After four months the blockade was over. The English force suffered its share of casualties. One sailor had a leg blown off by the Moors while he was working on the gun platform on the exposed northern bank of the river. He survived, but others weren’t so lucky. A member of the Leopard’s crew was shot in the head as the blockaders tried to set fire to two men-of-war that were leaving the harbor. Two men from the Hercules were killed in the same action, both hit in the back by arrows, and thirty more were wounded in the arms and legs by small shot.
Against this, Rainborow had delivered a catastrophic blow to the Salé rovers, destroying more than a dozen ships and killing hundreds of men. By making alliances with both the Saint and the sultan (who remained implacable enemies to each other), he had completely destabilized the pirate republic. And if he hadn’t managed to extract much in the way of compensation from New Salé, he had liberated its Christian captives. The final count was an impressive 348, comprising 302 English, Scottish, and Irish (including eleven women); twenty-seven Frenchmen; eight Dutchmen; and eleven Spaniards. The expedition was a tremendous success, by any standards. And there was more to come.
By August 8, 1637, all the freed slaves had been handed over. Rainborow sent off the Antelope, the Hercules, and the two pinnaces, telling them to “rove and range the coast of Spain, and to look for Turks’ men-of-war.” 43 They were all back in England six weeks later, having cheerfully disregarded their instructions.
Meanwhile, the Leopard and the Mary, reinforced by two supply ships which arrived from England days after the main fleet left for home, sailed down the coast to Safi, where Blake and the sultan’s representative disembarked and set out for Mohammed’s court at Marrakesh. They took with them Rainborow’s son, one of his lieutenants, a couple of chastened representatives from the erstwhile corsair republic, and a mixture of ambitions and aspirations. Rainborow hoped that the delegation would secure the freedom of more British slaves, and that the sultan would undertake to suppress corsair bases on the Atlantic coast. Blake, who had commercial interests in Morocco, was trying to broker a trade agreement with England. The Moroccan qaid hoped for English aid against el-Ayyashi and other rebel leaders who were threatening the sultan’s authority. At the very least, he looked to Charles I to put a stop to the activities of English merchants who happily traded guns to rebel strongholds farther down the Atlantic coast at Essaouira, Agadir, and Massa.
It was a month before the English party returned to Safi, and when they did, they brought with them four Barbary horses, four hawks, and sixteen English captives, all gifts from Sultan Mohammed to Charles I. They also brought a draft treaty which confirmed the peace between England and Morocco. And they brought Mohammed’s ambassador to the English court—a Portuguese renegade and his retinue of twenty-eight officials and servants. The sultan’s letter to Charles I which accompanied them announced grandiloquently: We send to you the slave of our lofty abode and our emissary to you for sultanic purposes the favored and most approved and noble and fortunate qaid Jawdar ben Abd Allah in the company of our servant the merchant Robert Blake. . . . Our aforementioned slave has received from us that which he will deliver to you, so accept graciously what he will give to you and God (who is exalted) will fulfill the aims in going out and coming in.44
The sultan went on to urge King Charles to look kindly on Robert Blake, who had worked hard to broker the agreement. He ended on a particularly optimistic note. “Your desires in this lofty territory will be fulfilled and your petitions all accepted and observed. We shall find none of them too difficult.”
At four in the afternoon of Wednesday, September 21, with a light wind and a calm sea, the Leopard hoisted its anchor and set sail for home.
As the shadows lengthened on a cold Sunday afternoon in November 1637, crowds of Londoners filled the narrow streets to watch a spectacular procession wend its way from Wood Street in the heart of the capital to the sprawling labyrinth that was the Palace of Whitehall. One of the city marshals led the way on horseback, accompanied by half a dozen servants who shouted and pushed people back, clearing a way through. Then came seven trumpeters, followed by four Moroccans in red livery. Each Moor led a fine Barbary horse covered with cloths of damask; two were equipped with saddles, bridles, and stirrups “plated over with massif gold of rare workmanship, esteemed each worth 1000 £.”45 Next walked the sixteen freed slaves—the hawks that should have preceded them had been handed over to the king four days previously, because he feared “their misusage from unskillful keepers.”46 There were city captains with great plumes in their hats, ten Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber in black velvet (there should have been twelve, but two didn’t turn up), and Charles I’s master of ceremonies, Sir John Finet, who choreographed the entire procession.
