3. Countdown

A week tomorrow and I am off, 4 days later and I'll be crossing the Straits of Gibraltar and landing in Tangier.  There’s something very romantic about Tangier – the first time I went I didn’t go into Morocco that way because of all the reports of how horrendous it is, but I did leave on the ferry and, looking back from the water, just loved it. And of course it has all sorts of exciting associations with spy stories and the like.

Everybody is saying "can I come with you?" - I say "yes" but
then they say they cant get off.  I made a lifestyle versus career choice when I was
17 and have never ever regretted it for one instant.  I'll never be rich
or famous, or climb that ladder of "success", but have always been able
to take off and do different things, and take occasional time out to
spend in some wonderful places.  I love the line in WH Davies' (who wrote the brilliant "diary of a supertramp") poem about standing and staring – and have stood and stared at mountains and deserts, seas and souks and palaces and people, and  relished every single minute.

The kitchen table is covered with books and maps.  I've got fascinated
all over again with the white slave traffic and am plotting places for
visits.  For 300 years Moroccans sailed all over western Europe literally
dragging people out of their beds, and commandeering ships' crews to
sell as slaves at around £35 per head - a fortune in those days.
Literally hundreds were taken from Cornwall.  All in all there were a
million white slaves in North Africa and it stopped less than 200 years
ago - only just before the abolition of slavery.  They had black slaves
too and fought the Europeans in Guinea, regarding the black Africans as
theirs by right.   

I've got Cornish blood in my veins - maybe some of my ancestors were
pulled out of bed to become white slaves and build fantastic palaces
that at the time were bigger than anything else in the world.  So I'm
going to stand where the slaves stood to be sold, and am going to look
at those palaces and fortresses they built. They were beaten, tortured,
starved, sometimes murdered, they lived in dungeons which they shared
with every imaginable vermin.  And some unimaginable.  The song "Rule
Britannia" was written at the height of the white slave trade in around
1730.

Morocco here I come…………………….