White Gold

by Giles Milton

  Such fanatical devotion to Islam was greatly admired in Morocco, but it was the source of growing consternation in the Christian West. “It curbs none of his passions and justifies all his enormities,” wrote Father Busnot, “ … [and] sanctifies the cruelties he exercises towards the Christians and Moors.” In the eyes of Busnot and many other Europeans, Moulay Ismail had co-opted religion for his own diabolical ends. Although it brought him great power and authority in Morocco, it was provoking a growing backlash against Islam in almost every nation in Europe.

  8

  TURNING TURK

  A CLOSE-KNIT COMMUNITY, Penryn was all too familiar with the perils of the sea. Many families in the town had sons working on pilchard skiffs in the English Channel, and a few of the more adventurous traders had undertaken daring voyages to the West Indies, the Spice Islands and the Americas. The hazards of such oceanic voyages were considerable, and tempests, hidden reefs and the Barbary pirates had taken a grim toll over the previous century. Whenever shipwreck or piracy claimed the lives of Penryn’s mariners, the town’s inhabitants gathered for prayers in the ancient church of St. Gluvias. The church was also where they assembled to give thanks for more welcome news. When, in 1717, the Turkish army was defeated by Prince Eugene of Savoy, the whole village had assembled to rejoice. The parish bell-ringers performed their duties with such gusto that the congregation rewarded them with the sizable gift of two shillings and six pence.

  Elizabeth and Thomas Pellow had received no direct news from their son since his departure from Falmouth in 1715. Their parting words had been to warn him of the dangers of the Barbary corsairs. It was only after he had set sail that they learned the troubling news that Moulay Ismail had torn up his peace treaty with the late Queen Anne.

  Although Pellow himself had been unable to dispatch a letter to his family, rumors of his capture and survival had almost certainly reached Penryn. At least one letter written by Pellow’s shipmate Thomas Goodman had made it back to England. This confirmed that the Francis had indeed been captured and that the crew had been taken to Meknes as slaves. It also reported that they were being forced to endure hard labor and that conditions in the slave pens were truly terrible.

  The Pellows, a poor family, stood no chance of gathering a ransom for their son. No letters or appeals in their handwriting have survived—they were probably illiterate—and they had little opportunity to travel to London in order to petition directly the secretary of state. But they did know one person who was in a position to help. Valentine Enys, the owner of the Francis, was a wealthy and entrepreneurial merchant with trading links that stretched as far afield as the tropical West Indies and the frosty Baltic. He frequently dispatched vessels to Madeira and the Mediterranean, and had built an immense fortune from trading in wines, timber and costly cloth—“druggetts, serges, calimoneos [and] perpetuans.” He had further augmented his wealth by speculating in the Cornish tin mines, a business that had won him important friends and contacts among London’s mercantile community.

  Enys had good reason to help the Pellows in petitioning the government. The capture of the Francis’s crew had also led to the loss of his ship, and he stood to benefit if ministers entered into negotiations with the Moroccan sultan. But Enys was a tough-nosed businessman who had, on similar occasions in the past, been prepared to cut his losses. He had also displayed a callous disregard for the men who served on his ships. In 1704, one of his vessels had been seized by French privateers who, on discovering that the captain, Anthony Dewstoe, was a neighbor of Enys, had demanded the sizable ransom of £65. Captain Dewstoe expected his friend to pay the money, for he was being held in terrible conditions in Brest prison. But Enys demurred, arguing that the ransom was too high. He even had the gall to justify his decision to Dewstoe himself. “No one in the world,” he wrote, “would ever ransom a ship for more than the worth.” Although Enys did eventually pay the ransom—thereby freeing the men—his attitude was scarcely encouraging for the Pellow family.

