1616

by Christensen, Thomas

  uncovered their heads, and did me homage, notwithstanding they were absolute murderers: Our lives and liberty is granted, and for a greater assurance, they tooke us both in to a great thicket of wood, where their timberd Cabine stood, and there made merry with us in good Wine and the best cheare their sequestrate cottage could afford.

  “The Modell of the Great City of Fez” from The Total Discourse, of the Rare Adventures, and Painefull Peregrinations etc., London, 1632, by William Lithgow.

  Parting from his young companion, he continued on alone. Crossing a field in Sicily he made a strange discovery — he found two young noblemen lying dead, each killed by the other in a duel. “Upon which sight to speak the truth, I searched both their pockets, and found their two silken purses loaden with Spanish pistols.” He not only helped himself to their money but also took their diamond rings off the young men’s fingers. “In the mutability of time,” he philosophized, “there is aye some fortune falleth by accident, whether lawful or not.”

  He arrived in Tunis in the summer of 1615, where he made what seems a surprising friendship, for a person of his Calvinist sensibility, with the notorious renegade corsair captain Yusuf Reis (Jack Ward). Boies Penrose speculated that Lithgow’s “shady exploit” in helping himself to the dead duelists’ valuables “may have caused him to a feel a bond in common with others who were not particular about the rights of property.” I think that following the success of his first book he was just thinking like an author, and he realized Ward would be a good story. He wrote:

  Here in Tunis I met with our English Captayne, generall Waird, once a great Pyrat, and Commaunder at Sea; who in despight of his denied acceptance in England, had turned Turke, and built there a faire Palace, beautified with rich Marble and Alabaster stones: With whome I found Domesticke, some fifteene circumcised English Runagates, whose lives and Countenances were both alike, even as desperate as disdainfull. Yet old Waird their maister was placable, and joined me safely with a passing Land conduct to Algiers; yea, and diverse times in my ten dayes staying there I dyned and supped with him, but lay aboord in the French shippe.

  Armed with Reis’s safe pass, Lithgow continued to Algiers, where he stayed seventeen days. He also visited Fez and claimed to have made a bold journey deep into the Libyan desert. In February 1616, however, he “bad goodnight to Generous Waird and his forward Runagates” and sailed back to Sicily, suffering his usual misfortunes along the return journey to Scotland. There he managed to hold still for a year or two. Then he set off again, this time by way of Ireland, with the ultimate goal of visiting Ethiopia and the legendary domains in Africa of Prester John.

  He never realized that ambition. Traveling through Spain, he found that outspoken Calvinists were not well received there. Sensing his danger, he made it out of Madrid and got as far as Malaga before he was surprised in an alleyway by nine officers, “who inclosing mee on both sides layd violent hands on mee, wrapping me up in a blacke frizado cloake, and gripping my throat to stop my crying, they carried me on their armes to the governours house, and inclosed me in a low Parlour.” He was now in the hands of the Spanish Inquisition.

  Someone had obtained a copy of his book, which condemned him to the torments appropriate to “an Arch-Hereticke to the Pope and the Virgin Mary.” He was waterboarded. He was hung by his arms with weights on his feet. He was hung upside down by his big toes. He was flogged. He was beaten. Suspected of being a spy, he was put on the rack, and both of his legs were broken. Through it all he refused to confess or to abjure his beliefs. Finally he was informed that he had been condemned to be burned.

  Then, suddenly, he was spared. The English consul had heard about his sufferings through a chance conversation and called in some favors at the Spanish court to get Lithgow released, barely alive. He was returned to England, where he was given scant chance of surviving, but he was nothing if not a tough old ornery cuss, and somehow he pulled through, “although my left Arme, and crushed bones be incurable.”

  In England Lithgow sued the Spanish government for damages and the return of money that had been confiscated from him. The Spanish ambassador promised him retribution, but he never delivered on the promise. The crippled Lithgow confronted the ambassador in London and “told him flatly in his face … what he was.” He so enraged the ambassador that he beat Lithgow severely. The English State Papers report that “Though the Scottish man took his blowes patientlie, yet he was committed to prison.” He remained in Marshalsea Prison for nine weeks for the crime of insulting an ambassador. His temper nothing soothed by this treatment, he was back in prison again the next year for unspecified offenses.

