It is traditionally said that Ward entered piracy after serving aboard a ship called The Lyon’s Whelp. When that ship put in at Portsmouth Ward learned of a barque harbored there that supposedly was richly stocked with the property of a recusant — a Catholic who refused to attend services of the Church of England — who was fleeing the country. The longer Ward talked with his shipmates over pint after pint of ale the richer this prize seemed and the easier to obtain. And indeed the seamen had no difficulty in seizing the barque from the two men on board, but unfortunately it did not contain the expected riches, which had been removed by their cautious owner. At this point there was no turning back. They continued down the English Channel until they came upon a French ship, which they commandeered. They went to Plymouth where they manned the ship with Ward’s old alehouse acquaintances and set sail for the Mediterranean.
An Englishman’s report to the state of Venice in 1608, following Ward’s capture of a Venetian galley, contains this description of him:
Captian Ward is about fifty years of age. Very short, with little hair, and that quite white; bald in front; swarthy face and beard, speaks little, and is almost always swearing. Drunk from morn till night. Most prodigal and plucky. Sleeps a great deal and often on board when in port. The habits of a thorough salt. A fool and an idiot out of his trade.”
The following year Ward sailed to Ireland and from shelter there captured several vessels. Returning to the Mediterranean he took more ships and grew wealthy. Settling in Tunis, he made an alliance with the captain of the Janissaries by cutting him a 20 percent share of his loot; this provided him with a secure base. He married an Italian woman but continued to send money to the English wife he had left behind.
He seems to have more or less retired around 1612. He is said by this time to have become a devout Muslim and to have taken the name Yusuf Reis. He built himself a palatial house called “more fit for a prince than a pirate.” According to one visitor, by this time he “always had a Turkish habit on” and “was to drink water and no wine.”
Reis survived many sea battles over the course of his life but succumbed to plague in 1622 when he was about seventy. His life was turned into a play called A Christian Turn’d Turk by the English dramatist Robert Daborne in 1612. Reis had enjoyed a reputation in England as a likeable rogue who was thought to have mainly attacked the ships of Catholic nations (a questionable notion), but his conversion to Islam was troubling to his English admirers. Daborne finessed the issue by attributing his conversion not to a matter of faith but to his love for a beautiful Turkish woman.
Harsh as the conditions of slaves in the Muslim Mediterranean could be, unless they were galley slaves — which was virtually a death sentence — they could usually obtain their freedom through the payment of ransom or by converting to Islam. For some slaves, however, these were not options. One former slave who nonetheless rose to a position of prominence was Malik Ambar, who was born in the mid-sixteenth century in the remote highlands of Ethiopia, or Abyssinia as it was then known.
Ethiopia at that time was under the control of the Solomonic dynasty, so called because it claimed descent from Solomon; but Malik Ambar was probably from a non-Christian region, like the majority of Ethiopian slaves (called Habshis) at this time. His name then was Chapu. Only later did he acquire the name by which he is remembered today — “Malik” means “king” and “Ambar” means “ambergris,” which is probably an allusion to his dark skin, since aged ambergris turns a dark gray to black color.
He was sold in a slave market on the Red Sea and taken to Baghdad, where he was purchased by a merchant who educated him and converted him to Islam. Most slaves were sold by the Solomonic Christians in exchange for Indian cottons, which were extremely popular at this time. Ambar was resold several times, eventually coming into the possession of a man named Chengiz Khan, who was chief minister of the sultanate of Ahmadnagar in the northwest of India’s Deccan plateau. This region, together with Bijapur to its south, had the highest number of Habshi slaves in India. In fact, Chengiz Khan himself was a former slave.
Malik Ambar, 1620s, by Hashim. From the Nasir al-Din Shah Album. Musée des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, Paris, 7172 Ravaux (App. 6.4).
