by Giles Milton
More than six decades after the capture of Browne and his men, Captain Ferris found himself in a very similar predicament. His sixteen heavy guns were more than enough to sink Captain Hakem’s vessel, and his crew were motivated by the knowledge that they would certainly be sold into slavery if they lost the battle. But the size of the Southwark, which towered over the corsairs’ xebecs, was to prove her greatest disadvantage. The ship’s great guns were unsuited to firing low in the water, and Captain Ferris realized that if the Salé corsairs managed to grapple his vessel, there was every chance that they would be able to board her.
The men on the Francis and the George watched the unfolding battle with feverish anxiety, aware that their own lives were at stake. Thomas Pellow, too, looked on in tense excitement as the Southwark’s crew fired their muskets at the two xebecs. “They behaved in the bravest manner,” he wrote, “fighting ten hours, and with a noble resolution.”
Captain Hakem’s men proved extraordinarily daring in their attack. They maneuvred their xebec close to the Southwark and managed to secure themselves to the English ship with their grappling irons. As this exposed them to shot, Captain Ferris’s men took full advantage of their position, “putting the Moors off after boarding them three times, and killing many of them.” As the day wore on, Captain Ferris’s men continued to prime and fire their guns, causing mayhem and bloodshed on the Salé vessels. But the corsairs fought with deranged fury, seeming oblivious to the carnage. Indeed, they appeared to be energized by the intensity of the battle and fought with gritty determination. For hour after hour they pressed home their attack, hacking their way on to the lower deck of the English vessel for a second, third and fourth time. Eventually, their numerical advantage began to tell. Captain Ferris’s men were exhausted by the fight and their resolve was broken by the continual wave of assaults. As the day wore on, their strength failed and they lost control of their vessel little by little. After an entire day’s battle, they had no option but to capitulate. “Being overpowered by a superior force,” wrote Pellow, “they were also obliged to submit.”
Crews of ships who resisted capture were accorded little mercy and were often executed on the spot. When the Englishman Captain Bellemy had tried to defend himself against a band of Salé corsairs, he met with a swift and violent end. “The pirate cut him down with his cutlas,” wrote his captured crewmate Francis Brooks, “and rip’d him open, and said ‘there was an end of a dog’ [and] so threw his murdered body into the sea.”
Captain Ferris was fortunate to be spared such a terrible fate, although he quickly discovered that the crews of all three captured vessels faced a grim future. Thomas Pellow provides scant information about the terrors endured by the men in the hours that followed their capture. He recalled only that the crews were “closely confined and treated after a barbarous manner.” To an eleven-year-old boy, the experience of capture must have been quite terrifying. “It is impossible for me to describe the agony I was then in,” he later wrote, “being separated from my uncle.”
A sense of helplessness and despair was the first response of most captured mariners. Captain Pellow and his crew were no exception. Just a few hours earlier, they had been free men. Now, they had lost all hope of liberty, and their captors were terrifying in their foreignness. Abraham Browne described Salé’s corsairs as “mor like ravones beasts then men”—a sentiment echoed by many other victims—and said that they fell upon their captives with great savagery, “striping of us all stark naked, having noe respect to any of us that weare wonded.” Such harsh treatment was by no means exceptional. When Joseph Pitts had been captured in 1678, he and his crewmates were chained in irons and denied all but subsistence rations: “only a little vinegar … half a spoonful of oil, and a few olives, with a small quantity of black biscuit.”
The captured crews of the Francis, the George and the Southwark found themselves separated into small groups. Captain Pellow and three of his crew were ordered aboard Captain Hakem’s vessel. Young Thomas was sent aboard the xebec commanded by Admiral el-Mediouni, along with his other three fellow shipmates. The Salé captains, realizing that they had not enough space aboard their vessels to accommodate all of their captives, decided to place some of the Englishmen on board those they had seized. These were then dispatched to Salé with a prize crew.
