by Des Ekin
‘[I]n the year 1631,’ Fr Dan began, ‘Morat Rais, a Flemish renegado, went as far as England, and from England to Ireland, where he arrived towards evening, and had put into an open boat some two hundred soldiers who then landed in a small village called Baltimore, where they took by surprise several fishermen of that island.
‘That same night they took 237 [sic] people, men, women and children, even those in the cradle.
‘This done, they brought them to Algiers …’
He paused, and his pent-up feelings suddenly flowed out through the pen on to the paper in a torrent of emotion:
‘It was a pitiful sight to see them put up for sale. For then, wives were taken from husbands and children from their fathers. Then, I declare, they sold on the one hand the husbands, on the other the wives, ripping their daughters from their arms, leaving them no hope of ever seeing each another again …’
Fr Dan was no ordinary priest. He was a member of the Trinitarians, an order of courageous volunteers, often from wealthy families, who had chosen to work among the slaves in Algiers, and, in extreme circumstances, to offer themselves as substitutes for enslavement. Dan would later become familiar to the Baltimore captives – a striking figure, pacing through the narrow streets in his distinctive white robe emblazoned with a blue and red cross on the breast. (The Trinitarians were originally a Crusader order.)
His obvious sympathy for the Baltimore villagers, whom his church would have viewed as heretics, was extraordinary and showed just what an impact this episode had had upon the entire European community in Algiers. As Fr Dan put it: ‘[T]here was not a single Christian who was not weeping and who was not full of sadness at the sight of so many honest maidens and so many good women abandoned to the brutality of these barbarians.’
The villagers’ nightmare had lasted for hours. Immediately after leaving the palace, the bedraggled captives from The Cove had been marched along the city’s main thoroughfare, Grand Market Street, to a large concourse whose shaded arcades were already filled with excited, shouting dealers. This was the notorious Bedistan slave market. Here, in this sunblasted crucible of human commerce, John Ryder, Tom Paine and the other male captives were stripped almost naked and put through their paces like prancing horses.
‘As soon as a vessel arrives from a corsair cruise after having taken a prize,’ Chevalier Laurent d’Arvieux, a French diplomat to Barbary in the 1600s, explained, ‘the slaves are unloaded and taken to the royal house. From these the Dey [Governor] chooses a fifth, and always the best, to be sold for the profit of the corps of the Militia.
‘These were taken to the State bagnios [prisons]; the others were led to the Batistan; it is a long, wide street closed at both ends, where all the captives are sold …
‘There you can find auctioneers or brokers who take the slaves by the hand, walking them from one end to the other and shouting the bids at the top of their voices.
‘It is an auction where everyone has the right to bid, and where the goods are delivered to the highest and last bidder, always assuming he has the cash to pay.’
The French diplomat explained that these dealers in human slaves (‘and many deal in nothing else’) used every trick in the book to find out whether the newcomers came from wealthy backgrounds.
‘They examine their teeth, the palms of their hands, to judge by the delicacy of the skin if they are working folk; but they’ll pay special attention to those with pierced ears, which implies that they are not common folk but people of quality who’ve worn earrings since childhood.’
He advised wealthy slaves to pretend they were humble artisans and to say with a weary sigh that it made no odds whether they were free men or slaves – their working conditions would be much the same.
Ottaviano Bon, a Venetian diplomat, had much the same story to tell about the slave market in Constantinople a few years earlier. ‘Every Wednesday, in the open street,’ he wrote, ‘there are bought and sold slaves of all sorts, and every one may freely come to buy for their several uses; some for nurses, some for servants, and some for their lustful appetites …
‘[T]hey are examined of what country they are, and what they are good for; either for sewing, spinning, weaving, or the like; buying sometimes the mother with the children, and sometimes the children without the mother, sometimes two or three brothers together, and again sometimes taking the one, and leaving the rest, using no terms of humanity, love, or honesty, but even as the buyer or the seller shall think will best turn them to profit.’
When John Ryder was finally hauled into the auction ring at the Algiers Bedistan, he was put on show like a bull or stallion. His experience would probably have been similar to Emanuel d’Aranda’s:
‘An old and very decrepit auctioneer with a staff in his hand took me by the arm and led me on various circuits of the market,’ d’Aranda wrote, ‘and those who felt like buying me asked my homeland, my name and my profession …
‘They felt my hands to see if they were hard and calloused from work. Then they made me open my mouth to establish whether my teeth were strong enough to chew sea-biscuits aboard the galleys.’
After the goods had been well exhibited, the auction began.
‘They made us all sit down, and this old auctioneer took the first man in line by the arm, walking him around the market three or four times, shouting, ‘Any advance?’ As soon as the first man was sold, he was moved to the other side of the market and a new round of bidding began.’
The auctioneer’s patter was loud and enthusiastic. ‘Behold!’ he would shout. ‘What a strong man is this! What limbs he has! He is fit for any work.’
