by Giles Milton
Moulay Ismail’s behavior was always unpredictable and he had been known to call for impromptu inspections of his household retinue. On one occasion, Pellow noticed that the sultan was “on the merry pin” and anxious to be amused. With a malicious smile, he ordered 800 of his servant-slaves—including Pellow—to be brought before him. When they were assembled in the palace parade ground, he called for an equal number of women to be summoned from the palace. He then gave a brief address, informing the men that he had, “on several occasions, observed their readiness and dexterity in obeying him.” As a reward for their loyal behavior, he said, he had decided to present each one of them with a wife. The men assumed he was joking, but Moulay Ismail was in earnest. He entered the throng with great enthusiasm and began matching men and women, “some by his own hand … and to others by the beckoning of his head and the cast of his eye, where they should fix.”
Pellow was horrified by the spectacle that followed, particularly when he realized that he was not immune from the sultan’s grotesque matchmaking. “I was also called forth and bid to look at eight black women standing there, and to take one for a wife.” Pellow looked them up and down, but found none to his taste. It was not their looks that he disliked. Pellow, filled with the prejudices of his age, objected to the color of their skin. The women had been brought as slaves from tropical Africa and were all jet black.
“Not at all liking their colour,” wrote Pellow, “[I] immediately, bowing twice, falling to the ground and kissing it, and after that the emperor’s foot … humbly entreated him, if, in case I must have a wife, that he would be graciously pleased to give me one of my own colour.”
Pellow was taking a great risk in making such a request. Yet Moulay Ismail was bemused by his entreaty and ordered seven half-caste slaves to be summoned from the palace. None of these pleased Pellow, “at which, I again bowed to the ground, still entreating him to give me one of my own colour.” The sultan was all too familiar with Pellow’s obstinacy, and his good humor prevailed. “[He] sent for a single woman, full dressed, and who, in a very little time appeared with two young blades attending her.” When Pellow was ordered to take her hand, he got a shock. “I perceived it to be black also, as soon after I did her feet.” The effect was just as the sultan intended. He “ordered me to lift up her veil … and look at her face.”
Doing as he was commanded, Pellow was surprised to discover that the girl was much paler than most, and that her hands and feet had been stained with henna. “[I] found her to be of a very agreeable complexion,” he wrote, much to Moulay Ismail’s delight. “The old rascal [was] crying out, in a very pleasing way, in the Spanish language, ‘Bono! Bono!’ Which signifies ‘Good! Good!’” He decreed that Pellow and the girl should be married without further ado.
The sultan enjoyed marrying off his slaves and counted it as one of his chief pleasures. He often placed himself in the role of chief officiant, standing in front of the crowd and pointing to a male and female slave. According to Pellow, he would call out “that take that,” and the couple would march off “as firmly noosed as if they had been married by the Pope.” Moulay Ismail paid particular attention to the skin color of the children they would produce. He was particularly fond of mulattos, or half-castes, and “always yokes his best complexioned subjects to a black helpmate, and the fair lady must take up with a negro.”
Moulay Ismail had hit upon the idea of breeding slaves early on in his reign. He found mulattos to be the most trustworthy of his servant-slaves and often forced his white slaves to wed black women in order to replenish his household of loyal half-castes. “He took care to lay the foundation of his tawny nurseries,” wrote Pellow, “to supply his palace as he wanted.” Pellow said that the offspring from these enforced unions were reared by Moulay Ismail’s own officers, and “taught to worship and obey that successor of their Prophet, and being nursed in blood from their infancy, become the executioners and ministers of their wrath.”
