by Dean King
Hunger began to derange the seamen and threatened to prove true, with ultimate irony, the myth that cannibals occupied the Sahara. At their lowest, some of the men ate the skin off their peeling arms, gnawing into their own flesh. Horrified, Riley tied one man’s arms behind his back. Two others lured an Arab child away from the tents. Riley discovered them and rushed up as they were about to kill him with a stone. “I convinced them that it would be more manly to die with hunger than to become cannibals and eat their own or other human flesh,” he later wrote, and he assured them that their masters would feed them at least enough to keep them alive until they could be sold. For the moment, Riley had succeeded.
September 21 brought about a change even more inexplicable than the sudden about-face to a well Riley believed they could never reach. The Wandering Arabs, desperate for water, did not wander. Sideullah and some of his tribesmen pitched their seven tents, rested in them or tended their camels, and prayed at the usual times, cleansing themselves with sand. Riley wondered if they had taken the wrong path. He could think of no reasonable explanation for simply stopping. Had the Bou Sbaa lost hope too? Were they simply surrendering to the desert?
chapter 10
Sidi Hamet’s Feast
At midday, after the nomads had taken refuge from the sun in their closed tents, two strangers on heavily loaded camels entered the valley. By desert custom, they should have stopped well short of the tents, dismounted, and waited for the head of the family to come out and greet them. These men, who peered out from slits in their swaddling and kept a hand near the double-barreled muskets on their saddles, rode directly into the friq.
From the corner of a tent, Riley, stupefied by the heat, eyed them warily. No matter how bad things were, he had learned that on the Sahara, they could always get worse. Beside him, deeper in the shade, Clark lay barely lucid, dying. He was “a perfect wreck of almost naked bones,” in Riley’s words, “his belly and back nearly collapsed, and breathing like a person in [his] last agonies.”
It would have been customary for the tent owners to offer the travelers water, but there was none.
No one left their tents. The two fierce-looking men, whose haiks concealed the scars of wounds sustained on two failed caravans to Tombuctoo—both having cost the lives of many men and many camels—made their beasts sit in front of Sideullah’s. They dismounted and sat on the ground, each propping his musket on a knee to keep it out of the sand. Riley wished that his master were there, but he and his sons had taken up their arms and ridden off with the other men before dawn. Or perhaps they had reached the end of the line and had abandoned them along with their own wives and children. If so, it would only be a matter of a day or two before they died.
Riley felt the palpitations of his frail body and listened to Clark’s grating breaths. Sometimes they sounded to Riley like distant wood chops in the forest, confusing him as to where he was and sending his mind reeling. Clark’s tattooed cross seemed to levitate on fresh crimson skin. The two sailors had descended into the zone where death inexplicably claims some men and spares others. Water makes up between 60 and 70 percent of the human body. Men have been known to die from losing as little as 20 percent of their water (or 12 percent of body weight); others have survived losses of up to 40 percent (or 28 percent of body weight). Riley’s and Clark’s relatively long, steady slide into severe dehydration had perhaps allowed them to endure to the extreme end of the spectrum.
Clark teetered on the edge, and Riley had also entered the later stages of dehydration, in which the body milks secondary systems to channel fluid to the blood so that it can perform high-priority tasks such as delivering oxygen and nutrients to the cells and carrying away heat to the skin to be released. Both men’s circulatory systems siphoned their joint oil, causing them to move in a stiff, jerky way. Their mouths produced no saliva, their eyes no tears.
“One feels as if one were in the focus of a burning-glass,” a sufferer of severe thirst once wrote. “The eye-balls burn as though facing a scorching fire. The tongue and lips grow thick, crack, and blacken.” In the agonizing final moments of thirst, the blood becomes viscous and loses its ability to transport heat to the skin. The victim is consumed by his own body heat, suffering a sort of internal meltdown.
The nomad women maintained their sphinxlike indifference to the sailors’ suffering. Sideullah’s wife and a daughter emerged from their tent, carrying a large skin and a roll of camel-hair tent cloth toward the strangers. The men rose. “Labez, Labez-salem,” they greeted the women. “Labez-alikom.” Peace, peace be with you.
