by Dean King
Heedless of his formal attire, the flesh-and-blood Willshire embraced the musky, bearded captain, half clad in a filthy haik hanging from one shoulder. “Welcome to my arms, my dear sir,” he said. “This is truly a happy moment.” Tears trickled down Willshire’s face as he took the once powerful seaman’s hands. He winced as their frail old-man bones shifted in his grip.
“Come, my friends,” Willshire said at last, “let us go to the city.”
Homecomings
As soon as Riley and the sailors entered the town, attracting a great crowd, the Bashaw of Swearah summoned them to appear before him. After examining them, he pronounced them free, subject to the sultan’s approval. At Willshire’s house, barbers sheared their lice-ridden hair and beards. Servants gingerly washed their ravaged skin and rubbed them down with oil.
The date was November 7, though they certainly did not know it when they entered Swearah. For the first time in more than two months, the sailors felt clean clothes against their bodies. They ate well-seasoned beef kebabs, wheat bread with butter, and pomegranates, an unforgettable meal cut short, alas, by the sailors’ nausea. A Russian Jewish doctor administered “physic” for their ailing stomachs. Riley credited this man’s continuing care during the following weeks with restoring their health.
On his first night of freedom, Riley broke down. He was delirious with symptoms of what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder. This was not an unusual reaction for sailors recently emancipated from the desert, who tended to be “abject, servile, and brutified,” according to British vice-consul Joseph Dupuis. “If they have been any considerable time in slavery,” he elaborated, “they appear lost to reason and feeling, their spirits broken, and their faculties sunk in a species of stupor which I am unable adequately to describe” (Adams, p. 130).
Regarding his sudden collapse, Riley was, as usual, forthright. “My mind, which (though my body was worn down to a skeleton) had been hitherto strong, and supported me through all my trials, distresses, and sufferings, and enabled me to encourage and keep up the spirits of my frequently despairing fellow-sufferers,” he said, “could no longer sustain me: my sudden change of situation seemed to have relaxed the very springs of my soul, and all my faculties fell into the wildest confusion.” Riley cowered in the corner of the room he shared with Savage, frequently crying, trembling when anyone approached, convinced that he was about to be carried back to the desert. Willshire himself attended to him, taking him for walks in the house’s gallery during his more lucid intervals.
As the men slowly regained their equilibrium, Willshire insisted that they be weighed. Riley, whose normal weight was 240, weighed less than 90 pounds. Clark and Burns, who had been the sickest, had dropped to levels “less than I dare to mention,” reported Riley, “for I apprehend it would not be believed, that the bodies of men retaining the vital spark should not weigh forty pounds.”1
Willshire sent as far away as the city of Morocco, a hundred miles, for hearty food to supplement the sometimes meager rations available at Swearah. A Captain Wallace of the English brig Pilot even brought the Americans salt pork, split peas, and potatoes, reasoning that sailors needed ship’s mess to restore their health.
Now Riley received a letter from Horatio Sprague. The Gibraltar merchant told him that he had written Willshire to guarantee that “your draft on me for twelve hundred dollars, or more, shall be duly paid for the obtainment of your liberty, and those with you.” Sprague told Riley in this letter, dated November 13, that he hoped to soon have “the happiness to take you by the hand under my roof again.” In his rush to meet Riley’s obligation to the Arabs, Sprague had delivered the two double-barreled shotguns—including his own, a finely crafted weapon—to Willshire. Riley’s risky promise to Hamet and Seid, who had remained as guests in Willshire’s house for two weeks, was at last fulfilled.
Having received their coveted guns, the brothers prepared to leave. Hamet was eager to return to his family but promised that afterward he would set off with a strong party to find the rest of the crew of the Commerce. The following morning, the Americans saw the brothers off. Though Riley could never fully understand Hamet’s ways, the Arab had earned not only the captain’s respect but his admiration. True, he had profited through a corrupt system involving the ransoming of human beings, but by his own standards and the standards that Westerners in this place had no choice but to accept, he had done nothing immoral. In the end, he had saved the sailors from slavery; he was a humane and trustworthy man. Grateful at being rescued, Riley did not regret the bargain he had made, only the circumstances that had made it necessary. Now that he was dressed as a Westerner again and among powerful friends, he would not turn his back on Hamet, a man who had seen past their differences and trusted him, in a place where trust among strangers was a rare thing.
