Virginia Gazette · 16 May 1771

CP-1771-001

MARSEILLES, March 5.

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Transcribed from the clipping

MARSEILLES, March 5. ACCORDING to Letters from Alexandria, we may expect to see Egypt recover its ancient Splendour under the Government of Aly Bey, the new Sultan of that famous Country. A Letter from St. Jean d’Acre, dated December 30th, 1770, says: “Syria is at the Eve of becoming the Theatre of Desolation, and of a cruel and destructive War.

Aly Bey, who has set himself up for the Sultan of Egypt, the Cheik Daer, and the Emir of the Drusas, having united themselves to subdue the Pacha of Damascus, the latter, upon the Approach of the combined Army, retired from Jaffa, after plundering it, except the Houses of the Franks.

All the Places through which his Troops passed felt the same Effects of their Retreat, which has so greatly alienated the Country from him that Nobody even at Damascus will trust either him or his People; and that the Inhabitants of Jaffa and Jerusalem themselves carried the Keys of those Towns to the Army of the Allies. Aly Bey has still the same Designs against Yemen.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 5 times magnification on 25 October 2026. The long s is set throughout this page and has been transcribed as a modern s. No character the type sets as a long s has been read as an f, and no f has been read as a long s; where the two could not be told apart the word was left unread rather than guessed. The clipping is a crop of body type. It carries no masthead, no folio line, no running head and no page number, so neither the publication name nor the printing date can be confirmed from the page itself. Both come from the hand-typed slide label and are recorded here unchanged. This clipping carries the strongest internal date evidence in the batch: the quoted letter is printed as “dated December 30th, 1770”, with the year set, which fixes the Marseilles dateline of March 5 as 1771 and is consistent with the labelled printing date of 16 May 1771. The printed dateline MARSEILLES, March 5. is set as a centred head in letterspaced capitals and stands in the headline field because no headline is printed; nothing has been composed to fill it. The quotation from the Acre letter opens with a quotation mark and no closing mark appears anywhere on the clipping, so the end of the quoted matter cannot be fixed from the page; the excerpt therefore ends at a complete sentence inside the quotation and does not supply a closing mark the paper did not print. The clipping continues past the excerpt with a paragraph on travellers and a sentence about a prince who “may find an Asylum in this Country”. Spellings are the paper’s and are kept as set: Aly Bey, Cheik Daer, Drusas, Pacha, St. Jean d’Acre, Franks.

Context added by this archive

The line worth keeping is the last one: “the Inhabitants of Jaffa and Jerusalem themselves carried the Keys of those Towns to the Army of the Allies.” The inhabitants act, collectively and of their own motion, in a 1771 American newspaper — and they are still “the Inhabitants”, with no name among them.

The Pacha of Damascus plunders Jaffa on his way out, “except the Houses of the Franks”, which is the clipping’s own account of who was spared.

Cite this clipping

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• CONSTANTINOPLE, August 5.Virginia Gazette · 16 January 1772
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More from the 1770s

• LEGHORN, March 20.Maryland Gazette · 13 June 1771
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