by Giles Milton
As the captives neared the imperial capital, they found themselves at the center of a spectacular parade. The sultan had gathered 10,000 soldiers to help him celebrate in style, and bands played all day in commemoration of the historic victory. Several of the sultan’s sons were exhilarated by the sight of so many captive Christians and began firing wildly into their ranks.
The festivities continued late into the night. Statues of the Virgin and saints were brought before the sultan so that he could spit on them, and there was a great fantasia to celebrate the triumph. Moulay Ismail issued an edict banning the wearing of black shoes, because the Spanish were said to have introduced the custom to Morocco when they first acquired Larache in 1610. The mufti of Fez was so elated by the victory that he was moved to poetry:
How many infidels at dusk have had their heads severed from their bodies!
How many were dragged away with the death rattle in their throats!
For how many throats have our lances been as necklaces!
How many lance-tips were thrust into their breasts!
Once the fantasia was over, Moulay Ismail separated the Spanish officers from the regular soldiers. He hoped to ransom the officers for a large sum, and they were lodged in secure cells. The rest of the men were cudgeled by the sultan’s black guard before being sent to the slave pens. “The negroes kept them at hard slavery,” wrote the British captive Francis Brooks, “beating and whipping them all day long; and at night they were to lodge underground; allowing them such bread as his other poor captives have, and water to sustain them alive.”
Such cruel treatment quickly took its toll on these sick and malnourished men. “After the poor Christians had undergone their hard labour and cruel stripes for the space of five months time,” wrote Brooks, “many of them fell sick and died.” When Moulay Ismail asked why so many were missing from the building works, he was informed that 500 had perished, while a further 700 had converted to Islam in order to escape punishment. By the time Captain Pellow and his men were brought to Meknes, only a handful remained alive.
Moulay Ismail was jubilant at his military triumphs and now turned his attentions to Ceuta, the largest and most formidable of Spain’s possessions in Morocco. He had been told that the citadel’s defensive walls were almost impossible to scale or mine, but nevertheless ordered his French slaves to dig deep tunnels under the walls. He also called upon the services of one of his Russian renegades, a blacksmith who was an expert at making powerful weaponry. But cannon proved of little use when it came to bringing down the city’s stone ramparts, and the sultan instructed his gunners to destroy Ceuta’s churches and mansions instead.
The attacks on Ceuta were to continue on and off for the next two decades. By 1716, the Spanish population had dwindled to a fraction of what it had been in former times and most of the buildings lay in rubble. Moulay Ismail nevertheless ordered yet another bombardment in the summer of that year, and a concerted campaign might well have won him the city. But he quickly lost interest when he learned that there were very few inhabitants left to capture. Besides, his new concern was how best to employ the growing number of captives already being held in the Meknes slave pens.
5
INTO THE SLAVE PEN
CAPTAIN JOHN PELLOW and his men had been horrified when they first entered the Meknes slave pen. It lay just outside the city walls but was a world away from the decorative splendors of the imperial pleasure palace. Built in the form of a square and surrounded by high ramparts, the slave pen looked like a military prison. It had four tall watchtowers, and its main gate was strongly fortified and protected by a thick iron grille. According to the French padre Nolasque Neant this was always locked and was “closely guarded by the king’s Moorish guards.” Once inside, the sultan’s captives found themselves in a grim compound that contained four barrack-style buildings. “Although they were very large,” wrote the Spaniard San Juan del Puerto, “they were very uncomfortable because of the growing number of slaves.”
Captain Pellow and his comrades were led into one of the barracks and lodged alongside the other British slaves. There were some 125 Britons being held in captivity—a number that was set to rise—as well as an estimated 3,000 slaves from elsewhere in Europe. These emaciated men shared stories with the new arrivals and told a woeful tale of the miseries they had endured since being brought to the imperial capital.
One of them, John Willdon, said that Meknes was “the [most] barbarosy place of the whole world.” He and his comrades had “been forced to draw carts of lead with ropes about our shoulders, all one as horses.” They had also been beaten and whipped until their skin was raw, and made to carry “great barrs of iron upon our shoulders, as big as we could well get up, and up to our knees in dirt, and as slippery that we could hardly goe without the load.”
Another of the men, John Stocker, had been captain of the Sarah when his vessel was intercepted by the Salé corsairs. He had been brought to Meknes shortly before Captain Pellow and his company, and was already half starved by the terrible diet. “I am in a most deplorable condition,” he wrote to a friend in England, “[and have] nothing but one small cake [loaf] and water for 24 hours after hard work.” He said that the slave lodgings lacked even basic sanitation and complained that his hair was crawling with lice. “[I] live upon the bare ground, and [have] nothing to cover me, and [am] as lousy as possible.” Like the other British captives being held in the slave pen, Stocker had fallen into a deep depression. Having listened to the tales of the Spanish slaves with a heavy heart, he feared that he would never be released. He confessed that “when I think on my poor wife and children, and the hardship they will meet with in my absence … [it] almost drives me distracted.” Touchingly, he added that he had written to his wife “in another stile, knowing her weak heart cannot bear to hear of the hardships I goes through.”
