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00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page i

Lands
In the of the

Christians
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page ii
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page iii

In theLands of the

Christians
ARABIC TRAVEL WRITING IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY

NABIL MATAR

ROUTLEDGE
New York and London
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page iv

Published in 2003 by
Routledge
711 Third Avenue,
New York, NY 10017

Published in Great Britain by

Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park,
Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

In the lands of the Christians: Arabic travel writing in the seventeenth century / edited
and translated by Nabil Matar.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. )
ISBN 0-415-93227-0 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-415-93228-9 (pbk: alk. paper) 1. Trav-
eler’s writings, Arabic—Early works to 1800. 2. Arabs—Travel—Early works to 1800. I.
Matar, N. I. (Nabil I.), 1949–
G227.I5 2002
910'.88927—dc21 2002069885
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page v

In Memoriam
Salim Kemal (1947–1999)
Unforgotten traveler
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page vi
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page vii

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

INTRODUCTION
Arab Travelers and Early Modern Europeans
xiii

THE TEXTS
A Note on Translation and Selection
3

1 | FRANCE AND HOLLAND

Selections from Kitab Nasir al-Din ala al-Qawm al-Kafirin
(The Book of the Protector of Religion against the Unbelievers)
AHMAD BIN QASIM [AL-HAJARI], 1611–1613
5

2 | EUROPE AND SOUTH AMERICA

Kitab Siyahat al-Khoury Ilyas bin al-Qissees Hanna al-Mawsuli
(The Book of the Travels of the Priest Ilyas, Son of the Cleric
Hanna al-Mawsuli)
ILYAS HANNA AL-MAWSULI, 1668–1683
45

3 | SPAIN
Rihlat al-Wazir fi Iftikak al-Asir
(The Journey of the Minister to Ransom the Captive)
MOHAMMAD BIN ABD AL-WAHAB AL-GHASSANI, 1690–1691
113

4 | FRANCE
Letters
ABDALLAH BIN AISHA, 1699–1700
196

Index of Names 215

Index of Places 223

00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page viii
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page ix

Acknowledgments

I AM GRATEFUL to many people who made this project possible, but fore-
most is Marilyn Goravitch, for her tireless dedication and unwavering com-
mitment at the Humanities and Communication Department of the Florida
Institute of Technology. Marilyn has been of great help to me in locating
references, finalizing the text for publication, and compiling the index. To
her, and to the other secretaries, Sue Downing (who was especially helpful in
locating biblical references) and Suanne Powell, I am deeply thankful. I also
wish to thank, as always, Victoria Smith and Linda Khan of the Evans Library
at Florida Tech; and Anne Mercante and Laura Baade for their linguistic
assistance.
Dr. Jane Patrick, former Humanities and Communication Department
head at Florida Tech, was kind enough to read the initial proposal; and Dr.
Mohja Kahf made some valuable comments and corrections, for which I am
grateful. Thanks are also due to Yolanda Corey for responding to all my
queries about South and Central American history, and to Marcia Denius,
who proofread part of the text. I also wish to thank Drs. Muhammad Sha-
heen and Muhammad Asfour of Jordan University and Sharjah University
respectively for their generous hospitality in Amman, Jordan and for sharing
with me their vast knowledge of Islamic history and Arabic literature. I am
very grateful to Dr. Khalid Bekkaoui of Sidi Mohammed University in Mo-
rocco for his close reading of the introduction and his helpful comments and
insights. I also want to thank Dr. Anouar Majid of the University of New Eng-
land for helping me with many of the Moroccan references and for always
sending encouraging notes. And of course, in the final stages, there was G. Y.
I am grateful to the dean of the College of Science and Liberal Arts at
Florida Tech, Dr. Gordon Nelson, who always encourages research; and to
Dr. Andrew Revay, vice president for academic affairs (now in joyous retire-
ment), who supported both my participation in the conference at the
Temimi Foundation in Zaghouan, Tunisia (March 20–25, 2001) and my re-
search at the National Library of Tunis. I am grateful to the librarians there
for their kindness, and to Dr. Mohamed Habib El Hila for providing me with
the proper library introduction and for clarifying some bibliographical entries.
I will be ever thankful to Dr. Abdeljelil Temimi for inviting me to the
conference on Great Britain and the Maghreb: the State of Research and
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page x

x Acknowledgments

Cultural Contacts at his quasi-monastic and stunningly evocative Fondation

in Zaghouan. The five days of intensive presentations and discussions were in-
valuable to me. I also wish to thank Mohamed-Salah al-Omari of Exeter Uni-
versity for coordinating the conference and overseeing it to perfection. Dr.
Khalid b. Srhir was extremely generous in sharing with me his vast knowledge
of Moroccan and North African history. Many other scholars who attended
the conference also have been of help. To all of them, I am deeply grateful.
Parts of the introduction were presented at different national confer-
ences: the University of Arkansas, Fayettville, invited presentation at the
King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies (February 10, 2001);
South-Central Renaissance Conference, College Station, Texas (April 4–7,
2001); and the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, New
Orleans (December 26–29, 2001). To all the respondents in these confer-
ences, especially to Dr. Donald Dickson and Dr. Vincent Cornell, I am
deeply grateful.

This book is dedicated to a man who was the most powerful inspiration in my
life—a man who was a traveler in the lands of Christians and indeed, in the
whole lands of mankind: Salim Kemal.
Although we both went to Cambridge University at the same time, we did
not meet until I was introduced to him, the new faculty member in the phi-
losophy department, in Nicely Hall at the American University in Beirut in
1981. Salim proved a fiery teacher: hami (“hot”) was the word that students
used about a man who brilliantly awakened their curiosity in the midst of the
cruelty of war. He was disarming and approachable, and possessed a gentle
smile, but behind it was a mind that was devastatingly sharp. Once Salim got
started, he was relentless, logical, unperturbed, unstoppable. Many mem-
bers of faculty disliked that quality in him, but I knew how much he was
driven by a brutal quest for truth, a Socratic devotion to ideas. During the Is-
raeli siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982, we used to meet, alone among
the remnants of the university, in the lower floor of Nicely, safe (or at least so
we hoped) from the naval and aerial horrors that were visited upon us. We
huddled under the stairwell, having brought coffee with us, and it was in
those afternoons that I encountered the full range of his fearless curiosity. In
those terrifying hours, he taught me about Walter Benjamin and Theodor
Adorno, Abu Al-Nasr al-Farabi and Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Abdallah Ibn
Sina, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and in those hours began a friend-
ship that will never end.
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xi

Acknowledgments xi

To Salim I owe my initiation into the fascinating world of translation. I

had never thought of doing any translation until he suggested that I work on
al-Farabi’s treatise of poetry. I did, and discovered in the process the excite-
ment of words.
Salim Kemal died of a heart attack on a grim Friday night, November 19,
1999, leaving behind him ground breaking publications on European and Is-
lamic philosophy. He also left behind a deeply saddened wife and children,
Jane, Sarah, and Rahim in Dundee, Scotland; aging parents in India; and his
brother, Fahim, in London. May you rest in peace, dear friend, and unfor-
gotten traveler.

[Every soul shall taste death. We will prove you all with evil and good. To Us
you shall return. (21:35, Dawood translation)]
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xii
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xiii

Introduction

ARAB TRAVELERS AND EARLY MODERN

EUROPEANS

Safir, ta’rif al-nas.

[Travel, and you will learn about people.]
—Medjdoub, Les quatrains de Medjdoub
le sacrastique

God almighty said to Moses, peace be upon him: take an

iron staff and wear iron sandals, and then tour the earth un-
til the staff is broken and the shoes are worn out.
—Muhammad bin al-Sarraj, Uns al-Sari wa–al sarib

WESTERN HISTORIANS, cultural analysts, and literary critics have viewed the
record of early modern travel and exploration as exclusively Euro-Christian,
demonstrative of modernity, superiority, and advancement. Englishmen trav-
eling to the Ottoman Empire, Italians to Palestine, Germans to Egypt, the
Portuguese to Arabia, and Frenchmen to Morocco have been presented as
the harbingers of the intellectual and economic forces that prepared for the
Renaissance and for western European power and domination. Meanwhile, a
total dismissal of Arab-Islamic travel has prevailed, one that recalls the com-
ment by a Dutchman to the Moroccan envoy, Ahmad bin Qasim, in 1611,
“We are amazed at you: you know languages, read books, and have traveled in
the cities and countries of the world. And yet, you are a Muslim!”1 For the
Renaissance interlocutor, totally ignorant of the Arab-Islamic heritage of ge-
ography and cartography, a well-traveled Muslim seemed an anomaly.
Such an opinion has persisted into modern scholarship. In Anthony Pag-
den’s two-volume collection of articles, Facing Each Other: The World’s Per-
ception of Europe and Europe’s Perception of the World, there was not a
single entry about the “perception” of or by any of the civilizations of Islam,
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xiv

xiv Introduction

whether in the Mediterranean Basin, Central Asia, or the Indian Subconti-

nent. It is as if Arabic and Ottoman Islam, with which Europe had been in-
teracting since the Crusades, did not exist at all. Earlier, Bernard Lewis had
claimed in his Islam and the West (1993) that the Arabs “showed the same
lack of interest [about Europe] as in medieval times”; and in his The Muslim
Discovery of Europe, he accused Muslims of a total lack of “curiosity” toward
Europeans.2 Lewis so totally discredited Renaissance Muslims’ curiosity that
when the Ottoman Empire opened up to Western institutions in the nine-
teenth century, he compared that opening to a discovery not unlike Christo-
pher Columbus’s of America. Echoing Lewis, Khalid Ziyadah contended that
there was nothing “to suggest that the Muslims exerted any effort to build a
good knowledge about the Europeans.”3
But the Ottomans had a history of travel and cartography,4 and many Arab
authors who studied their history found themselves reading about the variety
of European peoples with whom the Ottoman conquerors had come in con-
tact and conflict.5 Mohammad bin abi al-Surur (al-Bakri al-Warithi, b. 1676)
wrote about the history of the Romans and Byzantines ending with the advent
of Islam, after which he (rightly) recognized that history was made in the
Muslim rather than the Christian world:6 the rest of his treatise focused on
Ottoman rulers and their conquests. In the course of learning about the early
Arab and then Ottoman Empires, he read about the Christian and European
empires that had preceded them. At the same time, the Tunisian, Hussayn
Khujah (d. 1732), translated Turkish and Persian sources into Arabic, as he
announced at the opening of his Kitab bashair ahl al-iman bi-futuhat Al Uth-
man (finished c. 1726). In order to praise the Ottoman sultans, he wrote
about their forays into Europe and their encounters with European armies,
peoples, and cultures. Khujah wanted to compile information about the world
into which the Ottomans had settled and the populations they had confronted
or defeated. In writing about the Ottoman victory over Crete in 1669, for in-
stance, he listed information about the conquerors and the conquered:

1,833: the [number of] infidels who converted to Islam

1,895: infidel spies who were seized
1,895: infidels who were killed
1,880: Muslims who were freed from captivity
37,435: Martyrs from among the Muslims
300: Number of churches in the city.7
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xv

Introduction xv

Clearly, there was no sudden “discovery” of Europe among the Arabs.

For as these and other Arabic writers reveal, information about the lands and
peoples of Christendom was available and transmittable and was based on
translation, research, and travel. Indeed, it was in the area of travel that
much of that information made its way into the Arabic-speaking world of
North Africa and the Levant. Travelers, merchants, envoys, ambassadors,
and clergymen journeyed to London and Rome, Cadiz and Malta, Madrid
and Moscow. In the 1590s, Mulay al-Mansur’s scribe, Abu Faris al-Fishtali,
wrote to the Algerian ruler to thank him for assisting the numerous envoys
who were traveling to Venice “during the winter season when the waves of
the sea make the pathways dangerous.”8 The autobiography of Ahmad bin
Ghanem shows the extent of the author’s travels, and the range of informa-
tion which he collected about Spanish (and European) technology:

