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Updated: June 13, 2025
An order has come from the Pasha, that the Rais may take 2,500 instead of 3,250, less 750. This the people must pay. And I hear the poor wretches have at last consented to swallow the bitter pill. Every man, having a small property, or a householder, will pay each five mahboubs; the merchants considerably more.
He then told me he had held a Divan to obtain the extra contribution of 3,200 mahboubs, for the Pasha; but the people protested they could not pay such an amount. I wrote a letter to Colonel Warrington, stating this circumstance, and asked him if he could assist the people in any way.
The melancholy remnant preserve traditions of prosperity in comparatively recent times. Notwithstanding their miserable condition, however, these wretched people are drained by taxation of thirty mahboubs per annum so many drops of blood! The eastern village pays in proportion.
A forced contribution was therefore immediately levied upon them of 50,000 mahboubs and upwards, and the women and children were stripped of their gold and silver ornaments, and houses ransacked, to make up the amount at once. Ten thousand mahboubs were also demanded annually.
Besides this sum, Hateetah and Waled Shafou had each of them received a present of about a hundred mahboubs. Finally my friend, Haj Ibrahim, the merchant, undertook to arrange this business, and paid on our account twenty-eight reals more for our servants. On the morning of the 20th there was another general meeting, and I presented the treaty for consideration.
Mustapha Bey, who took a very affectionate leave of me, is now engaged in examining a tremendous case of peculation something like a defalcation of two thousand mahboubs. He is quite bewildered for the time. The Greek doctor came to see us off; but we started in a little confusion, for Mr. Yusuf Moknee was drunk, as he was nearly all the time of our stay at Mourzuk.
The pay of the Pasha is six hundred and fifty mahboubs per month, nearly all spent in the town. 17th. The weather is extremely hot and sultry. The sun burns the umbrella if you pass for a few minutes under it. Even the natives complain of the extreme heat of the weather. 18th. Not quite so oppressive; but, as Dr. Barth says, the south wind blows throughout Northern Africa in May. 20th.
It has been attempted to get the impost of ten mahboubs paid in Mourzuk, and likewise to force all the caravans to take that route. This would have acted as a check upon the slave-trade; but the influence of the Gadamsee merchants was too great to allow the measure to be carried out.
Under the Caramanly dynasty they paid only some 850 mahboubs per annum, besides being left to the uncontrolled management of their own affairs. This intelligence has so completely astounded the few remaining merchants who have any money, that they nearly lost their senses, yesterday and to-day, being very ill, and unable to attend to their ordinary business.
The whole of the population are now seized with a fit of gum-collecting, but they are not yet expert at making the incisions in the trees. In the course of time it will be a most profitable article of export for the people. This gum now sells for 10 or 12 mahboubs the cantar in Tripoli. Such has been entirely the "good work" of the English Consul. We stopped at one of Mr.
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