THE FRENCH IN AFRICA.

Lyttelton Times, Volume VII, Issue 446, 11 February 1857, Page 5

THE FRENCH IN AFRICA.

(From an occasional Correspondent of the Times.) Philippeville, October 4th. I am afraid my letters will be thought in England to ■be those of an optimist, and I must confess to a very strong admiration of the manner in which military and civil business is transacted here. I have had more opportunities than can fall to the lot of most men of seeing how the machine works. Everything is done liberally and yet economically. For an adequate object, such as making a pestiferous town healthy, or adapting a corps of troops to a necessary service, the French are dismayed by no number of figures. If a book is useful, they set it up in type, and Ist the author take as many copies as he pleasss, paying for the paper. If a portion of the country is unknown, they send the best antiquaries, and botanists, and engineers, and statists they have in their service, and produce a return which exhausts the whole subject; witness the Exploration Scientifique, which, although published at a marvellously cheap rate, costs £100, and fills five portmanteaus. Yet there is no want of proper checks, — no jobs, tio masses of idle gossip printed large, and bound in blue paper ; no gross engineeing blunders (except perhaps, in the character of their buildings in regard to earthquakes), no snug sinecures, and no nepotism. .The French may not see their way to colonize Africa, and Ido not think they do; I find fresh proofs every step I take in the country that they do not; but to conquer, and to hold a conquest, there is no system like that I see in action around me. The faults committed by the French are always in their vain attempts to correct some natural weakness. Their peasantry will not emigrate, and the genius of their population is not maritime. They have a proverb, that a man must be very poor or very mad t) trust himself upon the sea. The Government attempts to overcome the stay-at-home disposition of" the people by free passages and premiums upon cotton. It provides work for the navy by interdicting the establishment of commercial packet-boats along the littoral of Algeria. Miserable is the fate of the poor wretch who has to pass from the province of Algiers to that of Constantine. He cannot go bj r land unless lie go round by the desert, for the independent Kabyles would shoot him. He must go by sea, and must go in a French vessel of war. Let me tell my story as a warning to others. The first operation is to go to the post office in Algiers. In the courtyard of the post office, at the hour indicated, you will find a crowd of, say 100, of the dirtiest and most repulsive inhabitants of this African earth, —Maltese, Jews, and Arabs, and the half-castes of every race; [they are all pressing to a little window where the tickets are given. You must push your way among all these, and you must go in person with your passport in your hand. The probability is tha

there are more applicants than tickets, and unless you push lustily and yield to no fear of falling varmiu you will never get to Constantine. I will suppose that you have succeeded in getting to the window; the gentleman inside is remarkably leisurely and civil; the crowd at your back is naturally impatient and pressing. You are told that the first-class tickets are all reserved for superior officers, the second for the inferior officers; the third-class ticket entitles you to standing room on the deck, and the voyage lasts about 48 hours.