  Failing to get the compensation he sought, his thoughts, incredibly, turned again to wandering. For the moment, however, he limited himself to hobbling around England and Scotland. He worked on a book called Lithgowes Surveigh of Scotland but never brought it to publication. He was no longer enthusiastic about his homeland. He was not impressed with his country’s youth, who seemed to him devoted to

  Cards and Drunkenness, lashivious Lust:

  And all Prophananes, swearing and distrust.

  “The Author in the Racke at Malaga” from The Total Discourse, of the Rare Adventures, and Painefull Peregrinations etc., London, 1632, by William Lithgow.

  In his later years he journeyed to the Netherlands, where he had a courtside seat for some of the battles of the Thirty Years War. He planned a trip to Russia but never undertook it.

  In the end Lithgow became to the world just another old crank, and the exact year of his death went unremarked and unrecorded. He had survived, though, a quarter century after being broken on the rack. His travels might be seen, as James R. Burns suggests, as a kind of moral journey culminating in his final persona as a Protestant martyr. They also demonstrate that a dedicated traveler, touring not as a diplomat or sailor or pilgrim or merchant or anything other than a person curious about what lay farther down the road, could cover vast distances in the early modern world. And they show the extent to which such a traveler may carry preformed attitudes with him as a filter for experience and the extent to which, if his mind is not open, his attitudes to other ways of life may be hardened and constricted rather than loosened and expanded over the course of his travels.

  Notwithstanding his tedious patches of moralistic ranting, Lithgow left behind one of the first major works of modern Western travel writing, his Rare Adventures and Painful Peregrinations, published in 1632, a decade after he had returned from Spain. Its final words could read as the sigh of resignation of a broken old man; or they could be heard as the good-bye of a bad-ass traveler determined to keep on moving: “And so farewell.”

  Experiences of slavery and piracy in the Mediterranean world also informed the work of a writer greater than Lithgow. Following a long convalescence after being injured in the Battle of Lepanto, where he had performed heroically and lost the use of one arm (though not the arm itself as is sometimes said), Miguel de Cervantes spent a few more years in military duty in the then-Spanish state of Naples and elsewhere. In 1575 he was finally on his way back to Spain. He was a passenger in El Sol, a Spanish galley that was part of a fleet of four ships. Approaching the coast of Spain, the fleet encountered bad weather, and the Sol became separated from the others. It was attacked and captured, after stout but futile resistance, by North African corsairs under the command of a renegade Albanian captain called Arnaut Mami.

  Captives in Algiers, by Gustave Doré. Illustration for Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, 1863. Hachette and Co., Paris. Engraving.

  Cervantes was taken to Algiers, where he would endure five years as a slave. He would make daring but unsuccessful escape attempts on four occasions before being ransomed in 1580. That he was not severely punished for his attempts at escape is intriguing, and many scholars have given their imaginations free rein in inventing explanations, especially since Cervantes later was forced to defend himself against a vague, anonymous accusation that he had engaged in some unspecified sex
ual impropriety during his years as a slave. In the end, all of the hypotheses may say more about the scholars than about Cervantes.

  His experiences as a slave underlay some of his plays as well as the interpolated story “The Captive’s Tale” and other parts of Don Quixote; the second part of the novel was published in 1615, not long before the author’s death in 1616. According to the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo, it informed more than just those texts dealing explicitly with slavery: Cervantes’s novel was conceived at a fundamental level, he says, from “the other shore” — it was his experience as a captive in Muslim North Africa that enabled him to elaborate the vision of Spanish society that informs his work.

  Algiers, which had been part of the Ottoman empire for nearly a century, since the time of Suleiman I (“The Magnificent” or “The Lawgiver”), was one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. Together with Tunis and Tripoli it formed a naval counterbalance to the Ottoman overland offensive in the Balkans, part of a pincer attack on Christian Europe. Unlike those cities, Algiers had been an insignificant coastal village until the sixteenth century, when its maritime advantages made it a boomtown. Its population had also been swollen by the arrival of Moors expelled from Spain. By the early seventeenth century Algiers was the capital of a well-regulated state. Its economy was highly dependent on state-supported privateering: corsairs, legitimized by jihad, were taxed a percentage of their plunder. Silver was the basic currency.

