Mogador

‘I don’t believe there is a force that would compel me to endanger my life in times of the plague to guard the goods of others’, wrote an increasingly frustrated Dutch consular agent, Jean David Subremont, in September 1799. He was in Mogador, now Essaouira, then Morocco’s most important trading port. Subremont had shut himself in the consular house for three months, as had many Europeans, Muslims and Jews.  Others fled to the gardens outside the city walls or sought refuge in the countryside. Subremont had spent more than twenty years living in Morocco, but death had never felt so close. He survived, but his reports tell of tragedy: twin infants abandoned by their nurses to die only for the nurses themselves to follow; impoverished infected Muslims and Jews coming from the countryside seeking burial places; young lives lost just before marriage; a Jewish merchant’s daughter driven mad by her father’s death; businessmen ruined as their debtors perished; and Subremont himself losing his hearing.

‘If a Christian is attacked by that disease, no one will come to his aid, neither during his illness, nor close to his death’, Subremont, wrote. He had witnessed the death of a merchant in his own house, caring for him in his last hours. His assertion that he did so alone, however, may have been exaggerated, likely to emphasize his plea to leave the city. Instead his chief, Consul General Blount, wanted Subremont to remain where he was, in order to manage the business affairs of merchants under Dutch protection who had fled to safety abroad. Blount himself, normally based in Tangier, had fled to Spain, a fact not lost on Subremont.

Last month, I was reminded of this irony as I stood in Essaouira’s Kasbah quarter, where the government offices, foreign consulates, and the homes of wealthy Muslims, Jews, and Christians once stood. For most visitors, Essaouira is a charming medina with a windy, temperate climate. Its narrow alleys, colorful walls, remnants of a former multi-ethnic past, are reflected in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mosques, Sufi lodges, churches, synagogues and mellah (Jewish quarter). It is the city of Gnawa music and fearless cats. Its sea-facing, sand-colored ramparts, lined with European-made cannons, evoke memories of Orson Welles’s Othello (1951), partly filmed here. You can walk the entire medina in half a day, as I did, three times.

Most tourists don’t associate this place with deadly outbreaks of disease. A few steps outside the northern gate takes one to the Christian cemetery, and further on, to two Jewish burial sites where many plague victims rest. I thought of Subremont, who had lived in Morocco for over twenty years, surrounded by the invisible killer that ravaged the town in July 1799. According to his September report, around one hundred people were dying daily. The plague, reducing the town’s population by two-thirds through death or flight, showed no mercy. A British source tells us the former governor survived, but lost all twelve of his children and three of his four wives.

I was there for a conference addressing records relating to Mogador held in European archives. I presented a paper on the Great Plague of 1799-1800, which may have claimed a quarter of Morocco’s population, as seen through Dutch records. A highlight of the conference was meant to be a visit to the Isle of Mogador. In 1799, it was still a prison; by the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was a lazaretto for pilgrims returning from Mecca. Now it’s a nature reserve closed to tourists. Mogador’s history is intertwined with epidemics and preventive measures, like turning the isle into a quarantine in 1865 to protect against cholera.

This was the decision of the international sanitary council in Tangier. A committee of foreign consuls in that city that had grown too powerful and saw itself as the health authority for the whole country. It intervened in the urban planning of Tangier, Mogador and other cities. It employed people of its choosing, and it expected the Moroccan government to foot the bill.

Meanwhile, returning pilgrims, already quarantined in Mediterranean ports, faced another quarantine on the Isle of Mogador. Sometimes forced to disembark at high tide, they traversed rugged rocks to reach the island itself. They resented being confined on this little piece of rock, for a period of three to ten days, in overcrowded conditions, with limited supplies, surrendering their clothes and belongings to be disinfected, before being allowed to return to their hometowns. Non-Muslim passengers on the same ships were excepted from the need to quarantine.

Alas! The visit to the island did not materialize. The local authorities did not grant permission. My hopes of capturing images of the quarantine facilities and burial sites vanished. Instead, I took a taxi to the nearby Diabat, a village that lost one hundred of a population of 133 in the Great Plague. I wandered through the ruins of Dar Al Sultan, down the dunes, and gazed at the Isle of Mogador, that small rock that once served to protect Morocco from cholera and other deadly diseases,

I could only recognize a mosque by its minaret. The other buildings facing the shore may have housed the Moroccan guards, or the European doctors and nurses who represented the foreign consuls’ power. In 1799 such power did not exist. Mogador’s consuls and merchants had obtained from the governor the commitment to impose a land quarantine on people and goods coming from infected areas, but Sultan Muley Suleiman soon overruled it. A few weeks later the Great Plague started to ravage the town, and other towns, and the consuls blamed the monarch.

For all the tragedies of this plague and others that followed, Essaouira kept attracting merchants, travelers, and adventurers over the centuries. And I will be back, for I am owed a visit to the island.

COLOUR IMAGES: ALI AL TUMA. STILL FROM OTHELLO COURTESY MADEINCITY.