[After being expelled from Granada] I lived in Seville and started sail-
ing the ocean. I crossed it many times, and sometimes I sailed the big
ships, called galleons in the foreign tongue, which bring silver from
the faraway Indian west. They used to sail as a fleet, as was their cus-
tom, with soldiers and technicians trained in artillery. They used to
meet with their superiors to discuss that technology, often turning to
some of the many books written about that topic. Many books have
been written because authors and experts realize that their kings hold
such books in high esteem. I used to sit with them and learn by heart
what they discussed. I also worked on the cannons, without anybody
suspecting that I was an Andalusian. At the time when the Sultan of
the Christians ordered the expulsion of everybody from the Andalus, I
was in jail because of some disagreement with Christians over
courage. I had friends in high places, however, and I was released
from jail. So I decided to emigrate to the lands of the Muslims, and
join the Andalusians. But I was prevented from so doing, and nobody
could help me. So I spent some money in bribes and I left and went to
Tunis, may God protect it . . . Yusuf Dey ordered me to Halq al-Wadi
fort where I learned about cannons, working on them as well as read-
ing about them in European languages. When I noticed that the tai’fa
of the cannon men was ignorant, unable to load or to shoot accurately,
I decided to write a book because cannons are expensive, and if they
are not used properly, they can be destructive.9
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xvi

xvi Introduction

The result was a book, Kitab ul ’Izz wal Rifa’, which he wrote in Spanish and
which was later translated into Arabic by Ahmad bin Qasim.
Between 1611 and 1613, Qasim traveled to France and Holland. He fell
in love with a French woman, dined with princes and scholars, hobnobbed
with the nobility, engaged in disputations and debates, and conducted deli-
cate negotiations about a possible Dutch-Moroccan alliance against Spain.
He wrote an account of his journey (now lost) and repeatedly told his story
until decades later, on a visit to Egypt, he began writing a summary of the
longer account, which he completed in Tunis. His account became so popu-
lar that even a writer from faraway Sudan asked him for a copy. In that same
decade, an Egyptian copt came to Europe and traveled in the “republic of
letters.”10 Indeed, there was as much travel to and exchange with Europe
from the Levant as from the Maghreb. All communities that feared Ottoman
encroachment or sought assistance against Ottoman hegemony sent envoys
and delegations to European Christendom. In 1613, the anti-Ottoman
Druze leader, Fakhr al-Din II, accompanied by his wife and seventy atten-
dants, sailed to Leghorn and then Florence. An account was written about
his journey by Ahmad bin Muhammad al-Khalidi al-Safadi whose purpose,
as he stated at the outset, was to describe “the wonders in the lands of the
Christians.” Fakhr-al-Din’s journey, which was to last five years, started with
his arrival in Leghorn on October 25, 1613. As in the account by another
Levantine fifty years later, Ilyas al-Mawsuli, travelers from the Levant always
found themselves in quarantine because European ports feared the arrival of
the plague on ships. Alone, Fakhr-al-Din was taken to a house where he re-
moved all his clothes, amidst the burning of incense and herbs. Later, per-
mission was granted for his entourage to join him, and after a few days’ rest,
they went to Pisa, with its “three huge bridges and leaning minaret.”
Al-Safadi gave a detailed description of the city, its defenses, taxation sys-
tem, and religious festivities, when the inhabitants “wore colored masks, and
then removed the yoke from eggs and filled them with rose water and play-
fully threw them at each other and at the women.” His attitude, as was the
attitude of the refugees, was full of admiration for the wonders they saw. All
engaged the Christianity of the Italian cities, and al-Safadi elaborately de-
scribed the “Old Church” of Pisa with its statues of the disciples and follow-
ers. From Pisa the Lebanese refugees went to Florence, and then to the
Vatican where Fakhr-al-Din met Pope Paul V. In 1615, they moved to Sicily
where they stayed until 1618 when they returned to Lebanon. The journey
opened Fakhr-al-Din’s eyes to the marvels in “the lands of the Christians.” In
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xvii

Introduction xvii

1623, the Maronite Patriarch Jirjis Maroun went to Spain (having gone to the
Tuscan court a decade earlier). In 1630, he wrote to Tuscany requesting an
architect, a physician, a carpenter, a sculptor, a baker, and six farmers and
their families to come to Lebanon and teach Tuscan biscuit-making and agri-
cultural techniques to the local populace. The Europeans stayed in Lebanon
until 1633 and influenced Lebanese house architecture. As a result of the
journeys to Europe, some historians have argued for a subsequent dramatic
change in the character of Lebanon’s community and history.11
In 1654–55, an Orthodox priest from Aleppo accompanied his patriarch
on a trip to “the Country of the Christians,” Russia, and wrote about the
churches, strange customs, and politics along with the various foreigners he
encountered there, including those who told of dog-faced tribes that prac-
ticed cannibalism.12 Just about the same time, two “Arabians” who had con-
verted to Protestantism arrived in Paris, and lodged at a “Protestant house”
where they assisted in the conversion to Christianity of a Turk by the name of
Yusuf.13 In 1663, there was still, surprisingly, a group of free (not enslaved)
Muslims living in San Sebastián (in Madrid)—they were subsequently bap-
tized.14 A few years later, a Syriac Catholic priest from Iraq, Ilyas Hanna al-
Mawsuli, arrived in Venice on an English ship from Iskandarun and for the
next seven years wandered in the “lands of the Christians” (bilad al-nasara)
from Italy to Spain, and from Portugal to Sicily. In 1675, he boarded a Span-
ish ship from Cadiz to South America and wrote the first account of the New
World in Arabic. In 1681–82, a certain Butros al-Halabi (Pierre Dipy) settled
in France and served as translator for North African envoys and visitors, as
did another Aleppan who served as translator in Spain during the visit of the
Moroccan ambassador al-Ghassani in 1690. The latter, accompanied by a ret-
inue of fifteen to twenty men, visited Madrid and described the palace of the
Escorial, royal hunting, river skating, hospitals, laws of inheritance, Lent fast-
ing, Palm Sunday and Easter celebrations. He recorded contemporary events,
such as the death of the pope, and commented on women’s social and reli-
gious roles. The visit to Spain was a window on the rest of European affairs.
A year earlier, in 1689, Khujah went on a visit to the “lands of the ifranj”
(probably Italy) where he met many doctors and learned from them some
treatments with quinine, which he took back with him to his native Tunis. Af-
ter his return, he wrote to the European doctors and to others whom he had
known, asking them for a historical account of this medicine. In the short
treatise that he wrote, Al-Asrar al-kaminah (The Hidden Secrets), Khujah re-
iterated how he had met with the physicians both in the lands of the Franks
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xviii

xviii Introduction

as well as “in our city Tunis” and how much he had benefited from them.15
The account gives a history of quinine, with an emphasis on the facts that it
had not been mentioned by Galen or any of the subsequent Arab physicians,
and that its origin lay clearly in “India” (America).
A few years later, the Moroccan ambassador, Abdallah bin Aisha, went to
France, established lasting friendships with members of the French court
and trading companies, and fell in love. Upon his return to Morocco, he told
his family and friends about France and gave very detailed reports about the
whole journey to his ruler, Mulay Ismail, and to members of the court.16 In
1736, a Levantine who fraudulently pretended to be a Prince of “Mount
Libanus” traveled through Italy and France and raised contributions in Hol-
land toward “recovering his Territory.” Upon being discovered as a fraud, he
was executed.17 Other Muslims also visited Europe and told about it: “Hadge
Lucas,” who traveled to England twice, “has been a great Traveller,” wrote
the English captain John Braithwaite in 1729; he “speaks the Spanish per-
fectly well, and is very courteous to all strangers.” Indeed, Braithwaite re-
peatedly noted Moroccan familiarity with Christendom: “[S]everal Moors
frequented our House, that had been in England with their late Embas-
sador.”18 In 1747, Mahmud Maqdish traveled to the European East and
went into a church where he saw a painting that depicted a battle between
Spanish ships and ships from his native Sfax.19
Although the very concept of “Europe” did not exist among either the
Christian Arabs or Muslims, there was curiosity about the ruum (the
Qura’nic name for the Byzantines and other Europeans), the ifranj (Franks),
and the ajam (Spaniards) if only because from the Crusader invasion on,
there had been conflict, exchange and a two-way trade with them. Mer-
chants from the Maghreb and Andalucia, as well as from the Levant,
boarded Genoese or Venetian ships and traveled across the Mediterranean
to ply their trades.20 Others reached as far as England in their ransom medi-
ations on behalf of captives: “it hath pleas’d God,” wrote a father about his
captured son in a petition in Plymouth, 1688, “soe to order, that an Algerine
Merchant being in this town of Plymouth aforesaid hath promis’d to pursue
his redemption.”21 While many Maghariba such as this Algerian visited Eu-
ropean lands for purposes of trade and business, others had military intent:
in 1573, as the Algerians prepared to attack Tunis, they sailed to Malta and
explored the coastline until they were able to cut down timber for siege op-
erations.22 At the same time, Moriscos in Spain inquired about European
cities and travelers’ routes in order to escape via France, Germany (as with
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xix

Introduction xix

Ricote in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, 2:53) and Italy to North Africa
and Turkey.23 For the Christian population in the Levant, linguistic and edu-
cational reasons motivated their travel to European countries: from 1584 on,
an average of fifteen Christian boys went to Rome every year to study at the
Maronite College, after which they returned to their communities with an
extensive knowledge of European history, art, theology, and Catholic doc-
trine.24 Other Christians went on pilgrimages to centers of ecclesiastical au-
thority: Catholics to Rome and the Orthodox to Moscow. As a result, the
genre of rihla (travel writing) flourished in Arabic.25
After the 1609 expulsion from Spain, many Moriscos kept in touch with
compatriot merchants who were settled on Malta, or in Palermo, Marseilles,
Leghorn, and other European port cities to which they traveled frequently.
One of the main reasons for such contact was to establish financial centers
for money transfers, whether to pay off debts to European bankers; to pay
for the purchase of small pinks and ships manufactured by French, Dutch,
or Italian shipbuilders; or to finalize ransom payments for captives. An im-
portant commodity that motivated Muslims to travel to Europe or to the Eu-
ropean-held presidios in North Africa was tobacco. The tobacco trade was so
widespread that Muslim jurists condemned it for introducing Muslims to ne-
farious European habits, and for depleting national resources of much-
needed hard currency. Abu Salim Ibrahim al-Kallali described at length the
travels of Muslim merchants and their exchanges with their European coun-
terparts, showing how frequently traders went in search of tobacco and how
much they learned about the nasara (Christians), and about their own coreli-
gionists too:

The most degenerate of merchants travel to the lands of war, and en-
ter under the authority of rulers there. . . . They take pure gold, pure
silver, various kinds of weapons to use in payment for herbs which
they call fire and smoke. . . . After I had asked about the whereabouts
of the gold which the Muslims used in trade, and whether it was kept
hidden by people or was spent, I heard the strangest tale from some of
our friends the merchants. One said . . . that the gold was with the
nasara, may God destroy them, because of the trade in that cursed to-
bacco. I asked him to explain. So he said, “I will tell you the truth. I
traveled to the city of Ceuta, may God return it to the house of Islam,
and I stayed there twenty days awaiting the merchandise from India in
the hope of buying some. But I found nothing. While we were waiting
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xx Introduction

for the [Indian/American] merchandise, a ship arrived from the land

of the Christians. I rejoiced but when I went to check on its contents,
it had nothing but tobacco. By the next morning, all bundles had been
bought, all 1,500 qintars. And they were all paid for in pure gold. I
continued in the city for fifteen more days, hoping to do some pur-
chases. I was not successful so I returned to Tetuan where I found that
all the tobacco that had reached it had been sold, and that the revenue
had gone to those whom God had cursed.26

No wonder, thus, that just as in England King James I denounced tobacco in

his A counterblast to Tobacco (1604) as an imported alien herb used by
“pocky Indian slaves,” so did Mulay Ahmad order that “that insidious herb,
which is in the possession of the Christians in New Fez, be burnt.”27 In 1607,
the Moroccan rebel Abu Mahali denounced the “tree that came from the
lands of the infidels,” while the jurist Ali bin Ahmad denounced tobacco in
1617 as an import from the “land of the unbelievers.”28 The Europeans and
the North Africans frequently encountered each other in the context of
“taba,” or tabgh; thus the “two Moors taking tobacco” at the beginning of
Thomas Dekker’s play Lust’s Dominion (c. 1599–1600).
In light of their visits, “Moors,” “Arabians” and “Mahometans” became
prominent figures in European literary and artistic (portraiture) imagination
and widely informed the verse and prose of the Renaissance: William Shake-
speare’s Moroccan Prince in The Merchant of Venice, Thomas Middleton’s
Moors (converted to Christianity by English traders) at the court of King
James I in The Triumphs of Truth, the “Turqueries” of Spanish literature,
and the many Moors of Miguel de Cervantes’s and Lope de Vega’s plays and
novels.29 The Moor, wrote an anonymous English versifier in 1682,

who long inclosed had been pent

Within parch’t Africa’s dull Continent,
Whose untaught Hands did seldom ply the Oar,
And trembling always crept along the Shore,
Fir’d at the noise of the fam’d British Land,
His active Soul disdains the Lazy Sand,
And lanching forth, he plows th’ Atlantick Main,
Does boldly strive the Northern Pole to gain,
And reach those wondrous Magazins of Hail & Rain.30
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Introduction xxi

Despite the pomposity of his claim, the English writer recognized that the
Moors were traveling and learning.
From the Mashriq and the Maghreb, Muslim and Christian Arabs read
about, translated, and wrote from firsthand experience about the world
around them. There was curiosity in their travel. In his account of his jour-
ney to Mecca between 1630 and 1633, Ibn al-Sarraj advised the prospective
traveler in “the lands of God” to “observe and reflect on the differences in
landscape, between mountains and valleys and wilderness, the sources of
rivers and their courses, the ruins of ancient peoples and what happened to
them and how they have become news of past history, after they had been
seen and admired. He should also observe the differences in peoples, skin
colors, languages, foods, drinks, clothes, customs and wonders.”31 Although
Ibn al-Sarraj was traveling to a religious destination, he was open to new im-
pressions, ideas, observations, smells, tastes, and colors—to novelties and
differences. He was to satisfy his curiosity during his travel, the kind of travel
that many of his contemporaries cherished. Shihab al-Din al-Maqqari, for in-
stance, shows the extent of early modern Arab wanderlust: in 1600, he went to
Fez, then returned to Tlemsan, then went back to Fez; in 1618, he headed to
Egypt, then Hijaz, then returned to Cairo in 1623; then he traveled to
Jerusalem, Cairo, Hijaz, back to Cairo and Jerusalem, and finally to Damascus,
where he died in 1631.32 Unlike his European counterparts, who had to be
careful when traveling in neighboring countries of different Christian confes-
sions, an Arab (or Turk) from North Africa and the Levant had access to a vast
Ottoman empire ruled by the Istanbul-based Prince of the Faithful. While Eu-
ropeans were frequently confined by their national borders and denominations
and often feared crossing Protestant or Catholic lines, the Arabs (and the
Turks, as in the famous case of Eleya Chelebi) had an empire to explore.
In January 1682, the Moroccan ambassador Mohammad Temim and
seven members of his retinue visited France and discovered the social, artis-
tic, and intellectual innovation of the country. The ambassador attended an
opera, De Lully’s Atys, where he “showed much surprise,” probably at the
amazing stage scenery that included “vne Motagne consacrée à Cybele” (a
mountain consecretated for Sybil) along with a temple, palace, and gardens.
He also attended a ballet at the Royal Academy of Music. A week later, he
went to Notre Dame Cathedral and listened to an organ recital, and then
went to an observatory and to the apartment of a professor of astronomy
where he admired models of the globe and maps of the spheres, telescopes,
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xxii Introduction

and pendulums.33 “Cet ambassadeur,” commented one of the Frenchmen

who accompanied him, “estant curieux de tout ce qui regarde les sciences et
les arts.”34 The visit was such a success that when the ambassador left on
February 25, he and his retinue received glamorous farewell gifts from the
French monarch.35
This element of curiosity was again noted about Abdallah bin Aisha, and
about the Tunisian delegation that visited France in 1743. “It is our pleasure
to visit a kingdom we have long wanted to see,” said the top envoy, Ali Agha,
in the presence of his assistant, Mohammad Khujah, and the seven other
members of the delegation (including an imam, a cook, three guards, and
two servants). The French hosts thus became very eager to satisfy the guests’
curiosity: they took them to the opera, explained to them the difference be-
tween the Copernican and Ptolemaic astronomy systems, and invited them
to ceremonies that satisfied their “curiosité,” according to the French ob-
servers.36
As the writings in this volume reveal, travelers, envoys, ambassadors,
traders, and clerics were eager to ask questions about bilad al-nasara (the
lands of the Christians) and to record answers—and then to turn their im-
pressions into documents. They all wrote with precision and perspicacity,
producing the most detailed and empirically based information about the
way in which non-Europeans viewed Europeans in the early modern period.
No other non-Christian people—neither the American Indians nor the sub-
Saharan Africans nor the Asiatics—left behind as extensive a description of
the Europeans and of bilad al-nasara, both in the European as well as the
American continents, as did the Arabic writers.