At their departure, commensurate with his means, Riley gave Hamet a small present, which he did not name, and Willshire gave him some fine gunpowder and other tokens of his gratitude. Riley noted with confidence that Hamet again swore, “by his right hand, he would bring up the remainder of my crew if they were to be found alive, and Allah spared his life.”
Savage, Burns, Clark, and Horace embarked on a Genovese schooner under the British flag for Gibraltar on January 4, 1816. Riley stayed behind. He had promised Archie Robbins to do all that he could to send assistance, and he would be true to his word. After an emotional departure from Willshire, who would later tell his colleague James Renshaw, “I shall always reflect with pleasure on the day that made me acquainted with Mr. Riley,” the captain crossed Morocco by mule to meet James Simpson, the American consul-general in Tangier, to ensure that arrangements were made to rescue the remainder of his crew.
Clark and Burns returned to the United States from Gibraltar on board the Massachusetts ship Rolla. At the end of January, Riley himself reached Gibraltar, where Horatio Sprague received him with “demonstrations of unfeigned joy.” Riley, Savage, and Horace sailed on board the New York ship Rapid, reaching New York City on March 19 after a forty-four-day passage.
Reunited with Phoebe and his children in Middletown, Riley could not rest long. “Our meeting was one of those that language is inadequate to describe,” he noted. “I spent only a week with them, our hearts beating in unison.” He was bound for Washington to lobby for his urgent causes: finding his shipmates and repaying Sprague. He was received by many congressmen and introduced to Secretary of State James Monroe, who, Riley said, “received me in the most kind and feeling manner.” The administration agreed to pay the $1,852.45 needed to cover the ransom and expenses and assured Riley that funds to liberate the rest of the crew would be made available. But Willshire wrote Riley on March 10 to say that he had neither heard from Sidi Hamet nor received the “least information” respecting the rest of the crew.
Like Robbins, William Porter had been carried south to the coast, where he continued to have problems with his eyesight. Heading north again, he went completely blind, and his master had to carry him in a basket on a camel. When a February rain rejuvenated their camels, his master instructed him to bathe his eyes in camel’s milk and water several times a day. This treatment, Porter believed, restored his sight.
Around the beginning of March, eight traders with the same number of loaded camels entered the camp of his master’s tribe and bartered with them for four days. At the end of that time, Porter discovered that the traders had bought him. The leader, a man named Hamet, informed him that they would take him to Swearah, where his captain had arrived safely. Hamet fed him dried figs, dates, and biscuits.
After traveling north for a month, the band of traders left the desert. Three days later, they encountered a company of fifty men on foot who appeared suddenly before them and brought them to a halt. The men on foot did not have firearms or even swords. Each had a leather bag on his left side, suspended by a belt slung over the opposite shoulder, filled with stones. They demanded that the traders give them the white slave. Hamet refused. The ro
bbers, with their overwhelming numbers, would not back down. The traders fired a volley, dropping a number of their foe, but the rest immediately began to pummel them with fist-size rocks thrown with amazing strength. When the furious battle was over, Hamet and his seven men lay dead. The stone throwers stripped them of their clothing and arms and fled south to a walled village with the camels, the goods, and Porter. About a month after the attack, Porter was taken to Wednoon and sold to Abdullah Hamet, a wealthy merchant who treated him well.
In March 1816, to Porter’s great surprise and joy, he was reunited with Robbins, who suddenly arrived in Wednoon. Having nearly been starved to death, Robbins had been treated by Meaarah with the hot knife and fed meat. Meaarah then sold him for five camels and two blankets to Hamet Webber, an Arab trader of the Oulad El Kabla, which, Robbins said, was a splinter of the Oulad Bou Sbaa but “more warlike as a tribe, and less cruel as individuals than any Arabs I had seen.” Life with Hamet Webber was good. Robbins thrived as they wandered a great distance northeast and then northwest. Three days outside Wednoon, Webber had sold Robbins to Abdallah bel Cossim, not the bel Cossim who rescued Riley but the same man who had previously owned and brutalized Robert Adams of the Charles. Robbins was put to work harvesting barley, tobacco, and other crops and building a mud wall around a field.2
In April, Willshire received a scrap of paper from Wednoon with William Porter’s signature scrawled on it. In a second note, the nearly illiterate sailor managed to inform him that Robbins was in Wednoon also. Six months later, Willshire ransomed Porter for $163 and informed Riley in a letter that he had negotiated a ransom for Robbins. Porter arrived in Boston in December and reunited with Riley in New York shortly thereafter.
