White Gold

by Giles Milton

  Pellow, overwhelmed by the kindheartedness of everyone he met, felt the need to offer thanks for his redemption. “I went to church,” he wrote, “and returned thanks to Almighty God before the congregation for my deliverance.” The congregation was deeply moved by Pellow’s story, and the “worthy gentlemen” among them decided to arrange for a collection. But before they could do so, the Euphrates, bound for London, sailed into the harbor.

  Captain Toobin went down to the waterfront in order to meet the commander, Captain Peacock, and ask him whether he would carry Pellow back to England, explaining that he had “undergone so long and grievous a captivity in Barbary, and was so fortunately escaped thither.” The captain expressed his willingness to take Pellow, but warned that he was heading directly for London and was therefore unable to stop at any West Country ports. He was also intending to sail that very night and required Pellow to board the ship without delay. Pellow did not hesitate, even though it meant missing out on the church collection that was being raised in his name.

  The Euphrates sailed that evening, but ran into a squall almost immediately. “We met with very high and contrary winds,” wrote Pellow, “and, according to the season of the year, a very high and troubled sea.” It was a dreadful voyage, and Pellow found it insufferably claustrophobic below decks. “For my better breathing, I generally took up at night with the boat on the booms, where I lay me down to my rest covered over with an old sail.”

  After twenty-four days at sea, the lookout sighted land on the horizon. To Pellow’s unspeakable joy, it was the craggy coast of Cornwall. His neighborhood of Falmouth could be sighted for a short while, but it soon receded into the thick sea mist. There was a moment of panic when one of the crew fell overboard, but he was plucked safely from the water and the Euphrates pressed on toward London. After thirty-one days at sea, she sailed up the Thames Estuary and docked at the quayside of Deptford.

  Pellow had never before visited London and was daunted by the thought. He remained on board the ship for several days, considering how to organize a passage back to Cornwall. The rest of the crew went ashore and began circulating Pellow’s story, gossiping in taverns about how they had returned from Gibraltar with a onetime English slave. Their tales soon reached the ears of a girl whose brother remained enslaved in Meknes. The sister of William Johnston—who had wrecked Pellow’s second escape bid—appeared on board the Euphrates in order to learn if he had ever met Johnston. Pellow gave her a withering look. “Yes, yes, to my sorrow,” he said, “for had I not, it would in all likelihood have prevented me of many years’ grievous captivity.” He recounted the story of Johnston’s betrayal and told the girl that he wished he had cut off her brother’s head. When she started to weep, Pellow felt guilty at having upset her and said he was sure that Johnston would escape before long.

  After a week aboard the Euphrates, Pellow plucked up the courage to step ashore and, “going directly to church, returned public thanks to God for my safe arrival in Old England.” He was entertained by Captain Peacock’s steward, a Cornishman named William James, and was greeted by various other dignitaries in Deptford.

  Pellow was desperate to get home to Penryn. He knew no one in London, and his only desire was to be reunited with his family. He asked William James for help in arranging a passage to Cornwall; James suggested that he go to Beels’ Wharf, close to London Bridge, where Cornish tin vessels were accustomed to dock. Pellow headed there straight away and found three ships in the process of discharging their cargo. Their captains were drinking in the King’s Head in Pudding Lane, where Pellow struck up a conversation with Captain Francis of Penzance, the commander of the little ship Truro. “[He] readily offered me a passage in his vessel,” wrote Pellow, “ … which I most heartily thanked him for.” She was due to sail within ten days, giving Pellow time to get acquainted with the capital.

  It was while he was wandering through the streets that he met the nephew of a visiting Moroccan ambassador, a man named Abdelkader Peres. Pellow was well acquainted with this nephew and was pleased to see him—“much more,” he wrote, “than ever I was to see him in Barbary.” The nephew took him to his uncle’s ambassadorial lodgings, where Pellow was “by the old man very kindly received.” Abdelkader Peres was quite charming and “told me that he was very glad I was delivered out of an unhappy country.” He confessed to having no particular desire to return to Morocco, where yet another power struggle was under way, and asked Pellow to stay for supper. “And after I had dined there that day on my favorite dish, couscous, and some English dishes, I returned to my lodgings in Pudding Lane.”