The translations herein are taken from the following writers:

Ahmad bin Qasim, an Andalusian Morisco, went to France and Hol-

land in 1611–13. The title of his account is Nasir al-Din ala al-Qawm
al-Kafirin (The Protector of Religion against the Unbelievers). It is his
own abridgment of a longer account he had written, Rihlat al- shihab
ila liqa’ al-ahbab (The Journey of the Meteor to Meet the Loved Ones).

Ilyas Hanna al-Mawsuli went to Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal in

1668, and in 1675 crossed to South America. The title of his account is
Kitab Siyahat al-Khoury Ilyas bin al-Qissees Hanna al-Mawsuli (The
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Introduction xxiii

Book of the Travels of the Priest Ilyas, son of the Cleric, Hanna al-
Mawsuli).

Mohammad bin Abd al-Wahab al-Ghassani went to Spain in 1690 to

negotiate the release of Moroccan captives. The title of his account is
Rihlat al-Wazir fi iftikak al-Asir (The Journey of the Minister to Ran-
som the Captive).

Abdallah bin Aisha was the Moroccan envoy who went to France in
1699 and left behind him numerous letters addressed to members of
the French court and their families.

All of these accounts saw print only in the twentieth century, since the
press did not come into use in the Middle East and North Africa until the
early nineteenth century. But the fact that the texts were not published does
not mean that they were not known or used. While print was central to Eu-
ropean travel culture, Arab society had a rich oral tradition that transmitted
news, episodes, histories, and biographies across the Arabic-speaking com-
munity from Fez to Jerusalem and from Aleppo to Mecca. There was also a
vast trade in manuscripts (although Arabic writers in this period, like their
European counterparts until the mid-sixteenth century, did not distinguish
between “book” and “manuscript”). The Moroccan traveler Ali bin Moham-
mad al-Tamjarouti, who stopped in Algiers on his way back from Istanbul in
1590, noted how the city had more books in it than all the rest of the region,
and the “wandering [jawwal] scholar” Mohammad bin Ismail acquired many
books while visiting Istanbul in 1653.37 Written material circulated so widely
that Moroccan traveler Abu Salim al-Ayyashi reported that an Algerian he
met owned over 1500 books.38 In 1683, the poet-traveler Mohammed bin
Zakour again noted the abundance of books in Algiers.39 Meanwhile, at-
tached to every major mosque were the nassakheen or kataba (scribes), who
copied books in preparation for sale in the market. Until the mid-twentieth
century, these nassakheen were still part of the mosque institutions in North
Africa.40 One of the souks (markets) near the central mosque in many Is-
lamic cities is that of the scribes where books are still sold (those in Damas-
cus, Cairo, and Tunis are fine examples).
Interest in books also prevailed among the Orthodox and Catholic mi-
norities who composed their own texts and translated material into Arabic
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xxiv Introduction

from Greek and Latin for the use of congregations and clergy.41 Books also
played a major role in Arabic dealings with the Europeans: both al-Ghassani
and the Moroccan envoy to Spain in 1766, Ahmad bin al-Mahdi al-Ghazzal,
were ordered by their rulers to bring back with them all the books in Arabic
they could rescue from Spain. (The books that they failed to rescue, but
which survived the fires, constitute part of the Escorial collection of Arabic
manuscripts). The absence of print did not diminish the importance of
books, nor did it prevent the circulation of manuscripts in Arab society.
There is not a more monumental work in early modern bibliography than
Kashf al-Zunun ‘an Asami al-Kutub wal-Funun, the collection of 15,007 ti-
tles of predominantly Arabic, but also Turkish and Persian, writings that the
Turkish scribe and traveler Haji Khalifah (1609–57) recorded in alphabetical
order, with a separate unit on the books that circulated in the Maghreb. After
inheriting money from a relative, Khalifah traveled in Syria, Egypt, Iraq,
Iran, Arabia, Afghanistan, and other regions, writing down titles of books he
found at the warraqeen (paper makers) and in the libraries. He produced
the equivalent of the Short Title Catalogue of Arabic manuscripts in a large
part of the Islamic world.42
The travel accounts vary in length between a few pages and whole trea-
tises. While al-Mawsuli wrote two dozen pages about Europe, he wrote a
vast unit on America along with lengthy translations from Spanish accounts
about America. Paul of Aleppo wrote the longest travel account in early
modern Arabic, and it was one of the most detailed descriptions of seven-
teenth-century Russia in any language. Such accounts constituted the chief
source of information about Europeans, which was circulated in royal courts
and ecclesiastical enclaves, discussed by rulers and their strategists, and used
in diplomatic and commercial negotiations. Governors disseminated their in-
formation by letters that were proclaimed in Friday sermons, read by Sufi
masters in their lodges, and communicated orally from village to village and
tribe to tribe. Meanwhile, rulers listened to their envoys and queried them in
great detail, while others looked at drawings of the lands of Christians. When
the Tunisian envoy Yusuf Khujah visited Versailles in October 1728, he was
overwhelmed by the grandeur around him. After he apologized to his hosts
that he would not be capable of describing adequately to his compatriots the
majesty of the palaces he had seen, he requested pictures, “perspectives en
estampes,” to show the Tunisian bey (Ottoman official), Hussein bin Ali, and
other members of the Diwan (council of government) and the populace. Two
weeks later, the French king ordered that pictures be made of all royal
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Introduction xxv

houses, gardens and ponds, and be given to the envoy—who took them back
with him as evidence of the beauty and “richesses de la France.”43 News and
pictures of the Europeans that the travelers brought back spread across the
Arabic-speaking world, opening up venues for information, exchange, and
dialogue.
Numerous as the travelers were, there is little doubt that there would
have been more accounts written about Christendom had not specific factors
militated against travel. While Bernard Lewis attributed the paucity of Ara-
bic travel in Europe to Islamic lack of “curiosity,” other scholars have in-
voked the Maliki injunction against travel.44 But the evidence reveals that
there were very practical reasons, neither necessarily theological nor intel-
lectual, that deterred Arabs from traveling to Europe. First was the absence
of Islamic religious sites in Europe. Prior to the modern period, all travel was
either motivated by faith or commerce: given the dangers of travel, no early
modern man or woman, whether Christian or Muslim, went on a journey to
satisfy “curiosity,” but to fulfill a religious, commercial or diplomatic mis-
sion.45 The majority of medieval or early modern Europeans who traveled to
the Levant wanted to see Christian holy sites; others went for trade and/or
diplomatic exchange. Among the Muslim Arabs, the second motivation was
widely applicable, but not the first. The absence of those sites, however, did
not mean an indifference to travel and an absence of curiosity: the same rea-
sons that motivated Christians to travel within Europe—the quest for knowl-
edge—also motivated Muslim Arabs to travel within the world of Islam. The
famous Moroccan jurist Al-Hasan bin Masood al-Yusi included various chap-
ters in his Canons encouraging Muslims to travel in quest of learning.46
Furthermore, Arab travelers faced the difficulty of having to rely for their
transportation on European ships—ships whose crew were not always will-
ing to take “Mahumetans” on board. When the Moroccan delegation to Eng-
land in 1600 desired to return home, English sailors and captains refused to
transport “infidels”;47 in February 1628, John Harrison, the English repre-
sentative in Morocco, reported that two Moorish agents “sent from Bar-
barie . . . have been here a Long tyme,” and would not be able to return
unless the king furnished them with means of transport.48 A century later,
the situation had not changed and the Moroccan ambassador to England
complained how he “stood in need to Transport my self into my country” but
was “deprived of the Necessary Means.”49 On many occasions, North African
rulers wanted to send ambassadors and other emissaries to Europe, but were
delayed or prevented by the unavailability or resistance of European carri-
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xxvi Introduction

ers. Meanwhile, the relentless captivity of Magharibi seamen by European

corsairs and privateers precipitated a shortage in manpower and a resultant
decline in Magharibi naval capacity so that by the eighteenth century all
trade and travel from and to North Africa was carried out by European ships.
But the most important reason that militated against travel was fear—fear
of the Europeans who had invaded, terrorized, burned, expelled, and en-
slaved Muslims. The lands of Christians were lands of danger and violence,
from which ships and soldiers repeatedly appeared to threaten and attack.
Since the early fifteenth century, Portugal and Spain had been extending the
reconquista onto Mediterranean and Atlantic Islam. In 1406, the Spaniards
occupied Tetuan; in 1415, the Portuguese captured Ceuta, and in 1458 Kasr
al-Saghir, whereupon the Portuguese king, Alphonso V, was given the title
“the African” by the pope, in recognition of his anti-Muslim conquests; in
1471, Asilla and Tangier fell to the Portuguese, followed in 1497 by Melilla.
The peoples of North Africa were haunted, as Ahmad Bucharb wrote, “par
l’omnipresence de la peur” caused chiefly by the “infidels” who had well-for-
tified presidios, superior armaments, and mastery of the seas.50 The Por-
tuguese description of the establishment of Santa Cruz (Agadir) in 1505
recalls the European “discovery” and “conquest” of the Americas: the Por-
tuguese viewed Muslim North Africa as a land of savage unbelievers to sub-
due and natural resources to pillage—just as they viewed Brazil. In 1506, the
Portuguese occupied Mogador; in 1508, Hajar Badis and Safi; in 1514, Maza-
gan; and in 1515 al-Ma’mura. From 1537 to 1573, the Spaniards occupied Tu-
nis and built there “une ville européene”51; in 1614, al-Ma’mura fell to Spain.
Throughout the seventeenth century, European ships of war besieged
and bombarded the North African and Atlantic port cities. From 1621 on,
Algiers was attacked by the English (1621, 1661, 1665, 1669), and by the
French (1665, 1672, 1682, 1688)—the last destroying 9200 of the city’s
10,000 buildings.52 There were also intermittent attacks and blockades by
Danish, Spanish, Flemish, Genovese, Neopolitan, Papal, Portuguese, and
Sicilian fleets, and from 1662 until 1684, Tangier was in the hands of the
British. All these attacks revealed the vulnerability of coastal cities, which
forced Moroccan rulers to move their capitals inland—to Marrakesh and
Meknes. The attacks led not only to European domination of Muslims but to
the de-Islamicization of the region as churches and cathedrals and seminar-
ies were built, often on the sites of desecrated mosques. Coastal cities such
as Asfi, Mazagan, and Azammur (which had been occupied by the Por-
tuguese) became, according to Busharb, “a foreign element hostile to the
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Introduction xxvii

world around them,” one filled with obtrusive architecture.53 Such presidios
severed the organic links between communities and market towns, both on
land and by sea, creating fear and anxiety—similar to the fear Europeans
would have felt had Algerians established a base near Plymouth or the Mo-
roccans near Cadiz. The traveler Ibn Abid al-Fasi was on his way to the Mo-
roccan Atlantic coast when he was warned, “The infidels are still hunting the
Muslims there; they have harbors in which they dock their ships and from
where they fan out and capture the Bedouins who graze their cattle around
the harbor.”54 This traveler, who was able to reach Aden, was unable to reach
the Atlantic shore of his own country. It is not surprising that as a result of
fear, a special “Prayer of Fear,” based on the Qur’an 4:102–4, was used at
times of danger and Christian invasion.55
Fear was the most powerful deterrent to travel into the lands of Chris-
tians. The “anatomy of fear” that has been conducted on the inhabitants of
the Spanish Mediterranean littoral should also be conducted on the North
African population. Western historians find that the only fear in the early
modern period was of innocent Europeans who feared the rapacious “Ma-
hometans,” completely ignoring the fear the Muslims had of the European
nasara, whose legacy was not only of warfare but of religious persecution.56
The psychological impact of the arrival, from 1609 to 1614, of hundreds of
thousands of frightened and embittered men, women, and children who had
been driven out of their European homes because of their Islamic faith, or
the racial residues of that faith, permanently changed Arab and Islamic views
of Europeans. After their expulsion, the Moriscos settled in Tunisia, Algeria,
and Morocco and told the local inhabitants about the burnings, rampages,
tortures, and exile they had suffered at the hands of the Christians. The first
chapters in Ahmad bin Qasim’s Kitab describe the dangers of life in Spain
and his fears as a secret Muslim after witnessing the cruelty of the harraqeen
(the burners). Al-Anwar al-Nabawiyya fi Akhbar al-Bariyya, by Mohammad
bin abd al-Rafi’ al-Andalusi, Kitab ul-Izz wal Rifa’, by Ahmad bin Ghanem,
and Nur al-Armash fi Manaqib sidi abi al-Ghaith al-Qashash, by Abu Lihya
al-Qafsi, all written in the wake of the expulsion, describe not only the perse-
cution, robbery, and brutality that befell the Moriscos at the hands of the
Christians, but repeatedly report the burnings of compatriots that survivors
witnessed. Al-Anwar al-Nabawiyya has the word burn on every page of its
conclusion. Clearly, the memories of the Europeans, along with the attacks
that continued to be carried out against the Mediterranean and Atlantic
coasts, frightened the Magharibi and dulled their “curiosity” about the Euro-
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xxviii Introduction