Riley, who included an update of Porter in the second edition of his memoir, listened intently as the sailor told him about his journey to Swearah. He was most interested in the man named Hamet who was killed while transporting Porter north. When Porter told him that the Arabs had biscuits (a Western food that could only have come from Swearah) and that each carried good double-barreled guns, Riley felt certain that this Hamet was his Sidi Hamet, who was “under a most solemn oath to do his utmost in endeavouring to prosecute the redemption of the remainder of [the] crew.” Riley was sure that Sidi Hamet had died trying to keep his word. He mourned the news, not only because he considered Sidi Hamet a good man but also because he knew that the crew’s best chance for rescue had perished with his Arab friend.
Meanwhile, Robbins, like Robert Adams before him, suffered under bel Cossim’s cruel son Hameda and was brutalized by bel Cossim, who one day threw a heavy stone at him, hitting him in the side and leaving him in pain for two months. Robbins began to give up hope. The Muslims of Wednoon, he wrote, “had often urged me to espouse the faith of a good Mussulman—relieve myself from slavery—take an Ishmaelitish wife, and become great. I cannot tell what increasing misery might have driven me to.” Finally, he was bought by an emissary of a wealthy Berber named El’ajjah Mahomet and taken to his house 130 miles north of Wednoon. From there he wrote Willshire and eventually was taken to Swearah. In March 1817 Robbins finally arrived there, as he described it, “clad in an old woollen frock shirt, as my whole apparel; my hair had grown at random in every direction; and my beard presented one evidence of a Mahometan.” Willshire treated Robbins with the same kindness he had his shipmates. Soon thereafter, Robbins set sail for home, arriving in Boston in May.
In Swearah, Willshire had told Robbins that two Christian slaves were on an island near an Arab fishing camp far to the south. He had sent an emissary “to find them, if possible, and bring them to him that they might be redeemed.” Robbins knew that these two men had to be James Barrett and George Williams, but neither was ever rescued. No verifiable news of the remainder of the crew of the Commerce—Dick Deslisle, John Hogan, and Antonio Michel—was ever received.
To honor the two men who helped save him and his four shipmates, the captain renamed his two youngest sons Horatio Sprague Riley and William Willshire Riley. At his request, Congress voted to formally thank William Willshire for his role in rescuing the Commerces. This acknowledgment was delivered to Willshire through the U.S. consulate at Tangier. President James Monroe also sent a letter via the British government thanking Willshire for his services.
Riley’s account of the voyage of the Commerce and the captivity of her crew on the Sahara, published in 1817, was encouraged by Monroe and many congressmen and endorsed by New York statesman and abolitionist DeWitt Clinton. Aaron Savage wrote in an open letter printed in the book: “I do hereby certify that the narrative up to the time of our separation in Mogadore, contains nothing more than a plain statement of facts, and that myself, as well as others of the crew, owe our lives, liberties, and restoration to our country, under God, to [Riley’s] uncommon exertions, fortitude, intelligence, and perseverance.”
Riley’s memoir became legendary, propelling him to national and international fame. It was published in England that same year; French and Dutch editions followed during the next two years. Riley’s son William Willshire Riley later claimed that it had been “read by more than a million now living in these United States.” Although this figure is an exaggeration that has been amplified by careless scholars, Riley’s narrative did make a widespread and deep impact. Abraham Lincoln, for one, read the book as a boy and never forgot Riley’s graphic tale of captivity.3 One well-known nineteenth-century Ohio historian was named Consul Willshire Butterfield, and a South Carolina man named his son Sidi Hamet.