In the hope of capturing yet more ships, they spent the next month “in looking sharp out after other prey, and examining into the value of our cargoes.” Although they failed to repeat their spell of good fortune, other Salé xebecs met with continued success. Many of the English vessels that had put to sea in 1715 found themselves ransacked by the corsairs. Captain John Stocker’s ship, the Sarah, was captured at the end of March. Her fifteen crew members were seized and carted back to Salé. The Endeavour of Topsham was taken on the same day. Her nine-strong crew, which included a young boy, were also taken captive. Other seized vessels included the Union of Plymouth and the Hull-registered Rebecca and Mary.
Many of the colonial American merchants who had put to sea soon wished they had stayed at home, too. Captain Benjamin Church’s ship, the Prosperous from New England, was seized in the spring of 1716, just a few months before the Francis. Shortly after, the Salé corsairs captured a more profitable prize, the Princes, also from New England. All the crew members of these vessels would later meet—and become comrades in adversity—in the dreaded slave pens of Meknes.
Captain Hakem and Admiral el-Mediouni eventually tired of roaming the empty Atlantic. “Seeing no likelihood of any more prizes, and their provisions growing short, they followed the prizes and found them safe at anchor on the outside of the bar at Salé.” This shifting bank of sand, created by silt carried downstream by the Bou Regreg river, was extremely hazardous, especially for inbound vessels laden with cargo. Yet it also provided Salé with a natural defence from the sea and had long hampered large-scale military operations against the corsairs. Large craft were unable to enter Salé’s harbor, and even smaller xebecs—like Captain Hakem’s ship—were obliged to wait for high tide before they could nudge over the bar.
While the two captains waited for the tide to turn, they congratulated themselves on their good fortune. Knowing that Moulay Ismail would be delighted with the season’s haul of slaves, they looked forward to receiving payment for their human catch. But the two men soon had a rude awakening. At about noon, “[they] were all on a sudden in an extreme hurry on their discovery of a sail standing right in from sea upon them.” According to Thomas Pellow, the captains feared that it was commanded by Captain Delgarno, “who they knew then commanded a British man of war of 20 guns.”
The British captives could scarcely believe their unexpected good fortune. If this was indeed Delgarno, then his timely arrival presented them with a very real hope of rescue. The captain had made a name for himself by successfully attacking vessels belonging to the Barbary corsairs. Over the previous months he had seized two such ships. One had been taken in triumph to the British naval base at Gibraltar. The other had been shot to pieces and had sunk in the deep waters of Cape Cantin. It was now a race against the tide to see if the British captain could prime his guns and disable the Salé xebecs before the corsairs managed to reach the harbor.
The two corsair commanders acted with characteristic swiftness, trusting that the incoming tide was sufficiently advanced to allow them passage into the harbor. In this they were sorely mistaken. “Medune weighing his anchor, and Ali Hakim slipping his cable,” wrote Pellow, “they ran both aground on the bar.”
What happened next is not altogether clear. According to Salé’s French consul, Monsieur le Magdeleine, who watched the scene from the distant shoreline, the corsair xebecs were smashed to pieces by the wind and waves. Thomas Pellow tells a rather different story. He says that the British ship—whose identity was never confirmed—began to close in on the stricken vessels with the clear intention of trying to sink them.
As the attacking ship neared the xebecs, the captain opened fi
re with the heaviest weaponry, “some of his shot flying about them … [and some] far beyond them, insomuch that they were both … soon beat to pieces.” As the wind increased in velocity and the blustery squall developed into a spectacular storm, huge breakers began crashing over the sandy bar. The full force of the sea was now unleashed on the fractured xebecs, plucking at their timbers and steadily wrenching them apart. Their end was not long in coming. They spectacularly broke their backs and, as the foaming waters sluiced into their holds, the crews and prisoners were forced to swim for their lives.
“But for my part,” wrote Pellow, “I could swim but very little, and which, had I attempted, the merciless sea must have overwhelmed me.” In his desperation, he begged his crewmate, Lewis Davies to help. But Davies shook his head sadly, telling Thomas “that all his strength was highly necessary towards his own preservation; and that should he take me on his back, it would in all likelihood lose both our lives.”
