page_title: William Willshire
section_title: Life as a merchant in Mogadore
hierarchical_section_title: William Willshire / Life as a merchant in Mogadore
caption_attribution_description: Essaouira
context_page_description: William Willshire also known as William Wiltshire, was British Vice Consul to Mogadore, Morocco from 1814 until 1844, before being assigned to the Consularship of Adrianople in 1845, until his death in 1851.
  A native of London, he became an employee of English trading house James Renshaw and Co, and in early 1814 he was dispatched to Mogadore as that company's agent there. In the years thereafter he established himself as the foremost European merchant in the city, which was at that time an important trading port linking Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe and North America. Today Willshire is best remembered as the man who redeemed, cared for, and helped repatriate hundreds of Western sailors enslaved in the Sultanate of Morocco during the early part of the 19th century, including Captain James Riley, Robert Adams, and Captain Alexander Scott, all of whom would later write and publish harrowing accounts of their hardships endured as slaves in the desert. The town of Willshire in the US state of Ohio is named after him, in thanks, by James Riley.
context_section_description: His position as Vice Consul in Mogadore never carried with it significant financial reward (between 1831 and 1845 his salary from the foreign office was just a £100 a year), but during the 1820s and 30s as Willshire's business interests flourished, his social and professional influence in Mogadore increased, along with his personal fortune.
  Over time he began to play an important role in the various intrigues of the Moroccan elite and the foreign and Jewish merchants. For example, during the early 1830s he was conferred power of attorney in the long and complex bankruptcy dispute between the influential Moroccan based Anglo/Moroccan Jewish merchant house Macnin & Co and its several dozen London based creditors, in their attempt to recoup the company's £21,729 debt from its Moroccan based assets.
  Upon the return of James Riley to Mogadore that same year, the pair struck up what was to be a highly lucrative business partnership, exporting goods to New York.
  Other activities that Willshire engaged in included drawing a sketch map of Southern Morocco for the Royal Geographical Society and writing a commentary on it in 1845.
caption: The walled Moroccan port city of Mogadore (Essaouira), where William Willshire spent most of his adult life
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