Letter from Arabia: centuries-old ‘prized papers’ read for the first time
▶ The ‘Prize Papers,’ captured by the Royal Navy, are letters in Arabic written centuries ago but never delivered. They are finally being read, James Langton tells from Cambridge
Centuries-old Arabic mail has been read for the first time, in a find compared with the excitement of discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun.
About 80 letters, which were written but never delivered 250 years ago, have been unearthed by researchers in the UK.
They are part of more than 160,000 missives called the Prize Papers, which were found on thousands of ships seized by the British Royal Navy or privateers over three centuries.
Stored in the UK, they are now being digitised in a project by the National Archives and the University of Oldenburg in Germany.
One letter, destined never to arrive, was sent by a Syrian merchant on an Italian ship in 1759, lamenting the antics of an Egyptian nephew distracted by the pleasures of life in Italy.
It is an everyday discussion from one troubled trader to another and is now being pored over feverishly by academics hundreds of years later – and thousands of miles away.
Dr Miriam Wagner, director of research at the Woolf Institute, is working with a young Egyptian researcher to translate and study the letters, with the aim of publishing them in two books.
Yusuf Bakti, a Syrian merchant living in the Italian port city of Livorno, picked up his quill and began to write again. He had already dealt with the consignment he was sending to a friend and fellow trader in Alexandria, but there was something else that was bothering him.
His nephew, sent from Egypt to learn the business in the Tuscan city, was proving troublesome, distracted by the pleasures of Italian life.
“What we see is that his heart is passionate, and the arrogance and self-conceit are in his blood,” Bakti wrote in Arabic script to his old friend in Egypt.
The problem, the Syrian wrote, was that boy’s mother was Egyptian. “The arrogance and self-conceit are in his blood.”
The boy, Bakti admitted, had exhausted him. “We find that his case is hopeless,” he wrote. “My efforts are worthless. The Egyptian descendants have no worth.”
The letter never arrived. Accompanying Bakti’s goods, it was loaded on a Tuscan trader, the St Luigi di Gonzaga. In early January 1759, the merchant ship set sail for Alexandria on what should have been a short and uncomplicated voyage.
Just a few days later, a set of sails appeared on the horizon. It was the British frigate HMS
Ambuscade, bristling with 40 cannon. The Italian ship had no choice but to surrender. The cargo was taken as a prize to be sold and the profits divided among officers and crew.
Bakti’s post and about 80 other letters in Arabic from fellow traders were glanced at and disregarded as unintelligible by the British. Yet somehow they survived intact, first in the bowels of the British Admiralty storerooms and then in the UK National Archives in London.
Now they are being read for the first time in more than 250 years, the seals cracked and the paper unfolded. Long after Bakti and his nephew have faded from history, his complaint is now being heard.
Reading them for the first time “was a bit like finding Tutankhamun’s tomb”, says Dr Miriam Wagner. “I felt quite special opening them.”
Dr Wagner is director of research at the Woolf Institute, founded in 1998 in Cambridge to create an academic framework for discussing religious differences.
For this project, she is working with an Egyptian postdoctorate researcher, Mohamed Ahmed, in the translation and study of the letters. They will be published with a commentary in two books.
The letters are part of a larger collection known as the Prize Papers, a haul of about 160,000 letters found on thousands of ships seized by the British Royal Navy or privateers – essentially government-licensed pirates – over three centuries.
They are now being digitalised in a project by the National Archives and the University of Oldenburg in Germany.
The Arabic papers are separate, although they may form part of the final digital archive. The script, even for skilled linguists such as Dr Wagner and Dr Ahmed, is filled with anachronistic words long lost and which are sometimes partly in a Latin-based code to protect trade secrets.
In the longer letters, the handwriting frequently deteriorates as the writer tires. Sometimes it can take hours to agree on a single word.
“There are words that even as a native speaker I do not understand,” Dr Ahmed says. “They are not even in dictionaries.”
