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CHAPTER IV.

DESCRIPTION OF THE TOWN OF ACre.

JANUARY 10th. Anxiety, calculation, comparison of distances and routes, apprehension and impatience, all contributed to make the past a night of watching rather than of repose. I was out thrice before the day broke; and though the sky was dark and overcast, and the morning piercingly cold, I dressed and felt a pleasure in preparing to depart. With the first gleam of light, it began to pour down a torrent of rain; the hour of sunrise passed, and no mules came; ten o'clock arrived, without an abatement of the streams that deluged the streets; and even at noon the sun was still obscured, and a heavy south-western gale supplied fresh floods to the darkened atmosphere.

We had sent to the muleteer, who had refused to start on such a day, and those around us knew not how to interpret such a rashness of impatience as that which the very suggestion of moving displayed. We were therefore confined to the house the whole of the day; and, to render its detention less tedious, I passed the close of it in embodying such observations as I had myself made in my examination of the town, on the afternoon of the day before, with other notices that I had been able to collect regarding it in conversation with those long resident here.

The town of Acre is seated on the extremity of a plain on the edge of the sea-shore, and nearly at the bottom of a bay formed by the promontory of Mount Carmel on the south-west, and the skirts of the plain itself on the north-east. This bay, from the cape to the city, may be about ten miles across; from the extremity of the cape to the bottom of the bay, on the south-east,

more than half that distance; but from the bottom of the bay to the town of Acre, on the north-west, scarcely more than two miles in length, which is widely different from the most modern maps, where the bay is made to extend at least ten miles inland to the south-east of the town.

In fair weather the bay itself might offer a roadstead for large ships, but it could not be safely frequented by them in winter ; and the port, which is a small shallow basin behind a ruined mole, is scarcely capable of affording shelter to a dozen boats moored head and stern in a tier. Vessels coming on the coast, therefore, either to load or discharge, generally visit the road of Caipha, a place of anchorage within the bay at the foot of Mount Carmel, near which the river Kishon discharges itself into the sea. A vessel from Trieste was loading a cargo of cotton there, shipped by the British consul, the captain of which ship was of our party on the preceding evening.

This city was the Accho of the Scriptures already mentioned with Achzib, as one of the strong-holds of which the tribe of Asher could not dispossess their Canaanitish enemies, but consented to dwell among them as inhabitants of the land. * It rose to higher consequence under the liberal auspices of the first Ptolemy, who, after enlarging and beautifying it, honoured it with his name. † In after ages, it became a warmly contested port between the crusaders and the Saracens ; was long possessed by the former, and adorned with cathedral churches and other public works; and after passing from the Christians to the Mohammedans, and from the Mohammedans to the Christians again, it fell at length under the power of the Arabs, after a long and bloody siege. It is said to

Judges, c. i. v. 31, 32.

Cluverius, l. v.

+ Strabo, l. xvi. p. 758. Cellarius, Geog. Antiq. 1. iii. c. 13. p. 294. c. 21. p. 370. 4to. A. D. 1711. Reland, Palæstina Illustrata, 1. iii. de urbibus, p. 534. Extraits Historiques, relatifs au Temps de Croisades, du livre Insol Djelil fet tarikhi Koceds vel Khalit. Par M. de Hammer, inséré dans les Mines de l'Orient, vol. iii. p. 80. Vienne, en folio.

have been then laid utterly waste, in revenge for the blood it had cost its besiegers; after which, in the emphatic language of one of the most eloquent of our historians, "a mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with the world's debate." *

Maundrell, even so late as the year 1696, after recapitulating the advantages of its situation both by sea and land, says, "Notwithstanding all these advantages, it has never been able to recover itself since its last fatal overthrow. For besides a large kane, in which the French factors have taken up their quarters, and a mosque, and a few poor cottages, you see nothing here but a vast and spacious ruin." It has risen again from its ashes since that period, as its present state will best testify; and even since the period of the celebrated struggle here between the English and French, the history of which is familiar to every one, it has been strengthened, beautified, and improved.