  Pellow was resting when a messenger arrived to inform him that his extraordinary story had just been published in one of the capital’s newspapers. Pellow was surprised and asked to be shown the article. It told of his daring escape from Morocco, “where he had been a slave twenty-five years, being taken by the Moors in the tenth year of his age.” Almost every detail in the report was wrong, and Pellow noted wryly that it was filled with “Mr. Newswriter’s truths.” He met the author of the article soon after and scolded him for being “very much to blame, for that I had given him no such licence, neither could I without asserting a very great falsity.”

  The return of slaves from North Africa always generated tremendous public interest and the publication of such an article would certainly have led to calls for Pellow to be paraded through the capital. But he was fortunate to be spared the dubious honor of a public thanksgiving. Learning that Captain Francis was ready to sail with the next tide, he hastened aboard with his few belongings. He had escaped the crowds and now looked forward to the final leg of his long voyage home. “The first tide we got to Gravesend, and the next to the Nore, and the third over the Flats and into the Downs.” As they entered the English Channel, they were fortunate to meet with a stiff easterly that blew them rapidly toward Plymouth. Finally, on 15 October 1738, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the Truro docked at Falmouth Pier, “whence, being to Penryn, the place of my nativity, no more than two miles I got to the town in the evening.”

  As Pellow neared his birthplace and family home, he was astonished by what he saw. In the half-light of dusk, he could see hundreds of people walking slowly toward him. The entire population of Penryn had turned out to greet a son they had long ago given up as lost. “I was so crowded by the inhabitants,” wrote Pellow, “that I could not pass through them without a great deal of difficulty.” His arrival in Penryn brought back memories of his arrival in Meknes in the summer of 1716, “though this, I must own, was of a different and far more pleasing nature to me than my first entrance into Meknes.” Now, he was feted by the crowd, who were overjoyed to have him home. “Everyone, instead of boxing me and pulling my hair, [was] saluting me and, after a most courteous manner, bidding me welcome home.” Many of the villagers were anxious to know whether or not he recognized them, “which indeed I did not, for I was so very young at my departure.”

  Finally, at the top end of town, Pellow came face-to-face with his mother and father, who were by now probably in their late fifties. They did not know their son at first. He was so altered by his years in Barbary, and looked so different from the boy they had last seen in 1715, that they scarcely believed he was their own flesh and blood. Pellow was no less puzzled when he set eyes on his parents, who seemed to be complete strangers. “And had we happened to meet at any other place without being pre-advised … we should no doubt have passed each other, unless my great beard might have induced them to inquire further after me.”

  The three of them embraced and wept and embraced again. As they made their way back to the family home, Pellow began to tell them the extraordinary odyssey of his life. He spoke of his seizure and captivity, of his years in the service of the sultan. He told them of beatings and slave-drivers, of violent sieges and terrible wounds. He told them, too, of the countless men and women who had lost their lives in slavery.

  His story would be repeated many times in Penryn. It would eventuall
y reach the ears of a local hack, who immediately realized the potential of such a remarkable tale. He helped Pellow put pen to paper, and within two years of his return, The History of the Long Captivity and Adventures of Thomas Pellow appeared on the book stands. It provided its readers with a fascinating insight into the horrors of white slavery in Sultan Moulay Ismail’s Morocco.

  Pellow’s parents must also have had a story to tell. They had suffered years of anguish and grief, praying that they would one day be reunited with their only son. But their woes and tribulations are nowhere recorded, and not a single family letter has survived.