The women retrieved tent poles and constructed a shelter. They unloaded the strangers’ camels and arranged their goods and saddles in the shade. Then they brought a rack to hold the visitors’ most precious cargo: two bloated goatskins. Riley strained to hear as the women sat and talked with the men, who, it was now clear, were traders, asking them the usual questions of the desert: “Where did you come from? How long have you been traveling? What goods do you have?”
The elder of the two, a large, gray-bearded man with pointed ears sticking out from beneath a fat turban that shaded his eyes, motioned to the other, who rummaged through the packs. He brought over blankets, ostrich feathers, and blue linen for them to examine. The blue linen, which Sahrawi women use to cover their heads and take great pride in, had its intended effect: they could not help smiling as they fingered it approvingly.
Afterward Sideullah’s wife poked her head into the tent where Riley and Clark slouched in the stagnant air. “Sidi Hamet has come from the sultan’s dominions,” she said suggestively. “He can buy you.” She left, and Riley pondered her words. He trusted no one. A wrong move could send him into a deeper circle of this living—albeit barely—hell.
For the next few hours, he laid low, turning the question over: Should he approach the traders? His head was too muddled for reason. At last, thirst drove him, bowl in hand, to the tent. Standing filthy, tattered, and speechless before them, he pointed to his sore-ridden mouth. He knew that in their eyes he was a repulsive infidel. With his peeling skin and his scarred body, he had all the charm of a rat trying to join them for lunch. Sidi Hamet’s younger brother, Seid, wanted to strike him for his impudence and run him off, but Hamet stared at Riley. “El Rais?” he asked. Are you the captain?
Riley nodded. After a moment, Hamet motioned for his brother to take the bowl. Seid refused. Hamet got up and filled it himself. Riley held the bowl in his bony hands and examined its contents in awe: nearly a quart of clean water.
“Sherub, Rais,” Hamet ordered, raising his cupped hands. Drink, Captain.
Riley gulped down half the water. It was the best he had had since leaving the brig. It stung his chapped lips and awakened deadened nerves in his mouth. “Besmillah, Sidi Hamet, and God bless you,” he croaked in broken Arabic, lowering the bowl.1 He intended to take the rest to Clark. As he turned to go, Hamet stopped him and motioned for him to finish it.
Riley pointed to his tent and explained as best he could that he wished to give it to a dying shipmate. He feared the usual rebuke, but Hamet’s expression did not register anger. He nodded consent. Riley was surprised. He had seen Arabs—even the most brutish—dole out water to other men’s slaves, as Hamet had just done, but he had not seen one tolerate any sort of effrontery from a Christian slave.
Clark lay facedown on his mat. Riley turned him over and held his shoulders up. “Here is water,” he said. He held the bowl to Clark’s lips, and he drank, his sunken eyes brightening.
“This must have come from a better country,” Clark wheezed to his captain. “If we were there, and I could get one good drink of such water, I could die with pleasure.”
Sideullah returned in the late afternoon. Riley was not surprised that he brought back nothing from the day’s outing. It was typical of what Riley had seen so far. No matter what show of industry they made, the tribesmen seemed to produce nothing, to gather nothing, except when they milked the camels or decided to fill
their goatskins, the latter a duty bewilderingly now abandoned. None of the men had been to a well in more than a week.
News of the arrival of the northern traders spread, and Bou Sbaa began to materialize as if by magic from the empty desert. By dusk, Riley estimated, two hundred men, more than he had seen at any gathering, milled about his master’s camp, conversing with the northerners and one another and gesticulating in their fervent manner.
At sunset, Sideullah led them in their prayer. First they stripped off their haiks and washed themselves with handfuls of sand.2 Then, bowing repeatedly to the east, they chanted: “Allah Houakibar”—God is great. This was followed by the Shahadah, their declaration of faith and call to prayer: “Hi el Allah Sheda Mohammed Rahsool Allah”—I testify that Muhammad is the Prophet of God.3 Then Sideullah delivered a long prayer. They ended by reciting a chapter of the Quran together. Once again, Riley wondered about the inherent contradiction between their piety and their indifference to the suffering of their fellow men, especially Clark, whose light was fading with the day’s.