Christians. That Muslim travelers in Spain repeatedly wished for the destruc-
tion of the Christians (thus the repeated invocation for God to destroy or
shame them, damarahum al-Lah and khadhalahum al-Lah) was not a result
of structural hostility to Christians, but of the violence, expulsion, and autos
da fé committed by the Christians against the Muslims and their forefathers.
The fear of Europeans prevailed on the high seas too, especially as a fear
of the more seaworthy English, Maltese, or Spanish pirates who, as both
Arab and European travelers complained, including the famous French ori-
entalist Laurant D’Arvieux, indiscriminately attacked and kidnapped mer-
chants and emissaries.57 As early as the 1580s, such sea danger threatened
Magharibi travel. In his account of his journey to Istanbul from Tetuan, al-
Tamjarouti describes the dangers he encountered. He mentions how his ship
sailed close to the coast in order to avoid the Christian corsairs, and as soon
as they drew near Tunis, he heard sailors say that “he who crosses the Adar
tip will pay his ransom at home,” signifying the danger of captivity for Mus-
lims crossing that region.58 Similarly, al-Safadi wrote about the Maltese pi-
rates that accosted Fakhr-al-Din and interrogated the Flemish captain, and
only released the ship after they were assured that the travelers were “going
from the East to our country.”59 Over a century later, in 1731, the Moroccan
minister, Abu Muhammad al-Ishaqi, recalled while passing near a village in
Libya that the location had been famous for the capturing and selling of
Muslim travelers and pilgrims to Christians.60 As Christians feared the Bar-
bary corsairs, Muslims feared the European corsairs.
Despite peace treaties with European rulers, North African merchants
were afraid to sail to Marseilles, Genoa, or Leghorn, where there was either
open hostility or outright danger. The assassination/massacre of the Algerian
delegation, consisting of the ambassador and forty-five companions in Mar-
seilles on June 18, 1620 (celebrated in print by one French author) is just
one of many dangerous cases in point.61 In 1640, a Moroccan ambassador
who had just arrived in Cadiz to negotiate a treaty with Philip IV became so
afraid he would be taken captive by the Spaniards that he refused to con-
tinue to Madrid. He deserted his royal mission and hastened back home—to
certain punishment.62 Although danger beset all ambassadors in the early
modern period, in Muslim as well as in Christian lands, there were, in the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, repeated humiliations for
the North African ambassadors, whose countries did not have the military
and naval power to retaliate when European hosts broke diplomatic proto-
col. Between 1727 and 1728, a Tunisian embassy was held hostage at
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Introduction xxix

Chalon-Sur-Soane, and in June 1744, the Libyan ambassador, al-Hajj

Ibrahim Agha, asked somebody to translate/write a petition to his “Grace,” in
which he complained how his (Jewish) servant, Moses Moravir, had been
taken into custody

(for Debt) of the said Sheriffs . . . in Contempt of the Law of Nations,

and Your Grace’s orders to them, which, I highly resent, in the Of-
fenders, as a Reflection, & Reproach, on the King and the Countrey I
represent, whom I, intent to acquaint with the Affair, unless my said
Servants, are both immediately discharged, from out of their Confine-
ment, which, I absolutely insist upon, without any Regard, or Refer-
ence had to your English Laws, which I do not understand. . . . I will
forthwith, withdraw out of the Kingdom being Ashamed to appear
Abroad, and hear it said, I have suffered my Servants to be impris-
oned, and Confined, which is an affront, that has not been Offered to
any Ambassador but myself.63

The humiliation of the ambassador was a humiliation for his country, not
only among Europeans, but among fellow North African rulers and commu-
nities. Even worse, the Europeans could not be trusted to abide by the law of
nations.
While European travelers-cum-traders could often establish bonds with
merchant families and participate in civic and even religious activities, Mus-
lims could not even find a place of residence in a European city. The Euro-
pean city did not have the variety of peoples and ethnicities that Aleppo,
Cairo, Tunis, or Algiers had; nor did it have spaces such as the caravanserais,
khans, funduks (travelers’ lodgings/hostels), or even cemeteries that were
designated for peoples from other lands and religions. The numerous fun-
duks for Christians that existed in Moroccan cities in the sixteenth century—
as Diego de Torres confirmed in his Relacion del origen y svcesso de los
xarifes (c. 1574)—and the “English house” which was established in Alexan-
dria as early as 1586, and the funduk built for the French “nation” in 1660 in
Tunis (near the English funduk) attest to a willingness on the part of Muslim
society to ensure an architecturally-appealing residence for European
traders, diplomats, and visitors.64 The survival of three gravestones belong-
ing to three Britons and bearing the dates “MDCLXI,” “MDCXLVIII,” and
“1667,” which stand outside St. George’s Church in Tunis, suggests a settled
residence (and resting place) of European traders and travelers in the
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xxx Introduction

Islamic city in the early modern period.65 In 1736, Henry Boyde described
the French-run hospital in Algiers, which served all residents and local in-
habitants, and the Christian cemetery, which was on a spot of land that had
actually been bought by a Christian for that purpose.66
Despite their fear and anxiety, Muslims still went to Europe, driven by
their familiarity with what the Qur’an designates as al-nasara. Both the Arab
Muslim and Christian writers used this term to refer to European Christians,
thereby situating the “foreign” European Christians within the accessible
context of the Qur’anic worldview: al-nasara were a religious community with
a scriptural revelation recognized by Muslims as “People of the Book.” As a
result, rarely did Muslim travelers become confused or disoriented during
their visits because the lands of the European Christians, while new and
strange, were lands of a community they had known in their devotion as well
as in their daily lives. This was one of the paradoxes that travelers faced: the
fear of the nasara and, at the same time, the familiarity with the Eastern
nasara who lived in their midst from Baghdad to Jerusalem, and from Jaffa to
Alexandria to Meknes. Fakhr-al-Din II cooperated with the Maronite Chris-
tians in Lebanon who shared in his anti-Ottomanism, while al-Mawsuli’s ac-
count shows the interaction between western Europeans and the Levant
through the activities of Catholic missionaries.67 Al-Mawsuli met a few Euro-
peans who had relatives in Syria and Iraq whom he had known and admired,
and while he was in Europe, he met Christians, including his nephew, Yunan,
who was receiving an education he would utilize when he returned to his
community (taking with him the necessary school supplies). Al-Ghassani
compared the “Eastern” Christians with the Christians of Spain, and showed
his familiarity with the Arabic names of Christian feasts; while he did not
know Arabic words for archbishop or procession (terms that derive from the
Catholic tradition), he knew the names for Easter and Palm Sunday. On many
occasions, he mentioned how he and his delegation found themselves among
Christians who proudly introduced themselves to them as descendants of An-
dalusian Muslims, with family names that were the same as those in North
Africa. So Islamic was their demeanor that they were urged by the ambassa-
dors to emigrate to the lands of Islam—which they politely declined to do.
The Moroccan ruler Mulay Ismail reminded Louis XIV that Heraclius, whom
he thought the ancestor of the French monarch, had received a letter from
the prophet Muhammad which, the Moroccan believed, was still in French
possession. He believed that there was a millennium of exchange and com-
munication between Muslims and the ifranj of France—which encouraged
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Introduction xxxi

him to propose to the King that he convert to Islam.68 In Morocco, Francis-

can fathers taught literacy to Catholic captives: on many occasions, Moroc-
cans of noble families forced their way into those classes in order to learn
foreign languages.69 The Tunisian Ramadan Bey became so enchanted with
European music that he purchased an organ from France, “which gave him
great joy” (tarab).70 As travelers therefore wandered among al-nasara,
whether in France or Spain, Holland or England, they felt that despite being
in foreign lands, they knew something about the host religion and culture.
The Europeans were not total others beyond understanding or engagement.

The travelers wrote informative accounts that stand in contrast to many of

the European descriptions of the Muslim world in the same period. Travel-
ers from Europe to North Africa and the Levant, whether they came from
countries with an extensive medieval history of contact (such as Spain and
France) or countries of Renaissance interaction (such as England and Hol-
land) often carried with them ideological and polemical baggage that bur-
dened their accounts. They claimed to see what they never encountered, and
interpreted authoritatively to their readers what they never understood:
some claimed to meet Prester John, others claimed cannibalism among Mus-
lims, and up until the end of the seventeenth century, there were writers
who still declared that Muhammad’s tomb was hanging in midair. Some trav-
elers went to the regions of Mediterranean Christianity and Islam with a
sense of Western superiority and denounced all that was “Mahumetan” and
“oriental.” Because Islam, in their view, was a false religion, the people, cul-
ture, and history of Islam could not but be perverse and debased: the errors
of theology produced a failure in civilization. “The people [of Tunis],” wrote
the Englishman John Weale in 1656, “do and act everything contrary to
Christians as writing, sowing, cutting and feeding.”71 Muslims were struc-
turally separated from Christians.
Meanwhile, Arab writers of the same period described what they saw,
carefully and without projecting unfounded fantasies. They did not invent in-
formation because most of them were writing to governmental and ecclesias-
tical superiors who, if not accurately apprised, could blunder in their
dealings with their European counterparts. Even Paul of Aleppo wrote his
account “with accuracy” because his friend wanted to “verify, in general and
in particular, what [the friend had] heard of them from the details of his-
tory.”72 The purpose of writing an account of a journey was to describe the
lands, customs, religion, and social organization the traveler had seen—and
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xxxii Introduction

which another wanted to confirm. Authors therefore invested themselves

with an exemplary self in which their “I” was collective of all their coreligion-
ists,73 thereby telling more about the outer world they visited and the discus-
sions and exposures they had than the inner world they experienced. The
Moroccan ambassador, Ahmad bin al-Mahdi al-Ghazzal, wrote in 1766 about
his mission to free Moroccan captives, but the first hundred pages of his ac-
count describe the topography, geography, and history of the parts of Spain
through which he traveled—all from personal (and reliable) observation. As
he noted at the outset of his account, “I was ordered by his highness [Mulay
Mohammad bin Abdallah, reg. 1759–90] may the heavens elevate him, to
write down during this auspicious journey all that I heard, saw, noted and
learnt; and to tell about the cities and villages and describe all that I experi-
enced during my travels and stay.”74
The travelers did not frame their encounter with the Europeans within
the “particular myths, visions and fantasies” that characterize many (if not
necessarily all) European texts.75 The Arabic travel accounts cannot there-
fore be approached through the theoretical models with which European ac-
counts have been studied by writers as different as Stephen Greenblatt,
Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak.76 They belong to a tradition that is differ-
ent not only in its history but in its epistemology: the travelers were not har-
bingers of an Islamic imperialism compelled to alterize and to present, in the
words of Mary Louise Pratt, the “redundancy, discontinuity, and unreality” of
the Christians.77 Rather, they wrote empirical accounts about Europe with
the same precision that many of their coreligionists used to describe their
journeys within the world of Islam, and in the case of the Christian travelers,
within the world at large. Furthermore, and unlike the European travelers
who used classical or biblical sources as their guides, the Arabs did not have
previous models with which to compare or contrast Europe and America.
They went with an open mind and a clean slate. And even when a traveler
such as al-Ghassani went with anger and antipathy—repeatedly denouncing
the nasara for having expelled his forefathers and coreligionists from
Spain—he still admitted, on the first page of his account, that he had kept
himself open to the wonders and innovations of the nasara.
Despite being in what Mary Louise Pratt defines as “contact zones,”78 the
writers viewed travel as a means of experiencing rather than denouncing that
which was culturally and socially different. Al-Mawsuli enjoyed the bullfight
and described it without judgment, but, a century later, al-Ghazzal did not
enjoy it because he felt that “people should not torture animals”; still, he did
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Introduction xxxiii

not seize the opportunity to generalize about Christian cruelty. Mohammad

bin Uthman al-Miknasi, a Moroccan envoy who went to Spain a quarter of a
century later, enjoyed the bullfight but was offended by the urine smell in a
church belfry and hoped that God would purify the land of the unclean infi-
dels; still, he did not continue with a diatribe about European lack of hygiene
(which even European travelers decried). The travelers observed and com-
mented—and sometimes criticized their own religious society too: al-
Tamjarouti criticized the Turks for their unjust and violent rule in Algiers;
over a century later, and after admiring the museum of rarities of Sir Bonier
de la Moisson, Ali Agha exclaimed that it was great for him (Moisson) to be
under a ruler such as the French emperor who allowed his subject to enjoy
himself; had he been in the Ottoman Empire, “il ne jouiroit pas longtemps
de ces beautés.”79 Al-Miknasi was critical of what he saw of ecclesiastical
hypocrisy and rudeness in Spain—as he was of the tyranny of the Turks.80
The one area in which the Muslim travelers were consistently vociferous
and condemnatory was religion. But the hostility to the Euro-Christians re-
mained doctrinal and historical (based on their own and their predecessors’
experiences), not racial or cultural. Qasim spent much of his time in disputa-
tions with Christians (and Jews): inevitably, there was acrimony, disagree-
ment, and difference. The errors of the Christians, and their unwillingness to
see the truth that he demonstrated to them did not, however, prevent Qasim
from admiring, engaging, and praising numerous aspects of Euro-Christian
life, manners, culture, and politics. Three quarters of a century later, al-
Ghassani was as bitter and condemnatory of the Christians as Qasim had
been. Like Qasim, he knew the Bible well, and like him, prided himself on
refuting Christians in disputations. But Spain, with its memories of Islamic
glory (a glory that he was certain would never be recovered), could not but
provoke in him invective and denunciation. As al-Ghassani looked at
mosques and villages and citadels, he saw the possessions and cultural prop-
erty of his people which had been conquered and de-Islamicized.
Al-Ghassani was the most hostile of all the travellers who wrote about bi-
lad al-nasara. His hostility should always be seen, however, in light of the ex-
pulsion of his coreligionists from the Andalus. In the same way that
Europeans repeatedly denounced the “Mahometans” because they saw them
as having conquered the land of Christ, so did al-Ghassani denounce the
Christian “worshippers of the cross” (as he called the Spanish Catholics) for
having conquered the land of his fathers. But what made his hostility relent-
less was that the Christians had driven his coreligionists out and had not even
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xxxiv Introduction

