Vidal , United States Consul to By the President: J. C. Bancroft Davis, March 22, 1873

Mr. Vidal to Mr. Davis.

Sir: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt, this day, of your dispatch No. 22, informing me that it would be desirable to put the Department in possession of more explicit facts in regard to the slave traffic between Tripoli and Constantinople via Malta. When it is considered that a consul in Mussulman countries can neither take testimony from any but his own protegés, nor apply to any colleague or Mahomedan magistrate to make an affidavit in cases in which his protegés are not concerned, the Department will readily appreciate how difficult it would be for me to produce any judiciary proofs in support of the statements contained in my dispatch No. 27. Moreover, I beg to remind the Department that most of those slaves exported from here are females, and that it is positively forbidden by the laws and usages of the country that a Christian man should speak to a Moslem woman.

Nevertheless, I don’t say that it would be impossible to give the satisfactory algel proofs, only it might take time; it would require a certain outlay of money which I am not authorized by the Department to spend; and I should have leave to move as I think proper, between Tripoli, Malta, Constantinople, and Smyrna. But first may I be allowed to ask what fact the Department would wish me to prove. Is it that there are negro slaves imported from countries without the pale of the Turkish sovereignty, and bought and sold either here or in Constantinople? I can, at a fortnight’s notice, have two or three scores of those unfortunate beings purchased at prices ranging from $24 to $36 a head, put on board a vessel and shipped for any country in the world. But what would that prove? I could not make an affidavit against myself; and were one of my employés to buy those slaves himself, I might establish his own guilt, but not that of any one else.

But perhaps it would be more interesting to prove that those slaves are imported through Malta and, for all we know, that they change hands in that British island. It is not to be forgotten that by virtue of Article I of our treaty of 1862 with Great Britain, the reciprocal right of search and detention can be exercised, near the coast of Africa, only “to the southward of the thirty-second parallel of north latitude,” and that Tripoli is considerably north of that line.

Were I to follow a lot of slaves as far as Malta, I would wish to be authorized to act without connection with our consulate in that island, for the following reason: The climate of Soudan being so much hotter than that of Constantinople, the negro slaves from the interior of Africa are generally exported to Turkey in summer time, in order that the change of climate should be less trying to them. Now during those summer months our consul in Malta is compelled, on account of ill health, to leave the consulate in charge of a gentleman who is a very active and able person, who knows everything that goes on in the island, and is perfectly well aware that there are thousands of slaves carried from Barbary to the Bosphorus, via that British possession. But he is an Englishman; he never put his foot in our country, and to him the political interest of the United States is as nought, while he feels, of course, as all Englishmen do, the liveliest sympathy for the good name of his own country and government.

There is not an Englishman here, in Malta, or in Turkey, who does not know as well as I the existence of the traffic I am now denouncing. The newspapers of Europe have all said something about it; telegrams in regard to that trade have been sent from Constantinople to the four quarters of the continent; but I never heard till this afternoon of an Englishman, in authority in these countries, moving one finger to put an end to that shameful traffic.

But, this very afternoon, by a coincidence which I am at a loss to explain, one of the interpreters of the British consulate, who lives out of the city, very near the seashore, happening to see, by chance, a few black children, who were crying as they were nut on board a boat, which took them directly to a brig just in the act of weighing anchor, took his horse, rode with all speed to the British consulate, reported what he had seen; the consul-general communicated the information to the governor-general; the latter sent, in all haste, a custom-house boat after the brig, and, twenty miles from port, as the wind was against her, they caught her. She proved to be the Ottoman brig Malmaison—captain, Ali Salah—which was on her way to Malta, with a cargo of barley and four or five negro slaves as passengers. The vessel was taken back to port, her captain arrested, and an investigation made at once. It was ascertained that one of those slaves was a young girl kidnapped from her mother two or three days before, and another one belonged to the harbor-master himself. In the evening the master of the brig was authorized to proceed to Malta, and the captain of the port was dismissed; so, at least, it is reported. This fact will go far to prove, at any rate, that slavers from Tripoli to Constantinople are not afraid to take the way of Malta. It is also rumored that the authorities in that island will henceforth exert the greatest vigilance in regard to that trade. If such is the case, I cannot understand why they should this very time be so strict, while they have for more than twenty years willingly shut their eyes. Nor can I understand the secret spring of the action of the British consul here, and the governor’s; for those gentlemen, all at once so much interested, in appearance, to suppress the slave-traffic, knew since their arrival here of its being extensively carried on, and never, to my knowledge, attempted to interfere.

However, it may be stopped for a while, for a purpose now unknown to me; but it will soon revive; and it becomes the United States Government, supported, as it is, by four millions of black citizens, to place itself before the civilized world as the special protector of the African race.

Now, it is publicly known here that nearly every Turkish officer or functionary who leaves this place for Constantinople, or sends his family to Turkey, will not fail to improve every one of those opportunities, by sending along a lot of slaves intended for sale. But the worst negro-trafficant in Tripoli is a Moor, to whom I alluded in my dispatch No. 35, as having assisted the pashas of this regency in grinding the people with oppressive taxes. He is the owner of the Trabulus Gharb, a steamer which plies pretty regularly between Malta and this port. At every trip, just one or two minutes before the vessel is ready to start from this port, a number of women, carefully shrouded in their blankets, wearing stockings, so that the color of their feet cannot be seen, hiding their hands in the folds of their baracans, and with the head entirely wrapped in a thick colored handkerchief, leave the quay under the care of a man. They are put in a boat belonging to the Moor, and brought on board the steamer. During the journey, no one is allowed to speak to those mysterious beings; and at Valetta, instead of going on shore, as all other passengers do, they remain on board the steamer until they can be taken to another one, just weighing anchor, for Constantinople; or a sailing-vessel, belonging, too, to the Moor, is just at hand to receive them.

I will not conclude this letter without informing you that I was told by a merchant, just arrived with a Ghadames caravan, that the Sultan of Borgoo, or Dâs-sali-Wadâi, having just successfully invaded the neighboring territory of Bagharmi, enslaved all its population, and carried them away to his own country; in consequence we may expect to see slaves of that kind as cheap as sheep, for some time to come, in Cairo and Constantinople. The invaded territory is comprised between the 13th and 10th degrees of north latitude, and the 39th and 40th degrees of the East Faroe longitude. The conqueror reigns in the territory situated between the Bagharmi in the east and the Dâr-foor’s land in the west.

Awaiting your instructions in regard to that question,

I am, &c.,