The book remained in print through the end of the nineteenth century. Walking along blustery Cape Cod beaches and imagining himself on the desert, Henry David Thoreau thought of Riley’s narrative, “notwithstanding the cold,” as he stated in his collection Cape Cod. Anecdotal evidence of the Narrative’s impact and long popularity can be found in an 1876 history of education in Ohio:
One pupil read from the family Bible, another from Poor Richard’s Almanac, while still a third read thrilling passages from some highly prized volume, such-as Captain James Riley’s Narrative of Shipwreck and Captivity among the Arabs. If the reader of the last chanced to possess some elocutionary power, the whole school, teacher included, suspended operations and with open mouths and eyes listened intently to the interesting narration.
Riley’s son William would claim that “no private citizen of this country, whose name has been altogether unattended by any official station to give him consequence in the opinion of the world, has made himself so extensively or so favorably known as has Capt. Riley” (Sequel, pp. iv-v).
Riley’s book made the survivors of the wreck of the Commerce celebrities of sorts in their communities and in their travels, though this did not necessarily help them materially. The brutal conditions of captivity had left a lasting mark on each of them. They suffered from various health problems, and two died within seven years of returning home.
James Clark was plagued by swellings in the neck and chin, which were diagnosed as scrofula, or tuberculosis of the lymph glands, and deemed incurable. Dr. Felix Pascalis examined him in November 1816 and in a letter described a broken man with kidney pain, incontinence, depression, and a swelling in the neck so painful that Clark begged him to cut open his glands. “He was emaciated, of a pale, sallow, and dark spotted appearance,” Pascalis observed. “His weakness was extreme; he could not move without difficulty, as if his joints were stiff; and his thinking powers seemed also slow or suspended.” Under Pascalis’s care, which included alkaline baths and poultices, applications of potash to his glands and sores, and the use of ammonia, phosphate of soda, opium, bark, and wine, Clark made a remarkable recovery, but he lived only a few years longer, dying in 1820, at age twenty-nine, in New Haven.
Shortly after returning to East Haddam, Thomas Burns remarried, to Jane Lord, who soon gave birth to a daughter, Agnes. The family eked out a living on a rented farm, though Burns, who had suffered from two concussions in Morocco, exhibited questionable behavior. In Novem
ber 1818, under rather odd circumstances, he shot twenty-three-year-old Ezekiel Fox. “Burns having been annoyed, as he says, by a white Cat, loaded his gun, and went out in the evening for the purpose of shooting it,” the Connecticut Courant reported. “Perceiving something moving, as he supposed, along the top of the wall, which he thought to be the white cat, he fired and shot the young man dead on the spot.” Burns claimed that Fox’s white vest and cravat had fooled him. He was apparently never prosecuted. Five years later, Burns, then forty-nine, his wife, and daughter all became ill and died. The Courant obituary identified Burns simply as “one of the unfortunate sufferers with Capt. Riley, on the great desart of Sahara.”
Aaron Savage married Martha Edwards of Middletown Upper Houses in 1817 and died in Stonington, Connecticut, on May 16, 1831, at the age of thirty-six. In 1842, his daughter Margaret married Captain Riley’s son William. They gave their child Sarah, born the following year, the middle name Willshire.
Nothing else is known of William Porter’s life except that he died in Stow, Ohio, on September 11, 1847, at age sixty-three.
After returning to Connecticut, Archibald Robbins published his own narrative recounting the shipwreck and his captivity, which lasted the longest of any of the survivors’. In matters of fact, Robbins’s work largely confirmed Riley’s, the fate of Antonio Michel being the chief difference between the two, along with Robbins’s omission of the theft of the bottle of wine. Like Riley’s book, Robbins’s was an immediate sensation and went through twenty printings by 1830. Robbins remained a mariner and became master of a brig in the West Indies trade. He was later captured by Spanish pirates, who plundered his vessel and tried to extort more money from him by hanging him upside down until he was nearly dead. Eventually, they released him. In 1823, he earned a large profit ferrying workers up the Hudson to dig the Erie Canal. That same year, he married George Williams’s niece Almira, and they gave their first son, William, born in 1826, the middle name Riley. Robbins, judiciously, left the sea to become a storekeeper and postmaster. After Almira died, in 1835, Robbins married her sister Elizabeth. They moved to Solon, Ohio, where Robbins, a father of nine, died in 1860.