permitted the converts to remain in their lands. As he had earlier in his life
traveled on diplomatic missions to the Levant and to Istanbul, al-Ghassani
knew that while Muslim/Ottoman armies had conquered Christian lands,
they had not expelled the Christian populations. Even European travelers
admitted to the presence of large populations of Eastern Christians (whom
al-Ghassani recognized to be different from Western Christians) in Istanbul,
Jerusalem, Cairo, and other metropolitan areas. While the Muslims had per-
mitted the Christians to remain in their lands, the Christians had not permit-
ted the Muslims to remain in the Andalus. Such a realization underpinned
al-Ghassani’s imprecations that “God destroy them.” The Spanish Christians
had, after all, destroyed his ancestors.
But not every traveler was overwhelmed by memories of Christian domi-
nation or theological difference. Abdallah bin Aisha was able to forgo differ-
ence in favor of deep amity and mahabba (love/affection)—a word that
Qasim, but never al-Ghassani, had also used. Despite the religious chasm be-
tween the Christians and the Muslims, there was for Aisha the possibility, at
least, of acceptance of, and possibly deep engagement with, his French asso-
ciates. There was an immediacy that outweighed past conflicts and present
tensions—and led to enduring friendship. Fifteen days after leaving Paris on
his way back to Morocco, he wrote a letter to his host, Jean Jourdan, thank-
ing him for his hospitality. Through friendship, “the two of us have become,”
he wrote, “Aisha Jourdan and Jourdan bin Aisha”: the French was Moroccan
and the Moroccan French. “I have been in your house,” he continued, “and
have put your daughters in my lap, while their mother sat with me on the
sofa, and we all ate together. The pen will go dry if I continue with my emo-
tions.” Aisha’s mahabba spanned religious and political difference.81 Aisha
clearly regarded the European not as an other, separated both geographically
and ontologically, but as somebody who had become integral to his own sub-
jectivity and constitution.
In the same way that the views of European travelers to the Levant were
varied and nuanced, as Kenneth Parker and others have shown about Eng-
lish travelers to the Islamic Orient,82 so were the views of the Arab travelers;
and in the same way that there were Turks, Moors, Armenians, Greeks, Jews,
and Arabs for the European traveler to contend with, so were there
Spaniards and Portuguese, Andalusians of Islamic origin, “heretics” (al-
Mawsuli’s and al-Ghassani’s word for Protestants), Jews, New Christians and
Old in the lands of the Christians. The accounts reveal different personalities
and different preferences—and therefore, different “Europes.” Both al-
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Introduction xxxv

Ghassani and al-Ghazzal described Spain—and within three quarters of a

century of each other; but the former was much more interested in the reli-
gious institutions and practices of the monks and nuns than was the latter.
Where al-Ghassani’s Spain was ecclesiastical, al-Ghazzal’s was a land of fies-
tas; where the former argued with and criticized the friars, the farayila, the
latter treated them as part of the staff that welcomed him. Earlier, Ahmad
bin Qasim had been so riled at the many inaccuracies about Islam upheld by
his French hosts that he frequently argued with them, revealing a firm grasp
of the Old and New Testaments in both Arabic and Spanish. Meanwhile, no
English or French traveler could dispute knowledgeably with Muslims until
after the late 1640s, when translations of the Qur’an were published.
The major differences among the travelers, however, were dictated by
the time period in which they traveled. The seventeenth-century visitors be-
longed to an Islamic society that appeared as powerful and wealthy as the so-
ciety of Europe. Neither Muslim nor Christian was put on the cultural or
historical defensive during his European journey. Qasim admired the tidi-
ness of Amsterdam and the buildings in Paris, but he was not overwhelmed,
since Marrakesh boasted the palace of al-Badee’, an architectural marvel. He
felt so much an equal that he may have viewed his journey, according to Abd
al-Majid al-Qaddouri, as an act of theological and intellectual jihad against
equal adversaries.83 In his Kitab Nasir al-Din, he did not go into detail about
the European landscapes and cities as much as he delved into people’s
minds, challenging their theological and doctrinal “errors.” Paul of Aleppo
compared his native city to Moscow—to the advantage of the former, where
there were “no fear nor fires, nor any thing of the kind.”84 Al-Mawsuli was
stunned by the European wealth that he saw, coming as he was from the
easternmost outpost of the Ottoman Empire (and one that had been only re-
cently reconquered); but much as his religious emotions were heightened in
Rome, he still viewed himself as the subject of a sultan whose imperial
power was reverberating throughout Europe. After he served as translator to
the Ottoman ambassador who visited Paris in 1668, he wrote an account that
revealed his awe at Ottoman might and splendor. Even in America, he could
not but frequently recall his native land. Al-Ghassani admired many of the
novelties in Spain, but he credited the country’s greatness to its Islamic
legacy, about which he wrote with passion and sorrow. These travelers were
amazed and startled, but not defeated.
By the turn of the century, however, the travelers saw a different Europe.
In 1699, Ibn Aisha reflected the North African wonder at the valuable orna-
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xxxvi Introduction

ments, the objets d’art, the utensils and clothes that the French imported
from America, India, and Siam. In Spain as in Naples, Malta, and Sicily, the
travelers saw how al-nasara had developed institutions for education, health,
industrial production, and social organization unmatched by any in their own
countries. Ali Agha’s Tunisian delegation of 1743 was simply overwhelmed—
as the French wanted them to be—not only by the opulence and novelty
they saw but by the advances in technology, science, and art. Despite recog-
nizing the inadmissibility of human representation in Islam, as he noted to
his host, Ali Agha was awestruck at the beautiful paintings in the churches he
visited.85 Also, so much was new to al-Ghazzal that his account, like al-Ghas-
sani’s, is full of arabized Spanish words, ranging from chair to hat, mile to
coach.86 Al-Ghazzal admired much of what he saw in Spain: hospitals, gar-
dens, maritime schools, and royal entertainment. He described with fascina-
tion statues that looked like human beings and painted pottery that could not
but have life in it. He marveled at bridges with impressive arches; the nu-
merous water sources; the vegetation; flowers (“their myrtle is not like
ours”); and animals, including those in Carlos III’s private zoo—specifically
the lions from al-Hind (America), which were smaller than those in North
Africa. It was clear that the “modern” centralized states of Europe had su-
perceded the archaic Islamic polity.87
There were wonders among the nasara that could not be denied: Ali
Agha was so taken by the “ouvrages mecaniques” on the residence grounds
of Comte d’Evreux that he did not feel the rain drenching him.88 In Sicily,
al-Miknasi marveled at anatomy lessons and orphanages, dancing dogs and
fossils; but he could not help but add that the earthquake that killed thou-
sands in Messina on April 5, 1782, was God’s judgment on that “protectorate
of sin,” or that all the attention that the travelers received was actually in-
tended for “our imam and master al-Mansur.”89 Like other travelers, al-Mik-
nasi knew that outright praise for the Europeans could not be easily
tolerated by their rulers. As a result, and every once in a while, travelers re-
sorted to a policy of using the description of Europe to serve in the glorifica-
tion of the ruler. Al-Miknasi, who visited Malta, Sicily, and the kingdom of
Naples and Spain between 1781 and 1793 could not help but deride in ex-
pressions of Islamic superiority the European luxuries he saw; it would have
been dangerous to reveal to Mulay Mohammad and to the tradition-bound
jurists who dominated social and religious life in Morocco his admiration of
European wealth and advancement. For him and for other travelers, the Eu-
ropean world was more powerful, affluent, and possibly attractive than their
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Introduction xxxvii

own—although they did not dare admit to that. They knew that they had to
temper exhilaration with denunciation: after a detailed and exuberant de-
scription of a pleasurable visit to France in 1845–46, the Moroccan ambassa-
dor Muhammad al-Saffar could not but end his account with a statement in
which he rather gratuitously denounced the trickery and deceit of the Euro-
peans, adding the Qura’nic verse (Ruum 7) that they “know only some ap-
pearance of the life of the world, and are heedless of the Hereafter.”90 But it
was one single denunciation, written at the end of a book of wonders, praise,
and envy.
Curiously, similar disavowal of the greatness of the cultural other had ap-
peared in English seventeenth-century writings. In that century when Is-
lamic might was still at an enviable height, from Aghra to Istanbul, authors
such as William Biddulph, Henry Blount, and Paul Rycaut had to insist in
their prefaces that much as they had admired the Turks, they still believed
that England was superior and better. “For hereby all men may see how God
hath blessed our Countrie above others, and be stirred up to thankeful-
nesse,” wrote Biddulph;91 the purpose for writing about Morocco, John Har-
rison told Charles I, was to “discerne betwixt a blessed Christian gouernment
whereunis God had ordained you, and a cruell-tyrannous Mahometan
gouernment.”92 While these writers included criticisms of the Turks and
Moors as a precautionary measure, others censored their writings before
sending them to press, deleting sections that could be misunderstood as too
favorable to the “infidels.”93 Neither rulers nor readers, Muslim nor Christ-
ian, could bear too much reality.
Europe was complex and challenging, and the Arab Muslim travelers
knew that they had to learn and ask questions, sometimes relying on their
mastery of European languages (as was the case for all seventeenth-century
travelers) and at other times relying on translators. What they wrote down
was a product of measurement, observation, and evaluation—not fantasy.
They were learning and correcting old misconceptions. When the Moroccan
ambassador to England in 1682–83 was about to leave, he explained that his
visit had dispelled his previous misconceptions about the nasara of England.
During his visit, he had listened to what they had told him about Christianity
and had subsequently changed his views. He promised to change the views
of his compatriots too upon his return. “[W]e have Beene Towld,” he was
quoted to have said in his farewell statement, “that the Christians worship a
god mad[e] of wood or Stone wch they may throw into the fiarre e see Con-
sumed e this we have believed but I have this day with my Eyes I thank God
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xxxviii Introduction

(of whome he allwayes speakes with a greate Deale of Reverence) seene the
contrary I doe believe the English Nation the best people.”94
The travelers recognized the limits of their knowledge about Europeans
and tried to learn: sometimes they got their information wrong, as with al-
Ghassani’s account of the Protestant Reformation, and sometimes accurately,
as with his account of England’s Glorious Revolution. Al-Miknasi explained
to his ruler (twice) that Jews killed Christian children and that, as a result,
the Spaniards had expelled them. The ambassadors asked about the new, the
different, and the strange, and wrote down everything. After the Messina
earthquake, Al-Miknasi reported that some reports had put the number of
the dead at 20,000 while others put it at 100,000; some had put the number
of cities that had been destroyed at 50, others more. Al-Miknasi wrote down
all that he heard, including speculations and conjectures.95 He admitted that
he was in no position to make a judgment; but he was also not willing to in-
vent or impose anything. While European writers all too often indulged in
orientalism, Arab writers did not construct a parallel “occidentalism.”

The numbers of Arab travelers from the lands of Islam to bilad al-nasara
were never as high as those of the Europeans to Islam. Still, in the early
modern period, numerous ambassadors, emissaries, and merchants; captives
and spies; and priests and jurists ventured across seas and mountains into
Spain and France, Holland and Italy, England and Russia—and wrote first-
hand descriptions of the peoples and customs, the geography and ethnogra-
phy of the “lands of the Christians.” No other people wrote more about the
Europeans than did the Arabs.

NOTES

All Arabic names and book titles in this work appear as they are transliterated in the
online HOLLIS library catalogue of Harvard University. These transliterations are
often different in other catalogues since, unfortunately, there is no standardized con-
vention for the transliteration of Arabic among the Library of Congress, the British
Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale.