But all eyes were on the figure who followed Finet. Flanked on his left by the Earl of Shrewsbury and on his right by Robert Blake, rode Jawdar ben Abd Allah. His page walked beside him. One servant carried his scimitar, another had his slippers and his horse’s golden bridle. He was escorted by four footmen in blue livery and followed by eight more members of his household, “Moors in their country habits on horseback.”47
The pageant marched slowly past the soaring Gothic walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral (covered in scaffolding to receive a classical face-lift from Inigo Jones), and along Fleet Street, until it reached Temple Bar, where the Moroccan ambassador was met by a 400-strong contingent of Westminster’s local militia, who formed up on either side of the way as a guard of honor to escort him into Whitehall. There he was introduced to Charles I, and then to Henrietta Maria, whom he addressed in Arabic, interpreted by Blake. The four Barbary horses were presented to the king, along with the sixteen captives, and after a short private conference, Jawdar ben Abd Allah returned through the darkness to his Wood Street lodging—this time in a royal coach, because it was so dark that he couldn’t find his horse.
This spectacle was intended not only to honor the representative of a new and important ally, but also to provide a public display of English might, a loud proclamation of the Salé expedition’s success against the pirates. From the moment Rainborow arrived in the Downs, his mission was hailed as a triumph. He was fêted as a conquering hero. The king offered him a knighthood, which he declined, accepting instead a gold chain and medal worth £300.
The procession through the streets of London by a symbolic group of freed slaves (most had been dropped off at Torbay in Devon as soon as the fleet reached England) was a first, and a vindication of the ship-money levy—as the king’s ministers were quick to appreciate. “This action of Salé is so full of honor,” Thomas Wentworth told Archbishop Laud, “that it should, me thinks, help much toward the ready and cheerful payment of shipping monies.”48 Even Giles Penn was finally rewarded for having the idea in the first place: in December the king authorized him “to be his Majesty’s consul at Salé, and to execute that office by himself and his deputies in Morocco and Fez.”49 John Dunton published an account of the expedition, mentioning sadly that his little boy in Algiers was now “like to be lost for ever.”50 Then he, too, disappeared forever from the history books.
The ambassador stayed in London for six months, with the English treasury meeting his expenses to the tune of £25 per day while he and Blake ironed out the terms of the treaty with government ministers and City merchants. And he remained both actor and spectator in the king’s self-congratulatory pageant. The great Twelfth Night revels hadn’t taken place for three years: now they were reinstated. This year’s masque, Britannia Triumphans, by William Davenant and Inigo Jones, was a carefully orchestrated paean to “Britanocles, the glory of the western world, [who] hath by his wisdom, valour, and piety, not only vindicated his own, but far distant seas, infested with pirates.”51 While the French and Spanish ambassadors sulked because they hadn’t received VIP invitations and squabbled over who had the better seats, the master of ceremonies made sure that Jawdar ben Abd Allah and his retinue were given prominent places in the new Masking House at Whitehall.
They were, after all, part of the show.
Viscount Conway, a seasoned observer of court affairs, summed up the lavish reception given to the ambassador succinctly—and accurately. “The reason of all,” he wrote, “is the shipping money.”52
TEN
The Yoke of Bondage: A Slave ’s Story
By break of day in the morning, we discovered three ships about three or four leagues to leeward.”1
The victims of Barbary Coast piracy produced dozens of captivity narratives. Most are harrowing. Some are heroic. The odd few are rather hateful. But everyone’s story contains a sentence like this. The memory of fear is palpable, unstated, and common to all. The moment remains the same.