The album to which this image of Malik Ambar was attached, along with others from the royal Mughal court, came into the possession of the ruler of the Qajar region in present-day Azerbaijan during the nineteenth century. Most of the folios in the album are now in the Gulistan Palace Library in Tehran, where they have only occasionally been made accessible to scholars.
Malik Ambar, like many Habshi slaves in Ahmadnagar, was purchased to augment the sultanate’s military forces. Military slavery was an entirely different institution from the plantation slavery of the Americas. Because the loyalty of military slaves was critical, they were well cared for. The idea behind the institution of the military slave was that by removing warriors from their family ties, factionalism based on kinship could be held in check. The same idea was behind the janissary troops of the Ottomans, who were mainly preadolescent Christians from the Balkans, given up to the empire as a kind of tax called the devshirme; they were given military and Islamic training, and were supposed to remain celibate. It was also behind the extensive employment of eunuchs in the Chinese imperial court. In all of these contexts the childless men were also relied on as bodyguards and guards of the harem or the emperor’s concubines.
Around 1575 Malik Ambar’s master died, and his widow freed him. He took a wife and rose to be a cavalry commander in charge of about 150 men. The Mughal emperor Akbhar, who pursued an aggressively expansionist policy, sought to conquer the sultanate of Ahmadnagar. In 1595 Mughal troops besieged the fortress in the city of Ahmadnagar, being turned back only by a spirited defense led by the sister of the recently deceased sultan. Five years later, however, the fortress fell to the Mughals. Malik Ambar took advantage of the ensuing chaos. The Mughals had imprisoned the Ahmadnagar sultan, but Malik Ambar found a young member of the royal family to install on the throne as figurehead ruler. He also arranged for the young sultan to marry his daughter.
For several years Malik Ambar and his main rival, a man named Raju Dakhni, led separate armies against the Mughals. Finally in 1606 Ambar confronted and defeated his rival in battle, and imprisoned him in the fortress in his new capital. Now the uncontested supreme military commander, he won victories against a rival state to the south; he held the coast against European powers; and, though he did not regain the city and fortress of Ahmadnagar, he defeated the Mughals in a series of clashes and won control of the countryside. With each victory more soldiers joined his side.
But by 1610 the puppet sultan had begun to resist some of Ambar’s directives. One of his senior wives, a woman of Persian descent, goaded him to assert his independence. A Dutch observer reports that she called Ambar’s daughter, a younger wife of the sultan, “a mere slave girl,” and slandered Ambar besides. He was swift to respond: he had both the sultan and his Persian wife poisoned, and installed their five-year-old son as the new sultan.
Thanks to his military successes and his adroitness at palace intrigue, Malik Ambar enjoyed a long reign as the prime minister and was effectively the ruler of the Ahmadnagar sultanate. Observers agree that he was a skillful and evenhanded administrator. One of his main accomplishments was the rationalization of the tax system. He assessed the fertility of land holdings and imposed taxes based on a percentage of the actual produce, allowing the substitution of cash payments in place of a percentage of the yield. A Dutch visitor in 1617 reported that Ambar was “very much loved and respected by everyone and keeps good government.”
The Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir both dispatched armies against him, winning only fleeting victories, as Ambar proved a master of guerilla tactics. He developed brigades of light cavalry that made quick harassing raids on enemy supply lines while avoiding directly engaging with the main Mughal military force. Jahangir grew obsessed with Malik Ambar. He called him “Ambar the b
lack faced” and “Ambar of dark fate,” and referred to his followers as “rebels of black fortune.”
The Submission of Rana Amar Singh to Prince Khurram, ca. 1620, by Nanha. Opaque watercolor on paper. 20 × 31 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, IS 185-1984.
Prince Khurram, the future Shah Jahan, was delegated with subjugating various Indian kingdoms to Mughal rule. Among these was the important Rajput kingdom of Mewar, the last such kingdom to fall, in 1615. In the following year Prince Khurram went on to defeat Jahangir’s nemesis, Malik Ambar, though his victory would turn out to be limited and temporary.