  There are gaps, too, in Pellow’s own account. He makes no mention of his sisters—who had perhaps gone to an early grave—nor does he speak further of his unwilling conversion to Islam. Instead, he chooses to dwell upon the miracle that had enabled him to endure and survive for so many terrible years. “Nothing,” he wrote, “but the Almighty protection of a great, good, all-seeing, most sufficient, and gracious God could have carried me through it.”

  After twenty-three years of slavery, Pellow had returned to the fold.

  EPILOGUE

  THOMAS PELLOW’S RETURN to England did not mark the end of the white slave trade. A steady stream of Europeans and Americans continued to be captured—usually at sea—and held in wretched conditions in Algiers, Tunis and the great slave pens of Meknes. One of the most infamous incidents involving British mariners occurred in 1746, when the ship Inspector was wrecked in Tangier bay. All eighty-seven survivors were taken into captivity.

  “Large iron chains were lock’d around our necks,” wrote Thomas Troughton, one of the ship’s crew, “and twenty of us were link’d together in one chain.” It was five long years before Troughton and his surviving comrades were bought back by the British government. Their fellow slaves were not so fortunate; the ruling sultan steadfastly refused to release his French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch captives.

  But in 1757, the vacant Moroccan throne was seized by Sidi Mohammed, a shrewd and capable individual who was more open to foreign influences than his predecessors. He was “endowed with penetration and judgement,” according to the French consul Louis de Chenier and enjoyed conversing with European guests at his court. His enlightened opinions raised many eyebrows among his advisors, especially when he declared that Morocco’s shattered finances would be better repaired by international trade than by piracy and slavery. His intention was to encourage vessels from every nation “to trade with and enter his ports, being desirous of peace with the whole world.” To this end, he declared war on the corsairs of Salé and Rabat, who had opposed his accession to the throne. They were attacked by his imperial guard and quickly brought to heel. The governor of Salé was brutally stoned to death, and the inhabitants of Rabat were “made to feel the resentment of the prince.”

  The sultan followed his victory with a flurry of diplomatic activity. He proposed treaties with all the nations that for so long had been the victims of attack. In 1757, he signed a peace treaty with Denmark. Two years later, the British and Dutch also concluded a truce. Sweden followed suit in 1763, and the Republic of Venice added her name to a treaty soon after. Almost every European nation would eventually sign accords with the Moroccan sultan: France and Spain in 1767; Portugal in 1773; Tuscany, Genoa and the Habsburg Empire a few years later. In 1786, the newly independent United States of America also agreed a truce.

  The once-great corsair fleet of Salé fell into disrepair during these long years of peace. After two decades of virtual inaction, many of the ships were rotting hulks, no longer seaworthy. European observers reported that the harbor contained no more than fifteen frigates, a few xebecs and some thirty galleys. It was a far cry from the days of old, and ships such as these were no match for the great navies of Britain and France. Yet old habits die hard, and Salé’s corsairs continued to cherish vainglorious dreams of renewing their holy war against Christendom. They recalled the time when their mighty fleet, working in tandem with the still-powerful corsairs of Algiers and Tunis, had wreaked havoc on European shipping. In those days, the white slave auctions had reaped far greater dividends than the more peaceful business of international trade.

  Sultan Mohammed died in 1790; his successor, Moulay Sulaiman II, displayed rather more sympathy toward his Salé corsairs—even though he ratified the treaties signed by his father. The new sultan went so far as to dispatch his much-reduced fleet back to sea in the early years of the nineteenth century, with orders to attack European merchant ships that were trading with his enemies. There were fears that this was the prelude to full-scale hostilities against Christendom.

  But the corsairs of Salé, and their fellow slave traders elsewhere in Barbary, were about to discover that they had finally met their match. In the summer of 1816—exactly one hundred years after Thomas Pellow became one of Moulay Ismail’s slaves in Meknes—they were dealt a devastating blow from which they would never recover. In what was to prove a most extraordinary deus ex machina in the story of white slavery, the Pellow family of Cornwall was about to take its terrible revenge.

