a knife, a couple of flints, or a small quantity of English gunpowder,
and the _lallah_, or lady, with “a skein of thread, a large needle, or a
pair of scissors.” An ordinary silk handkerchief of two shillings value,
he adds, was a present for a princess.
During his residence at Algiers, but in what year I have been unable to
discover, he seems to have married the widow of Mr. Edward Holden,
formerly consul of that place, who outlived him, and erected a monument
to his memory. In 1723, the year after his return from Syria, a violent
earthquake was felt at Algiers, which threw down a number of houses, and
stopped the course of several fountains; but in the year following a
still more violent shock was felt, which seems to have shaken the whole
coast, while the air was clear and temperate, and the quick-silver
standing at the greatest height. At such times the barometer, he
observes, was not affected with any sudden alterations, nor was there
any remarkable change in the air, which was neither more calm nor windy,
hazy, nor serene, than at other times. During the same year, while
sailing in an Algerine cruiser of fifty guns towards Cape Bona, he felt
an earthquake at sea, which produced so prodigious a concussion in the
ship, that at each shock a weight of twenty or thirty tons appeared to
have fallen from a vast height upon the ballast. At this time they were
five leagues to the south of the Seven Capes, and could not reach ground
with a line of two hundred fathoms.
In the year 1727 he visited the kingdom of Tunis, which was not, he
observes, divided, like Algiers, into provinces, governed each by a
provincial bey, but was wholly under the immediate inspection of the
bey, who annually made the circuit of his dominions with a flying camp,
and collected the tribute. The seacoast, the Zeugitania of the ancients,
was more thickly inhabited, and exhibited more contentment, prosperity,
and other marks of good government than any portion of the neighbouring
kingdom. Upon arriving at Biserta, Utica, and the ruins of Carthage, Dr.
Shaw throws open the floodgates of his learning, in endeavouring to
determine the extent of the encroachments made by the mud of the Bagrada
upon the sea, the site of the little city which Cato rendered
illustrious by his death, and the circumference and topography of Dido’s
capital. Bochart, with a still greater luxuriance of quotation, had, by
comparing the testimony of the ancients, determined its circumference to
have been nearly forty-five miles; but according to Dr. Shaw, the
peninsula upon which it stood does not much exceed thirty miles in
circumference, and the city, he thinks, could never lay claim to above
half that extent. However, as at the beginning of the Punic war the
number of its inhabitants is said to have amounted to seven hundred
thousand, while it was pronounced by Suidas the largest and most
powerful city upon earth, I cannot believe it to have been no more than
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