When d’Aranda himself went under the hammer, he became naturally curious. ‘I asked an old slave: “How much are they offering?” He told me: “That one is offering 190 patacoons [Spanish dollars], and the one over there is offering 200 patacoons.” The closing bid was made for 200.’
Meanwhile Joane, Bessie and the rest of the Baltimore females were being ushered into an enclosed sales room off the main square where buyers queued up to inspect them privately and in intimate detail.
It would have become rapidly apparent to Joane that the buyers were primarily interested in three classes of females: virgin girls, skilled craft workers such as seamstresses, and women whom they regarded as outstandingly beautiful.
In this cultural context, ‘beautiful’ meant ample and curvaceous. According to one contemporary diplomat, the most desirable concubines had ‘big breasts … [and] they are fat because they eat a lot of rice with beef and butter.’
Porcelain-skinned Cornish women were particularly in demand in Barbary, so the Baltimore women – with their Devon and Cornwall parentage – would have precisely met this demand.
Joane herself may have fallen into this category – or perhaps it was just that the buyers examined her swollen belly and liked the idea of getting two slaves for the price of one. She watched the bidding rise higher and higher, and eventually the hammer fell at 150 Spanish dollars (around £32).
Bessie would probably have been sold as a domestic servant at a much lower price.
We know the sale price of only one other woman from Roaring Water Bay. ‘Ellen Hawkins of Baltamore’ was sold for $86 – that is, around £18. Since she is not listed among the named Baltimore captives, she may have been one of the nameless domestics.
However, much of the attention at the sale would have focused on the younger women and teenage girls. Joane would have had to watch helplessly as friends such as Miss Croffine and Anna, the Meregeys’ maid, were submitted to intimate examinations aimed at confirming their virginity and thus establishing their higher market price.
‘[When] there is a virgin that is beautiful and fair, she is held at a high rate, and is sold for far more than any other,’ wrote Ottaviano Bon.
A contemporary traveller, Aaron Hill, reported that it was something of an entertainment for men to view these ‘miserable Christian captive-virgins’:
‘[T]hey feel their bre
asts, hands, cheeks and foreheads; nay, proceed, if curious in the nicety of search, to have the young and wretched creatures taken privately to some convenient place where, undisturbed … [they can] discover instantly by proofs and demonstration, whether the pretended virgin has as yet been robbed of that so celebrated jewel.’
The English slave Joseph Pitts concurred. He reported that buyers had the right to stick their fingers into the women’s mouths, squeeze their breasts and check their virginity ‘in a modest way’.
A French traveller, Gerard Nerval, had first-person experience of such a viewing in the 1800s. ‘They poked open their mouths so that I could examine their teeth,’ he wrote. ‘They made them walk up and down and pointed out, above all, the bounciness of their breasts.’
Let’s pause at this point and reflect on how much a human being was thought to be worth in financial terms.
First of all, we have to realise that there was a huge difference between the inflated ransom demanded and the purchase price. D’Aranda is careful to draw the distinction between ‘the value set according to the body, and not according to the ransom that may be got’. While a good craftsman might fetch, say, £46 in the slave market, his ransom might be set at five or six times that amount. These sums could be hopelessly unrealistic – one impoverished Irish captive wrote to the Earl of Cork to report that his ransom had been set at £200.
As for the value of ‘the body’, the prices varied widely.
Among those held in high esteem were doctors, gunsmiths, and barrel makers. Unskilled workers might fetch only a quarter of that price, and the sick and elderly a mere tenth.
Prices could be affected by glut and shortage, or by nationality. D’Aranda claimed that English captives came bottom of the list: ‘An Englishman is sold on 60 to 70 patacoons whereas a Spanish or Italian is valued at 150 to 200.’
Bidding took place in the main currency of Algiers, a silver coin known as the Zevu Bucu or ‘double bucu’. But as this coin was often adulterated, the hard currencies were the Spanish dollar and the Venetian ducat.
Since the dollar was worth around four shillings and threepence in English money, a captive sold at, say, $215 would be worth just over £45 sterling.
Thanks to a remarkable price-list of English and Irish slaves sold at auction in Algiers in precisely this period, we have an accurate idea of what female slaves such as Bessie Flood, Miss Croffine and Anna were worth.
According to this fascinating document, the price of white female slaves varied from $86 (£18) right up to $357 (£75), a huge amount in those days. That was the sum fetched by a London woman called Elizabeth Alwin, who must have been seen as extraordinarily attractive.
The prices fetched by the other females in this list give some clue to the bidding for the Baltimore women. Alice Heyes from Edinburgh was sold for $258 (£55). Ursula Corlion of Falmouth fetched $107 (£23), while Sarah Ripley of London was sold for $172 (£36).
Four women from Youghal in Ireland were sold together for $890 (£189) and a family of three women – Anna, Elizabeth and Katherine Wright – fetched $590 (£125).
Sometimes mothers were sold with their children. Mary Weymouth was sold along with her two little boys for $215 and Bridget Randall was sold along with her son for $225.