  Bird’s-Eye View of Algiers, after Antonio Salamanca, from Braun and Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum (Cities of the World), vol. 2, 1575. Engraving.

  Georg Braun (1541–1622), a cleric of Cologne, edited the first comprehensive world atlas in six volumes between 1572 and 1617. The atlas contained several hundred prospects, bird’s-eye views, and map views of cities around the world. Franz Hogenberg did the majority of the engravings, but the project enlisted more than a hundred artists and cartographers. The enterprise was an expression of the new globalization of the early modern world.

  Algiers is correctly shown as a strongly fortified town advantageously placed on a harbor, although its triangular shape is not conveyed. The text in the cartouche reads, “View of Algiers, the most powerful town of the Saracens, built in the Numidian province of Africa. Situated on the edge of the Balearic Current in the Mediterranean Sea, across from Spain. Under Ottoman rule.”

  The corsair system of Algiers was a meritocracy: if you were a good pirate it didn’t matter much who you were or where you were from. Any corsair captain could rise to the supreme rank of admiral of the sea (kapudan derya) based on performance. Many corsair captains were devoted Muslims who considered themselves mujahidin, warriors for Islam. From the Muslim perspective corsair activity was a response to harassment by Spain, which had expelled its Moriscos — Muslims who were supposed to have converted to Christianity in order to stay in their Spanish homes — in 1609 and had made several attacks against the North African coast. Other corsair captains had baser motives. Renegades from many nations found shelter in Algiers, and some took advantage of the benefits (such as reduced taxes) of converting to Islam. The Spanish author of the Topography and General History of Algiers (1612), who is presumed to have been Antonio de Sosa, one of Cervantes’s fellow captives, wrote that

  There is no Christian nation in the world from which there are no renegades in Algiers. Beginning with the remote provinces of Europe, there are in Algiers renegade Muscovites, Reds …, Bulgarians, Poles, Hungarians, Bohemians, Germans, Danes, Norwegians, Scots, Englishmen, Irishmen, Flemish, Burgundians, Frenchmen, Navarrese, Basques, Castilians, Galicians, Portuguese, Andalusians, Valencians, Aragonese, Catalans, Majorcans, Sardianians, Corsicans, Sicilians, Calabreses, Neapolitans, Romans, Tuscans, Genoise, Savoyans, Piedmontese, Lombards, Venetians, Slavs, Albanians …, Greeks, Candiotas, Cretans, Cypriots, Surianos, Egyptians, and even Abejinos of Prester John and Indians from the Portuguese Indies, as well as from Brazil and New Spain.

  By the 1580s, when Christopher Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine, Algiers and its renegade corsairs were infamous in Christian Europe; he alludes to

  the cruel pirates of Argier,

  That damned train, the scum of Africa,

  Inhabited with straggling runagates.

  In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Algiers was the birthplace of Caliban’s mother, a witch. Jean-Baptiste Gramaye, a French speaker from Flanders, who was held in the city in 1619, called it “the Whip of the Christian World, the terror of Europe, Bridle of Italy and Spain, Scourge of the Islands.” Samuel Purchas, the early-seventeenth-century chronicler of voyages, became apoplectic on the topic of Algiers:

  the Whirlepoole of these Seas, the Throne of Pyracie, the Sinke of Trade and the Stinke of Slavery; the Cage of uncleane Birds of Prey, the Habitation of Sea-Devils, the Receptacle of Renegadoes of God, and Traytors to their Country….

  The city, with its enclosed harbor, had acquired the reputation of invincibility. Its triangular configuration was bordered by the sea, mountains, and a ravine on the three sides — the design of the city was compared to a bent crossbow. Surrounded by twelve-foot-thick and forty-foot-high moated walls, it spread uphill from the bay to the Qassabah (Kasbah), manned by Turkish janissaries. Here was a strong fortress surrounded by its own octagonal walls and heavily armed with multiple tiers of guns. Larger than Rome, the city boasted many public baths and fountains; terraced gardens; a mint; mosques, chapels, and synagogues; and a theological school. Houses were built close together; they often enclosed interior courtyards and were topped with roof gardens. It was possible to move from house to house by rooftop without descending to the narrow streets below. Officials lived in the heights by the Qassabah, while corsairs clustered in residences near the sea.