  THE CALL TO arms against Barbary was led by the eccentric British admiral Sir Sidney Smith. He was passionate about the issue of white slavery and had established a movement devoted to ending the trade forever. It was called the Society of Knights Liberators of the White Slaves of Africa and it rapidly drew influential members from across Europe. When at the end of the Napoleonic Wars crowned heads and ministers gathered to discuss peace at the Congress of Vienna, which began in 1814, Smith and his knights elected to join them. They organized discussions on the fringes of the congress and petitioned for a military showdown with the lawless rulers of North Africa. “This shameful slavery is not only revolting to humanity,” thundered Smith, “but it fetters commerce in the most disastrous manner.”

  Sir Sidney and his knights drew attention to a trade that had ensnared at least one million Europeans and Americans over the previous three centuries. The largest concentration of white slaves had always been in Algiers. The city had a continuous population of about 25,000 captives between the years 1550 and 1730, and there were occasions when that number had almost doubled. During the same period, some 7,500 men, women and children had been held in Tunis and Tripoli. The number of slaves in Moulay Ismail’s imperial capital was more difficult to ascertain, even though the conditions in which they were held were better documented than elsewhere in North Africa. The 5,000 captives reported by European padres were contested by Ahmed ez-Zayyani, who claimed that the real figure was at least five times higher.

  Although North Africa’s slave population had fallen to 3,000 by the time of the Congress of Vienna, Sir Sidney knew that this was a recent development. He was also aware that snapshot statistics told only part of the story. The number of slaves shipped to North Africa each year was always dependent on the rate at which they died, apostatized or gained their freedom. Dysentery, the plague and forced labor killed thousands, requiring the corsairs to put to sea in search of replacement captives. The ransoming of slaves also played its part in sustaining the flow For two centuries, perhaps three, there had been an influx to Barbary of almost 5,000 white slaves each year.

  The most powerful European leaders read Smith’s petition with interest, but did nothing more than pass a resolution that condemned all forms of slavery. Smith was initially disheartened, but soon discovered that his plea for military action had made a deep impression on the rulers of southern Europe, who continued to suffer considerable losses at the hands of the corsairs. They supported his battle cry and pointed an approving finger at America, whose government had taken bullish action against North Africa. It had sent a fleet to Algiers just a few months earlier and successfully forced the authorities to release all their American slaves. With this mission uppermost in their minds, the southern European rulers began taunting Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, for his lack of enthusiasm for an attack on Barbary. They accused him of deliberately turning a
blind eye to the ravages of the corsairs, since Britain stood to benefit whenever her trading rivals were attacked.

  Lord Castlereagh was stung by these criticisms. He had been forceful in advocating the abolition of the black slave trade; now, he vowed to end the trade in white slaves as well. In the summer of 1816, he persuaded the British government to dispatch a large fleet to the Mediterranean. Its goal was to compel the rulers of Barbary to stop seizing and selling European captives. There was to be no debate, no payment of bribes and absolutely no concession. “If force must be resorted to,” read the British government’s lofty statement of intent, “we have the consolation of knowing that we fight in the sacred cause of humanity.”

  There was never any doubt as to who would command this great squadron. In public life he was known as Lord Exmouth, the Vice Admiral of the Mediterranean fleet. But among his friends and family in his native Cornwall he was more familiar as Sir Edward Pellew—a collateral descendant of the same West Country family as Thomas Pellow. The orthography of the Pellow name had changed in the intervening decades, and Sir Edward had acquired a wealth and status that placed him in a very different social stratum to the humble Pellows of Penryn. But he remained deeply attached to his Cornish roots and had chosen to settle his family in Falmouth, less than two miles from Penryn. He was certainly familiar with Thomas Pellow’s story and had a passionate interest in the white slaves of Barbary. When invited by Sir Sidney Smith to join the Society of Knights Liberators, Pellew had leaped at the opportunity. “I am greatly obliged to you, my dear Sir Sidney, for thinking of me among your knights,” he wrote. “I shall give it all the support I can.”