by Des Ekin
In most cases, however, conversion led to an open door of opportunities that people back home could only dream about. Far from being despised as turncoats, renegadoes were welcomed into the highest echelons of Algerine society. For them, the sky was the limit. Humble fishermen like William Symons or Christopher Norwey from Roaring Water Bay could become great corsair captains and make fortunes virtually overnight – in fact, Fr Dan reported that the greatest corsairs were renegadoes. A man like Edward Cherry could become a soldier and rise through the ranks to the very top. They could work their way up the civil service ladder. None of these things were likely to happen to a lowly-born individual in Europe, where such social mobility would not become commonplace for centuries to come.
Today, those who voluntarily convert from Christianity to Islam talk of a gradual shift, a slow dawning, rather than a sudden dramatic epiphany. The process is eased by the fact that the two faiths have much in common. For women like Bessie Flood or Miss Croffine, there would have been some practical incentives as well.
‘What I love about Islam,’ one modern female convert told a journalist recently, ‘is the sense of respect they have for women. I have felt more respect and dignity as a Muslim woman than I ever had as a non-Muslim woman.’
This could have been one of the driving forces behind the mass conversion of the Baltimore women – whether or not they were actually aware of it.
Back home, a married woman had no property rights: everything she owned was vested in her husband. She would also sacrifice her identity and take her husband’s name. In contrast, Islam, in its purest form, emphasised a wife’s individuality, encouraging her to retain her own name and property.
While there was no concept of equality between the sexes (and nor was there in Europe at the time) there was the exotic notion of an honourable collaboration in marriage. The woman’s role as wife or mother was respected and revered. Not everyone kept to this code, but, all in all, Bessie Flood’s position in Algiers was, at the very least, comparable to that of her counterparts at home, and in many cases, infinitely better.
Neither side took kindly to losing someone to the opposition. In England, renegadoes were treated with contempt. Among the European authorities in Barbary, it was felt that any action was justifiable in an effort to prevent a man sacrificing his soul.
The Barbary rulers were equally strict about Muslim converts. Today, revisionist writers stress the religious tolerance in the Barbary states. It is true that they showed a remarkable open-mindedness: they allowed Catholics, Protestants and Jews to practise their religions, and even permitted chapels in the heart of the slave prisons.
‘Religion bothers nobody there,’ d’Arvieux wrote, no doubt with a Gallic shrug. ‘You pray to God if you want, you fast when you can’t avoid it, you drink wine if you have the money and you get drunk when you’ve drunk too much.’
But true tolerance would have allowed Muslim citizens to embrace Christianity, and that’s where the Barbary authorities drew the line. In fact, they reserved their worst punishments for those who forsook the crescent for the cross.
The most grisly sentences were carried out in the grim and desolate area outside the Gate Of The Stream. Here the ancient stone walls sprouted gruesome metal hooks or ganches, reserved for those unfortunate converts for whom, in d’Arvieux’s words, ‘a slow death was intended’.
Those who preached against Islam could be impaled on a stake. One English visitor reported that three people met this horrendous fate during his spell in Barbary.
Haëdo tells of one young Arab man who converted to Christianity in Algiers. He was dragged to a nearby building site, hurled alive into a construction mould, and immersed in molten concrete. Some three hundred years later, workmen demolishing the building found the shape left by the body of the martyr St Geronimo, complete with binding cords.
Ransom, treaty and apostasy: those were the main ways out of slavery and they were all utilised by the captives from Baltimore. But there was another means of exit, one that carried such high risks and such a low chance of success that few captives were crazy enough to try it. This was the option of escape.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Fleeing The Pirates’ Nest
Algiers, early 1640s
THE walls of the old workshop building shook and the rafters echoed as the fourscore English and Irish slaves made a joyful noise unto the Lord.
Slaves like John Ryder and Corent Croffine roared out their favourite psalms under the enthusiastic leadership of their young minister, the Reverend Devereux Spratt.
Outside in the sunbaked streets of Algiers, Janissary soldiers and religious police officers walked past, shaking their heads in amused disbelief at the heathen racket.
But unknown to them, the lusty hymn-singing was a cover for one of the most audacious escape plans ever concocted in Barbary.
For in a cellar a few feet beneath the singers, other slaves were secretly hammering nails, forcing groaning lengths of timber into contorted shapes, and stretching tarred canvas across the framework of a small seagoing vessel that would carry them out of the city of slaves and back to freedom.
It is one of history’s most astonishing escape sagas but we can’t recount it without first telling the story of Devereux Spratt – the remarkable clergyman-slave who made it all possible.
In the cool marble interior of the Anglican Church of The Holy Trinity in Algiers there are memorials to some of the most remarkable English-speaking citizens who featured in the bloodstained history of the corsair capital.
There’s a memorial to John Tipton, the first English consul to be appointed to Algiers. There’s a marble slab dedicated to the enslaved villagers of an obscure village called Baltimore. And, fittingly close to them, there’s a memorial to an extraordinary cleric named Devereux Spratt.
