Next, he reasoned it might still be all right, because the pirates weren’t actually going looking for Christians as such, just for anyone who was rich enough to be worth the risk and weak enough to keep that risk to a minimum.
He still felt uneasy. But his master came up with a solution to his troubles. “He told me peremptorily, I must and should go.”13
The expedition wasn’t a success. After nine weeks cruising inside and outside the Straits, all the corsairs had to show for their efforts was “one poor Hungarian French man of war.”14 The enterprise left Okeley’s disappointed master in so much debt that when the reluctant corsair got back to Algiers, he was thrown out on the street and told to get a job. He had to find his own lodgings, and he had to earn enough to pay his master two Spanish dollars every month.
The idea of the slave as an unfettered freelance worker was not as odd as it might sound. Security was tight in the case of galley slaves, whose lot was so harsh that they would go to any lengths to escape: their heads were shaved to mark them out, and they were often kept in close confinement while ashore. Other Christians had a relatively free time of it, as Okeley found when he went looking for work. He first approached an English tailor, also a slave, who offered to teach him his trade but then changed his mind. Then he fell in with another English slave, who had set himself up as a general trader selling lead, iron, shot, alcohol, and tobacco. Okeley had managed to save a little money, his master lent him some more, and he went into partnership with the man. “That very night I went and bought a parcel of tobacco,” he said. “The next morning we dressed it, cut it, and fitted it for sale, and the world seemed to smile on us wonderfully.”15
For the next three or four years Okeley worked hard and prospered. His partner turned out to be a drunk, and he faded into the background, to be replaced by an English glover, John Randal, who along with his wife and child had been with Okeley aboard the Mary when she was taken. Randal made and sold canvas clothes in the little shop they ran together, while Okeley dealt in wine and tobacco. He locked his goods away each night in a cellar he had rented for the purpose, and regularly buried his money for safekeeping.
His abiding concern was the welfare of his soul. The Algerians allowed their slaves freedom of worship (they were much more tolerant in this respect than most European nations), but there was no Protestant minister in the city. A Spanish Dominican, Father Joseph, celebrated mass, but Okeley’s hatred of popery was as venomous as his contempt for Islam. “We were very much at a loss for the preaching of the Word,” he later recalled.16
God moved in a mysterious way to answer his prayers. In 1642 an Algerian corsair was on the cruise off the coast of County Cork when he intercepted and captured a merchant ship bound for England. She was carrying 120 Protestant refugees who were escaping from the Great Rebellion, a wave of vicious sectarian fighting that was currently sweeping through Ireland.
For one of those refugees, a twenty-two-year-old minister named Devereux Spratt, capture by pirates seemed the last straw. He had lost his mother and his eight-year-old brother during the recent siege of Tralee. He had nearly died himself of a fever in Limerick, and had survived two attacks by rebels on the road down to Cork. And now this—a thing “so grievous that I began to question Providence,” he wrote in his journal, “and accused Him of injustice in His dealings with me.”17
It was only when the despairing Spratt arrived in Algiers and realized that the Protestant slaves had no one to minister to them that he revised his opinion and found a divine plan in his capture and enslavement. So did Okeley, although he had the grace to wonder “that the wise God should supply our necessities at the cost and charges of others of His dear servants.”18 The Protestant community agreed to pay a levy to Spratt’s master for his services, and before long he was conducting services three times a week in Okeley’s storage cellar, to a congregation of as many as eighty slaves. He was so successful in his preaching that although his ransom was soon paid by English merchants based at Livorno, he elected to stay on as a free man, “considering that I might be more serviceable to my country by my continuing in enduring afflictions with the people of God than to enjoy liberty at home.”19
Okeley’s master never recovered from the financial disaster of his last venture into piracy, and his debts mounted until they reached a point where he was forced to sell off all his slaves. Okeley was passed to an old gentleman with a country estate twelve miles out of Algiers, who treated him exceptionally well. “I found not only pity and compassion but love and friendship from my new patron,” he wrote.20 The man took him into the country, showed him how markets operated, gave him produce to bring back to the city to share with his fellow Christians, and groomed him to take over the management of the estate. “Had I been his son, I could not have met with more respect nor been treated with more tenderness.”21
Okeley’s attitude toward the Algerians was complicated, ambivalent, and very human. He naturally resented his enslavement, and he kicked against Algerian culture, regarding it as brutish and cruel, and dwelling at length on the appalling punishments he saw being meted out to transgressors. A Dutch slave who threatened his patron with a knife had his arms and legs broken with a sledgehammer; a Turk was crucified for an unspecified offense, while another was thrown off a high wall onto a big meat hook and left there to die. Two Moors who struck Turks (presumably members of the Janissary corps) had their right hands amputated and hung round their necks on strings. A third was dragged through the streets, his heels tied to a horse’s tail: “It was a lamentable spectacle to see his body all torn with the rugged way and stone, the skin torn off his back and elbows, his head broken, and all covered with blood and dirt.”22
This was a favorite topic with Christians in Barbary, who took possession of the moral high ground while conveniently forgetting how their own societies dealt with miscreants—the public and horribly inefficient hangings, the brandings and ear-croppings and nose-slittings. Okeley also loathed Islam with all the strength in his Puritan soul, and this deep contempt led him to view its rituals harshly. Ramadan, for instance, he saw as a perversion of Lent, “an observation which they [i.e., Muslims] may be presumed to owe to that Nestorian monk who clubbed with Mahomet in the cursed invention of the Alcoran”—another reference to the Sergius myth. He ignored or was ignorant of the study of the Qur’an, which was an integral part of Ramadan, and regarded the dawn-till-dusk fasting as meretricious and insincere. “When they have drunk and whored themselves into sin [each night], they fancy they merit a pardon by abstinence, a piece of hypocrisy so gross that whether it be to be sampled anywhere in the world, unless perhaps by the popish carnivals, I cannot tell.”23
Religious toleration was a rarity in Europe, and Okeley was amazed to discover that in Islam “every man may be saved in that religion he professes,” whether he was a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim; and that at the last, all will “march over a fair bridge, into I know not what Paradise.”24 Not that he condoned such a liberal attitude to salvation—he subscribed, after all, to a Puritan theology which believed most Christians were going to hell, never mind the unbelievers. He was impressed, however, by the respect which ordinary Algerians showed toward authority. “It’s worth admiration,” he wrote, “to see in what great awe they stand of the meanest officer, who is known to be such by his turban and habit.” These officers patrolled the streets and arrested violent offenders without weapons or helpers, because resistance was unthinkable.
