Skeletons On The Zahara (40 page)

Several hours later they woke suddenly, choking on dust. Their reeling minds tried to cope with the braying, bellowing, and staccato grunts that surrounded them. The hardpan trembled as thirty Arabs drove dozens of camels, mules, and donkeys into the pen, heedless of the current occupants. Irritable from their journey, the camels growled as they collapsed beneath their heavy loads, lurching backward and forward to the ground. After the Arabs had unpacked the beasts and lain down wrapped in their haiks to sleep, bel Cossim and Hamet quietly roused their party, and they continued on their way.

As the sun rose, they saw some Berber dwellings. Riley begged bel Cossim to buy milk to soothe their stomachs and to give them energy to keep them going, but the Berbers, who had little to spare in the drought and wanted nothing to do with the night-traveling band, refused to sell them any. “Keep up your spirits, Captain,” bel Cossim told Riley, seeing that he looked desperate. “Only a few hours longer and you will be in Swearah if Allah the Almighty continues his protection.”

“I was so reduced and debilitated,” Riley recalled, “that I could not support even good news with any degree of firmness, and such was my agitation that it was with the utmost difficulty I could keep on my mule for some moments afterwards.” Sidi Hamet had ridden ahead, so Riley knew they must be getting close. But after waiting eight weeks for a moment that until very recently he had despaired of, Riley could not comprehend the fact that they would reach the town in only a few hours. Each step felt like it could be his last.

Around eight o'clock in the morning, they came upon another set of large dunes. As the mules plodded stoically up the side of one, the sea came into sight. There before them, at last, lay the stone walls and towers of Swearah, on the shallow peninsula of Mogadore. Near the town rode a brig flying the Union Jack. Ten months earlier, the sight of Britain's colors would have raised the Americans' ire. Now it brought tears of joy.

Riley looked at Horace with fatherly affection. The boy's grin pushed back the dark lines on his face like ripples on the surface of a pool. He had been through so much in the past months and borne it well. Some stumble into manhood, some fight it, but few earn it as he had. Truly, he was a man now. Riley was proud to be his adoptive father.

Burns and Clark perked up for a moment, but their slack faces soon returned to the gloomy, wasted cast they had assumed and would not shed without the passage of time. Savage's eyes flashed. As turbulent as his mind had been, there was still fight in him. Riley looked upon him with sorrow, but he would hold no grudges.

Impatient with the excruciatingly slow pace, Bel Mooden and Sidi Mohammed now raced ahead to the town, leaving the sailors with bel Cossim. “There is a vessel to carry you to your country and family,” announced the Moor, suddenly garrulous. “Inshallah, you will soon see the noble Willshire, who will relieve you from all your miseries.” Bel Cossim prayed out loud in Arabic, and then in Spanish declared his own wish: “May it have pleased Almighty Allah to have preserved the lives of my wife and children!”

“[Riley's] and his men's first interview with Mr. Willshire, with a distant view of Mogadore.”

(from An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, 1817)

About two miles southeast of Swearah, they stopped beside an imperial palace, a square-walled enclave with thirty-foot towers, capped by green tiles, at each corner. Nearby, a stream flowed into the bay, across which rose the walls and minarets of Swearah. The mules grazed while the men relaxed and gazed out past the many small fishing boats on the water at the impressive town, a view that, Riley declared, “infused into my soul a kind of sublime delight and a heavenly serenity that is indiscribable, and to which it had ever before been a stranger.”

Then suddenly, to their astonishment, the American flag rose above the town.

“At this blessed and transporting sight, the little blood remaining in my veins gushed through my glowing heart with wild impetuosity,” Riley exclaimed, “and seemed to pour a flood of new life through every part of my exhausted frame.”

William Willshire approached on horseback. Bel Cossim met him and prepared him for the sight he was about to encounter. As they rounded the corner on foot, Riley heard bel Cossim say only, “Allá están”— There they are.

Willshire had seen captive Englishmen just off the desert before, but he was staggered at what now met his eyes: five men so ragged and wasted that he was momentarily repelled. Then he strode forth to greet them.

Now it was Riley's turn to be stunned. This young man, not yet twenty-five, dressed in an immaculate riding coat with tails, concern etched in the fine features of his face, was the same tall, trim youth he had seen in his dream on the desert, the dream that had buoyed and propelled him to this point.