Such bizarre breeding programs were by no means unique to Morocco. Mixed-blood slaves were also reared in Algiers, in order to increase the stock of half-caste servants of the regime. The French captive Chastelet des Boyes was bought by a slave master who kept fifteen or sixteen black women on his farm close to Algiers. He would regularly send his white slaves to breed with them and on one occasion selected Chastelet des Boyes. The Frenchman was taken to the farm by a eunuch, who ordered four of the women to strip him and set to work. “Having spoken to them,” wrote des Boyes, “he shut the door behind us, leaving me food … [and] a bottle of date brandy.” The eunuch remained close by and kept a watch on the sexual activity occurring within. “He didn’t fail,” wrote des Boyes, “ … evening and morning, to give us serenades on his drum.” After six days of sexual activity, the eunuch entered the room and released des Boyes. “He had a private talk with each one of the black women, and took me back to the patroon [slave owner] in the town.”
Thomas Pellow discovered that his new bride did much to improve his situation. The girl’s brother-in-law was “a man of very considerable authority” with some 1,500 young men under his charge. Other family members were also well placed; they, too, were generous to Pellow and his bride, and “received us very courteously indeed.” They told him to “always behave to her as a loving husband … and at the same time exhorting her no less duty to me.”
Pellow was given fifteen ducats by the sultan—as were the other newly betrothed retainers—but had to use some of this to buy his marital certificate. Once the certificate had been signed by the court secretary and presented to the couple, “we were all dismissed to make merry with our friends, and celebrate our nup-tuals.”
Pellow’s adopted family did their best to organize a feast. One of his wife’s brothers provided food, while Pellow himself borrowed enough money to buy “a fat bullock, four sheep, two dozen of large fowls, [and] twelve dozen of young pigeons.” The wedding feast lasted for three days, and the family engaged in “a great deal of mirth and friendly satisfaction.” But for Pellow himself, one important ingredient was missing: he was unable to acquire any wine or spirits to enliven the party. “It [was] the soberest wedding you ever saw,” he wrote, “for we had not, among all this great company, one intoxicated person.”
Pellow’s unexpected marriage bound him ever closer to his adoptive home. His conversion to Islam meant he was most unlikely to be redeemed by his home government, and he now found himself with a family of his own in Morocco.With mounting despair, he realized that he was unlikely ever to return to his native village of Penryn.
7
REBELS IN THE HIGH ATLAS
THERE ARE FEW records from Meknes between the years 1717 and 1720. The surviving British slaves had begun to lose hope of ever being released from their misery. A lone anonymous letter, which appears to have been written in the spring of 1717, suggests that conditions were as appalling as ever.
“Ye rains are now pretty well gone,” it reads, “so that it’s now beginning to be hot and long days.” The writer added that it was enough “to pierce a man to think of standing, sixteen hours or more, bare-headed in the sultry hot sun” and noted that forty-one of the British captives had recently died from hunger, sickness or the grueling daily regime. The men were still working on the outer reaches of the imperial palace and were forced into “carrying prodigious loads of dirt and stones from morn to night, without intermission, on our bare heads, without any difference twixt masters and men.” The same correspondent said that “we are all alike miserable, and I run the risk of many bastinadoes for the present stolen moments.”
The men were probably working on the Dar al-Mansur, a monumental edifice that stood on the edge of the palace compound. Some of the slaves may also have been toiling on the enlarged stables, whose size and scale had already impressed Father Busnot when he visited them a few years earlier. The interior walls were almost a mile long and supported row upon row of arched galleries. Each arch was supplied with fresh running water, and there wer
e fountains, pavilions and exquisite domed storehouses for the horses’ bridles and saddles. Father Busnot thought that the stables were “the beautifullest part of his palace.” By about 1719, they had become one of the largest.
Accounts vary as to how many horses were housed in them at any given time. Some visitors counted 1,000; others claimed to have seen more than 10,000 in the enlarged outhouses. The Moroccan chronicler Ahmed ben al-Nasari said the total number of horses was closer to 12,000.