By ten o’clock the friq was quiet again. Riley and Clark were banished from the tent. Riley helped his comrade move to a spot not far away, where they collapsed on the bare sand and dozed, fitfully, shivering, short on the fuel necessary to maintain their body heat. They had eaten only snails and roots for three days. At midnight, Sideullah woke them up and gave them each a pint of sweet fresh camel’s milk. Riley later asserted that this saved Clark’s life.
In the morning, Hamet took the captain aside and questioned him. Again, Riley did not attempt to explain that he was from across the Atlantic but said that he and his men came from England. Hamet nodded understanding. Using his hands, his expressive face, and the rudimentary Arabic he had picked up, along with a smattering of French and Spanish, Riley related the events that had brought him there, pointing out the direction of the wreck. He described his wife and his children, eliciting an unexpected heave from his own chest. He claimed that Horace was his oldest son.
To the Arabs, hardened by life on the desert, tears from a man were shameful. When the Frenchman Brisson was reduced to weeping in front of the Bou Sbaa, he wrote, “some women perceiving it, instead of being moved to compassion threw sand in my eyes, as they said, to wipe away my tears” (p. 369). Riley expected no sympathy, but Hamet, having recently returned from a disastrous caravan of two miserable years, had seen his family—his wife, two sons, and a daughter—only briefly before taking to the desert to try to clear his debts. Moved by Riley’s suffering, so similar to his own, the trader teared up too.
“Men who have beards, like me, ought not to shed tears,” Hamet said, brushing his face with his arm before walking away.
Riley was encouraged. Here was a man who might be willing to help. He began to formulate a plan.
A short time later, he found Hamet alone.
“I have a friend in the north,” he told him. “If you will buy me and my shipmates and deliver us to the realm of the Sultan of Morocco, my friend will pay you a large sum of money.”
As Hamet peered into Riley’s eyes, the Arab showed no hint of a reaction. He and his brother were in debt to his father-in-law, Ali, a ruthless sheik who lived near Wednoon, and he had been weighing what opportunity the Christian sailors presented, if any. A Marrakech Bou Sbaa of the Oulad el-Hadj Ben Demouiss branch, Hamet was growing convinced that Allah had led him to this lowly band of Oulad Brahim, his Bou Sbaa cousins, to right his misfortunes. His instincts told him to trust the bold captain.
“No,” Hamet responded. “Impossible. I might be able to take just el rais to Swearah.” This walled town, called Mogadore in the West, was the emperor’s international trading post on the Atlantic.
“I have seen the sultan,” Riley told Hamet. “He is a friend to my nation.”
Hamet listened and then ratcheted up the stakes. “Mohammed Rassool?” he asked. Muhammad the Prophet? Riley bowed. He pointed to the east and then to heaven, indicating that he knew the Prophet came from the east and that he believed he had ascended into heaven. This pleased Hamet. “How much money?” Hamet asked.
Riley scooped up a handful of small stones and counted out fifty. “This many Spanish dollars for myself and the same for each of my men.”
“I will not buy the others,” Hamet said. “How much more for you?” Riley added another fifty stones to the pile.
“Is the money in Swearah?” he asked, using his hands and words. “Or must it be sent from your country?”
“My friend in Swearah will pay,” Riley replied, though he knew no one there.
“You are lying,” Hamet scoffed.
“No,” Riley said, placing a fist over his heart and shaking his head. “El rais does not lie.”
Hamet held him in his piercing gaze. “If you deceive me,” he said, making a slashing motion with his hand, “I will cut your throat.”
Unflinching, Riley nodded his consent. He pleaded again for Hamet to buy his “son,” Horace, but the trader said he could not get any others off the desert. “Say nothing about this to your master,” he concluded, “nor to my brother or anyone else.”
Despite Hamet’s reluctance, Riley was encouraged by his manner. He was direct and clever and spoke with understated force. Riley felt sure that whatever he decided would come to pass.
The captain went to hunt for snails and found Savage, whom he had not seen in many days, and Hogan doing the same. They stumbled around in vain, for they had already exhausted the supply at this site. The camels had mauled the scattered thornbushes, devouring all the branches less than an inch thick.