Spratt was an unusual clergyman in all sorts of ways. He was a strong spiritual leader, and yet he was racked by an all-too-human self-doubt that he admitted with an endearing candour.
As pastor to the English and Irish slaves in Algiers, he used his skills to forge this disparate crowd into a coherent, positive community.
By the time Spratt came to work with the slaves in Algiers in the early 1640s, John Ryder and the other Baltimore captives were entering their second decade of captivity. Since they were all Anglicans from the same southwestern corner of Ireland as Spratt’s own church, they would certainly have been his parishioners in Algiers and probably his friends as well.
Devereux Spratt was only twenty-one when he was seized by Algerine corsairs while sailing from Cork to England around ten years after Baltimore. The newly-ordained cleric had already experienced more than his share of bad luck. He had been forced out of his first parish in Ireland by the bloody 1641 rebellion, and his subsequent abduction by corsairs plunged him into a deep depression accompanied by a major crisis of faith. But his perspective changed when he arrived in Algiers. As soon as he set eyes on the hundreds of English slaves who desperately needed his help, he could no longer sustain his self-pitying opinion that God had ‘dealt more hard with me than with other of his servants’.
At first, his own conditions as a slave were reasonably good. ‘God was pleased to guide for me and those relations of mine taken with me, in a good ordering of civil patrons for us, who gave me more liberty than ordinary,’ Spratt wrote.
But Spratt was not destined to remain in clover for long. As soon as serious negotiations began for his release, he was sold on to a new owner. And during the switchover, thieves ransacked his clothes and stole a £1,000 bond he’d hidden at the time of his capture.
It was back to square one with the release negotiations, and Spratt fell into another slough of depression.
‘My patron asked me the reason,’ he recalled, ‘and withal uttered these comfortable words, Deus Grande which took such impressions as strengthened my faith much in God.’
Deus Grande: God is great. The same words were used to comfort many a homesick slave, accord
ing to the Spanish missionary Diego de Haedo. Spoken in Sabir, (another version is Dio Grande) they were used as part of a calming, fatalistic mantra intoned by master to slave:
Non pillar fantasia.
Dio grande.
Mundo cosi, cosi,
Si venir ventura, andar a casa tuya.
Si estar escripto en testa forar, forar.
Dio grande, sentar no piglliar fantasia.
Anchora no estar tempo de parlar questa cosa.
Dio grande.
No pigllar fantesia.
Mundo cosi cosi.
Si estar scripto in testa andar, andar.
Si no, aca morir.
Which translates roughly as:
Don’t be stubborn.
God is great.
Such is the world.
If you are fortunate, you will go home.
If it is written on your forehead for you to leave, you will leave.
God is great, don’t be stubborn.
Now is not the time to speak of such a thing.
God is great.
Don’t be stubborn.
Such is the world.
If it is written on your forehead for you to go, you will go.
If not, you will die here.
After that watershed, Spratt’s luck changed. An English captain began raising funds for him among the Leghorn merchants. ‘After his return to Algiers, he paid my ransom, which amounted to 200 cobes [around £40],’ Spratt recorded.
But then there was an unexpected development. The minister had proved such a comfort to the English slaves that they begged him to stay on as a free man and continue ministering to them. Spratt, who detested Algiers, tried to shift the burden of this awful decision on to the captain, his benefactor.
‘I told him that he was the instrument, under God, of my liberty, and I would be at his disposing,’ Spratt wrote. ‘He answered no; I was a free man, and should be at my own disposing. Then I replied: “I will stay; considering that I might be more serviceable to my country in enduring afflictions with the people of God, than to enjoy liberty at home.”’
With this courageous decision, the clergyman’s prolonged crisis of faith was finally over. He remained in Algiers for another two years, during which he was said to have pulled back many slaves from the brink of desperation. Perhaps Spratt’s own human weakness – his personal familiarity with what Brian Keenan called ‘the silent, screaming slide into the bowels of ultimate despair’ – enabled him to empathise with them and help them more effectively than any other minister could have done.
During his term there he even conducted slave marriages and baptised their children. In the parish church of Castmell, Lancashire, a number of people were recorded as having been baptised in Algiers by Rev. Devereux Spratt.
But after two years of this voluntary mission, he was effectively expelled from the country for his role in assisting the daring escape of his friend William Okeley and four other English slaves.
We’ve already touched on Okeley’s story. He was the slave who started a tobacco shop and later expanded it into a workshop making waterproof canvas clothes. Over the past few months, he had been making preparations for his escape by converting his assets into cash and stowing it in the false bottom of a trunk which he’d entrusted to Spratt’s care.
Now it was time to put all those canvas-sewing skills to better use.
It was a simple but audacious escape plan. If Okeley and his glovemaker friend could make waterproof canvas clothes, they could make a waterproof canvas boat. But it would have to be big enough to carry seven escapers, and such a large craft could never be concealed at the workshop. They needed a place where a group of English slaves could meet without arousing suspicion, and work noisily without anyone hearing.
Okeley gained permission to hold thrice-weekly prayer meetings at his shop’s storeroom. Spratt agreed to preside at these meetings and, according to Okeley, ‘we found our burthens much lighter and our conditions not pressed so hard upon our spirits’.