Moulay Ismail was obsessed with the care of these horses and selected his most trusted slaves to pamper them. He decreed that every ten stallions should have two captives to care for them and provide them with every possible luxury. The sultan’s favorite horses were fed with lightly perfumed couscous and camels’ milk. Others were given sweet herbs that were gathered by the slaves each morning. Horses that made the pilgrimage to Mecca were given right royal treatment: they were exempt from labor, and the sultan himself declined to mount them. The slaves who cared for these sanctified animals were under the strictest orders and were punished with great severity if they slacked in their duty. Every time the horse urinated, they had to be ready with a vessel in order that the holy urine did not have contact with the earth. Some years earlier, the French ambassador Pidou de St. Olon watched in bemused disbelief as he was shown a horse that had recently returned from Mecca. “It was led in state just before him [Moulay Ismail],” he wrote. “His tail was held up by a Christian slave, who carried a pot and a cloth to receive his excrements and wipe him. I was told that the king, from time to time, went to kiss that horse’s tail and feet.”
A group of specially selected slaves was also charged with caring for the sultan’s extensive menagerie. Many of these animals had been presented to him as gifts from various African rulers and included wolves, leopards, lions and lynxes. He was particularly attached to two of his camels, which were “as white as snow,” and instructed his slaves to wash them with soap every other day.
Moulay Ismail also had an obsession with cats and had forty of them as pets, “all of them distinguished by their names.” He always visited them when they were being fed by the slaves and was accustomed to throw them “whole quarters of mutton.” On one occasion, the sultan was horrified to discover that one of his favorite cats had snatched a rabbit from its warren and killed it. Instead of punishing the slave in charge, as everyone expected, the sultan ordered “that an executioner should take that cat, that he should drag it along the streets of Meknes with a rope about its neck, scourging of it severely and crying with a loud voice: ‘Thus my master uses knavish cats.’” Once this gruesome spectacle had been performed, the unfortunate feline had its head chopped off.
The slaves were terrified of the sultan’s whimsies—just as he intended—for they never knew who would be his next victim. The British and colonial American captives wrote little about how they found the inner strength to survive the daily horror of life in the slave pens. But when the Boston preacher Cotton Mather met a group of American slaves released from Algiers in 1681, they told him that communal prayer had done much to fortify their spirits. “[They] formed themselves into a society,” he wrote, “and, in their slavery, enjoyed the liberty to meet on the Lord’s Day Evening.” The men warned one another about the temptation of apostasy and even set out a code of conduct “to prevent and suppress disorders among themselves.” Many of the slaves from the American colonies were deeply religious men, having been raised in strict Puritan households. Joshua Gee, a puritan from Boston, Massachusetts, admitted that prayer alone had enabled him to survive his suffering. “I always found reliefe in seeking God, when I could find it nowhere else,” he wrote. “It was a great relief to me that I had learned so much scripture by heart when I was young.”
The British slaves in Meknes also found strength in prayer. According to Francis Brooks, they prayed “for the preservation of their own king and country, and that God would be pleased to open their hearts to remember them in this sad and deplorable condition.” They prayed for their families; they prayed for their comrades. But most of all, they prayed to be released from the appalling hardship and suffering.
These Protestant captives always looked with envy upon their Catholic counterparts. Moulay Ismail permitted his Catholic slaves a certain freedom of worship—as did the dey of Algiers and the bey of Tunis—and occasionally allowed the padres in the friary to celebrate religious festivals. The most colorful of these was the feast of Corpus Christi, when the padres would bribe the slave guards to allow all the Catholic slaves to participate. In the spring of 1719, Father Francisco Silvestre was one of those who helped organize the festival. “On this day,” he wrote, “the walls of the patio of the sagena [slave pens], where the procession begins, are decorated with green stalks.” Arches were bedecked with herbs and flowers, and all the slaves were given candles. “A cleric leads … [and] all walk, chanting hymns appropriate to the day.” It was one of the few times in the year when the Catholic slaves could momentarily forget the miseries of their lives.
Moulay Ismail did not always allow the padres to celebrate such festivals. He gave 500 bastinadoes to one slave who asked if the men could celebrate the feast of St. John the Baptist and showed even less inclination to offer concessions to his British and American captives. “Some of them had asked him leave to keep their Easter,” wrote Father Busnot, “as he had granted it ten days before to the French Catholick slaves.” The sultan pondered for a moment, then asked if they had fasted. When they shook their heads, he told them: “Where there is … no lent, there is no Easter, and so he sent them back to the works.” It was a typically cruel but rational observation.
