After a year of captivity, the sailors were taken to Fez to toil on another pretentious fortress. Their keepers abused them without mercy, and a midshipman of the privateer, Mr. Nelson, took his life in his hands and complained to the emperor. Such boldness won the tyrant’s favor, and he asked what the grievances were. The midshipman showed a heavy stick of wood with which one of the keepers had beaten the men of the _Inspector_ because they sang some songs during the night to keep their spirits up. “Fetch me four sticks of that same size, and let them be good ones,” commanded his Majesty Zin el Adbin. “Also drag that wicked keeper before me.” The whole company of British seamen was also ordered into the royal presence, and four of the most stalwart were selected and told to take the sticks and break them on the keeper’s bones. The victim was stretched on the ground, and the incensed mariners flogged him with great enthusiasm while the emperor encouraged them to make a thorough job of it or have their own bones broken. The guards carted away what was left of the keeper, and he died an hour later. From Fez the captives were carried to Tetuan to await tidings from the British ambassador to Morocco, who was striving to obtain their release. At parting with their black overseer, he made the logical remark: “Now I have no more to do with you; and if ever you catch me in your country, I expect no better usage than you have had here.” The negotiations moved haltingly while the sailors waited in prison in Tetuan. After a long delay enough money was received from Gibraltar to redeem twenty-five of them, who were selected by the governor of the city, “who dismissed them with wishes for a happy voyage.” Three weeks afterward the balance of the cash came to Tetuan, but the emperor put a spoke in the wheel by refusing to let the privateersmen go until that matter of the old debt was canceled. The British ambassador sent a naval officer to England for more money, and there was another delay, which annoyed the Moorish governor of Tetuan. A squadron of British men-of-war, under Commodore Keppel, rode at anchor in the harbor, but their guns were silent while the ambassador was arrested, his property seized, and his secretary thrown into a dungeon pit twenty feet deep, where the playful Moors dropped dead cats and dogs and stones on him. It could scarcely be said that Britannia rules the waves that washed the shores of Morocco. Commodore Keppel pledged his word that the old account should be squared, although it was well known that the British Government had already paid it once, and the ambassador gave a promissory note for the whole amount. Finally the claims were settled to the satisfaction of the Emperor of Morocco, and the survivors of the privateer were put aboard H. M. S. _Sea-Horse_. “They ran into the water as deep as the waist, each thinking himself happiest that he could get in the boat first.”