1. Ahmad bin Qasim (bin al-Hajari), Nasir al-din ‘ala al-qawm al-kafirin, ed.
Muhammad Razzuq (Al-Dar al-Bayda’: Kulliyat al-Adab wa-al-Ulum al-Insaniyah,
1987), 53.
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Introduction xxxix

2. Anthony Pagden, Facing Each Other: The World’s Perception of Europe and
Europe’s Perception of the World (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000). Pagden would
have greatly benefited from reading Abd al-Majid al-Qadduri, Sufara Mahgaribah fi
Urubba, 1610–1922 (Rabat: Jamiat Muhammad al-Kamis, 1995) which surveys Mo-
roccan travel history. Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1993), 15; and The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: W. W. Norton,
1982), 299. The same opinion was repeated by Norman Cigar: the Arabs were not
“interested” in Europe; see Cigar, ed. and trans. Muhammad al-Qadiri’s Nashr al-
Mathani: The Chronicles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), xv.
3. Khalid Ziyadah, Tatawwur al-nazrah al-Islamiya ila Urubba (Beirut: Mahad
al-Inma al-Arabi, 1983), 13. I am grateful to Dr. Bekkaoui for this reference.
4. See the study of sixteenth-century Turkish traders in Venice and other parts of
Italy: Cemal Kafadar, “A Death in Venice (1575): Anatolian Muslim Merchants Trad-
ing in Serenissima,” in Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World, ed. Sanjay
Subrahmanyam (Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1996): 97–125; see also the unit on Ot-
toman cartography in Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern
World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); V. L. Menage, “Three Ottoman
Treatises on Europe,” in Iran and Islam, ed. C. E. Bosworth (Edinburgh: University
Press, 1971), 421–33; and Virginia H. Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and
Peace, Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700–1783 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), chapter 2.
5. The term Arab is used in this book to refer to writers whose language of
thought and expression was neither Turkish, Aljemda, nor Syriac, but Arabic. All
four authors whose works are translated in this book, along with every other author
who is mentioned, wrote in Arabic. Arab/Arabic is used not to suggest a national
identity but a linguistic commonality
6. Muhammad bin abi al-Surur, Sirat al-Ashab wa Nuzhat dhawi al-Albab, MS
4931, National Library of Tunis.
7. Hussayn Khujah, Kitab bashair ahl al-iman bi-futuahat Al Uthman, MS 6554,
National Library of Tunis, 412. For a description of the text and a study of Khujah,
see Ahmed Abdesselem, Les Historiens tunisiens (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1993),
206–21.
8. Abdallah Guennun, Rasail Sadiyah: Cartas de Historia de los Saadies (Tetuan:
Instituto Muley el-Hasan, 1954), 188–89.
9. Ahmad bin Ghanem, Kitabz-ul Izz wal-Rifa, MS 1407, National Library of Tu-
nis, 4r-6v. See the translation of some selections in David James, “The ‘Manual de
Artilleria’ of Ahmad al-Andalusi with Particular Reference to its illustrations and
their Sources,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 41, no. 3
(1978): 251.
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xl Introduction

10. Alastair Hamilton, “An Egyptian Traveler in the Republic of Letters: Jose-
phus Barbatus or Abucacnus the Copt,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti-
tutes 57 (1994): 123–50.
11. Asad Rustum and Fuad Afram al-Bustani, eds., Lubnan fi ahd al-Amir Fakhr
al-Din al-Ma’ni al-Thani (Beirut: Manshurat al-Jami’a al-Lubnaninya, 1969), 208–41.
I am currently preparing a study and a translation of this account. For the ideological
impact of the journey, see Butrus Daw, Tarikh al-Mawarina al-Dini wa-al-siyasi wa-
al-hadari (Junieh: al-Matba’a al-Bulusiyya, 1977), 4: 225–51.
12. Paul of Aleppo, The Travels of Macarius: Patriarch of Antioch: written by his
attendant archdeacon, Paul of Aleppo, in Arabic, trans. F. C. Belfour (London: Ori-
ental Translation Committee, 1829–36). An abridged version of this text was pub-
lished by Lady Laura Ridding, The Travels of Macarius, Extracts from the Diary
(1936: rep. New York: Arno Press, 1971).
13. British Library, MS Harley 7575, “The Conversion and Baptism of Isuf,” 19.
14. Cl. Larquié, “Les esclaves de Madrid à l’époque de la décadence
(1650–1700),” Revue Historique 224 (1970): 62, n.8.
15. Hussayn Khujah, “Al-Asrar al-kamina bi-ahwal al-kinah kinah,” MS 14117,
National Library of Tunis.
16. In a letter to Madame de Saint Olon, the wife of the French Ambassador to
Morocco, he stated that he was going to “parler de vous à nos Enfans, du bien que
vous nous avez fait.” Mercure Galant, May 1699, 218.
17. Tenth Report of the Royal Commission of Historcal Manuscripts (London:
Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1885), 456–57.
18. Captain John Braithwaite, The History of the Revolutions in the Empire of
Morocco (London: J. Darby, 1729), 65, 73.
19. Mahmud bin Said Maqdish, Nuzhat al-anzar fi ajaib al-tawarikh wa-al-
akhbar (Beirut: Dar al-Gharb al-Islami, 1988), 2:216. The historian Abu al-Qasim al-
Zayyani (1734–1833) visited Leghorn where he stayed for four months, then
continued by land to Marseilles and Barcelona and then returned to Morocco—
where he wrote an account of his travels and the world at large: Al-Tarjumanah al-
kubra fi akhbar al-mamura, ed. Abd al-Karim al-Filali (Rabat: Wizarat al-Anba
1967), 373 ff. See also G. Salmon, “Un voyageur Marocain à la fin du XVIII siècle,”
Archives Marocaines 2 (1905): 330–40.
20. See Tahar Mansouri, “Les Relations entre Marchands Chretiens et
Marchands Musulmans au Maghreb à la fin du Moyen-Age,” in Chretiens et Musul-
mans à la Renaissance, comp. Bartolomé Bennassar and Robert Sauzet (Paris: H.
Champion, 1998), 411; Samir Ali Khadim, Al-Sharq al-Islami wa-al gharb al-
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xli

Introduction xli

Masihi . . . 1450–1517 (Beirut: Muassasat al-Rihani, 1989). Charles Issawi, “The De-
cline of Middle Eastern Trade, 1100–1850,” in The Global Opportunity, ed. Felipe
Fernandez-Armesto (Aldershot, England: Variorium, 1995), esp. 141–47. For earlier
accounts of Arab-Islamic travel, see R. P. Blake and R. N. Frye, “Notes on the Risala
of B. Fadlan,” Byzantina Metabyzantina 1 (1949): 3–37; Abdurrahman A. El-Hajji,
“At-Turtushi, the Andalusian Traveler and his Meeting with Pope John XII,” Islamic
Quarterly 11 (1967): 129–36; Houari Touati, Islam et Voyage au Moyen Âge (Paris:
Seuil, 2001).
21. Devon Quarter Session, 128/99/6.
22. Chronique Anonyme de la Dynastie Sa’dienne, ed. Georges S. Colin (Rabat:
F. Moncho, 1934), 45.
23. L. P. Harvey, “The Literary Culture of the Moriscos, 1492–1609,” MS. D.Phil,
d. 2040-1 (Oxford University, 1958), 325. There are many articles on the flight of
Moriscos and the routes they took: see Abdeljelil Temimi, “Le passage des
Morisques à Marseille, Livourne et Istanbul d’apres de nouveaux documents ital-
iens,” Revue d’Histoire Maghrebine 55–56 (1989): 303–16. Until the expulsion of
1609, many Moriscos and Moors traveled from Spain to North Africa and vice
versa—as one of Francisco de Tàrrega’s characters in the play Los Moriscos de Hor-
nachos declared; see Jean-Marc Pelorson, “Recherches sur la “Comedia” Los
Moriscos De Hornachos,” Bulletin Hispanique 74 (1972): 41; C. B. Boubland, ed.,
“Los Moriscos de Hornachos” Modern Philology 1 (1903–4), scene 3, p. 556. Even
after the expulsion, they continued to correspond with the remnant of Moriscos in
Spain: Hossein Bouzinelo, “‘Plática’ en torno de la entrega de la Alcazaba de Salé en
el Siglo XVII,” in Al-Qantara 15 (1994), 69.
24. The Lebanese Maronites Jibrail al-Suhyuni, Nasrallah al-Aqoori, and
Yuhanna al-Hasruni studied in Rome at the Maronite College and later traveled to
France to assist in the establishment of an Arabic press.
25. For example, on the travels of Ibn Abid al-Fasi to Aden in 1587, see his Rih-
lat, ed. Ibrahim al-Samarrai and Abd Allah Muhammad al-Hibshi (Beirut: Dar al-
Gharb al-Islami, 1993). On the journey of Abu Abdallah Muhammad al-Tamjarouti
to Istanbul in 1589–91, see his Kitab al-Nafhah al-Miskiyah fi al-Safarah al-Turkiyah
(Tetuan: n.p., 1960). His name appears as Majruti in Hollis (although the Arabic is al-
Tamjarouti). On the journey of Abu Salim al-Ayyashi to Mecca, Medina, and
Jerusalem in 1663, see Ma al-Mawaid (Fez: n.p., 1899). On the journey of Ibrahim
bin abd al-Rahim al-Khiyari to Damascus and Istanbul in 1663, see his Rihlat al-Khi-
yari, ed. Raja Mahmud al-Samarrai (Baghdad: Wizarat al-Thaqafah wa-al-Alam,
1969). On the journey of Muhammad bin Zakour to Algeria in 1682, see his Nashr
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xlii

xlii Introduction

Azahir al-Bustan (Rabat: al-Matbaah al-Mulkiyah, 1967). These travelers were very
careful about documenting their travels, “I used to take notes during my journey,”
wrote al-Khiyari, ”about everything I saw, observed or thought....Despite the diffi-
culty of travel, I scribbled the information whenever I felt inspired.” Ibrahim bin
Abd al-Rahman al-Khiyari, Tuhfat al-Udaba wa-salwat al-ghuraba, ed. Raja’ Mahmud
al-Samarrai (Baghdad: Wizarat al-Thagafah wa-al-Alam, 1969) and M. Hadj-Sadok,
“Le Genre ‘rih’la,’” Bulletin des Études Arabes 8 (1949): 195–206. See also Abder-
rahmane El Moudden, “The Ambivalence of Rihla: Community Integration and
Self-Definition in Moroccan Travel Accounts, 1300–1800,” in Muslim Travelers: Pil-
grimge, Migration, and the Religious Imagination, ed. Dale F. Eickelman and James
Piscatori (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 69–84.
26. Mohammad al-Manooni, “Malamih min tatawwur al-Maghrib al-Arabi fi bi-
dayat al-usuor al-haditha,” in Ashghal al-Mutamar al-Awal li-Tarikh al-Maghrib al-
Arabi wa-Hadaratih (Tunis: al-Jamiah al-Tuniisiyah, 1979), 106n.
27. Mulay Ahmad, quoted in chapter 3 of Mohammad Hajji, al-Harakah al-
fikriyah bi-al-Maghrib (Rabat: Dar al-Maghrib lil-Tailif, 1976), part 1, 248–50.
28. Abd al-Majid al-Qadduri, Ibn Abi Mahali al-Faqih al-Tha’ir (Rabat: Manshu-
rat Ukaz, 1991), 165.
29. See the introduction to Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance
Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991); chapter 1 in my Turks,
Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999); and Albert Mas, Les Turcs dans la Littérature espagnole du siècle d’or
(Paris: Centre de recherches hispaniques, 1967). For pictorial representations, see
Yvette Cardaillac-Hermosilla, “Images du Maure en Europe à la Renaissance,”
Chretiens et Musulmans à l’Epoque de la Renaissance, ed. Abdeljelil Temimi (Za-
ghouan: Fondation Temimi, 1997), 79–114.
30. “An Heroick Poem to the King, upon the Arrival of the Morocco and Bantam
Embassadors, to his Majesty of Great Britain” (July 1682), 3–4.
31. Ibn al-Sarraj, Uns al-sari wa-al sarib, ed. Muhammod al-fasi (fasi: Wizarat al-
Dawlah, 1968), 7.
32. Muhammad Tammam, Tilimsan abra al-usur (Al-Jazair: Al-Muassasah al-
Wataniyah lil-Kitab, 1984), 241.
33. Charles Penz, Les Emerveillements Parisiens d’un Ambassadeur de Moualy Is-
mail, (Janvier-Fevrier 1682), (Paris: Editions Siboney, n.d.), which was taken from
Compte Henri de Castries, Les Sources inédites . . . Dynastie Filalienne . . . Archives
et Bibliothèques de France (Paris: E. Leroux, 1922), vol. 1; Eugène Plantet, Mouley
Ismael Empereur du Maroc et la Princesse de Conti (Paris: E. Jamin, 1893/1912); Jean
Baptiste Lully, Atys: tragedi en musique (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1682).
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xliii