And Okeley was prepared to notice and condemn the vices of Christians—particularly drunkenness, which he regarded as a European introduction. He hinted darkly at worse in the book he wrote about his experiences, claiming he could “relate a passage during our captivity in Algiers that had more of bitterness in it than in all our slavery, and yet they were Christians, not Algerines; Protestants, not Papists; Englishmen, not strangers, that were the cause of it.”25 But he refused to elaborate.
Almost imperceptibly, Okeley was becoming assimilated into Al
gerian society. He held fast to his own religion and his own kind, socializing primarily with other English captives, but step by step he became acclimatized to slavery and Barbary. “The freedom that I found in servitude,” he recalled, “the liberty I enjoyed in my bonds was so great, that it took off much of the edge of my desire to obtain and almost blunted it from any vigorous attempt after liberty.” 26 Perhaps this was bound to happen when the repatriation rate for victims of piracy was as low as it was. Only one of the victims of the Sack of Baltimore had been ransomed, for instance. All the others (except for two who were put ashore almost immediately), 106 of them, were dead, enslaved, or turned Turk.
The man whose job it was to procure the release of captives in Algiers was James Frizzell, the Levant Company agent who had helped Sir Robert Mansell during his unproductive negotiations in 1620. Three years afterward, England concluded a treaty with the Ottoman Empire which was supposed to signal the end of piratical attacks on both sides, the official recognition of English consuls in Algiers and Tunis, and the repatriation of 800 English slaves. Frizzell was appointed to Algiers—by the Levant Company rather than the English government, which tended to leave such diplomatic initiatives to merchants, along with the task of paying for them—and for the next two decades this influential but strangely elusive character did his heroic best to serve English interests in the city.
He began his long term in office with a success, by negotiating the release of 240 captives; but things went downhill from there. The pasha placed him under house arrest if avanias—the taxes levied on European merchants—weren’t paid, and confiscated his goods if English pirates interfered with Algerian shipping. The Levant Company stopped employing him when it judged that trade with Algeria was just too dangerous and unprofitable. The English government ignored him. Frustrated relatives of captives spread nasty rumors that he was slow at handing over ransom money sent from England because he hoped captives would die in the interim so that he could pocket the cash.
And through it all, it was Frizzell who kept the register of prisoners brought in by corsairs; Frizzell who badgered the English government with tallies of the lost and tried to arrange the credit which would enable their friends at home to find them; Frizzell who promised the pasha anything and everything that might lead to liberty for slaves, even—to quote a 1627 agreement he made with the diwan—“that he will restore to the city of Algiers all the ships and slaves of the Muslims taken by the English from the time of his appointment.”27 In 1643, long after the Levant Company and the English government had dispensed with his official services, he was still being described in Parliament as “Mr. James Freesell, residing as consul at Argiers.”28
Frizzell was an English captive’s best hope of repatriation. But it was a slim hope at best. Of 708 prisoners taken by pirates between 1629 and 1632, only twenty-four had been freed by the latter date. In 1637, Frizzell reported that 1,524 English subjects had been taken by Algerian corsairs, and not one hundred of them had been ransomed. And in any case, by 1644, when Okeley was losing his desire for liberty, Frizzell was old. He may even have been dead: after 1643 nothing more is heard of him in England.
After five years of slavery, William Okeley was jarred out of his complacency by the kindness of his master, who proposed that he give up the business in Algiers and take over the running of his country estate. “If I once quitted my shop,” Okeley reasoned, “I should lose with it all means, all helps, and therefore all hopes to rid myself out of this slavery.” He might have a comfortable life as an estate manager for a benevolent patron; but “fetters of gold do not lose their nature; they are fetters still.”29 If he wanted to see England again, he had to act.