Pellow was still clinging to the wreck—with all hope almost gone—when a tremendous wave brought down the ship’s mast. Realizing that this was his last hope of saving himself, he leaped into the water and lunged for the mast. As he flailed about in the choppy waves, he was spotted by a lookout and was “taken by some people in a boat from the shore.” Half drowned and trembling in terror, he watched in amazement as the Moorish crew swam calmly ashore. “[they] were under no apprehension of danger from the sea,” he wrote, “leaping into it and swimming to shore like so many dogs.” His crewmates had also done well to save themselves. All of the men from the three captured ships managed to struggle through the breakers to safety, where they were picked up by agents working for the corsairs. As they sat on the foreshore recovering from their ordeal, they saw the British vessel slip quietly out to sea. Within minutes, she was little more than a shadow in the dense sea mist.
THOMAS PELLOW’S FIRST glimpse of Salé in the summer of 1716 revealed a town originally built for defense. Over the previous decades, each side of the river estuary had been enclosed by stout battlements, and the two castles were bristling with weaponry. There were also gun emplacements mounted on the rocky shoreline, providing defense against any enemy ships attempting to enter the harbor. Towers and minarets poked above the ramparts, and in places there were orchards and vegetable gardens that stretched down almost to the sea. When the orange and lemon trees were in blossom, Salé looked quite enchanting.
Yet the great wealth enjoyed by the slave traders and corsairs was rarely apparent to newly arrived captives. Although vast sums of money were lavished on the opulent interiors of the merchants’ houses, the streets and alleys were filthy and half engulfed by rubbish. When the Frenchman Germain Mouette was taken there as a slave in the early years of Moulay Ismail’s reign, he was disgusted to find that the city walls were used as a public latrine. “There are many heaps of dung and earth as high as they,” he wrote, “which would render the entrance very easy.” Others found the souks dirty and claustrophobic, and “so narrow that a cart can scarce pass through them.” Many buildings appeared to be on the verge of collapse, and even the town defenses were said to be in a pitiful state of disrepair. The walls were “demolished and broken down in a great many places,” according to one English witness, who concluded that “‘tis a place of no great strength.”
Captain John Pellow, his young nephew and the other captives now had their first taste of life as slaves. It was a custom, throughout Barbary, for a large iron ring to be riveted to the ankle of each new arrival. In Algiers, these rings weighed one and a half pounds and were attached to a long chain, which the slave was obliged to drag behind him. The Salé slave traders often imposed far harsher conditions. One English slave said that his captor “gave order that shackles should be made for each slave, weighing fifty pound weight.”
The captives were also ceremoniously marched through the town on their first arrival, so that the locals could curse them and offer degrading and hostile treatment. When the English captive, George Elliot had been first brought ashore, he was surrounded by “several hundreds of idle, rascally people and roguish boys.” As they lunged at him and made “horrod, barbarous shouts,” Elliot and his comrades were “forced like a drove of sheep through the several streets.”
For Thomas Pellow, the experience of this public humiliation was extremely frightening. “It may easily be imagined what sad terror and apprehension I was under in so dangerous a situation,” he later wrote; “ … I could see nothing else by being delivered from death than the more grievous torments in my becoming a slave.” He and his crewmates were still in shock from the disaster they had suffered at sea; now, in a “very low and feeble condition,” they were led to the infamous matamores.
The matamores were underground cells, which each accommodated some fifteen or twenty slaves. The only light and ventilation came from a small iron grate in the roof; in winter, rain poured through this opening and flooded the floor. The grate provided the only access to the outside world. On the rare occasions when slaves were allowed out, a rope was suspended from the iron bars and they had to clamber up, using muscles that had often not been exercised for many weeks. But the luxury of fresh air was rare indeed. For weeks on end—until the next slave auction—the pitiful captives were held underground in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions.
Many slaves left accounts of these horrendous places, but only one—written by Germain Mouette—charts the full horror of life in this subterranean hell. The largest of Salé’s subterranean dungeons, which was often used for the most recently arrived captives, was supported by brick pillars. It was so deep in the earth that water and sewage frequently bubbled up from the mud floor in the wet winter months. “In this, the Christians for the most part cannot lye on the ground as they do in the others,” wrote Mouette, “because there is water in it knee deep, six months in the year.” To avoid getting soaked, “they make a sort of hammocks, or beds of ropes, hanging by great nails one above another, in such manner, that the lowermost almost touch the water with their backs.” All too often, the topmost hammock would come crashing down, “and then he and all under him certainly fall into the water where they must continue the rest of the night.”