Of the Canaanitish Accho, it would be thought idle perhaps to seek for remains, yet some presented themselves to my observation so peculiar in form and materials, and of such high antiquity, as to leave no doubt in my own mind of their being the fragments of buildings constructed in the earliest ages. On the south-east front of the newly-erected outer walls of the city, in sinking the ditch before them to the depth of twenty feet below the level of the present soil, the foundations of buildings were exposed to view, apparently of private dwellings of the humblest order, as they were not more than from ten to twelve feet square, with small door-ways and passages leading from one to the other. As we obtained admittance into the ditch for the purpose of examining these remains more closely, we found the materials of which they were originally constructed to be a highly-burnt brick, with a mixture of cement and sand as well as small portions of stone

• Gibbon's Hist. vol. ii. c. 59. p. 142. 168.

+ Maundrell's Journey, p. 72. D'Anville's Compendium of Ancient Geography, vol. i. p. 412.

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in some parts, the whole so firmly bound together by age and the strongly adhesive power of the cement used, as to form one solid mass. As the walls were of some thickness, though the apartments they enclosed were small, they offered an excellent material for building, and portions of it had been used in the foundations of the outer walls of the fort, in the same way as fragments of the old Greek city have been applied to the building of the fortifications before the modern Alexandria.

Of the splendour of Ptolemais, no perfect monument remains but throughout the town are seen shafts of red and grey granite and marble pillars, some used as thresholds to large door-ways, others lying neglected on the ground, and others again used as supporters of the interior galleries of okellas or public inns, forming piazzas around the central courts below. Of these, altogether, we counted nearly two hundred in different parts of the town ; and besides several slabs of fine marble, perhaps once used in the pavements of some hall or palace, now collected near a magazine at the north end of the town, we observed a fine Corinthian capital, in perfect preservation, lying at the door of a new mosque on the west, and the fragment of another of the composite order, the diameter of which was upwards of five feet.

The Saracenic remains are only to be partially traced in the inner walls of the town, which have themselves been so often broken down and repaired as to leave little visible of the original work; and all the mosques, fountains, bazars, and other buildings, are in a style rather Turkish than Arabic, excepting only an old but regular and well-built khan or caravanserai, which might, perhaps, be attributed to the Saracen age.

The Christian ruins are altogether gone, scarcely leaving a trace of the spot on which they stood. The cathedral church of St. Andrew, the church of St. John the almsgiver, the tutelar saint of the order of Knights Hospitallers, with the convent of that order, and the magnificent palace of its grand master, as well as the church belonging to a nunnery distinguished by the chastity of its

abbess during the siege and storm of the city in 1291, and other churches, palaces, monasteries, forts, &c. all recapitulated by Maundrell in his account of this place, are now no more to be seen. Even the three Gothic arches mentioned by Dr. Clarke †, and called by the English sailors "King Richard's palace," have been razed to the ground, so that the very sites of all these monuments of early days will soon become matter of uncertainty and dispute.

In the period between Maundrell's visit and that of Dr. Clarke, I know not what causes may have contributed to have swept away the traces of so many remains, or whether some still existed then besides the arcades which he noticed; but the subsequent destruction has been entirely caused by the late Djezzar Pasha, in improving the fortifications and constructing the outer walls of the present town.

The city of Accho, for so it is here called, having changed its Greek for its original Hebrew name ‡, is now a square of somewhat more than a mile in circumference. Its situation and boundaries cannot be better expressed than in the words of Josephus, who says, — " This Ptolemais is a maritime city of Galilee, built in the great plain. It is encompassed with mountains; that on the east side, sixty furlongs off, belongs to Galilee; but that on the south belongs to Carmel, which is distant from it an hundred and twenty furlongs; that on the north is the highest, and is called by the people of the country, The ladder of the Tyrians,' which is at the distance of an hundred furlongs." §

On the north-west and south-west sides, the town is enclosed by a single wall; which, on the north-west side, ranges along a sandy

• Maundrell's Journey, p. 73. 8vo.

+ Clarke's Travels, vol. ii. p. 379.

Ammianus Marcellinus observed, that, even in his time, the Greek and Roman names of cities in Syria, were not commonly used by the natives of the country; and this observation will apply still more generally in the present day.

Josephus' Wars of the Jews, book ii. c. 10. s. 2.