Heedless of his formal attire, the flesh-and-blood Willshire embraced the musky, bearded captain, half clad in a filthy haik hanging from one shoulder. “Welcome to my arms, my dear sir,” he said. “This is truly a happy moment.” Tears trickled down Willshire's face as he took the once powerful seaman's hands. He winced as their frail old-man bones shifted in his grip.

“Come, my friends,” Willshire said at last, “let us go to the city.”

Homecomings

As soon as Riley and the sailors entered the town, attracting a great crowd, the Bashaw of Swearah summoned them to appear before him. After examining them, he pronounced them free, subject to the sultan's approval. At Willshire's house, barbers sheared their lice-ridden hair and beards. Servants gingerly washed their ravaged skin and rubbed them down with oil.

The date was November 7, though they certainly did not know it when they entered Swearah. For the first time in more than two months, the sailors felt clean clothes against their bodies. They ate well-seasoned beef kebabs, wheat bread with butter, and pomegranates, an unforgettable meal cut short, alas, by the sailors' nausea. A Russian Jewish doctor administered “physic” for their ailing stomachs. Riley credited this man's continuing care during the following weeks with restoring their health.

On his first night of freedom, Riley broke down. He was delirious with symptoms of what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder. This was not an unusual reaction for sailors recently emancipated from the desert, who tended to be “abject, servile, and brutified,” according to British vice-consul Joseph Dupuis. “If they have been any considerable time in slavery,” he elaborated, “they appear lost to reason and feeling, their spirits broken, and their faculties sunk in a species of stupor which I am unable adequately to describe” (Adams, p. 130).

Regarding his sudden collapse, Riley was, as usual, forthright. “My mind, which (though my body was worn down to a skeleton) had been hitherto strong, and supported me through all my trials, distresses, and sufferings, and enabled me to encourage and keep up the spirits of my frequently despairing fellow-sufferers,” he said, “could no longer sustain me: my sudden change of situation seemed to have relaxed the very springs of my soul, and all my faculties fell into the wildest confusion.” Riley cowered in the corner of the room he shared with Savage, frequently crying, trembling when anyone approached, convinced that he was about to be carried back to the desert. Willshire himself attended to him, taking him for walks in the house's gallery during his more lucid intervals.

As the men slowly regained their equilibrium, Willshire insisted that they be weighed. Riley, whose normal weight was 240, weighed less than 90 pounds. Clark and Burns, who had been the sickest, had dropped to levels “less than I dare to mention,” reported Riley, “for I apprehend it would not be believed, that the bodies of men retaining the vital spark should not weigh forty pounds.”1

Willshire sent as far away as the city of Morocco, a hundred miles, for hearty food to supplement the sometimes meager rations available at Swearah. A Captain Wallace of the English brig Pilot even brought the Americans salt pork, split peas, and potatoes, reasoning that sailors needed ship's mess to restore their health.

Now Riley received a letter from Horatio Sprague. The Gibraltar merchant told him that he had written Willshire to guarantee that “your draft on me for twelve hundred dollars, or more, shall be duly paid for the obtainment of your liberty, and those with you.” Sprague told Riley in this letter, dated November 13, that he hoped to soon have “the happiness to take you by the hand under my roof again.” In his rush to meet Riley's obligation to the Arabs, Sprague had delivered the two double-barreled shotguns— including his own, a finely crafted weapon— to Willshire. Riley's risky promise to Hamet and Seid, who had remained as guests in Willshire's house for two weeks, was at last fulfilled.

Having received their coveted guns, the brothers prepared to leave. Hamet was eager to return to his family but promised that afterward he would set off with a strong party to find the rest of the crew of the Commerce. The following morning, the Americans saw the brothers off. Though Riley could never fully understand Hamet's ways, the Arab had earned not only the captain's respect but his admiration. True, he had profited through a corrupt system involving the ransoming of human beings, but by his own standards and the standards that Westerners in this place had no choice but to accept, he had done nothing immoral. In the end, he had saved the sailors from slavery; he was a humane and trustworthy man. Grateful at being rescued, Riley did not regret the bargain he had made, only the circumstances that had made it necessary. Now that he was dressed as a Westerner again and among powerful friends, he would not turn his back on Hamet, a man who had seen past their differences and trusted him, in a place where trust among strangers was a rare thing.