This particular moment, which came as the sun rose over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday, August 10, 1639, belongs to William Okeley, author of the most remarkable captivity narrative of them all. Okeley’s ship, the Mary of London, was taking cloth and colonists to Providence Island, a settlement off the coast of present-day Nicaragua. The Providence Island Company was founded in 1629 by a group of English Puritan noblemen, who dreamed of creating a God-fearing sanctuary where Protestants could worship in their own way, free from interference by church or state. They did, however, manage some interference of their own. In its short life, Providence had already become notorious for its buccaneers, anti-Catholic crusaders who preyed on the Spanish silver fleet. As a hopeful Providence Island settler, Okeley was imbued with a fair amount of righteous Puritan xenophobia, ranting against Catholics, Turks, Jews, “lying miracles,” priests, friars, atheism, pride, and impudence.2
When the pirates came into view that dawn, the Mary was six days out from the Isle of Wight and traveling in convoy with two other vessels that were also making the crossing to the New World. Well out into the Atlantic by now and away from the corsairs’ more obvious hunting grounds, she should have been safe.
The ship had suffered a run of bad luck ever since leaving Gravesend in June. For five frustrating weeks she lay becalmed in the Downs off the coast of Kent. Then, when the wind finally picked up and she was able to make her way around the south coast of England toward the Isle of Wight, the beer went sour. The crew had to throw it overboard and take in vinegar to mix with water for the rest of the voyage.
The Mary set off from the Isle of Wight on Sunday, August 4, 1639—and promptly ran aground on a sandbank, where she had to wait for the tide to lift her off. Rattled by their misfortunes, crew and passengers prayed for a fair wind—and reaped a whirlwind six days later, in the shape of the three Algerian corsairs. “God appoints it the moment when it should come about to blow us into the mouths of our enemies,” said Okeley.3
As soon as the as-yet unidentified strangers were sighted, the masters of the English ships passed worried messages between them. They agreed that the best plan was to stay together, heave to, and wait for the strangers to come up to them. The day wore on, the ships came closer, and, even when it was obvious that they were pirates and steering a course toward them, the English resolved to stay and fight.
At dusk the corsairs were still a little way off, and the master of the Mary lost his nerve and gave the order to hoist sail. In the darkness the vessel almost managed to escape, but dawn saw the pirates closing fast. After a short fight in which six of the English were killed and others wounded, the pirates took control of the Mary. The survivors joined the crews and passengers from the other two vessels, both of which had been taken in the night. They were kept belowdecks in one of the corsairs’ ships for five or six weeks, “condoling of each other’s miseries” in the stinking darkness and learning lingua franca.4
William Okeley’s description of arriving in Algiers in chains reads disconcertingly like a page from a guidebook:Algiers is a city very pleasantly situated on the side of the hills overlooking the Mediterranean, which lies north of it, and it lifts up its proud head so imperiously, as if it challenged a sovereignty over those seas and expected tribute from all that shall look within the straits. It lies in the thirtieth degree of longitude and hath somewhat less than thirty-five degrees of north latitude. The city is considerably large, the walls being about three miles in compass, beautified and strengthened with five gates. . . .5
The houses are fine, he says. The temples are magnificent. The castles are strong and the baths are stately.
But there is no such thing as a fair prison. And he at last admits that beautiful though Algiers is, “in our eyes it was most ugly and deformed.”6
The prisoners spent their first night ashore in a “deep, nasty cellar,” one of the holding pens by the quay. The following morning they were herded en masse to the Hall of Audience at the palace and paraded in front of the pasha, Yusuf II, who sat cross-legged on blue tapestry cushions in a gown of red silk and a great turban. The pasha had the right to one in every ten captives as his dividend (some accounts say one in eight, or even one in five), and with ransom in mind, he usually chose those who seemed to be or claimed to be well-born. Okeley was not, and he accompanied the remaining prisoners back to the bagnio, where they waited for market day.