In the fall of 1616 Jahangir dispatched his son Khurram to lead a large force in an assault on the Ahmadnagar sultanate. Shortly before Khurram departed, Jahangir was sitting in his palace when he saw an owl fly onto a nearby roof. Because owls are associated with the night, like the blackness that so impressed Jahangir about his enemy, he associated Malik Ambar with owls. Calling for a gun, he shot at the bird and killed it, or so he wrote in his reign journal, the Jahangirnama. He subsequently commissioned a painting called “The Defeat of Malik Ambar,” in which the association with owls is emphasized — a caption reads, “The head of the night-coloured usurper is become the house of the owl” — and his fantasy of defeating his nemesis was fulfilled, if only within the margins of the painting.
Khurram did defeat Malik Ambar, forcing him to pay tribute to the Mughals. Jahangir was so pleased with this result that on his son’s return he rewarded him with the name by which he would later be known as emperor, Shah Jahan, “ruler of the world.” But the victory proved temporary. Malik Ambar returned to battle and won back the lost territory. He continued to be a thorn in Jahangir’s side until the two rival leaders died within a year of each other.
Malik Ambar died in 1626, when he was probably in his late seventies. Janhangir died in 1627; he was fifty-eight. Upon news of Ambar’s death a Mughal chronicler graciously conceded that “this Ambar was a slave, but he was an able man.” Seven years later his kingdom finally fell to the Mughals.
Because military slavery, unlike plantation slavery, did not make much use of women, the Habshis married Indian women and were gradually assimilated into society. By the eighteenth century the institution of Ethiopian slavery had ceased to exist in India, and the Habshis had virtually disappeared as a distinct group.
The plantation slavery of the Americans was a different institution entirely. Plantation farming — estates of hundreds of acres devoted to a single crop — was an Arab innovation copied by Europeans from sugar plantations in the Levant. Long established in Brazil and other parts of Latin America, plantation slavery was beginning to spread in the early seventeenth century from the Caribbean to the British colonies of North America.
In May 1616 the governor of Bermuda welcomed the Edwin, a ship that carried a variety of items useful to the young colony. The vessel “brought with her also one Indian and a Negroe (the first thes Ilands ever had).” The Indian, probably a Carib, a people originally from the north coast of South America who had been used as slaves in the Americas since the conquest, was a novelty because Bermuda had no indigenous population. The black man was a slave who was probably employed initially as a diver for pearls. Since slavery was common throughout the early modern world, the arrival of a single slave might seem an insignificant event. But it signaled the beginning of the second phase in what would be the largest and most inhumane relocation of peoples in world history.
Slave networks had long existed along the west coast of Africa. Because land in that tropical climate was quickly exhausted as an agricultural resource, power depended not so much on the control of land as on the control of people. Slaves were acquired through warfare and traded up the coast. They might have been treated harshly, but they were still perceived as people. Typically their roles as slaves were not passed to their descendents. A slave in the household of an important leader could be a person of influence.
So there were many varieties of slavery: Cervantes was kept as a slave with a view to the payment of ransom. Malik Ambar was purchased as a military slave to strengthen the Ahmadnagar sultanate’s defenses against the Mughals. Both emerged from their time as slaves into positions of influence. The cruel American slave trade was different. It saw African slaves and their descendants as chattel — not as people but simply as property. Under this system slave status was inherited and continued in perpetuity.
The main initiators and the most active participants in the cross-Atlantic slave trade were the Portuguese. As their maritime exploration and trade took them more and more frequently up and down the coast of Africa, they began to exchange textiles, guns, and other manufactured goods for slaves in African port cities and to carry the slaves across the Atlantic to the Americas.
“Landing Negroes at Jamestown from a Dutch Man-of-War, 1619,” by Howard Pyle. From Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Jan. 1901, vol. 102.