He had to escape.
Running away posed a whole new set of problems. Escape from Algiers was rare, and the few Christian slaves who succeeded did so either by seizing an opportunity while crewing a pirate ship near friendly coasts, or by taking a chance and swimming out to a European merchant vessel which might happen to anchor in the bay of Algiers. The punishment for recaptured runaways was at the whim of their owners, and could be brutal: John Randal, the glover who went into partnership with Okeley for a time, received 300 strokes on the soles of his feet merely because he was suspected (wrongly, as it happened) of trying to escape. He was so badly injured that he had to give up work.
Okeley hit on an amazingly audacious plan. He meant to build a small boat in secret, in sections, in his cellar; then to dismantle it and carry it in pieces, so as not to arouse suspicion, to a secluded spot outside the city walls. Under cover of darkness he would put it back together and row or sail due north across 190 miles of open sea until he reached Majorca, where he would throw himself on the mercy of the Spanish governor.
He obviously couldn’t do any of this on his own, and his first step was to sound out Reverend Spratt and other members of the English community. They all told him it was a brilliant idea, while at the same time discovering pressing reasons why they couldn’t join him. After making discreet inquiries over the spring of 1644 he eventually recruited six fellow slaves, all Englishmen. John Anthony and another John, whose surname Okeley doesn’t give, were carpenters. A third John, John Jephs, was a sailor. William Adams was a bricklayer—not an obviously useful skill when it came to boatbuilding, but Adams regularly worked outside the city walls, carrying substantial pieces of timber which he used to level his work. These men had thirty-six years of slavery between them.
The other two conspirators aren’t named at all. They were employed in washing and drying clothes down by the seashore, which meant they could both travel out of the city without being challenged, taking small pieces of the boat with them hidden in their laundry baskets. All seven men could come and go fairly freely during daylight hours, but besides the sentries who manned the city gates around the clock, Algiers had an ad hoc system of watchmen and concerned citizens who would apprehend any slave they saw acting suspiciously beyond the walls.
The prospect of going home was exciting, and rather frightening. No one knew quite what to expect when and if they reached England again: the civil war had been raging for nearly two years, and unsettling scraps of news of the battle between king and Parliament had reached the Barbary Coast, brought by passing ships. Being the earnest Puritan that he was, Okeley also tussled with the propriety of deserting his kind patron—but only briefly. “One thought of England and of its liberty and Gospel, confuted a thousand such objections and routed whole legions of these little scruples.”30 His co-conspirators, on the other hand, became markedly less enthusiastic about the project when they stopped to consider the logistics of building a boat, smuggling it out of the city, and then surviving the voyage. Again, Okeley’s response was brisk. He told them that “if we never attempted anything till we had answered all objections, we must sit with our fingers in our mouths all our days and pine and languish out our tedious lives in bondage. Let us be up and doing, and God would be with us.”31
That June, the cellar where Okeley stored his goods, and where Spratt ministered to the Protestant congregation on Sundays, was turned into a clandestine boatbuilding yard each night. The slaves got hold of a twelve-foot-long piece of timber for the keel, which they cut in half and prepared for jointing: Adams the bricklayer might get away with carrying a six-foot piece of wood out of the city, but one that was twice that length (and keel-shaped) would be a bit of a giveaway. The same held for the ribs of the boat. The carpenters hit on the ingenious idea of making each rib in three sections and boring two holes at each joint. They could quickly reassemble them simply by fitting nails into the holes, and each joint was designed to make “an obtuse angle and so incline so near toward a semicircular figure as our occasion required.”32
They agreed it would be folly to use wooden boards for the hull: the hammering and sawing would attract too much attention. Instead they bought enough stout canvas to cover the frame twice over, and one night Okeley and the two carpenters set about waterproofing it with hot pitch, tar
, and tallow.
That nearly brought the plan to an abrupt and tragic end. They worked in the close confines of the cellar, melting their materials in earthen pots, with the door closed and rags stuffed into every gap to prevent telltale steam escaping into the street. Before long the room was filled with noxious fumes. Okeley was overcome and staggered out into the night, gulping for breath before he collapsed. His comrades brought him to and dragged him back inside, but within a short time they were also complaining of nausea and dizziness.
Eventually the three men agreed to put their faith in God and work with the cellar door wide open, Okeley keeping lookout while the others applied the molten pitch. It took them two nights; when it was done, they crept 200 yards through the narrow, dark streets to Okeley’s shop, where they stowed the canvas safely until it would be needed.
Step by step the group got everything ready. They practiced putting the boat together and taking it apart, and putting it back together again. They fashioned wooden seats, and made oars from pipe staves, and bought more canvas to use as a makeshift sail. They got hold of two tanned goatskins to use as water bottles, and decided to take fresh water, a small quantity of bread, and nothing else, “presuming our stay at sea must be but short, for either we should speedily recover land or speedily be drowned or speedily be brought back again.”33 Okeley sold off the goods from his shop and entrusted the money to Devereux Spratt in a false-bottomed trunk made specially for him by John Anthony, one of the two carpenters.
Pirates of Barbary Page 20