It was a frightening time. On top of the disorientation and discomfort there was a dreadful apprehension as the prisoners remembered lurid tales of cruelty, male rape, and forced conversion, of being beaten and tortured and made “either to turn Turk or to attend their filthiness.”7 Such things did happen. Slave owners would deliberately mistreat new slaves before allowing them to write home for their ransom, just to give an added urgency to the pleas for money. Sodomy, both consensual and nonconsensual, was more common in North Africa than in Britain, although not as ubiquitous as Europeans liked to maintain. And while most descriptions of Christian captives being tortured into converting to Islam rely on hearsay or are colored by a strong element of anti-Islamic propaganda, there is no doubt that the more pious owners did bring pressure to bear on their slaves to become Muslims.
A European slave being bastinadoed.
Okeley’s induction into Algerian society was less dramatic than he expected, but still deeply humiliating. A few days after his encounter with the pasha, he and the other prisoners were led out into the open market, or bedestan, where slaves and plundered goods were offered for sale. It was here, eight years earlier, that curious onlookers had watched as Murad Raïs’s bewildered Baltimore captives were paraded up and down, had seen them clinging to each other and weeping as wives were taken from husbands and children separated from their parents.
Now an old dealer with a staff marched each man up and down, while prospective purchasers poked and prodded. They examined Okeley’s teeth—“a good, strong set of grinders will advance the price considerably.” 8 They felt his arms and legs, and paid special attention to the state of his hands. Calluses were evidence that a man was used to labor, which was good; although paradoxically, those with delicate or tender hands might command more money, since buyers “will suspect some gentleman or merchant, and then the hopes of a good price of redemption makes him saleable.”9
When everyone had had a good look, the prisoners were made to sit in a row on the ground, and the old man took each in turn and led him round the market again, crying out, “Who offers most?” Prices varied wildly, depending on the profession of the captive, his or her physical state, and the perceived potential for ransom. Gunners and skilled artisans were in great demand. A professional soldier could sell for 200 Spanish dollars, nearly £50. Once the bargain was struck, the slaves were taken once more to the pasha’s palace, their selling prices written on placards hung round their necks or on pieces of paper tucked into their hats. Yusuf not only took his tithe of new prisoners, he also had the right to any of the remaining slaves if he was prepared to match the price offered in the bedestan.
Okeley was sold to a Morisco—he doesn’t say for how much—and immediately received a sharp lesson in deference. His new master brought him home from the palace and left him in the care of his old father, who amused himself by sneering at Okeley’s Christian faith. “My ne
ck was not yet bowed nor my heart yet broken to the yoke of bondage,” the Puritan recalled.10 He responded by miming a cobbler stitching, intending to suggest that Islam was nothing more than a patchwork of nonsense cobbled together by the Prophet, the Nestorian monk Sergius, and a Jewish doctor named Abdallah. He referred to an anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic legend that was common in seventeenth-century Europe which claimed that Mohammed had almost been converted to Christianity by Sergius, and that the Qur’an had been tampered with by Abdallah after the Prophet’s death.11
You might think this was quite a hard mime to get. But get it the old man did. He flew into a frenzy, punching and kicking Okeley savagely. When his son came in and heard what had happened, he drew a knife on Okeley and was only prevented from stabbing him by his wife.
The new slave learned two lessons from the episode. One, that it was not a good idea to criticize another’s religion; and, two, that “where the whole outward man is in bondage, the tongue must not plead exemption.”12
For the first six months of his captivity Okeley worked as a domestic servant in his master’s home until, in the late spring of 1640, he was suddenly sent to sea.
Like most wealthy Algerian citizens, his master invested in piracy, contributing a share of the finance for a voyage in return for a share of the prizes. When the ship in which he had an interest took an English merchantman with a cargo of silver and other rich commodities, he and his fellow investors were so encouraged by their success that they decided to fit the prize out as a corsair, increase her armament, and send her on the cruise. Okeley was sent down to the shipyards to help with fitting her out for the voyage. Then he was told to join the crew.
He wrestled long and hard with his conscience over the morality of engaging in an action against fellow Christians. First he told himself that his job was only to manage the tackle, and that wouldn’t kill anybody. But, he argued, the management of the tackle enabled the ship’s guns to be brought to bear on a victim; so he could still be indirectly responsible for the deaths of Christians.
Pirates of Barbary Page 19