  Elizabeth and Thomas soon found history repeating itself. Enys’s correspondence reveals that he was not unduly troubled by the capture of a small ship like the Francis. Nor did he make any effort to raise the ransom money that might have secured the release of the crew. He had written off the Francis as a lost vessel and saw little point in devoting time and money to a cause that was doomed to fail. The Pellows nevertheless pinned all their hopes on Enys and continued to pray that he would petition government ministers on their behalf. When he died in 1719, they must have felt that they had lost their most influential interlocutor.

  Although the families of the Meknes slaves ceased to have any direct news after 1717, they did receive snippets of information from Consul Anthony Hatfeild. For the first two years of his tenure, Hatfeild had been unable to discover anything of substance about the captives being held in the slave pens. But in the autumn of 1719, he at last obtained a list of those who were still alive, which provided him with exactly the information he had been seeking ever since his arrival in Tetouan. It confirmed that twenty-six British vessels had been captured over the previous five years, including two from New England and one from Newfoundland. It also listed the names of 188 men who were still being held in the Meknes slave pens. Many more had died, apostatized or simply disappeared without trace.

  Consul Hatfeild forwarded the document to London in the hope that it would encourage fresh efforts to win the release of the slaves. There is no record of a copy being sent to the West Country, but it seems inconceivable that news of its arrival was not swiftly conveyed to Devon and Cornwall. If so, the Pellow family was in for a nasty surprise. Next to Thomas’s name were the two words most feared by every parent of a captured mariner: “turn’d Moor.” They now knew that their only son had converted to Islam.

  Their reaction to this news remains a matter for conjecture, but it must have caused them grave concern. The discovery that a son or husband had apostatized was always a shock, and the few letters that have survived from the period provide a fascinating glimpse into the fears and prayers of men and women like the Pellows. When the Algiers slave Joseph Pitts informed his father of his forced conversion to Islam, the old man had been deeply distressed. “I confess,” he wrote, “when I first heard it, I thought it would have overwhelmed my spirits.”

  Old John Pitts was so appalled by the news that he beseeched Church ministers to help him through his sorrows. These ministers displayed rather more understanding about his son’s plight, arguing that apostasy caused by torture earned him the right to forgiveness and pointing out that the Church itself had devised a service of repentance for the few renegades who managed to escape from Barbary. The Laudian rite, as it was called, began with a public humiliation of the individual, who was made to kneel at the entrance of his local church dressed “in a white sheet and with a white wand in his hand.” For three weeks the penitent was forced to remain in this garb, during which time he was told to keep “his countenance dejected.” Then, after striking himself in the chest and kissing the base of the font, he was allowed to receive absolution and the holy sacrament.

  The elder Pitts was not convinced that any apostate deserved forgiveness—even his own son—although he begrudgingly wrote a letter, urging him to return to the Christian fold whenever possible. “I can hardly write to thee for weeping,” he said, “ … what more shall I say to thee … I will pawn the loss of my soul upon the salvation of thine, if thou dost but duly and daily repent.”

  Such a sentiment was quite possibly echoed by Elizabeth and Thomas Pellow on learning that they, too, had lost a son to Islam. They knew that he no longer stood any chance of being redeemed by the government, since apostates were considered to have forfeited their British nationality. The Pellows may also have feared local reaction to the news. Their offspring’s conversion was a source of shame—one that could have stigmatized them in the little community of Penryn. Yet it would not always have been thus. Just a few decades earlier—in the days of the Pellows’ gr
andparents—a tale of apostasy and Islam was more likely to have been a source of mirth.

  THE LAUGHTER COULD be heard from the farthest end of the street. It crescendoed into a loud roar before fading into the noisy hubbub of the town. It was the spring of 1623, and the Phoenix playhouse in London was packed with grinning, toothless theatergoers. They had gathered to watch The Renegado, a ribald farce set among the souks and slave markets of Barbary. With its cast of eunuchs, viziers and lusty viceroys—and its bawdy jokes about circumcision—it represented a world that was both comical and remote. When one of the characters is asked whether he will convert to Islam, he joshes that he is too attached to his foreskin:

  … I should lose

  A collop [piece of flesh] of that part my Doll enjoined me

  To bring home as she left it; ‘tis her venture,

  Nor dare I barter with that commodity

  Without her special warrant.