I was so fortunate as to have a friend at court and by great luck I obtained a second-class ■ticket; but this did not admit me to either a first or second class cabin, or to mess with the magnates of the sword; it simply gave me a sleeping berth. For this the post-office charges 48f, Never was such a vessel of war seen as the Phare. The deck was a dirty bivouac—men, women, and children, of every country and costume, lay huddled in blankets. It is probably connected in some way with " colonization" that all the French officers on board had wives with them, and that the wives had more than the usual number of children, according to French statistics. The evidence these interesting Gallic Algerians gave of a sound condition of lungs must have been very satisfactory to their martial parents. But the ladies are not allowed to enter the two sacred cabins. For the chief part of the day, except when taken out for a little air and exercise, they and their babies are ranged upon shelves round a very small cabin under the quarter deck. There they are in two tiers, in every attitude of maternal tenderness, interrupted at intervals by circumstances attendant upon the rolling of the vessel. Now, this cabin is just large enough, with very close packing, to hold a table and ten small chairs; and, as the French Government does not propose to itself to starve the mercantile classesjof its "colony" to death, " les civiles' are allowed to be supplied by the purveyor with breakfast and dinner in this hole. The consequence is that from 9 o'clock in the morning till 8 o'clock at night 10 men are always eating and talking in this lady's cabin. There are constant relays of consumers. They are commis-voya-'geurs, Jews, Maltese traders, and people from the fair at Algiers. The language is never very refined, and sometimes rather gross. The scene is occasionally enlivened by the entrance of a fat little Frenchman in regimentals, who makes a frantic effort to get to his wife and children and gesticulates and scolds in obedience to the silent commands of his wife. Bub it is quite useless ; " les civiles" stand upon their rights as " les militaires" stand upon theirs—they have paid their money, and if Messieurs les Officiers are particular about their wives why don't they take them into their own cabin, or let the civiles dine there ? The system, therefore, does not act very well for the military magnates to whose honour and glory it was- erected. As to to its effect upon commerce there can be no question about it. No man who has any selirespect could possibly subject himself habitually to such humiliations. I perfectly understand that on board a man-of-war civilians must always be intruders. But why put a vessel of war to such a purpose ? There were more than 200 deck passengers on board Le Phare—surely that would have paid, even according to the exorbitant notions of profit of the Messagerics Imperiales. However, tbe horrors on deck and the stenches below drove me to pass my time on the forecastle, and gave a full view of the windings of the African shore, from which I believe we never diverged for more than.a mile. As the ship stopped at every town or village on the coast for at least an hour, I had an opportunity of noticing the progress of the French settiemants on the seaboard. Dellis is one of the most important of these places. We stopped here four hours to disembark gunpowder. During the. whole of this time tUe officers in command were chiefly employed in making the passengers put out their pipes and cigars, but I noticed that an individual success in this attempt only occasioned a flash, from a luoifer match five minutes afterwards. Deilis is naturally the northern port of Kabylia, and is, of course, very useful to the French just now. It is not a very extensive town. It is built half-way m> the rock, and according to the returns of 1852 it contains ninety-four ho,u -.es attached to the town are a hundi'ed and forty hectares of corn lane, producing a total gross produce of 11,520t. This, it will be seen, gives a return of less than

£2 an acre to the French colonist who cultivates corn. The return is very detailed—4oo hectolitres of wheat, 660 of barley, and 44 of beans. The powder we are disembarlcing is, of course, for our friends the Zouaves, who are doing their spiriting not gently in these mountains. There has been a constant succession of little battles, and rather a more important affair on the 29th, wherein the Zouaves swarmed up the mountains with their usual speed, and the Chasseurs d'Afrique dashed along upon their Ai'ab horses with their usual impetuosity. The Arabs were, of coarse, driven off with slaughter, and their village burnt. I do not pretend to give any details of those affairs, for the papers tell nothing that they do not get from the 'Moniteur Algerien,' and private accounts never agree upon any single point. D'Herbelot says that the word "Berber," which is the generic name of these "Kaby^es, ia derived from Ber Beratkom, " gui signifie deuxchoses: ou bien, 'votre pays est fort desert;' ou bien, ' votre pays est un pays de ble.' " The Baron de Slade remarks upon this, that " Ces deux explications sont egalement absurdes ; and the authority of D'Herbelot must go down before that of the prince of living Arabic scholars. I cannot however, help thinking that, whether good or bad etymologically, this name, so derived, if given in the spirit of prophecy, would exactly describe the country of the Berbers before and after a French invasion. The French, howevei", consider themselves a very ill-used people by these Berbers. "I can understand," said a French officer to me the other day, " men fighting for their liberty, or their religion, or their property; but these tribes are incorrigible. We respect thier religion, never interfere with their women, and put money into their pockets, and yet they will not let us alone. The greater part of the Ai-abs who attacked us at Dra el Migan were fellows who came down into the streets of Algiers to sell their produce, wrap up their 500f. in their girdles and ride home with it, without any Frenchman taking a sou of it from them or asking them where they were going with it." Ko doubt this is literally true ; but an invader and a conqueror cannot expect to be loved even by those who trade with him. However, the French^ have got at least 22,000 men in these mountains, and all the issues stopped. I wish they had, twice as many; for there can be no hope for' the Kabyles in resistance, and the stronger the French are, the better they can afford to be merciful. Next to Dellis the most, interesting place our vessel stopped at was Djigelli. It offers the curious spectacle of a town entirely destroyed by an earthquake. Djigelli is—l must now say " was," a little town of which the official returns give no account. It is also upon the seaboard of Kabylia, and has been an episcopal city and the capital of a piratical power. Louis XIV. took the place in 1664, and, after all the old-fashioned errors, of quarrels between the commanders, and sufferings of the soldiers, his army was ignominiously expelled by the -Turks and Kabyles, who took ' thirty-six pieces of artillery and pursued the French to their ships. The town is built upon a tongue of rock which runs out into a large bay ; a small plaiD of rich land lies beyond the promontory, and there the mountains of Kabylia rise peak over peak as far as the eye can follow them. As we grew near we fancied for a moment that the French? expedition had reached the spot. The plain and the lower spurs of the inountains were covered with tents, but they were too straggling for a military encampment. •'' C'est unjleau de Dieu," said an old French woman who, mounted upon a rolled-up mattress, couldjust look over the high bulwarks, and was pointing to the town. It is, indeed, a trace of the scourge of the Almighty. The mind loses itself in the attempt to measure the force that could have shaken the mountains; but there lies the city, a total wreck, there is .not one house standing whole; there is not a roof upon the whole promontory. We anchored within pistol-shot of what was once the fort, and I looked at the place for two hours. The destruction is more complete than that of those buildings of Sebastopol which lined the harbour. The largest building of the whole, the caserne, (•Tumbling down into a mass of rubbish—just like the buildings of the Karabelnaia. Sometimes the outer walls are standing, and the .irreen wooden blinds still sling to their hinges. I noticed also that the basement stories were seldom entirely destroyed, although the fall of the roof had smashed everything within. The arched colonnades, which we should suppose

