Recently, Archbishop Ġorġ Frendo drew my attention to a rare antique volume housed in the Dominican convent in Rabat, Description de l’ Afrique, a 1686 translation into French of a huge tome about Africa originally written in German and published in Amsterdam in 1668. It contains an extensive section about Malta, an early, detailed and substantially accurate guidebook of the islands in the seicento.

That the Maltese islands were commonly considered to form part of Africa and not of Europe should come as no surprise. Several classical geographers like Ptolemy (died c. 170 AD) had no hesitation in classifying Malta as part of the African continent. Even old cartography added to the confusion. Many antique maps, before the conventional stabilisation of north and south, represent Malta ‘upside down’. If drawn or photographed from Libya, Gozo would be on top of the image. If drawn, or photographed from Sicily, Malta would be recorded upside down. In today’s convention, maps still show Malta as seen from Africa.

Malta officially became part of Europe only in 1801, through a penny-pinching measure engineered by the British Treasury. Salaries of the UK military varied considerably, depending on whether they were stationed in Europe or in Africa. British servicemen assisting the Maltese rebels during and after the French blockade claimed the higher rate of pay as they were serving in Africa.

London cut their expectations short. A law was rushed through Parliament “An Act to declare the Isle of Malta to be part of Europe” – the very first enactment by the House of Commons concerning Malta, before the island was even a British colony. Everybody was happy – the British Treasury for saving pots of money, the racists for the deletion of a perceived African stigma. No one asked what the military thought of that law. Thank you, Westminster, for opening the doors to Malta’s membership in the European Union.

Portrait of Olfert Dapper. Photo via Wikipedia.com

The wheel almost came full circle during the Second World War. The Colonial authorities decided to deport 42 law-abiding Maltese citizens, among them my father, without charge or trial, from Malta to Uganda. His Majesty’s judges found it unconstitutional to exile British subjects out of Malta. No problem, thought some wise guys at the Colonial Office: why not pass an Act to declare Uganda to be part of Malta? If you’re powerful enough, geography is expected to obey.

Olfert Dapper, from Amsterdam, author of the fundamental Africa encyclopaedia, had made a name for himself as a physician, a historian and a geographer. Born in 1636, despite his keen interest in world geography, he never ventured outside the Netherlands. A street in Amsterdam, Dapperstraat, honours his memory, as did the short-lived Dapper Museum in Paris. He died, only 53 years old, in 1689.

Dapper justifies including Malta in the African continent on various grounds ‒ its geographical position to the south of Libya, the authority of classical geographers, and the fact that the inhabitants speak Arabic. He was not aware that over 90 per cent of Maltese DNA is said to be Sicilian or that the Maltese language derives from Sicilian semitic, not from Maghreb Arabic.

Malta houses at least two copies of the French version of Dapper’s rare book, one at the National Library and another in the Dominican convent in Rabat. An antique English translation is also recorded, but I have not come across it. To the best of my knowledge, Dapper’s important account of Malta has not received the attention it deserves. Lovers of antique cartography knew all about the fine maps of Malta and of Valletta included in his volume, but apart from that, almost nothing.

It had to be Thomas Freller’s genuinely monumental 2009 publication on Grand Tour visitors to Malta that first studied the text critically and traced some of its sources. Freller established that Dapper garnered the copious information about Malta from works of previous authors like Willem Schellinkx, Johann Friedrich Breithaupt’s travel notes, and from Pierre D’Avity. He also made use of first-hand oral narratives by travellers to Malta, like the Dutch delegation under Admiral Ruyter that visited the islands in 1662, and some Dutch merchants who regularly traded here.

Frontispiece of Description de l’Afrique by Olfert Dapper.

Dapper’s text stands out by its quest for objectivity. Overall, his meticulous details about Malta cannot be faulted for their accuracy and honesty. Though a Protestant, differently from several other more-or-less contemporary storylines, his proves even-handed when assessing the very Catholic Malta of the Order of St John. Though Mohammed for him remains the False Prophet, he shows no irony or ridicule when recounting Catholic miracles, like the 1551 Turkish siege of Mdina, when the inhabitants placed the marble bust of St Agatha on the ramparts and the Muslims fired at it but only managed to damage the little finger of her right hand.

Dapper gives detailed descriptions of the church of St Agatha in Rabat, the Dominican convent and the Madonna tal-Għar.

The author paints a bi-polar picture of the island: a civilised, sophisticated and affluent urban society, fuelled by corsairing and the robust use of slaves, in parallel with a primitive and deprived rural component struggling for a living out of ungenerous soil.

Like any conscientious geographer, Dapper concentrates eagerly on the physical characteristics of the islands − distances, what the land yields, climate, unusual natural and the man-made landmarks, customs. Though art does not seem a priority, he occasionally passes rather generic value judgements – that church is plain, that palace is very beautiful. It would be unrealistic to try to condense all the data Dapper records in a few hundred words. I will choose, quite arbitrarily, and at random, well-aware that this short feature fails to do justice to the tremendous amount of information contained in this book.

Pictorial title page of Dapper’s volume.

The natural resources of the island intrigued Dapper. He recorded the luxuriant groves of orange trees, vineyards, pomegranates, olives and lemons in the gardens of San Anton. Malta produced only little wine, strong and acidic, as local grapes were unsuitable for wine. They were huge, ‘like plums’, and their skins quite tough, but proved excellent as table grapes.