The American painter Howard Pyle (1853–1911) is best known for his illustrations to editions intended for young audiences of such books as The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood and Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates. He also illustrated episodes from American history, which were collected in 1923 in Howard Pyle’s Book of the American Spirit. Here he depicts the beginning of North American slavery, showing a group of emaciated African slaves being brought to Jamestown. The slaves’ nakedness is contrasted with the elaborate outfits of the armed slave traders and settlers.
The slaves were first taken to work in mines and farms in Central and South America. Portuguese Brazil was an obvious destination. The mainland ports of Cartagena and Veracruz, which were rich with gold and silver from the mines of Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, became the official slave-trading cities of Spanish America. The same ships that delivered the slaves would then carry ore or agricultural products produced with slave labor to Europe. There they loaded up again with manufactured goods and returned to Africa to repeat the cycle.
This trade was a factor in the development of a global economy. It was a potentially lucrative enterprise, because profits were made from each leg of the triangle. Eventually profits were increased by packing chained slaves tightly in order to deliver the largest possible cargo, even if many died along the way, though this was mainly a development of the eighteenth century.
The slave trade was responsible for a second wave of epidemic disease in the Americas. The first wave had occurred shortly after the first European contact — within twenty-five years of Columbus’s first voyage Americans began dying of smallpox. Now unhealthy conditions aboard slave ships brought new diseases. Epidemics in 1616 and 1617 in Brazil were attributed to the arrival of slave ships.
Plantation economies grew so dependent on slavery that it became a habit that was tough to kick. Plantation slavery employed two varieties of slaves: house slaves worked as servants and performed menial household duties. Field slaves worked under harsh conditions in the fields. The average life expectancy of a sugar plantation slave was seven years. Women were enslaved as well as men to perform household duties and work as field hands, and also to protect the slave owner’s investment from devaluation over time by replenishing the slave population. Children often began working around the age of seven.
Within a year after the arrival of the first slave, a Bermudan was exulting in “the “good store of neggars … brought from the West Indies.” Within three years slaves were introduced to Jamestown, where John Rolfe had developed tobacco as a viable cash crop. Virginia would become one of the largest importers of African slaves. The first phase of slavery, from the conquest to about the early seventeenth century, was modest in its numbers compared to what was to follow. The introduction of slave economies through the Caribbean to North America by English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch traders marked the beginnings of the second and more devastating phase of New World slavery — the trade would accelerate during the second half of the seventeenth century, and more than three-quarters of the slaves brought to the Americas would be imported during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The black slave brought to Bermuda in 1616 heralded the flood that would follow. The Americas had become slaves to slavery.
Movement of goods, including slaves, across vast distances required a multinational system of support for travel, and nowhere was travel more encouraged and supported than in the Muslim world, as Pietro della Valle was discovering. The dapper Italian made a grand entrance into the holy city of Jerusalem — the head cameleer had dyed the camels with henna and bedecked them with trappings of yellow and crimson silk. He stayed three weeks seeing the sites of the city and observing the Easter celebrations of 1616, although his visit was marred somewhat by the high fever that struck his servant Tommaso.
Pietro della Valle Prepares for a Caravan Journey, 1664–1665, from Der Voortrefelkyke Reisen van Pietro della Valle, a Dutch translation of his travels. Engraving.
From Jerusalem, unceremoniously tossing the invalid in a pannier slung over the back of a camel, he continued to Damascus. Here Tomasso decided he had had enough. Having visited Jerusalem, the party had completed its religious pilgrimage, yet della Valle, rather than returning home, seemed intent on journeying deeper into the lands of Islam. “Seeing himself in such a condition and such a place,” della Valle tells us, “he became frightened and morose, and this only made him worse. His thoughts returned to his home and his family, to the comforts and delights of Italy; then despair seized him, and he gave himself up for lost.” He was given last rites, but these were accompanied by herbs and infusions prepared by a Jewish healer. Reviving, Tommaso recanted his determination to return to Italy, assuring della Valle that he was prepared to go anywhere with him, even to India.
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