ABSTRACT
In the late 1580s, the Englishman Thomas Saunders was serving on board the Jesus voyaging to Tripoli in North Africa along with a multinational crew containing at least 23 of his countrymen. On leaving Barbary, the machinations of two Frenchmen brought the ship under suspicion and ‘Turkish’ pirates seized the crew and merchants and chained them up ‘foure by foure.’ The Turks despoiled the vessel, hanged the mate Andrew Dier, and made the rest of the company slaves ‘perpetuall unto the Great Turke.’ Saunders and his comrades had their heads shaved and were set half naked to row in the galleys and to quarry stones under the hot North African sun. He reported that two of the crew were forced to convert to Islam and were raped. The rest struggled with the violence of their overseers, the hardship of their labors, and the inadequacy of their food and clothing. They were redeemed one year later by the efforts of Sir Edward Osborne, but half of the company had already perished from disease and overwork. Saunders was among those fortunate enough to survive their enslavement and, on returning to England, published an account of his ordeal in 1587.1
One hundred years later Thomas Phelps also printed the story of his experiences as a slave in Barbary, this time in Morocco. Phelps was employed on board the Success of London sailing for Madeira, and was captured shortly after leaving the Irish coast. He was put to work quarrying and building, ‘not Living…but Starving and Dying daily.’ Attempts to ransom him failed and in desperation he ed from his captors on gouty legs and frantically rowed to a nearby English man of war. Phelps had his revenge, however: he piloted the English man of war to burn some of the Moroccan eet before returning home and publishing his tale of enslavement and escape in 1685.2
Stories of Barbary slavery were still popular a century later. In the 1790s, for instance, James Wilson Stevens was one of several Americans eager to recount the horrors suffered by his countrymen enslaved in Algiers to readers at home. Stevens recorded how American slaves were ‘subjected to a series of misery which humanity blushes to record,’ weighed down with chains, and set to work at the marine and in public quarries before their ransom was nally paid.3 Eighteenth-century Englishmen also remained interested in shocking tales from North Africa. Authors titillated British readers with ctive tales of slavery and escape, and ex-captives rehearsed the depredations they had suffered for a fascinated audience at home.