Dapper justifies including Malta in the African continent on various grounds

Equally impressive was Boschetto, cultivated “at great expense” and covered with plantations of oranges and lemons, citrus, grenadines and other fruit trees, besides herbs and vegetables, overrun with hares and rabbits, and an abundant olive grove. Cannons armed the roof of Verdala Castle, which command views fort-belle and fort-agréable.

The author also found worthy of mention the garden ta’ Baldu, later called ta’ Vassallo, near Rabat, which contained unequalled orchards, planted with trees that produced huge raisins, dark and white figs, and excellent-tasting peaches, with a rich fountain deep in a grotto. Dapper praises the quality of Maltese waters gushing fresh out of natural sources.

The local inhabitants nourish themselves on mutton, goats, pork, donkeys “which are the horses of the locals”, mules and chickens, which taste excellent despite the dryness of the soil. Malta’s horses, fort-beaux, number about four or five hundred, are not shod and feed only on straw and barley.

On the feast of St Matthew, a special market is set up at Maqluba, to sell sweet cakes, honey, grain and other items of food. Il-Maqluba, where a large round area of land had dramatically subsided, obviously intrigued Dapper the geographer.

Map of Malta and Gozo in Dapper’s book.

Malta produced two types of cumin, a wild variety used for pharmaceutical products and another one added when baking bread. Maltese cumin fetched high prices in Europe, together with anise. An old cough lozenge, La pasticca del Re Sole, to this day marketed in Italy, advertises among its ingredients the anice di Malta.

Dapper commends the salt industry, started in Malta by the Knights of St John. Salt then being the only known food preservative, represented a vital industry. The author also remarks on the abundance of flowers, among which he singles out the roses d’une odeur ravissante, thyme, aromatic herbs and vegetables tasting better than those found in Holland, and principally cauliflower of excellent flavour. Fruit resembles that found in Italy. Sweet or bitter oranges of extraordinary beauty and size abound, luscious apricots and exceptionally large peaches, various sorts of melons and dates. Still no mention of any new vegetables from America, like potatoes and tomatoes.

Cotton grown in Malta earns the accolade of being the best in the whole world. The shrub, though small and having to be replanted each year, differently from Egyptian cotton, beats it in softness and quality. The seed tastes of almonds and pine nuts.

Dapper then moves on to discuss how people dress. Middle class people follow Sicilian or Italian fashions, with slight differences; all the others wear capes with hoods. The natives speak a distinctive language, a corrupted Arabic, though each village has its own dialect. Country folk only communicate in Maltese, but the bourgeoisie use Italian or French, besides their native tongue.

The author then details the contents of marriage contracts. Greek usages prevail in funerals: the mourners pull their hair out, hurl themselves on the coffin and wail.

The Roman marbles in the Grand Master’s Palace mentioned by Dapper, painted by Jean Pierre Houel. Photo: Courtesy of Daniel Cilia

Rural people are poor because of the infertility of the land and rely on the cultivation of cotton and cumin. Wheat, fresh and salted meat, pulses, oil and wine had to be imported from Sicily. The inhabitants go about heavily armed, with long swords and large daggers, zagales or javelins and lances, half-pikes, sticks a deux bouts. The knights carry muskets or guns.

The perfect fortifications, the unrelenting military training, armed soldiers always on the alert, and the intrepid valour of the knights have rightly earned the island the title Malta fior del Mondo.

At some point, Dapper inserts a longish potted history of Malta and of the Hospitaller Order. I think we can overlook that.

The account contains plenty of curious information about physical man-made landmarks, like churches, palaces and cities. The Grand Master’s Palace impressed the author as large and majestic, with a beautiful fountain at the entrance, a flower garden, a closed balcony which also houses a lovely aviary, a tower for safe keeping the valuables of the Order, two stables, one for coaches and saddled horses and the other for mules and donkeys, commonly used for riding in Malta.

He waxes lyrical about the unique armoury, large and rich enough to arm to the hilt 30,000 men, and singles out the large Roman heads of notable women, Penthesilea and Zenobia, Tullia and Claudia Metella then proudly walled up in the Palace courtyard. These portraits had always raised controversies among scholars. Some considered them later fakes and some questioned whether they were found in Malta at all. Antiquarians loved them and squabbled about them. Count Giovan Antonio Ciantar, Jean Pierre Houel, Onorato Bres, Annetto A. Caruana and others illustrated them.

Freller recently solved the mysteries surrounding them – German corsairing knights of Malta in 1584 excavated them in Mahdia in Tunisia and shipped them to Malta where Grand Master Verdalle allotted them a place of honour. They now rest in the reserve collection of the Archaeological Museum in Valletta.

Birgu, though well-fortified, by then consisted of about 200 houses, in which only the Maltese and some seafarers lived. All the knights had transferred their residence to Valletta. Corsairs and mariners mostly inhabit Senglea, fortifié à la moderne.

Dappper dedicates less than one page to Gozo. More fertile and hilly than Malta, it has no large cities, only hamlets and scattered houses. He mentions Xlendi, Dwejra and Mġarr by name. Its agricultural produce is enough to feed its inhabitants, but it also exports surplus edibles to Malta. Mutton, hares and birds abound, together with honey in great profusion.

The beautiful falcons due to the king in Spain come from Gozo. Its 5,000 inhabitants live by the same customs as the Maltese. The island has a castle, a small and unimportant one, though armed with numerous guns that cover the whole island and particularly the city beneath it. The Grand Master appoints a knight as Governor every three years.

Acknowledgements

My gratitude to Daniel Cilia, Jeremy Debono, Thomas Freller, H.E. Archbishop George Frendo OP, and Joseph Schirò.