Captain Pellow and his men soon discovered that they were part of an organized, well-disciplined system that was designed to stretch each slave to his physical limits. On first arriving at the slave pen they had been given an old straw mat and were told to find themselves a place to sleep “on the cold ground” of the barracks. The filthy floor was infested with fleas and cockroaches. The slaves ate and slept in these terrible conditions, and spent the short nights dreaming of their families back in England.
Each morning, as the fiery sun broke the dawn sky, one of their number was appointed to oversee thirty of his comrades for the rest of the day. Some days this role would fall to Captain Pellow himself. On other days, it would be undertaken by Briant Clarke or Lewis Davies. The duties of the overseer included emptying the slop bucket and filling the water pitchers. It was also his job to collect the stinking barley flour from the storehouse, make the dough, bake it, and distribute it evenly among the men.
The daily ration for each of the men was woefully inadequate—fourteen ounces of black bread and an ounce of oil. The oil was often exchanged for “something to make us pottage at night.” Craving fresh meat, the men were sometimes able to acquire fat and gristle from one of the numerous European renegades in Meknes. These rancid scraps were used to make the evening gruel—the only hot meal that the slaves ever got to eat. If they were lucky, they could supplement this with any edible roots and weeds that they could grub out of the earth.
Their staple was bread made from barley that had lain for many months in damp storehouses. It was often so rotten that it could not be kneaded into dough. Worse still, the bread was only partially cooked in the middle, because the ovens were heated with damp reeds that produced very little heat. John Whitehead complained that “many times it has had such a nauseous smell that a man could not endure it at his nose.” There were occasions when the supplies of barley ran low and Captain Pellow and his men were given nothing at all to eat. In one letter, John Willdon bemoaned the fact that “we have not had a bitt of bread allowed us for eight days togeather, but what we have gone from dore to dore a-beging of other Christian slaves.”
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nbsp; Moulay Ismail was anxious that the slaves should eat in order to preserve their strength and had been known to visit the slave pens in order to ensure that the men were eating their pitiful rations. “One day,” wrote Father Busnot, “[the sultan], finding some of that bread which a slave had hid in a hole of the wall, [he] call’d Francis le Clerc of St. Brieux [who had hidden it] and made him eat it by force, which he told us had been greater torment to him than if he had fasted three days.”
The French slaves were particularly disgusted with the food and complained bitterly about those who prepared it. “Those poor cooks were subject to be affronted by all the gang,” wrote Germain Mouette, “because sometimes the pot was too salt, or too fresh, or not well boil’d and everyone had something to say to vex them, so that sometimes nobody would serve the office.”
Life was miserable for everyone in the slave pen, especially in midsummer when it was airless and hot. There was a rank stench of unwashed bodies, and the slop buckets also contributed to the noxious air—particularly, as many of the slaves were suffering from diarrhea and dysentery. On their arrival at the pen, Captain Pellow and his company had each been handed a rough woolen djellaba with a huge hood. They made frequent complaints about this strange and uncomfortable garment, which they never had the opportunity to wash. It quickly turned fetid and rubbed against their broken skin, causing welts and bruises. “In this habit,” wrote Simon Ockley, “they are exposed to the scorching heat of the sun in summer, and the violence of frost, snow, excessive rain and stormy winds in winter.”
There was the occasional exception to the daily cycle of thirst and gnawing hunger. Moulay Ismail was accustomed to eat his lunch in full view of the slaves working on his building projects. On one occasion, the platter of couscous and viands was larger than usual, and the sultan was unable to finish it. He bade his assembled kaids eat the remnants, but they attacked the food with a greedy relish that disgusted the sultan. He told them to stop “and order’d it to be taken from them … [and] carry’d to the Christian slaves that worked close by.” The kaids thought that he was jesting and began picking out chunks of meat, tossing them to the slaves and “alleging that the Christians were unworthy to eat in the same bason as the king had done.” But Moulay Ismail meant what he said and forced them to hand over the entire bowl, “full of pullets, pigeons and rice, dress’d with saffron, which they eat with at least as good an appetite as the kaids would have done.”
Such unexpected supplies of food were rare indeed, and for month after month Captain Pellow and his men existed on starvation rations. Thomas Pellow said that many of his former crewmates grew quite desperate from the continual hunger. “This scantiness,” he wrote, “has put several upon hazarding a leap from very high walls only to get a few wild onions that grow in the Moor’s burying place.”
The terrible food was not the only grievance of Captain Pellow and his men. The newly arrived slaves quickly discovered that the black guards appointed to oversee them were extremely violent. The guardian of the British captives lived in a small shack next to the main gate of the slave pen. He was responsible for discipline and punishment, and also kept a daily tally of the captives under his charge. “[He] locks them up every night [and] counts them out in the morning,” wrote John Whitehead. He also woke the men at dawn and led them to “the several drivers or overseers, who carry them to their respective works, where they are kept labouring till the stars appear in the evening.”