Introduction xliii

34. Castries, Les Sources inédites . . . Dynastie Filalienne, 1:656.

35. For the list of gifts, see La Gazette de France, February 28, 1682, p. 142.
36. Jean Baptiste de Fiennes, Une Mission Tunisienne à Paris en 1743 ed. Pierre
Grandchamp (Tunis: J. Aloccio, 1931), 11, 21, 41.
37. Muhammad bin al-Tayyib al-Qadiri, Kitab iltiqat al-durar, ed. Hashim al-
Alawi al-Qasimi (Beirut: Dar al-Afaq al-Jadidah, 1983), 2:135. For the impact of Ara-
bic books on sub-Saharan Africa, see Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), chapter 3.
38. Quoted in Mulay Bilhemissi, Al-Jazair min khilal rahalat al-maghariba fi al-
’ahd al-Othmani (Al-Jazair: Al-Sharika al-Wataniya lil-Nashr, 1981), 75–76.
39. Ibid., 59.
40. I am indebted to Dr. Ibrahim Chabbouh, former director of the National Li-
brary of Tunis, who passed on this information in a private conference held with him
in Amman, Jordan, June 18, 2000.
41. See Wahid Qaddurah, Bidayat al-tibaah al-Arabiyah fi Istanbul wa-bilad al-
Sham (Tunis: Markaz al-Dirasat wa-al-Buhuth, 1993), 170 ff.
42. Gustavus Fluegel, Lexicon Bibliographicum et Encyclopaedicum a Mustafa
ben Abdallah Katib Jelebi, 7 vols. (London: R. Bentley, 1835–58). For books circulat-
ing in the Maghreb, see 6:648–64. For a brief biography of Khalifa, see the introduc-
tion to the Arabic text by Shihab al-Din al-Najafi (Baghdad: Maktabat al-Muthanna,
1972).
43. Correspondence des Beys de Tunis, ed. Eugène Plantet (Paris: Ancienne Li-
braire, 1894), 2:228, 234.
44. For the Maliki injunction (Maliki is the Islamic school of jurisprudence in
North Africa, excluding Egypt.), see Jerome Weiner, “Fitna, corsairs and diplomacy”
(Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976), p 114. See also the long note in Majid, Un-
veiling Traditions, 183, n. 44.
45. Actually, at a time when early modern Christendom was still deeply appre-
hensive about curiositas—the quality that had led to Adam’s primeval sin—it is not
possible to find travel curiosity among Europeans: “it is difficult to discover in the
[European] literature of the period any whole-hearted and unqualified commenda-
tion of travel,” notes Samuel Chew in The Crescent and the Rose (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1937), 29. See also G. K. Hunter, “Elizabethans and Foreigners,” in
Shakespeare in His Own Age, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1965), 37–53; Carlo Ginzburg, “High and Low: the Theme of Forbidden
Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Past and Present 73 (1976):
28–41. See Edward Said’s reaction to Lewis, as if curiosity toward Europeans was
“the only acceptable criterion” of knowledge: “Orientalism: Reconsidered,” in Orien-
00LotC.front 10/8/02 12:11 PM Page xliv

xliv Introduction

talism: A Reader, ed. A. L. Macfie (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 351.
46. Al-Hasan bin Masood al-Yusi, Al-Qanun, ed. Hamid Hamani (Rabat: Matbaat
dar Al-Furgan, 1998), ch. 7.
47. The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadel-
phia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 1:108.
48. State Papers (hereafter, SP), Public Record Office, London, 71/12/165.
49. SP 71/17/118.
50. Ahmad Bucharb [Bu Sharb], “Les Conséquences Socio-Cultuerelles de la
Conquête Ibérique du Littoral Marocain,” in Relaciones de la Peninsula Ibérica con
el Magreb siglos XIII–XVI, ed. Mercedes García-Arenal and María J. Viguera
(Madrid, 1988), 492–93 in 487–539.
51. Paul Sebag, “Une ville Européene à Tunis au XVIe Siècle” Cahiers de Tunisie
9 (1961): 97–108; and Noureddine Saghaier, “Un Faubourg Chretien à Tunis au
XVIe Siècle,” in Temimi, ed., Chretiens et Musulmans, 221–231.
52. Plantet, Deys d’Alger, 1:158, note. Algiers had been one of the most attractive
cities on the Mediterranean. Half a century earlier, in 1638, even an English captive
in Algiers praised its beautiful buildings, noting that its “houses [were] built staire-
like one over the other, enjoying a most wholesome ayre and pleasant situation:
scarce any house of the City but hath the prospect of the Sea, there are in her many
stupendious and sumptious edifices. . . . [there is] a multitude of people, and exces-
sive Riches, in gold, plate, and household furniture her women for beautie give place
to none”: Francis Knight, A Relation of Seaven yeares Slaverie vnder the Turkes of
Argeire, suffered by an English Captive Merchant (London: T. Cotes, 1640), 32.
53. Ahmad Bu Sharb, Dukkalah wa-al-isti’mar al-Burtughali (Al-Dar al-Bayda:
Dar al-Thaqafah, 1984), 438 and 334–401. See also the drawings of Portuguese forti-
fications in Ahmad bin Ghanem’s Kitab ul-izz, reproduced in Mohammad Abdallah
Annan, “Min Turath al-Adab al-Andalusi al-Moorisci,” Revista del Instituto de Estu-
dios Islámicos en Madrid, 16 (1971): plate 4.
54. Al-Fasi, Rihlat Ibn Abid al-Fasi, 85. For the presidios, see chapter 2 in Henk
Driessen, On the Spanish-Moroccan Frontier (New York: Berg, 1992).
55. See Christians and Moors in Spain, comp. Colin Smith (Warminster: Aris and
Phillips, 1992):3: 128–33.
56. See the seminal article by Comte Henri de Castries, “Les Corsaires de Salé,”
Revue des Deux Mondes 13 (1903): 823–52. Castries was writing at the height of
French colonialism and may therefore be excused for failing to see the fear of the
colonized. No excuse, however, can be made for Bruce Taylor, who repeated, uncrit-
ically, Castries’s ideas in “The Enemy within and without: An Anatomy of Fear on the
Spanish Mediterranean Littoral,” Fear in Early Modern Society, ed. William G. Na-
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DIARIO DEL

PILOTO DE LA REAL ARMADA, D. BASILIO VILLARINO, DEL
RECONOCIMIENTO, QUE HIZO DEL RÍO NEGRO, EN LA COSTA
ORIENTAL DE PATAGONIA, EL AÑO DE 1782 ***
Nota de transcripción
Notas
 DIAR IO
DEL

PILOTO DE LA REAL ARMADA,

D. B AS I L I O V I L LA R I N O,
DEL

RECONOCIMIENTO QUE HIZO

DEL

RIO NEGRO,
EN LA

COSTA ORIENTAL DE PATAGONIA,

EL

AÑO DE 1782.

Primera
Edicion.

BUENOS-AIR ES.
—
I M P R E N TA D E L E S TA D O.
—
1837.
 DIARIO DE VILLARINO.

DIA SABADO 28 DE SETIEMBRE DE 1782.

A las 12½ del dia puse á la vela las cuatro embarcaciones de mi
mando, que llevo para hacer este reconocimiento, á cuyo tiempo me
hallaba equipado y provisto con aquellas cosas que se me dieron, y
pudo proporcionarse en este establecimiento: y en esta tarde
navegaron hasta la Laguna Grande en el Puerto de San Xavier,
habiéndome quedado yo hasta el dia 1.º de Octubre por aclarar
algunos cargos con la Contaduría: y en este dia me incorporé al
anochecer con la expedicion, que estaba 9 leguas rio arriba de este
establecimiento, en cuyo sitio hice noche.

DIA 2 DE OCTUBRE.
Este dia arreglé las guardias, los ranchos de la gente, y hice
algunos transbordos de útiles y víveres para acomodarlos mejor;
habiéndose mantenido el viento al NO que es enteramente contrario
á esta navegacion. A las 2 de la tarde se llamó el viento al S flojo, y
con él me hice inmediatamente á la vela, y con la ayuda de los
remos, sirga, y de los caballos, en los parages á donde podian
entrar, navegué cinco leguas, y dos y media en línea recta, al ONO 5
grados O de la aguja, hasta las 7 de la noche que me acampé; y me
hallo distante del establecimiento 11 leguas, al NO ¼ O corregido.

DIA 3.
 A las 6 de la mañana me hice á la vela prosiguiendo mi viage, y á
las 7, sobre una fugada de viento por el SO, desarbolé del palo
mayor: arrimé á tierra para componerle y zafar la maniobra; y por
haber refrescado el viento mucho, no pudimos seguir mas adelante
hasta las 2 de la tarde; y á las 6½ paré inmediato al corte de la
madera de arriba.

DIA 4.
Amaneció con el viento al OSO, duró y siguió todo el dia con
granizo, de modo que no fué posible salir, ni hacer camino alguno.

DIA 5.
A las 6 de la mañana proseguí mi viage hasta las 6 de la tarde,
habiendo navegado 12 leguas por el rio, y 5 en línea recto al ONO 5
grados N corregido; habiendo estado el viento al SSO duro.

DIA 6.
Al salir el sol proseguí mi viage, y teniendo espias con la gente
casi todo el dia en el agua, navegué ¾ de legua al ONO corregido, y
por las vueltas del rio 3 leguas. Aquí hay superior terreno en estas
rinconadas, y abundante sauceria en las islas.

DIA 7.
Al salir el sol, salí continuando mi navegacion con viento al NO
fresco: seguí hasta las 6 de la tarde que me acampé, habiendo
hecho el rumbo directo al NO ¼ O corregido; distancia de 1½ legua
siempre al remo y á la sirga, y por las vueltas del Rio Cuarto, en
cuya distancia hay dos potreros de buen terreno, mucho pasto y
bastante saucería, con 7 islas que están en medio del rio.
 DIA 8.
Salí al amanecer á la sirga, por ser el viento contrario y la
corriente mucha: navegamos hasta las 8 de la noche, y sin embargo
del esfuerzo que se hizo, no pudimos navegar mas que 5 leguas por
el rio, y 2 en línea recta al ONO 3 grados O corregido.

DIA 9.
Al salir el sol salí, y navegué hasta las 8 de la noche, 2 leguas al
rumbo directo del ONO 5 grados N corregido: y en esta distancia
hace el rio dos potreros de buen terreno, grandes, y las entradas
muy angostas. Este dia, á las 3 de la tarde, pasé la primera
angostura.

DIA 10.
Al salir el sol salí á la sirga con los caballos, y al remo hasta el al
anochecer, y navegué 6 leguas y á rumbo directo al NO corregido 2:
en este íntermedio es el terreno bastante estéril, y con pocos
sauces.

DIA 11.
Al salir el sol, seguimos nuestro viage con viento N fresco y
contrario: á las 11½ se rompió contra un sauce el palo del trinquete
de la chalupa San Francisco de Asis. Al anochecer nos acampamos
cerca de la segunda angostura, habiendo pasado, á las 3½ de la
tarde, la boca de parte de este rio, donde entra una corriente
velocisima y forma una grande isla. Este dia he navegado 6 leguas
por rio, y en línea recta 2; y un tercio al N ¼ O corregido.

DIA 12.
 Al ser de dia mandé al carpintero le hiciese mecha nueva al palo
mayor de la chalupa San Juan, y á las 7 de la mañana continuamos
nuestro viage: á las 8 varamos, y nos detuvo bastante el sacar al
San José: á las 11 pasamos la segunda angostura: á las 2 de la
tarde estabamos en el camino de San Antonio, y á las 7 de la noche
nos acampamos, y volví á repetir las órdenes á los patrones de las
chalupas para que no se separasen, por habérselas dado
continuamente. Navegué este dia al NO corregido 3½ leguas, y por
el rio 6½ segun sus vueltas.

DIA 13.
A las 6 de la mañana salí en cuanto me daba el viento por el N, y
paré á las 9 del dia por ser el viento contrario y aparentar agua.
Mandé poner los toldos á las embarcaciones, y al carpintero que
registrase una isla y buscase un palo para el San José, el que no
pudo hallar. Registré el armamento, y hallé 8 fusiles inutiles y 5
pistolas: cargué las armas restantes, y navegué al ángulo de 65
grandos 00 en el cuarto cuadrante, 3 minutos de distancia.

DIA 14.
Salí al amanecer continuando mi viage, y á las 10 llegaron del
establecimiento D. Juan Ignacio Perez y D. Pedro Indart. Arrimé á
tierra, y mandé al carpintero á registrar otra isla para el dicho palo, y
trajo uno que puso al instante en astillero, y queda á toda prisa
trabajando en él. Hoy navegué al NO ¼ O corregido, 3 millas de
distancia en línea recta: el terreno en esta inmediacion es bastante
inferior.

DIA 15.
Se prosigue trabajando en el palo de San José, y la gente de mar,
que se entretiene en tomar liebres para ayudar á los víveres, mató
28. Mandé dos peones á hacer la descubierta, y dijeron que en 8
leguas no se hallaba rastro fresco.

DIA 16.
Al amanecer arbolé el palo mayor nuevo. Se fueron D. Ignacio y
D. Pedro, al mismo tiempo que me hice á la vela, continuando mi
reconomiento con viento por el S flojo: refrescó bastante el viento, y
á las 9 varamos, que costó bastante trabajo sacar el San José: á las
12½ volvió á varar, y lo sacamos á la una de la tarde. Seguimos con
viento fresco: á las 5 pasamos la Cruz de Villarino: á las 7 hicimos
noche, y este dia fué el de mejor navegacion, pues conducimos por
el rio 11 leguas, y directamente, al NO corregido, 16 millas
marítimas: pero tuvimos la desgracia de que descubriese agua la
chalupa San José, y quedé observando, á ver si puedo descubrir por
donde la hace, por no vararla, que me seria de mucho atraso.

DIA 17.
A las dos de la mañana empezó á llover, y siguió hasta el
mediodia, y el San José hizo 68 baldes de agua, desde ayer al
anochecer hasta esta hora. A la una de la tarde continué á la sirga,
por ser el viento fresco contrario, y no poder los caballos entrar:
seguí á remo y sirga hasta el anochecer, que me acampé, habiendo
hecho el rumbo del NO ¼ O corregido, 3 millas de distancia.

DIA 18.
Al salir el sol continué mi viage á la sirga, por estar calma: al
mediodia observé el sol en 39° 44′, y dí dos horas de descanso á la
marineria. Seguí navegando á la sirga y remo hasta las siete de la
tarde, habiendo hecho el rumbo directo de 62° 00′ en cuarto
cuadrante, 7 millas de distancia.
 DIA 19.
Al salir el sol continué mi viage, y habiendo navegado hasta el
anochecer hice solo 5 millas de distancia, al O ¼ NO corregido, tales
fueron las vueltas que hicimos, segun el rio, de barranca á barranca:
pero hay en este intermedio muy buenos potrero, ó rinconadas de
buenas tierras, y esta noche no parecieron los caballerizos con la
caballada.

DIA 20.
Salí al amanecer, y navegué hasta las ocho de la noche 8 millas,
al ángulo de 58° 00′ en cuarto cuadrante, que por las vueltas del rio
fueron 33; y en este intermedio hay algunas rinconadas de
excelentes tierras, y he visto algunos árboles de la misma especie
que los que sirven para hacer carbon en el establecimiento. Cuando
atraqué á la costa del S para acamparme, hallé al dragon llamado
Torres, que con el peon Vergara me condujeron 15 caballos de órden
del Señor Super-Intendente, que yo habia pedido para servicio de la
expedicion.