would first yield to a vibration from beneath, had generally kept their perpendicular; but everything is cracked and rent and torn about except the rock upon which the trumpery, high, squai'e, rattletrap French town was built. I could discern no flaw or fissure in that. The French are building a long, low barracks upon the plain. Here, at least,.experience has taught them to take a lesson from the despised indigenes. " Comme cesArabes sont betes!" is a phrase one hears a hundred times a-day from a hundred French mouths. They are not so " bete," however, as to build five stories over an earthquake. We took up many passengers at Djigelli, among others a rather pretty young woman with a child. I found her shortly aftei wards telling her woes in fluent French to two Maltese sailors, who understood her very little and cared for what she said still less. It was the old, old, story. Her husband had deserted her, and was living with another woman at Philippeyille—a salle femme,& meekante femme, who had at least cingiiqnte mis. She was going to seek him out and make him take the" child, when, as she lamented, she should be alone in the world. After a little sympathy and a little good advice, such as not to scold or to insist, but to look her best and dress her best, and be rather coquette with him than otherwise, aided by a cup of coffee, I got her to tell me the story of the earthquake.

She had been at Djigelli 15 years—nearly all her life— and she spoke of the scene as one of rather pleasurable excitement. It happened on the 22nd of August. There were several secousses, and . the' doors all slammed, and the ■crockery all tumbled down, and the people all ran out of their houses. Then came the great treniblement, and down came the houses with one universal crash. Thanks to the warning shocks, there were only five people killed, and of these only one was a Frenchman. My miserable yet voluble acquaintance was going back again to Djigelli as soon as she had settled matters with her husband, and upon my objecting that tents must be unpleasant places to live in now that the rains might be expected, she answered that they were building large barracks which would be ready before the rains came. " But," she added, " perhaps they may come down too. We had a little seeousse yesterday,, but it only "lasted a second." So, then, while we. were coming out of Algiers Harbour Djigelli was quivering. There is an onomotopeia of stuttering instability about even the name of this place. I relate my conversation with this Djigelli matron—upon the justice of whose case, seeing that she had been living for several weeks under a tent in a very military neighbourhood, I offer no opinion—only to show how easily people get accustomed to earthquakes We passed Collo in the night; I am told it is as thoroughly knocked down as Djigelli. I am writing about the French in Africa,and not of my own discomforts, except as far as they illustrate my subject; but the last night on board that French ship of war was a scene to remember. The wind blew half a gale, the Arabs were all sick, the military babies screamed in chorus,1 the mattresses with their superincumbent Jews and Maltese all slid about the deck, the hills of portmanteaux and mountains of sacks of " sustentatiovs militaires" toppled over and rolled about, the naval officers tried to' make their orders, heard; while over all and above all, and dominating all, a mad Zouave, who was invalided by a sunstroke and ' was going to the hospital at Constantine, excited by the turmoil, stalked about drilling an imaginary troop or leading an imaginary assault, and issuing his commands in a voice of thunder. Then camethe midnight rushing over the sides of the ship into Maltese boats, and the two miles row from Storra to Philippeyille ; but enough, enough. May I never again see the deck of a French ship of war as a civilian and a passenger! G. W. C.