THOMAS FELLOW HAD changed beyond recognition in the five years since he had left Penryn, and his parents and sisters would scarcely have known him. He was no longer a boy—his wispy beard was testimony to that—and he wore a long djellaba with a pointed hood. He had also acquired a new language since leaving home. Although he had slacked in his studies while at grammar school in Penryn, he was a bright, quick-witted lad who had little trouble in mastering Arabic. If he remained in the country for many more years, there was every chance he would speak Arabic more fluently than his native English.
Pellow had certainly experienced more than most young lads of sixteen. He had witnessed appalling suffering, and had been beaten and tortured by his now-dead slave master. He had also found himself married, albeit unwillingly, and had been forced to change his religion. In the process, he had suffered the pain and humiliation of public circumcision. His experiences had transformed him into an outspoken young man, who was feted among his fellow renegades for having dared to deny Moulay Ismail access to his own harem.
At some point in 1720—the exact date is unclear—Pellow received some unexpected news. Moulay Ismail decreed that 600 apostates were to be sent to guard Kasbah Temsna, a fortified encampment that lay some 200 miles to the southwest of Meknes. Pellow himself was to be one of the captains of the troop—a polyglot band of former slaves from France, Spain and Portugal, along with men from several city-states of Italy.
Pellow was pleased by the turn of events, for he was desperate to leave the imperial capital. The sultan’s capriciousness terrified him, and he was depressed by the constant murders and beatings. Yet he feared that this new posting would bring its own dangers. Moulay Ismail had long used renegade Europeans to fight his battles and often ordered them to lead the first wave of attack against rebellious warlords. “He takes ‘em with him into the field,” wrote Pidou de St. Olon, “and, in the engagements, always places ’em in the front, where, if they betray but the least design of giving way, he cuts ’em up in pieces.”
Pellow and his men had received only cursory training in warfare before receiving orders to pack their belongings and prepare to depart. It was a disheveled but well-armed band that assembled on horseback outside the walls of Meknes. Their wives waited beside them on mules, while scores of other pack animals carried food and supplies. The troop was
led by one of the sultan’s commanders, Hammo Triffoe, who had a further 2,000 men under his charge. His orders were to accompany Pellow and his men to Kasbah Temsna and leave them with enough supplies for six months.
The sight of such a large band of soldiers on the march terrified the inhabitants of the villages that lay on their route. Moulay Ismail’s troops were often unruly and violent, and were given free rein to pillage their way across the landscape. Entire regions could be devastated by their passing, with farmers left destitute and peasants relieved of their belongings. Those who refused to hand over supplies would be “plundered of all that they have, and cut in pieces themselves.”
The presence of the disciplinarian Commander Triffoe helped to keep order on this occasion, and Pellow makes no mention of any insubordinate behavior. The men spent four uneventful days on the march before they sighted the great walls of Salé, where Triffoe hoped to stock up on provisions.
Their arrival at Salé brought back unpleasant memories for Pellow. This was where his captivity had begun five years earlier; this was where he had been chained and shackled inside one of Salé’s underground matamores. In the distance, he could glimpse the sparkling Atlantic, but there was not a single European vessel riding at anchor. Most reputable foreign merchants had long ago abandoned their trade with Salé, and only those with reliable contacts in the town still dared to ply an illicit trade with the corsairs. Pellow knew that none of these merchants would risk his livelihood for the sake of helping him to escape.
His stay in Salé was rather more comfortable on this occasion than on his first visit. While Commander Triffoe’s men prepared their encampment outside the city walls, “us newly married people had the liberty to go into the town, were lodged there, and most sumptuously feasted by the emperor’s order.” Their pleasure was marred only by the knowledge that yet more European captives—seized at sea by the Salé corsairs—were being held in the city’s infamous dungeons.