  Governance of the city-state centered around the ocak, the garrison to which janissaries recruited elsewhere in the empire were assigned. As the janissaries gained seniority they moved into administrative positions in the Divan, the council of state. The Divan was for the most part a democratic institution in which policy was decided by vote of members. Native Algerines could not serve as janissaries and had little role in state governance — though on the city level they filled mayoral and city council positions — but they received exemption from many taxes and civic obligations.

  According to the account of an early-seventeenth-century French writer, nearly eight hundred slaves were carried to Algiers in 1616. A modern estimate suggests that between 1520 and 1650 more than six hundred thousand captives were taken to the slave market. Many captives were chosen for work as pages or servants. Those with skills in specialized trades could work for merchants and keep up to a third of the income from their labor. The remainder did manual labor in quarries, public works, farms, or the shipyard; they were housed in special barracks, called bagnios, similar to those in which the janissaries lodged.

  Slaves could obtain their freedom by converting to Islam, but this would complicate their return home, for “turning Turk” often meant an encounter with the Inquisition. Such conversos provided military and naval knowledge to Algiers and served as interpreters.

  To prevent European states from joining forces against them, the city employed a subtle policy of shifting favoritism. Tributes, prisoner releases, corsair targets, and treaties favored one opponent or another. Beneficiaries of this system tended to be reluctant to team up with the less fortunate.

  Algerian corsairs developed a type of vessel that was heavily armed and extremely fast by the standards of the time. Driven by sails, the corsair ships could easily overtake galleys powered by rowers. A Dutchman who had been living in Marseilles, named Siemen Danziker (called Simon Danser by the English), contributed to the development of this type of ship. According to John Smith, prior to the arrival in Algiers of Danziker and the Englishman Jack Ward, “the Moores knew scarce how to saile a ship,” a claim that has the flavor of European condescension. William Lithgow claimed that Christian renegades taught the corsairs to cast cannon and use them in sea batt
les.

  After turning renegade Danziker rose rapidly among the ranks of the corsairs and acquired the name Deli Reis — “Captain Devil.” He is said to have captured forty ships that were then incorporated into the corsair fleet. Danziker also greatly expanded the range of corsair activity, traveling as far in search of prey as Iceland, which Algerian-based corsairs raided in 1616.

  At some point recalling that he had left a wife and children in Marseilles, Danziker exchanged ten Jesuit priests he had captured off the coast of Valencia for the right to return to France, where he was granted full citizenship. His allegiances again reversed, he now attacked Algiers on behalf of the French. But he was captured and beheaded there, as the traveler William Lithgow looked on.

  Though the most secure, Algiers was not the only corsair stronghold in North Africa. The other most formidable corsair captain of the early seventeenth century, Yusuf Reis (Jack Ward), operated out of Tunis. More advantageously located than Algiers for trade, Tunis was a more active commercial center, and less dependent on corsair revenue. But it possessed an excellent harbor and welcomed seamen who would convert to Islam and confine their raids to Christian ships. Reis and Danziger were sometimes a team and sometimes at odds. Perhaps a single town could not hold these two rough, powerful personalities. English taverns during the seventeenth century rocked with ballads about them:

  All the world about has heard

  Of Danseker and Captain Ward

  Ward’s date of birth is unknown, but in 1616 he seems to have been in his early sixties. He was a fisherman, “a fellow, poore, base and of no esteeme” — or so said a resentful ship master who had been taken prisoner by him and who wrote a chapbook about him that was published in 1609. He had apparently fought against Spain, and was one of many English buccaneers who were left adrift after the death of Elizabeth, when James reversed her policy of opposition and made peace with Spain. Many of these seamen, their raids no longer encouraged or supported, made their way to the Mediterranean and became corsairs. “After the death of Queen Elizabeth,” wrote John Smith, the king “had no employment for those men of warre…. Those that were rich retired with that they had; those that were poore and had nothing but from hand to mouth, turned Pirats.”