A considerable number found their way to the ports of Santa Maria and Cadiz, where, after lingering some time in the vain hope of seeing the waters open for their egress, according to the promises of the rabbis, they embarked on board a Spanish fleet for the Barbary coast. Having crossed over to Ercilla, a Christian settlement in Africa, whence they proceeded by land towards Fez, where a considerable body of their countrymen resided, they were assaulted on their route by the roving tribes of the desert, in quest of plunder. Notwithstanding the interdict, the Jews had contrived to secrete small sums of money, sewed up in their garments or the linings of their saddles. These did not escape the avaricious eyes of their spoilers, who are even said to have ripped open the bodies of their victims in search of gold which they were supposed to have swallowed. The lawless barbarians, mingling lust with avarice, abandoned themselves to still more frightful excesses, violating the wives and daughters of the unresisting Jews, or massacring in cold blood such as offered resistance. But, without pursuing these loathsome details further, it need only be added that the miserable exiles endured such extremity of famine that they were glad to force a nourishment from the grass which grew scantily among the sands of the desert; until at length great numbers of them, wasted by disease and broken in spirit, retraced their steps to Ercilla, and consented to be baptised, in the hope of being permitted to revisit their native land. The number, indeed, was so considerable that the priest who officiated was obliged to make use of the mop, or hyssop, with which the Roman Catholic missionaries were wont to scatter the holy drops whose mystic virtue could cleanse the soul in a moment from the foulest stains of infidelity. “Thus,” says the Castilian historian, Ferreras,[k] “the calamities of these poor blind creatures proved in the end an excellent remedy, that God made use of to unseal their eyes, which they now opened to the vain promises of the rabbis; so that, renouncing their ancient heresies, they became faithful followers of the cross!” Many of the emigrants took the direction of Italy. Those who landed at Naples brought with them an infectious disorder, contracted by long confinement in small, crowded, and ill-provided vessels. The disorder was so malignant, and spread with such frightful celerity, as to sweep off more than twenty thousand inhabitants of the city in the course of the year, whence it extended its devastation over the whole Italian peninsula. Many of the exiles passed into Turkey, and to different parts of the Levant, where their descendants continued to speak the Castilian language far into the following century. Others found their way to France, and even England. Part of their religious services is recited to this day in Spanish, in one or more of the London synagogues.