Returning to camp, Riley fetched Clark, who had recovered to a remarkable degree, though he still moved feebly, like an old man. The four Commerces sat down outside Hamet’s tent. “I have great hopes,” Riley told them, despite the trader’s naysaying, “that we should be bought by this man and carried to the cultivated country.” Sidi Hamet came out and sat down, silently though unabashedly examining the men. Even he, who had seen horrific suffering on the Sahara, grimaced at their deplorable state. “He will not take us,” they whispered. But as Riley had hoped, Hamet was interested. He began openly sizing them up for durability and worth. He asked Riley if any of their group had died, if they had wives and children, what they had been fed. Riley answered in their favor, assuring Hamet honestly that even Clark, who was so emaciated, was the husband of a beautiful woman named Ruth, the father of two children, and a soldier who had won glory in battle.
As Riley was about to discover, a Christian’s value as a ransomable commodity depended on his rank, wealth, health, and location. On the desert, where a tent with a life of four years was worth a camel, and a camel was worth a dozen goats or half a dozen sheep, a Christian’s worth fell somewhere between a tattered blanket and an adult camel, except in rare circumstances. Officers were worth more than seamen, though the Arabs, desperate for practical skills, would hold indefinitely a gunpowder maker, a surgeon, or a smith who naively admitted it. Married men brought more than single men for their perceived added wealth. The Arabs quickly noticed a man’s fine accoutrements. Brisson, who had lavished watches, silver buckles, and money on his first captor to ingratiate himself, was sold from one owner to another for five camels, while the ship’s baker went for one. Ultimately, Brisson regretted the gifts, which served only to inflate his ransom price.
To ransom a Christian, a Sahrawi had to deliver him to the imperial port of Swearah, where foreign merchants or consuls could make the payment. To get there, they had to cross the desert, past hostile bedouin tribes, past the fortified Berber towns of the Souss region, and finally past the operatives of the Sultan of Morocco, where Christian slavery was technically illegal and the sultan was fond of the “gifts” Western nations paid for their citizens’ freedom. All the while, the captor had no guarantee he would actually receive the agreed-upon sum. Instead of making the long, risky journey, a Sahrawi often sold his slave locally at a small but sure profit to a buyer who would sell at
a small profit to another buyer.
In this way, in an agonizing peristalsis, the Sahara slowly yielded Christians north one territory at a time, the nearer to Swearah the higher the price, with the medium of exchange switching from bartered goods to cash at Wednoon, on the edge of the desert. On the Sahara, the French merchant Saugnier was traded once for a barrel of meal and a nine-foot bar of iron, and later for two young camels. He was sold twice at Wednoon, first for $150, then for $180. Seamen with him brought $50 to $95. Robert Adams of the Charles went in the latter range, once for $50 worth of blankets and dates and a second time for $70 worth of blankets, dates, and gunpowder.
In 1810, the English merchant and author James Grey Jackson proposed paying a fixed rate for Westerners delivered to Mogadore. “A trifling sum would be sufficient,” he maintained, if it was always on hand and the policy well known. This would eliminate the uncertainty that led to the repeated reselling of Christians and extortionate ransom prices. Jackson estimated that $150 per man would be enough, “a sum rather above the price of a black slave.” The British adopted the practice to the south at Saint-Louis, on the Senegal River, where in 1816 the speedy recovery of some of the passengers of the Méduse proved its soundness, but no such standards existed for Christians being transported north.
On the morning of September 24, the Bou Sbaa broke camp and moved northwest all day. When they stopped at dusk, Sideullah’s women pitched tents for the family and for Hamet and Seid, who had ridden with them. The next day, the group stayed put, and Hamet and Sideullah discussed business. They haggled over the items Sideullah wanted from the traders, and over Riley. For him, Sideullah demanded two coarse haiks, a bundle of ostrich feathers, and the blue linen his wife coveted. On the desert, where such goods were rare, it was a hefty price and one that reflected Riley’s rank as captain. At length, Hamet agreed. On the coast, these goods were worth less than half a British pound, or two Spanish dollars. Riley had promised to pay fifty times that for his freedom.