DIA 21.
Amaneció el dia con viento al NO, tan fuerte que no fué posible
hacer camino, por lo que me mantuve en este parage, y mande dos
peones á la descubierta; los que me dijeron habrian caminado como
9 leguas rio arriba, y no hallaron otra novedad que el juntarse la
barranca del S con el rio, de aquí como 8 leguas, sin que haya
camino para pasar á la orilla, internándose el camino de los indios
como dos leguas tierra adentro.

DIA 22.
 Amaneció con el viento al SO flojo: á las 7 se fueron para el
establecimiento el soldado José Torres y el peon Vergara; y yo
continué mi viage, y navegué este dia solo 3 millas al NO corregido,
por la fuerte corriente, viento contrario y malos sirgaderos.

DIA 23.
Al ser de dia seguí, continuando mi viage con viento al NO fuerte,
pasando á la sirga y á fuerza de espias. A las tres de la tarde se
llamó el viento al SE récio, y tanto, que la chalupa San Francisco
partió cuatro vergas sin poder casi romper la fuerza de la corriente,
particularmente en el Estrecho de las Siete Islas. Navegué hasta las
siete de la noche al NO corregido, 9 millas de distancia. Dios quiso
darnos este viento tan á tiempo y tan á propósito para pasar este
parage, que á no ser así de seguro tardariamos en salir de este
parage mas de dos semanas.

DIA 24.
Navegué todo el dia á la sirga y teniendo espias, sin que tuviese
hueco para dar de comer á la gente. A mediodia, por la fuerza de la
corriente me faltó un cabo de tres pulgadas: esta tarde se vió fuego
al NO como á distancia de 4 leguas: hice el rumbo del NO ¼ O
corregido, 3 millas de distancia. En este intermedio y lo navegado
ayer, hay mucha sauceria, y conté 16 islas: el terreno de una banda
y otra es malísimo en dicho intermedio.

DIA 25.
Anoche, no habiendo parecido los caballerizos, estuve con mucho
cuidado: esta mañana mandé en busca del capataz, y yo monté á
caballo y seguí el rio aguas arriba, y hallé un potrero de buen pasto
y terreno, que tendrá como una legua cuadrada, cuyo sitio parece
no ser frecuentado de indios, aunque á la salida hallé una senda
muy vieja por donde han transitado. Pero el camino que
regularmente siguen pasa tierra adentro, y separado de dicho
potrero mas de dos leguas; por lo que mandé al capataz trajese allí
la caballada por precisarme el rio á separarme dos leguas en una
vuelta que hace al N; y en este intermedio hay una isla de igual
anchura con muchos sauces, y á mi parecer buen terreno. Al
anochecer avisté los caballerizos á la parte del S, á cuya banda pasé
en el bote, los que me digeron no habia novedad, y que no habian
podido descubrir los indios, ni saber en que parte estaba el fuego
que avistamos todo el dia: pero que en la inflexion que hace el rio
mas arriba, ya se separaba de la barranca, y habia buen parage para
los caballos, pues hacia ya de la parte del S considerable llanura. En
cuya atención, y en la de que es mi intento llegar con las
embarcaciones á los toldos primero que los caballos, que con eso
aseguro la caballada, lo que no sucederá si acaece lo contrario,
mandé al capataz cuidase los caballos en el parage donde estaban, y
estuviese atento cuando yo llegase con las embarcaciones á la
llanura que me decia, y entonces condujese allí la caballada.
Este dia navegué en línea recta 4 millas al ONO corregido.

DIA 26.
Salí al salir el sol á la sirga, y navegué al NO 4¼ millas, habiendo
hecho alto á las 4 de la tarde para aguardar la caballada y tener los
peones á la vista: pues esta mañana á las 9½, habiendo mandado
los peones á registrar el campo, hallaron un indio que andaba
corriendo guanacos, el que no quiso venir á bordo. Fueron 3 peones
á ver los toldos, y satisfechos que solo dos toldos habia, llegaron á
ellos y hallaron otro indio mas en ellos y unas cuantas chinas, que
ninguno quiso venir á bordo. Preguntaron por Francisco, y unos
dijeron que se habia ido para la tierra de las Manzanas, y otros que
estaba cerca. A las 2 de la tarde divisaron los peones un indio,
encima de un cerro observándonos: fueron hasta el cerro, y ya no
pareció. Por esto, y porque mas adelante no habia parage en donde
tener los caballos, de modo que estuviesen inmediatos á las
embarcaciones, paré y mandé se trajesen.
Cuatro dias há que intento pasar la caballada á la parte del N,
por los mejores pastos y sirgaderos, y proporcion de tenerlos cerca,
pero no fué posible por no haber paso, esto es, caida ni salida del
rio, por las barrancas que hace.
Esta noche se toldaron las embarcaciones, por haber empezado á
llover con truenos.

DIA 27.
A las 5½ de la mañana me hice á la vela, rio arriba, con viento
ESE flojo, por lo que fué menester la ayuda de la sirga y de los
remos, habiendo dejado la caballada en este sitio á fin de
avanzarme con las embarcaciones, y de la parte de arriba de los
toldos: á cuyo efecto previne al capataz de la caballada estuviese en
observacion para que la condujese al parage donde hiciesen noche
las chalupas. Hasta mediodia nos ayudó bastante el viento por el E:
á este tiempo pasó un peon un brazo del rio, á donde hallaron los
indios con sus toldos, y vino á darme la noticia de que ya los indios
los habian levantado y se habian ido. Pero no pudiendo arrimar á
tierra, ni los caballos pasar adonde yo estaba, caminé sin poder dar
de comer á la gente, á fin de avanzar hasta donde pudiese estar el
reguardo de peones y caballada. Seguí toda la tarde á fuerza de
remo y vela, no siendo esta bastante á romper la rapidez del rio: á
las 6½ avisté los peones, arrimé á donde estaban, y hallé con ellos
al hermano del capitan Chiquito, y otro indio que venia en busca
nuestra, por haberle dado noticia de nosotros los indios que
levantaron los toldos. Los regalé con bizcocho, aguardiente y tabaco,
á fin de que por ellos tengan, los mas indios que haya, noticia de
nuestro buen trato: se fueron ya de noche los indios á sus toldos, y
quedé en este parage á pasar la noche. A las 10 de la mañana ya
me separé de la barranca del S, y navegué este dia al O ¼ NO
corregido 15 millas de distancia.
 DIA 28.
Salí á las 6 de la mañana, y navegué hasta las 6 de la tarde al
ONO corregido 6 millas de distancia. Hoy se tomaron dos truchas de
2½ libras cada una, sin que hubiese mas novedad. Los caballerizos
se quedaron separados de nosotros, por no poder alcanzar adonde
estaba la caballada.

DIA 29.
Salí á las 6 de la mañana: á las 9 llegué adonde se junta el rio
con la barranca del N, la que fuí á reconocer por parecerme, ó por
no quedar con la desconfianza de si tendria por una quebrada que
habia algun arroyo. Volví á mediodia, y hallé cuatro indios junto á las
embarcaciones, con la novedad de que venia la cacica vieja y la
lenguaraza Teresa. Continué mi viage, y á las 5 de la tarde me
avisaron que estaban las referidas chinas, y otras dos mas con 10
indios que las acompañaban, en parage que de ningun modo yo
podia llegar allí con las embarcaciones: esto me puso en cuidado por
los caballerizos y caballada, por lo que tomé el medio de traer con el
botecillo los dichos indios y las chinas á dormir junto á las
embarcaciones, que con esto aseguro por esta noche los caballos.
Se les dió de comer, y se les regaló aguardiente, algun bizcocho y
tabaco, y les hice varias preguntas concernientes á mi comision; y
dicen, que de donde tiene los toldos Francisco hasta el Colorado hay
dos dias de camino; y de este parage hasta el Choelechel diez: que
antes de llegar hallaremos dos rios á la parte del N que entran á
este: que inmediato á los toldos de Francisco debemos pasar la
caballada á la parte del N, porque la del S es intransitable, y que
ellos, cuando van á las tierras de las manzanas, se separan del rio y
caminan tierra adentro. Que el cacique del caballo bailarin está de
aquí tierra adentro al SSO, y que las aguadas que tiene son pozos.
Este dia navegué al ONO corregida 4½ millas de distancia.
 DIA 30.
Se fueron les indios á las ocho de la mañana, y yo continué mi
viage con viento contrario, y siempre inmediato á la barranca del N:
se llamó el viento al SO, y con la ayuda de este y los caballos, pues
hubo algunos buenos sirgaderos, navegué al ángulo directo de 50°
00′ en cuadrante, 8 millas de distancia, y por las vueltas del rio, 18.
Esta mañana me dijeron los indios que venian indios Aucaces del
Colorado á las tolderias de Francisco, y que este habia ido á
encontrarlos: que los dias pasados habian pasado por el Choelechel
muchos Aucas, con mucha porcion de ganado. A las 7 me acampé:—
órden San Lorenzo.

DIA 31.
Salí á la mañana con viento al NO fuerte. A las 12½ llegó el
dragon Villalba á decirme de parte del dragon Antonio, que lo
esperase, pues traia ganado y venia este muy cansado. A la una
vinieron los indios en caballos reyunos. A las dos se fué Villalba y el
peon que le acompañaba, á incorporarse con los que traen el
ganado, y yo continúe á pasar mas adelante, media legua que hay
de muy malos sirgaderos. Al ponerse el sol me acampé, no habiendo
podido conseguir salir de dichos malos pasos. Al anochecer he visto
á Villalba y al peon; y preguntado como no habian vuelto á ayudar á
traer y custodiar el ganado, y que si sucedia alguna cosa como
quedariamos? Me respondió, que venia gente bastante con él, y que
lo mismo sucederia que ellos estuviesen allí, como que nó: navegué
este dia al ángulo de 60° 00′ en cuarto cuadrante 4 millas de
distancia, y por él no han sido 13.
 DIA 1.º DE NOVIEMBRE.
Al amanecer se fué Villalba y el peon, y yo continué siguiendo mi
viage hasta la 1½ de la tarde, habiendo navegado al ONO 5 millas
de distancia. A esta hora llegó el dragon Antonio, me entregó las
cartas de oficio del Super-Intendente, y me pidió un peon para
ayudarle á traer el ganado que estaba cerca: hice alto en este sitio,
y volvió con el ganado á los cuatro de la tarde, que constaba de 30
reses. A las dos de la tarde llegaron indios con la lenguaraza Teresa,
la que trajo noticia que Francisco con sus toldos habia caminado rio
arriba, á un parage donde esperaba porcion de Aucas: que mucha
gente, de la que estaba con él, se habian vuelto rio abajo, hasta un
paso que habia, á donde iban á pasar las mugeres y niños, para que
estos siguiesen al Colorado, y ellos volverse á robarnos los caballos y
matar los peones; y que esta noticia la mandaba el cacique viejo,
que fué el único que se quedó con su toldo en el parage á donde
estaba. Esta noche puse 5 marineros á caballo á rondar el ganado y
caballada, con los 5 peones que tengo, y los 6 que vinieron del
pueblo: con este dragon vino el calafate José de los Santos y un
peon con 8 caballos.

DIA 2.
Esta mañana se fueron los indios, á quienes regalé y ofrecí
amistad y buena armonia, y yo continué mi viage. Esta noche,
habiéndole dado á la lenguaraza bastante aguardiente, me confesó
que Francisco se habia ido de miedo, pero á juntar indios, y que el
viejo no habia caminado con ellos, porque estaba tan enfermo que
no podia montar á caballo. A mediodia observé el sol en 39° 00′ de
latitud S: vinieron algunos indios, á quienes regalé y obsequié
bastante. Al anochecer largaron los indios sus caballos entre los
nuestros, y dijeron que les mandaba el cacique que dormiesen entre
nosotros. Mandé á los peones y gente de guardia tuviesen mucho
cuidado con ellos, pues dicen que ya se vuelven á unir los toldos y á
juntar los indios. A mediodia estaba inmediato á una horqueta, que
por los indios no pude averiguar si es de algun otro rio que entra por
el N del principal, ó si es formada por alguna isla. Este dia hice el
rumbo del NO ¼ O, 4 millas de distancia directa que por las vueltas
del rio se hicieron.

DIA 3.
Salí siguiendo mi viage á las cinco de la mañana: á mediodia
llegó el cacique Francisco con un número como de 30 á 40 indios;
los regalé y convidé con aguardiente, tabaco y bizcocho, y se les
hizo de comer á todos, y á las dos de la tarde continué, y los indios
anduvieron entre el ganado y la caballada, por lo que
inmediatamente hice venir todo al costado de las embarcaciones. Al
anochecer acampé, y vinieron 6 indios de parte de Francisco, con
una botija á pedir aguardiente: se la dí, así por esegurar los
chasques que vengan del pueblo, como por adquirir noticias, y por
medio de sus indios ó esclavos mandar ahora chasque con nuestra
gente al pueblo, á fin de tener pronta respuesta á los oficios que
envio. Este dia fué la distancia directa de 1½ millas al NO: aquí hay
excelentes potreros y buenas tierras.

DIA 4.
Salí de mañana, y á las 9 del dia llegó uno de los nuestros con la
noticia de que los indios habian levantado los toldos, y ya caminaban
las chinas con ellos, menos el de Francisco, y del viejo: y luego llegó
Francisco con su familia y mas de 50 indios y chinas, y viendo yo la
mucha canalla que venia, tiré á navegar sin arrimar á tierra; y á las
dos de la tarde volvieron: se les dió de comer y aguardiente; y á la
noche se repitió lo mismo. Navegué este dia dos millas al NO ¼ O, y
hay muy buenas tierras. Esta tarde, que navegué en una sola vuelta
9 millas de distancia, cuando paré á la noche tenia, desde el parage
de donde habia salido al mediodia de camino en línea recta 180
varas, que así son las vueltas y potreros de este rio, los cuales
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