The services attracted up to eighty English slaves who no doubt kicked up an almighty noise. ‘Though we met next the street,’ says Okeley, ‘yet we never had the least disturbance from the Turks or Moors.’
Okeley was adamant that the main purpose of the meetings was ‘to strengthen our faith’. Yet it’s impossible for any modern generation to read this story without thinking of the concert rehearsals that covered the noise of tunnel digs at Colditz.
Eventually, a prototype of the canvas boat was created. ‘Having formed the design, or at least the rough draft and general model of it, my first care was whether it was likely to prove leaky or take wind,’ says Okeley.
The multi-talented Devereux Spratt was enlisted as marine consultant. He checked over the boat and ‘judged it possible’.
Spratt takes up the story, writing years later: ‘I remember there was a canvas boat made in our meeting-house in Algiers, which was carried forth and hid in a brake of canes by the seaside.’
The boat had been smuggled down one piece at a time by a laundryman who hid the sections among his heaps of dirty clothes.
The seven conspirators met down at the ‘brake of canes’ on a dark night in July. Okeley’s design had been sound: the boat floated like a dream. But she could handle only five people, so two of the slaves had to trudge back to their lodgings with heavy hearts.
The canvas had been waterproofed with pitch, but water still seeped steadily through the joints. One of the men had to work flat-out to bale out the craft while the others hauled on oars fashioned from sections of wine barrels. However, no matter how hard they rowed, the wind forced the light craft back towards land. The dawn light revealed a scene that plunged the exhausted men into near despair: they were still just outside Algiers harbour.
Fearing capture and torture, they rowed frantically for their lives and made it over the horizon. But it was blisteringly hot and within a couple of days their drinking water had all gone.
It was at this point, as Spratt wrote later, that there began a series of three ‘signal providences’ or blessings.
Just as the men were lapsing into ‘a despairing and starving condition’ a turtle broke through the surface right beside their boat. The desperate men captured it and saved their lives by drinking its blood.
The second break came on the fifth day when the men, adrift on the open sea, sank into an exhausted sleep but managed to wake just as their leaky boat was about to sink beneath them. They spotted land ahead – it was Majorca, and they were safe.
The third item of good fortune related to Spratt himself. The Algerines were no fools, and they knew exactly what had been happening at the clergyman’s prayer meetings. Spratt’s main fear was that he would be held liable for the men’s ransoms, ‘seeing I was much suspected to have a hand in contriving the boat’.
His paranoia increased when he was followed down to the harbour by a Moor who lived next door to the storeroom. ‘Seeing me one day upon the Mole viewing their ships, [he] frowned and grinded his teeth at me …’
Shortly after that, the Algerines expelled all ransomed slaves from the city. ‘I then got my free card which cost 50 cobes [£10], and departed with some of my countrymen to Provence and Marseilles, thence to Toulouse …’
Eventually Spratt made it back to England, to be reunited with Okeley and return his trunk of money to him. He preached at a parish in Devon before being sent back to minister in Mitchelstown in Co. Cork – the same county he had left in such haste, years beforehand. A memorial in the local church pays tribute to him to this day.
Understandably, Spratt had no affection for the corsair capital. He ends his story with a heartfelt prayer: ‘The Lord stir up the hearts of Christian princes to root out that nest of pirates.’
‘It will perhaps be asked, what facilities of escape a slave has in Algiers,’ Filipo Pananti wrote. ‘It occasionally happens that a captive saves himself by swimming on board some ship in the bay or Mole; but nearly all the powers of E
urope are obliged to give up any slaves that may be found on board their vessels …
‘Whenever any armed vessels of [England or France] anchor near the capital, care is taken to keep very strict lookout on the captives, lest they be induced to take advantage of the circumstance; when brought back after having attempted to escape, a slave is well bastinadoed and loaded with a double quantity of irons.’
After a short spell in Algiers, Ryder, Croffine and the rest of the Baltimore slaves would probably have agreed with the Tuscan poet’s pessimistic assessment. Escape from the ‘well-guarded city’ was rare. A combination of factors combined to make it all but impossible – the city itself was clamped shut at night, security on the waterfront was tight, and the inland routes held even more hazards than Algiers itself.
In the remainder of this chapter we’ll take a look at the rare ones who did break free, and the determined ones who never gave up trying.
The history of successful escapes from Ottoman slavery shows that a spontaneous dash for freedom often had just as much chance of succeeding as a meticulously planned mission.
The English adventurer Captain John Smith was a case in point. Condemned to thresh corn in a field, he rushed his guard and beat his brains out with the flailing bat. Swapping clothes with his rich master, he galloped off on his horse and wandered lost for sixteen days before encountering some friendly soldiers who helped him escape.
There were other spur-of-the-moment successes. In 1669, a fifty-year-old Portuguese slave working in a garden in Algiers spotted an English ship lying just offshore. Wielding a pruning knife, he hacked his way through the guards, plunged into the sea, and swam out to the vessel.