  The Renegado played to packed houses and was performed alongside other farces set in Barbary, such as A Christian Turned Turk. But by the 1640s, the prurient humor seemed inappropriate. The repeated attacks on the West Country—and the horrors perpetrated by the slave dealers—meant that the world of Islam was no longer quite so amusing. Thousands of Britons had been forced into apostasy in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco, and the stock-in-trade gags about circumcision, castration and sodomy no longer seemed entertaining, especially when wives of the slaves learned that their owners “do frequently bugger the said captives.”

  The concerns of these women, and the widespread anxiety about the Islamic world, would eventually penetrate the highest levels of government. On 19 March 1648, a pious young colonel named Anthony Weldon brought alarming news to the Council of State. He informed their noble lordships that the Koran—long considered to be both blasphemous and seditious—had been translated into English for the first time. Even more disturbing was the fact that its translator, Alexander Ross, was intending to publish his translation.

  The ministers of the crown were horrified that such a book might soon be available to the public at large and were particularly concerned that it would lead to a wave of apostasies. They immediately ordered the sergeant at arms “to search for the press where the Turkish Alcoran is being printed, and to seize the same, and the papers.” The sergeant was also told “to apprehend the printer and take him before the Council of State.”

  The printer was quickly arrested, and all his copies of the translation were seized and placed under lock and key. All future publications were banned, and Ross himself was summoned to the Council of State “to give an account for the printing of the Alcoran.”

  The records of his clash with the censors have unfortunately been lost. But Ross later wrote an essay about why he had undertaken his translation and must have used similar arguments when dealing with the councillors of state. He said that his “newly Englished” edition—entitled The Alcoran of Mahomet—had been produced “for the satisfaction of all that desire to look into the Turkish vanities.” He conceded that the publication was likely to cause a storm of controversy, but considered his Alcoran to be essential reading for all who wished to understand the motives of the fanatical slave traders of Barbary. “[In] viewing thine enemies in their full body,” he wrote, “thou maist the better prepare to encounter and, I hope, overcome them.” The depredations of the Salé corsairs were uppermost in his mind. “There have been continual wars, and will be still between us,” he wrote. “It concerneth every Christian who makes conscience of his ways, to examine the cause and to look into the grounds of this war.”

  The councillors claimed that Ross was encouraging apostasy, which he countered by arguing that the Koran had “already been translated into almost all languages in Christendom … yet never gained any proselyte.” But he concurred that the book could be dangerous in the wrong hands and said its circulation needed to be strictly monitored. “It is not for every man to meddle with apothecaries drugs,” he wrote, “[for] he may chance to meet with poyson as soon as an antidote.”

  The Council of State agreed to a man that Ross’s English translation was an unwelcome addition to the growing number of books about the Islamic world. Yet they were taken aback by the force of his argument. Ross had made a powerful case for the publication of his book and may also have pointed out to the councillors that their action in suppressing his Koran was probably unlawful. Just four months earlier, two separate Whitehall councils had voted for the toleration of all religions in England, “not excepting Turkes, nor Papists, nor Jews.”

  When the Council of State weighed up the arguments, they conceded that Ross had the law on his side. Offering neither explanation nor apology, they retracted their decision to ban the book and informed Ross that his Alcoran could be published in English after all. On 7 May 1649, the presses were set up once again. Soon after, the first edition of the English Koran was published.

  Ross was correct in arguing that his translation of the Koran would not cause widespread apostasy. Instead, it provided the raw material for countless bilious sermons and diatribes against the Islamic world. His Alcoran was pillaged and bastardized, and whole sections of the book were cited as proof of the falsehood of Islam and the dangers of apostasy. One of the most successful of these anti-Islamic bigots was Humphrey Prideaux, a Cornish divine whose native village of Padstow had long been familiar with the terrors of the Salé corsairs. Prideaux’s book, The True Nature of Imposture, Fully Displayed in the Life of Mahomet, did not pull its punches. It played on every popular fear about apostasy, intertwined with a robust defense of Christianity.