The letters, though, are in perfect condition. “The ink shines,” he says.
Conservators removed the letters from the archives, gently cracked the wax seals and unfolded them after 259 years in the dark. They were in three large bundles, each addressed to the traders’ main agent.
Inside the bundles were dozens of letters to other merchants, to be distributed by local courier networks.
The senders were Christian Arab businessmen, but the men with whom they did business were from many faiths, including Muslims and Jews.
Some of the phrases are Christian or Hebrew but they are written in the international language of trade in the region, under the Ottoman Empire, which was Arabic.
“It’s a snapshot of the old Middle East with its incredible multiculturalism,” Dr Wagner says. “This whole idea of one nation, one faith, one language is a very European concept that then penetrated the Middle East.
“These letters came before the time when this kind of thinking began poisoning things.”
The Arab merchants’ goods and correspondence had become entangled in a global conflict known today as the Seven Years’ War.
Waged across continents and oceans, it pitched the European powers against each other in two great coalitions, one led by Britain and Prussia, and the other including France and the Holy Roman Empire, centred in Austria but whose lands included much of what is now the Netherlands.
The Arab merchants were doubly unfortunate. First the St Luigi di Gonzaga was chartered by a Dutch-owned company and suspected of carrying French cargo, drawing it into the conflict.
And second, in the year 1759 Britain’s Royal Navy inflicted crushing defeats on its enemies, becoming the most powerful in the world.
For HMS Ambuscade, soon to take part in a victory over the French fleet at Lagos, the Tuscan merchant ship was easy pickings. Records show the cargo of the St Luigi di Gonzaga was a snapshot of global trade in the mid-18th century.
There was wool from England, safflower, olive oil and a case of wine. From the Dutch spice islands in the east there was coffee and pepper. Even more extraordinary was a consignment of cochineal, a red dye produced by crushing insects found only in Mexico, then a Spanish colony.
On its return voyage, the ship would have carried leather from camels, bulls and buffalo, one of Egypt’s main exports. There was a request for Egyptian mouse traps, effective in dealing with the rats on the ship.
The letters include precise instructions about when to sell the goods to maximise profits. There is intelligence passed on that a caravan is due to arrive from Hejaz, the coastal region of today’s Saudi Arabia, which would first drive prices up but could flood the market.
The caravan is presumably carrying frankincense, much in demand in Europe, but there is a warning that it might not be of good quality, mixed with stones and dirt.
Away from trade, the human stories emerge. Some worry about the damage caused by the same conflict that led to the capture of the Tuscan ship.
“Concerning the war between the English and the French, may God bring peace for the merchants and for the citizens. Rather, the war goes on, and there is inflation in this city and in Marseille and in Spanish territories. All of this is due to this war.”
The Christian merchants show proper sensitivity in addressing Muslims.
To his Muslim partner in Alexandria, Haji Sa’d Sarara, the Christian Anton Kayr writes: “God glorified and exalted be he may bring all the wellness in the name of all the prophets and messengers, Amen.”
Some of the letters are from Catholic clergy in Rome, sending letters to their brothers in Middle East monasteries.
Ben Gabriel Al Kildanin expresses sorrow over the deaths of his mother and other family members in one year.
“What should I do? Should I cry? What should I say or write? O sorrow. Do I not deserve to stay beside my mother and brothers, so that I could smell their scent and to please myself by looking at them. How can I live without them? I should have gone to the grave before them.”
Bakti emerges as the biggest personality, so much so that he has become the central character and inspiration for Livorno, an Arabic historical novel written by Dr Ahmed and recently published with support from Sharjah’s 1001 Titles initiative.
The behaviour of the wayward nephew continues to preoccupy him, with the young man now subject to a curfew.
“He can only take leave when I know where is he going and with whom, according to the mandatory rules. But this did not work with him, because of his arrogance and lack of humility.”
Did the youth ever mend his ways? Sadly, the records do not tell.