Although the smaller dungeons were not so deep in the earth, they were overcrowded and extremely claustrophobic. Mouette said that there was so little room in the cells that the captives were forced to lie in a circle with their feet meeting in the middle. “There is no more space left,” he wrote, “than to hold an earthen vessel to ease themselves in.”
The arrival of Captain Pellow and his men coincided with the worst of the summer humidity, which covered the rush matting they were given as bedding with a thick layer of mold. According to Mouette, these mats had “such a noisome scent caus’d by the dampnes of the earth that the place becomes intolerable when all the slaves are in, and it grows warm.” The smallest of the matamores were usually “filthy, stinking and full of vermin,” and death was all too often a blessed release.
Thomas Pellow was led to one of these small matamores, where he was locked up with three of his shipmates—Lewis Davies, Thomas Goodman and Briant Clark—as well as with twenty-six men from the George and the Southwark. They were soon joined by seventeen French captives, who had also been seized at sea, and a group of slaves from elsewhere in Europe. “For three days,” wrote Pellow, “[we were] closely shut up there, and our allowance by the Moors nothing but bread and water.” The men were extremely fortunate that a few European merchants—who had been granted exceptional permission to trade in Salé—brought other food, “which was to us, in our so weak and disconsolate condition, of very great service.”
Tired, hungry and clothed in rags still stiff with sea salt, the men stood in fear of the day when they would be hauled from their cell and put up for sale. Salé’s slave market had traditionally been the largest and most profitable on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Like its counterparts in Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, it did a brisk trade in European slaves, many of whom were
pounced on by dealers and later sold elsewhere. In each of the auctions, the overriding goal of the corsairs was to make as much money as possible out of their miserable captives. The fittest men and most beautiful women were eagerly snapped up by private buyers. The old and the sick, who were almost valueless, were sold for a pittance and spent the few months that they survived doing hard labor.
Salé had two slave markets, one on the north bank of the river—now the town’s principal souk—and one on the south. Of the latter market, which was held in the shadow of the magnificent Oudaia Gate, not a trace remains. A gnarled tree spreads shade over the broken ground where slaves once stood in chains, and a whitewashed koubba, or domed sanctuary, marks the shrine of a holy marabout. It requires a leap of imagination to picture the scene as it was some three centuries ago.
Testimonies of slaves held throughout North Africa reveal a trade that was brutal and devoid of any moral scruples. In the days that preceded the auction, the strongest men often found themselves being treated to unusually generous rations. Abraham Browne was fed “fresh vitteles once a daye and sometimes twice in abondance, with good white breade from the market place.” He rightly suspected that the bread was “to feed us up for the markett, [so] that wee might be in some good plight agaynst the day wee weare to be sold.” As the sun rose on the day of the auction, the slaves were released from their dungeons and taken to the marketplace. “We were driven like beasts thither and exposed to sale,” wrote William Okeley, who was auctioned at Algiers. “Their cruelty is great, but their covetousness exceeds their cruelty.”
Just a few days earlier, these men had been masters of their own destinies. Now, they were stripped and put through their paces. They were made to jump and skip to test their agility; they had foreign fingers poked into mouths and ears. The experience of being auctioned was both terrifying and humiliating, and every individual had his own tale of suffering. George Elliot had been distressed by the way in which he was jostled through the crowd of dealers. He was chained to a black slave-driver, who “coursed me up and down, from one person to another.” Joseph Pitts was appalled to discover that the dealers in Algiers had a sales patter that was similar to that of the traders peddling onions and eggplants in the weekly vegetable market. “‘Behold what a strong man this is! What limbs he has! He is fit for any work. And see what a pretty boy this is! No doubt his parents are very rich and able to redeem him with a great ransom.’”