  When Prideaux had first tried to get his manuscript accepted, in 1697, the publisher is said to have wished “there were a little more humour in it.” But when he made a closer study of this heady cocktail of bigotry and bile, he realized he had a potential best seller on his hands. On the eve of publication, Prideaux himself had a sudden fear that he might have overstepped the bounds of decency. In an introductory letter to his readers, he urged them to discount any notion that he had maliciously distorted the truth in order to set forth Islam “in the foulest colours.” He assured them that his book was a fair and balanced account, born of many years of study. “I have been careful to set down all my authorities in the margin,” he wrote, “and at the end of the book have given an account of all the authors from whom I collected them.”

  Prideaux need not have feared what the general public would make of his book; The True Nature of Imposture was a runaway success and was rapidly reprinted in numerous editions. The first print run sold out immediately, and a second edition quickly followed. This, too, sold out, and a third and fourth reprint soon followed. As tensions flared on the Barbary coast, Prideaux prepared a further four editions between 1712 and 1718; the book would be reprinted once more in 1723.

  Fear of Islam was a subject of equally heated debate in the crown colonies of North America—especially New England, which had lost a number of merchants and mariners to the Barbary corsairs. One of Boston’s Puritan ministers, Cotton Mather, was particularly taxed by the issue of apostasy. He conceded that the slaves were suffering terrible deprivations in Morocco, yet believed that physical hardship was no excuse for spiritual weakness, rather that it should help the slaves to strengthen their Christian faith.

  In 1698—the year after the publication of Prideaux’s book—Mather wrote “A Pastoral Letter to the English Captives in Africa.” His tone was uncompromising, and he had few words of comfort for these bruised and battered men. “Who gave you to the African pyrats?” he asked sternly. “It was the Lord, against who you had sinned.” He insisted that their own faithlessness had led to their capture and reminded them that there was very little their friends could do to win their release. “You cannot now make your moans to your consorts, to your parents, to your tender-hearted relations … but you must make your moans to God in the Lord Jesus Christ.”

  Mather assured the slaves that he was writing “for your consolation.”
Yet few were in any doubt as to the real reason for his letter. The minister had been shocked by individual tales of apostasy and even more appalled to discover that large numbers of men had converted to Islam. “We must let you know,” he wrote, “that we are very much concerned for your being preserved faithful unto the death in that Christian faith which you have hitherto professed.” He begged these wretched individuals that, “whatsoever miseries you undergo, you may not, in a vain hope of deliverance from those miseries, renounce the Christian religion.”

  Slavery and apostasy continued to interest Mather for many years, but age did not temper his views. In his sermon “The Glory of Goodness” he was scathing about those who had renounced their Christianity. “The renegades, for the most part, were those who suffered the least share of adversity,” he wrote. “The fellows enjoy’d more prosperity, and lived in gentlemen’s houses with much of idleness and luxury and liberty; these for the most part were they that fell into the snare of the wicked.”

  Few in colonial North America were interested in understanding the world of Islam, and even in Britain there was almost no desire to peer beneath the surface of the frightening world of Barbary. One lone voice attempted to counter the anti-Islamic rhetoric. Simon Ockley was a brilliant linguist who from an early age had been “naturally inclin’d to ye study of ye oriental tongues.” A country parson at Swavesey, in Cambridgeshire, Ockley spent much of his time poring over Arabic manuscripts in the university libraries of Cambridge and Oxford. “[He] consulted divers of our Arabic mssts,” wrote the Oxford-based Thomas Hearne, “in which language he is said by some judges to be ye best skill’d of any man in England.”