Torture in Tripoli

Miss Tully was the sister — or possibly sister-in-law — of the British Consul in Tripoli at the end of the eighteenth century.

She lived through years of Libyan revolution, systematic torture and macabre assassinations but, if returning to the capital today, would surely feel aggrieved at the decline in standards of public safety.

The Gadaffi of Tripoli in her time was called the Bashaw — and Miss Tully's letters home about his court provided the first account 'of the private manners and conduct of this African Despot'.

As readers of its first edition in 1816 were told, it also detailed 'such sketches of human weakness and vice , the effects of ambition, avarice, envy and intrigue as will scarcely appear credible in the estimation of a European'.

A woman's walk on a garden wall might be fatal, the bite of a camel even more so, an invitation to take the long indented corridor to the Bashaw's dining area absolutely so. There were catastrophic plagues and calamitous white slavery.

But there were many compensations. There was no oil then — but gold could be found on the beach and 'tied in bits of rag about the size of a small nut', each one worth ten shillings and six pence. There were transparent candied dates, 'far surpassing in richness any other fruit'. A lucky guest who pleased the Bashaw might be given a piece of Roman paving.

The rules of mourning dress after each bout of plague or murder required that golden finery be dulled and dampened rather than exchanged for black. But this was only a small inconvenience. To read on through the delightful new edition of these letters, published by Hardinge Simpole, is the purest nostalgia.