United States or Azerbaijan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
From that time forward the Mohammedan rulers of the Barbary coast were never long without ships of some sort. The Aghlabī princes sailed forth from Tunis, and took Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. The Fātimī Khalifs waged war with the navies of 'Abd-er-Rahmān, the Great Khalif of Cordova, at a strength of two hundred vessels a side.
The important negotiations with Spain which had been alternately suspended and resumed necessarily experience a pause under the extraordinary and interesting crisis which distinguishes her internal situation. With the Barbary Powers we continue in harmony, with the exception of an unjustifiable proceeding of the Dey of Algiers toward our consul to that Regency.
His last service was to take a chief part in the negotiations with the Barbary Powers, for the abandonment of Christian slavery, in 1816. Lord Exmouth would not allow him, or any of his family, to accompany him to the attack on Algiers, in the autumn of that year. He died at Plymouth, June 19th, 1832, only seven months before his brother Lord Exmouth. John, the youngest brother, entered the army.
It is even more difficult to imagine the United States paying blackmail to a set of small piratical tribes on the coast of Africa. Yet this is precisely what we once did with the Barbary powers, as they were called the States of Morocco, Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers, lying along the northern coast of Africa.
He gone, my wife and I to talk, and sup, and then to setting right my Tangier accounts and enter my Journall, and then to bed with great content in my day's worke. This afternoon comes Mrs. Barbary Sheldon, now Mrs. Wood, to see my wife. I was so busy I would not see her.
Nevertheless, they worked much good among the Catholic prisoners, established hospitals and chapels in various parts of the Barbary coast, and many a time suffered the penalty of their courage at the hands of a merciless Dey, who would sometimes put them to a cruel death in order to satisfy his vengeance for some reverse sustained by his troops or ships from the forces of France.
"'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view." There is infinitely less enthusiasm for African discovery, nay, more horror of African travelling in Tripoli than in London: in truth, the greater part of the Europeans of Tripoli, and in all Barbary towns, are a degraded unenthusiastic race, wholly occupied with their petty quarrels and intrigues.
The inhabitants of Barbary do not like a wild life, they are extremely fond of what civilization can give them, such as creme de menthe, rifles, good waterworks, maps, and railways: only they would like to have these things without the bother of strict laws and of the police, and so forth. Travel in Barbary with seeing eyes and you find out all this new truth.
Sweden also professes sentiments favorable to the subsisting harmony. With the Barbary Powers, excepting that of Algiers, our affairs remain on the ordinary footing. The consul-general residing with that Regency has suddenly and without cause been banished, together with all the American citizens found there.
All this was so well known at home, that members of the Opposition in Congress jokingly accused the Administration of undertaking to decide constitutional questions for the people of Tripoli. Before the news of this flight into Egypt reached the United States, Eaton had been instructed by the President to take command of an expedition on the coast of Barbary in connection with Hamet.
Word Of The Day