And what would male slaves like John Ryder and Tom Paine have fetched? None of the twenty Baltimore males features on this list, but, based on the same catalogue, it seems that prices ranged from £7 to £66 and averaged at around £27.
To put these prices in context, a clergyman at that time earned £20 and a labourer around £8 a year. An ox cost £4, a horse £3 and a cow £2.
By that reckoning, Ellen Hawkins was worth six horses and Joane Bradbrook was worth eight oxen. A labouring male would have had to work for more than three years just to repay someone’s sale price on the slave market.
What do these figures mean today? A price of £32 would equate to nearly £3000, or about 4,500, in our time. So perhaps the clearest parallel is that in seventeenth-century Algiers, a woman like Joane Broadbrook could be sold for the price today of a ten-year-old hatchback car.
‘After the slaves are sold at the Badistan, or marketplace,’ says an official English report in 1675, ‘they are carried to the King’s house and entered again, where every farthing that is offered for them more than was at the Badistan, turns to the benefit of the public.’
Emmanuel d’Aranda fell down at this final hurdle. He’d been sold privately, but on the Pasha’s whim, he found himself headed for the State galleys.
Then, with all business concluded, the profits were shared out. After expenses, half the proceeds would go to the mission’s investors, who usually included the ship’s captain. The other half went to the ship’s company. Each seaman got three parts and each Janissary got half a seaman’s cut since he was already on salary. The captain received forty parts.
The profit from this expedition would certainly have run into thousands of pounds – anywhere between a quarter and half a million in today’s money. Morat’s shares must have earned him a substantial sum – perhaps £50,000 or more today. This would go a long way in a society where everything ran on slave labour. Corsair captains were rich enough to be able to build lavish suburban mansions. Their lifestyle – on land, at least – was genteel and civilized. In a later era, an English diplomat’s daughter would write glowingly of her neighbour, a corsair rais whose home was immaculate and who would occasionally drop in on her father for a glass of port.
The tastes of Morat’s crewmen would have been less refined. Renegade sailors on shore leave were the terror of Algiers. They were compared to wild animals and one European observer wrote that all the money they brought to the city was tainted by the ‘debauchery’ and ‘unchecked licence’ of their activities on land.
That first night, the noise of their raucous celebrations filtered through the prison bars, adding further misery to the plight of John Ryder and Tom Paine; and rose up from the streets through the carved latticework of the harem screens to taunt Joane and Bessie. Once free human beings, they were now simply items of property, and they could do nothing but await their destinies.
His hectic day over, Consul James Frizell sat down to prepare his official report. The document that reached England later that summer provided surprisingly little information. Instead, it took the form of a heartfelt plea from Frizell on behalf of the Baltimore captives, the 231 other English slaves … and himself.
‘Humble petition from James Frizell to the Lords.
‘Most humbly showeth onto your Lordships that since the receipt of Your Lordships’ letter to me [July 22, 1629], here hath been taken to this place of new English captives to this day the number of 340 persons remaining here, of which 89 of them are women and children taken lately from Baltamore, with 20 men only. The rest were taken out of several ships and barks which they have sunk at sea. And this is but a beginning of the mischief that they intend to do hereafter.’
Frizell finishes his letter by beseeching the Lords to ‘commiserate [my] miserable estate and that of our poor distressed captives’ and ‘to release me out of thraldom.’
In a final, desperately pathetic note, the consul promises that if all of this is done, then he ‘with the 340 poor English captives, shall ever pray for Your Lordships’ persons’ health.’
Amazingly, this brief report represents Frizell’s only recorded reference to Baltimore that year. The only other reference is a letter in December from a Captain William Thomas, who refers inaccurately to ‘170 persons’ taken from Baltimore.
And so, against a background of official indifference, the slaves’ new lives began. In the next few chapters, we will look at the fates that awaited the various categories of captives – the children, the men and the women. But first, we will examine the most dreaded fate of all: a fate so awful that it has been described over and over again as a living hell.
Yet any man living in the fishing community of The Cove would have been a prime candidate
for this particular job. Men like Tom Paine had spent their entire working lives pulling oars at high speed, in furious bursts of energy. They already had all the skills required to become a galley slave.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Condemned To The Oar
He that’s condemned to the oar hath first his face, eyebrows and head close shaven (for no more disgrace cannot betide a Christian). Then, being stripped to the girdle (as when rogues are to be whipped), chained they are to the seats where they sit rowing, five in a row, a Turk going on a large plank between them, and though their eyes are ready to start out with pulling, he cries: ‘Work, work, you Christian curs!’, and though none needs one blow for loitering, yet his bare back bleeds and rises up in bunches.
—from The Lamentable Cries Of Prisoners in Algiers under the Turks, 1624
BEING ‘condemned to the oar’ was the worst possible fate in Barbary. Witnesses nearly always used the same short word to describe life on the galley bench: it was hell, an unremitting torture of agony and exhaustion. Galley slaves were worked, quite literally, until they dropped dead. Their bodies were dumped into the sea and their place on the bloodied, sweat-stained bench was immediately taken up by another unfortunate slave.