The black guards were absolute masters of the slaves under their charge and most had been handpicked by Moulay Ismail on account of their physical strength and willingness to thrash their captives. Germain Mouette penned a vivid description of his first meeting with the guardian of the French slaves, whose self-appointed role was to make the men’s lives as miserable as possible. A “black of prodigious tall stature, of a frightful aspect, and a voice as dreadful as the barking of Cerebus,” he was also a harsh disciplinarian and always clutched “a staff in his hand, proportionable to his bulk, with which he saluted every one of us, and then led us into the storehouses to chuse pickaxes of an extraordinary weight.”
Mouette’s guard was accustomed to chain the men at night and took a sadistic delight in tormenting the French captives. “Nothing was to be heard at night in our prisons but dismal groans,” wrote Mouette, “occasion’d by the violent pains proceeding from our beating.” Every dawn, the guard would appear at the door with his staff and call the men to work. “His voice put such life into us that the moment we heard him in the morning cry out at the door, ‘eoua-y-alla crusion,’ that is, ‘come out quick,’ every one of us throng’d to be foremost, for the hindermost always felt the weight of his cudgel.”
The repeated beatings, appalling diet and unsanitary lodgings caused many of the men to fall ill. Moulay Ismail required his sick slaves to continue with their work; only those too weak to stand were allowed to rest their broken bodies in the little infirmary that lay within the compound of the slave pen. This building had been established in the 1690s, when Moulay Ismail granted the king of Spain permission to endow a small friary in the captives’ quarters. It housed up to twelve Franciscan fathers, whose safety was guaranteed by the sultan as long as the Spanish king paid protection money.
The sick who were sent to the infirmary were accorded few privileges. “They are no better us’d in sickness than in health,” wrote Mouette. “The common allowance to the king’s slaves is only a porringer of black meal and a little oyl.” They were still required to perform chores and given precious little time to recover. “No rest is allow’d them,” added Mouette, “till they see they are not able to wag hand or foot … [and] cannot rise thro’ weakness.” The Frenchman said that many slaves were terrified of being forced to undergo treatment by local physicians, whose homespun cures were primitive and painful. “If the slaves complain of any pains in their body,” he wrote, “they have iron rods, with buttons of the same metal at the end, as bigg as walnuts, which they make red hot and burn the wretched patient in several parts.”
Moulay Ismail rarely showed any sympathy toward slaves who fell ill and would often beat them for not working as hard as their healthy comrades. On one occasion, he exploded with rage when told that his building program was being delayed by the fact that so many slaves were ailing. “By the emperor’s order,” wrote Francis Brooks, “his negroes fell to haling and dragging them out of that place [the infirmary].” The sick slaves were brought before the sultan, who showed no mercy toward them. “When, in that weak and feeble condition, [he saw] that they could not stand on their legs when dragged before him, he instantly killed seven of them, making their resting place a slaughter house.”
Captain Pellow and his men had been in captivity for just a few weeks when three of their number fell desperately ill. It was clear that they were unlikely to survive, and their shipboard companions looked on anxiously as they succumbed to a slow death. John Willdon wrote a desperate missive to England, warning that unless an ambassador was sent within the next few weeks to try to win their release, there would no longer be any English slaves alive in Meknes. “If he don’t come in a little time,” he wrote, “he may abide where he is, for we have a distemper called the callenture, and our men dye almost every day for want of subsistance.”
Willdon’s warning proved all too prophetic. Captain Richard Ferris of the Southwark was the first to die; he breathed his last in September 1716. John Osborne and John Foster died soon afterward, while Matthew Elliot of the George succumbed to severe sickness in the spring of 1717. Thomas Pellow’s shipmate Briant Clarke also died at about this time. Just six days later, he was followed to the grave by Captain Robert Fowler of the George and John Dunnal of the Francis.
John Dunnal was a popular crew member and the men grieved deeply at his departure. Captain John Pellow gave a moving address on the day of his death, aware that many more of his British colleagues were likely to meet their end in the Meknes slave pen. Thomas Pellow managed to obtain permission to atte
nd the little ceremony and was touched by his uncle’s words. “I shall never forget my uncle’s tender behaviour at the interment,” he wrote. “The corpse, being brought to the grave, and no particular person appointed to read the Christian ceremony of burial, my uncle took it upon him.”
Captain Pellow began reading the prayers, but the months in captivity and the overwhelming sense of loss proved too much for him to bear. In the midst of reading, he faltered and broke down. “He was not able, through the abundance of tears flowing, to go through it.” The captain was so overcome with emotion that he had to pass the Bible to one of the crew. “Never did I see such a mournful meeting,” wrote Thomas Pellow, “every one catching the contagion and all standing for a considerable time in dead silence, quite overwhelmed with grief.”
Once the little ceremony was over, Dunnal’s corpse was lowered slowly into the ground, in a plot that lay some distance from the city walls. This site had only been in use for a few years, for Moulay Ismail’s Christian slaves had previously been buried close to the ramparts. But having decided to incorporate the Christian burial ground into his palace gardens, the sultan “caus’d it to be dug six foot in depth, and all that earth to be carry’d three quarters of a league from thence.” Father Busnot said that “of five thousand Christian slaves employ’d at that work, which lasted but nine days, fifty dy’d by the stink of the bodies newly bury’d.”