At their departure, commensurate with his means, Riley gave Hamet a small present, which he did not name, and Willshire gave him some fine gunpowder and other tokens of his gratitude. Riley noted with confidence that Hamet again swore, “by his right hand, he would bring up the remainder of my crew if they were to be found alive, and Allah spared his life.”

Savage, Burns, Clark, and Horace embarked on a Genovese schooner under the British flag for Gibraltar on January 4, 1816. Riley stayed behind. He had promised Archie Robbins to do all that he could to send assistance, and he would be true to his word. After an emotional departure from Willshire, who would later tell his colleague James Renshaw, “I shall always reflect with pleasure on the day that made me acquainted with Mr. Riley,” the captain crossed Morocco by mule to meet James Simpson, the American consul-general in Tangier, to ensure that arrangements were made to rescue the remainder of his crew.

Clark and Burns returned to the United States from Gibraltar on board the Massachusetts ship Rolla. At the end of January, Riley himself reached Gibraltar, where Horatio Sprague received him with “demonstrations of unfeigned joy.” Riley, Savage, and Horace sailed on board the New York ship Rapid, reaching New York City on March 19 after a forty-four-day passage.

Reunited with Phoebe and his children in Middletown, Riley could not rest long. “Our meeting was one of those that language is inadequate to describe,” he noted. “I spent only a week with them, our hearts beating in unison.” He was bound for Washington to lobby for his urgent causes: finding his shipmates and repaying Sprague. He was received by many congressmen and introduced to Secretary of State James Monroe, who, Riley said, “received me in the most kind and feeling manner.” The administration agreed to pay the $1,852.45 needed to cover the ransom and expenses and assured Riley that funds to liberate the rest of the crew would be made available. But Willshire wrote Riley on March 10 to say that he had neither heard from Sidi Hamet nor received the “least information” respecting the rest of the crew.

Like Robbins, William Porter had been carried south to the coast, where he continued to have problems with his eyesight. Heading north again, he went completely blind, and his master had to carry him in a basket on a camel. When a February rain rejuvenated their camels, his master instructed him to bathe his eyes in camel's milk and water several times a day. This treatment, Porter believed, restored his sight.

Around the beginning of March, eight traders with the same number of loaded camels entered the camp of his master's tribe and bartered with them for four days. At the end of that time, Porter discovered that the traders had bought him. The leader, a man named Hamet, informed him that they would take him to Swearah, where his captain had arrived safely. Hamet fed him dried figs, dates, and biscuits.

After traveling north for a month, the band of traders left the desert. Three days later, they encountered a company of fifty men on foot who appeared suddenly before them and brought them to a halt. The men on foot did not have firearms or even swords. Each had a leather bag on his left side, suspended by a belt slung over the opposite shoulder, filled with stones. They demanded that the traders give them the white slave. Hamet refused. The robbers, with their overwhelming numbers, would not back down. The traders fired a volley, dropping a number of their foe, but the rest immediately began to pummel them with fist-size rocks thrown with amazing strength. When the furious battle was over, Hamet and his seven men lay dead. The stone throwers stripped them of their clothing and arms and fled south to a walled village with the camels, the goods, and Porter. About a month after the attack, Porter was taken to Wednoon and sold to Abdullah Hamet, a wealthy merchant who treated him well.

In March 1816, to Porter's great surprise and joy, he was reunited with Robbins, who suddenly arrived in Wednoon. Having nearly been starved to death, Robbins had been treated by Meaarah with the hot knife and fed meat. Meaarah then sold him for five camels and two blankets to Hamet Webber, an Arab trader of the Oulad El Kabla, which, Robbins said, was a splinter of the Oulad Bou Sbaa but “more warlike as a tribe, and less cruel as individuals than any Arabs I had seen.” Life with Hamet Webber was good. Robbins thrived as they wandered a great distance northeast and then northwest. Three days outside Wednoon, Webber had sold Robbins to Abdallah bel Cossim, not the bel Cossim who rescued Riley but the same man who had previously owned and brutalized Robert Adams of the Charles. Robbins was put to work harvesting barley, tobacco, and other crops and building a mud wall around a field.2