomachs at the windows of a club.
At this accursed port, Larache, of the Beni-Aros, after a signal had been made by a man mounted on a mule, who held one end of a row of flags, the other being made fast to a post, a great annoyance fell upon the blameless captain of the good ship Rabat. The bar at El Areish is three times out of four impassable when steamers call, as here the river Luccos [8] meets the tide, and such a surf gets up that as the people have no surf boats, communication from a vessel to the shore is always dangerous, and not frequently impossible. This, to an ordinary steamer, means either delay or loss of cargo, generally the latter, for when the bar is bad it often takes three or four days to become passable, and as the anchorage is most precarious a south-east gale causes great danger to a vessel lying in the open roads. On this occasion, though, the sea was like a sheet of ice, smooth, shining, and the bar just marked by a thin line of foam. To the astonishment of the uninitiated passengers the fury of the captain knew no bounds, the officers turned sulky, and the one man on board who seemed unmoved was the unlucky priest, who shipped to please the owners of the line, or to appease the folly of the nation, or for “empeño,” [9] or for some other reason at present not made known, passed all his time in fishing when in port, or when at sea in studying counterpoint, and playing on a piano which was tuned about the time Queen Isabella was expelled from Spain.
A narrow, nine-knot crank and Clyde-built steamer was the Rabat, full five-and-twenty years of age, boilers too small, but engines sound, and the whole vessel kept as clean as holystone and paint could clean, brass work all shining, and herself ever a-rolling like a swing-boat at a fair, sailed out of Barcelona, owned by the Spanish Trans-Atlantic Company (Chairman: the Marquis of Comillas), and subsidised by the Spanish Government to carry mails down the Morocco coast in order that the majesty of Spain might fill the eyes and strike the imagination of the Moorish dogs, and show them that the Spaniards were on a level with the other nations, such as the Inglis, Frances, el Bortokez (Portuguese), el Brus (the Germans, that is, Prussians), and the Austrians, called by the Moors el Nimperial.
Captain from Reus, taciturn, and shaved each Sunday when the priest said mass, for it is decent for a man to stand before his God with a clean chin, at other times a stubble on his face on which a man might strike a match, so that the match had not been made in Spain. Four officers: an Andalusian, two Catalans, and a Basque; two engineers, and the aforementioned priest, together with a crew of eighteen men and half a dozen stewards, served to get the craft, whose utmost measurement could not be above twelve hundred tons, across the sea.
The Pope had granted plenary indulgence in the following terms: “for looking to the circumstances, the weather, etc., I deign to grant full dispensation according to the ecclesiastic law, from fasting and from abstinence (from meat) to all those who by reason, either of their profession or as passengers, find themselves on board the vessels of this Company, and that for three years’ time, excepting (if it can be done without too great an inconvenience) on Good Friday and on the Vigils of the Apostles, Saint Peter and Saint Paul, also on Christmas Day and any other day which may be opportune … on which three days I also dispense from sin the passengers and crew if any difficulty unforeseen by me makes their compliance an impossibility.” Given “en Vaticano” and through the Bishop of Madrid and Alcala under whose ægis it appears that Spanish ships all sail armed with this plenary indulgence; manned with the priest and men and duly subsidised, it could not be expected that the Rabat cared much for passengers, still less for cargo; so when the lumbering “barcazas” approached the ship, curses loud, guttural, and deep were heard on every side. The unwilling sailors, mostly Valencians and Catalans, stood by to work the donkey engine; but their fears were vain, for it appeared that all the cargo was but four bales of Zatar (Marjoram) for the Habana, and a few thousand melons for the Sultan’s camp. The bales of Zatar soon were dumped into the hold, but five long hours were wasted passing the melons up from hand to hand; in counting them, recounting them, in storming, and the whole time a noise like Babel going on, shouting of Moors, cursing of Spaniards, and the confusion ten times intensified because no man could speak a word the other understood. The Rabat having been only five years upon the coast, no one on board could speak a word of Arabic. Why should they, did they not speak Christian, and are Spaniards and sailors to be supposed to burrow in grammars as if they were schoolboys or mere Englishmen. A miserable Jew, fearfully sea-sick, balancing up in the gunwale of a boat, in a mixed jargon of Arabic and Portuguese kept tale after a fashion, of the melons, and at last the vessel put to sea amid the curses of the passengers, and having earned the name amongst the Arabs of Abu Batigh, the Father of the Melons. Amongst the Arabs almost every man is Father of something or some quality, and lucky he who does not find himself styled, Father of the “ginger beard,” or of “bad breath,” or any other personal or moral failing, peculiarity, or notable defect.
Once more we urge our nine-knot course, and now find time to observe our fellow-passengers. In the cabin a German lady and her daughters are enduring agonies of sea-sickness, on the way to join her husband at Rabat. [11] The husband, known as the “mojandis,” that is, engineer to the Sultan, proves, when we meet him, to be a cheery polyglot blasphemer, charged with the erection of some forts at the entrance to the harbour of Rabat. For a wonder the bar of the river Bu-Regeh proves passable, and the German lady and her husband can land, which is, it seems, a piece of luck, for the bar is known as the most dangerous