The Quaker City weighed anchor the morning of June 23 [from the Azores] and six days later arrived on the continent at Gibraltar, where the passengers scattered like marbles. They planned to rejoin the ship later at its stops in Marseilles, Leghorn, or Naples. While most of the pilgrims headed north to Spain and England, Sam, Colonel Denny, James H. Foster of Pittsburgh, Dan Slote, and a couple of others, accompanied by five bottles of champagne and seventy-five cigars, steamed forty miles south to spend a night in the ancient city of Tangier, Morocco, “This is the infernalest hive of infernally costumed barbarians I have ever come across yet, he reported to his family, though he expressed modest enthusiasm for it in an Alta letter: Tangier was ‘full of interest for one day, but after that it is a weary prison.” It was remarkable not for “its civilization” but for its exotic fashions. Sam and his companions bought “Moorish costumes,” including red fezzes, to wear back to the ship,.
June 29 Saturday – QC arrived at Gibraltar at 10 AM.
“In a few moments a lonely and enormous mass of rock, standing seemingly in the center of the wide strait and apparently washed on all sides by the sea, swung magnificently into view, and we needed no tedious traveled parrot to tell us it was Gibraltar. There could not be two rocks like that in one kingdom” [Innocents Abroad, Ch 7].
Sam wrote from Gibraltar to his mother and family.
June 30 Sunday – Sam and seven others, including Dan Slote, boarded a steamer to Tangier. THIS is royal! Let those who went up through Spain make the best of it—these dominions of the Emperor of Morocco suit our little party well enough. We have had enough of Spain at Gibraltar for the present. Tangier is the spot we have been longing for all the time. Elsewhere we have found foreign-looking things and foreign-looking people, but always with things and people intermixed that we were familiar with before, and so the novelty of the situation lost a deal of its force.
July 1 Monday – Sam and others returned from Tangier to re-board the QC for a 6 PM departure.