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About three in the afternoon he came up with us, and after a great fight we were forced to yield, and were carried all prisoners into the port of Salee, where we were sold as slaves. I was fortunate enough to fall into the hands of a master who treated me with no little kindness. He frequently went fishing, and as I was dexterous in catching fish, he never went without me.
"The man who can eat through iron, drive all my slaves before him, set fire to my house, and pull me by the nose, is better away from me than near! Take care, though, that he does not come back again!" The captain promised that he would take very good care of that; and the next day, with joyful hearts at our unexpected success, we set forward on our return-journey to Salee.
He ascertained that no such vessel as we described had come into Alarache, but that one exactly answering her description belonged to the port of Salee, some leagues to the southward, and that she had been on a long cruise, and had returned about the time the captain calculated she might, with some booty and some captives on board.
Similarly the inhabitants of Salee burn a straw hut on the river which flows past their town. Further it deserves to be noticed that in Northern Africa, as in Southern Europe, the midsummer festival comprises rites concerned with water as well as with fire.
About three in the afternoon there was a desperate engagement, wherein many were killed and wounded on both sides; but finding ourselves overpowered with numbers, our ship disabled and ourselves too impotent to have the least hopes of success, we were forced to surrender; and accordingly were all carried prisoners into the port of Salee.
For our ship sailing towards the Canary islands, we were chased by a Salee rover; and in spite of all the haste we could make by crowding as much canvas as our yards could spread, or our masts carry, the pirate gained upon us, to that we prepared ourselves to fight. They had eighteen guns, and we had but twelve.
Captain Gale, for so I shall now call him, had a very sharp look-out kept lest we should again fall in with the Salee Rover, or any of his consorts, which, it was very probable, might still be hovering about in that part of the ocean. The first day after parting company with the Rainbow passed by without a single sail heaving in sight.
They knew that on the north coast dwelt the descendants of the Greek and Roman colonists, and of their Arab conquerors that there were such places as Tangiers, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers with its piratical cruisers who carried off white men into slavery; Morocco, with an emperor addicted to cutting off heads; Salee, which sent forth its rovers far over the ocean to plunder merchantmen; and a few other towns and forts, for the possession of which Europeans had occasionally knocked their heads together.
Mauritania, Cesariensis is now called the kingdom of Tremessan, the capital of which is named Tremessan or Telensin. This region is full of deserts, and reaches to the Mediterranean, to the city of Oran with the port of Mersalquiber. The kingdom of Fez reaches to the ocean, from the west to the city of Arzilla, and Sala or Salee is the port of this kingdom.
At Salee, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, persons who suffer from diseased eyes rub them with the ashes of the midsummer fire; and in Casablanca and Azemmur the people hold their faces over the fire, because the smoke is thought to be good for the eyes.
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