When Barbary pirates terrorized Europe

As European sailors plied the West African coast for slaves in the 17th and 18th century, their kin in race and religion were being captured and sold to Muslim masters farther north in Morocco, Algiers and Tunisia. In “White Gold,” Giles Milton describes how Europeans were captured by the corsairs of Sale, “a pirate republic” on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, and auctioned off at a slave market.

Milton frames this story using the account of the extraordinary adventures of Thomas Pellow, a Cornish boy. At age 11, Pellow decided to drop out of school to serve his uncle as an apprentice aboard the Francis, which sailed from Cornwall in 1715 to Genoa. It would never return, and Pellow would not see his family and home for 23 years.

Captured by Barbary corsairs, or pirates, Pellow and the rest of the crew were sold as slaves by Sultan Moulay Ismail in the imperial capital of Meknes, where he saw his uncle and scores of others die in dungeons or be killed by guards and the sovereign himself.

Pellow, who would go on to become one of the most trusted attendants to Moulay Ismail, converted to Islam and was married off by the sultan to a well-connected Muslim woman. Although he later said he rejected his Christian faith under duress, there is no first-hand testimony presented in “White Gold” of Pellow having any major qualms about his new religion, other than its prohibition of alcohol.

One of the main themes of “White Gold” is the menace posed by North African corsairs to Europe’s fleets and shores. A small Cornish town was attacked in 1625 by Barbary pirates “dressed in Moorish djellabas and wielding damascene scimitars ... [who] made a terrifying sight as they burst into the parish church.” And a Basque province in Spain lost so many seamen to corsairs that it could not meet its quota for the royal levy of mariners.

“White Gold” addresses a gap in our understanding of the past practices of slavery. Overshadowed by the much vaster scale of the American slave trade, the issue of European slaves has received scant attention, even though the word “slave” was first used to describe white captives. The word originated with the subjugation of Slavic peoples in the Middle Ages by the Holy Roman Empire. “Slave” came to be synonymous with “Slavonic captive,” and the word comes to modern English by way of the Old French esclave and the medieval Latin sclavus. According to Milton, about 1 million European prisoners changed hands between the 16th and 18th centuries in North African slave markets, including those in Sale, Tunisia and Algiers.

“White Gold” is a retelling of contemporary testimonies, with extensive quotation from writings of that time. This gives the book a naive tone that the modern reader may find quaint, if not uncritical. Too many quotes in the vocabulary and spelling of that era may make for occasionally tedious reading.

The author of “Samurai William” and “Big Chief Elizabeth,” Milton does not explore the tactical and technological aspects of the apparent defenselessness of British shipping in the face of Barbary corsairs. This challenges the notion of naval superiority born of the British fleet after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

More important, “White Gold” may incline some to draw parallels with the troubled relations today between Christianity and Islam. However, in portraying the conflict over white slaves as a clash of religions, Milton does not place the issue within an analytical framework or provide a historical context.

On the one hand, the whims and acts of Moulay Ismail and his sons might appear buffoonish, but on the other, they might be striking to those readers familiar with modern tyrants and their heirs. The tale of the sultan’s son, who killed a servant for inadvertently disturbing a pigeon he was feeding, might be dismissed as a wild exaggeration. Yet it is hard not to recall the well-documented excesses of Uday Hussein, the deceased son of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

There was, at the time, a sense of Christendom in Europe, even though it had been fractured by the Reformation and religious wars. “You have met with a Christian at last, and here’s my hand,” said the Irish captain to Pellow after he had agreed to take him back to England following his escape from Meknes. It can no longer be said that the West has a sense of religious unity. In contrast, religion is what still defines the Islamic world.

Although straying a bit too far into the terrain of historical speculation, the narrative picks up at times and provides for entertaining (if not always credible) reading. Milton’s reliance on the accounts of captives like Pellow adds a more genuine feel of what it was like to be a European slave in North Africa. There was hopelessness and despair, as the following suggests:

O purgatory in life,

hell placed on earth,

evil with no equal,

strait with no way out!

The words come from a character in “El trato de Argel,” a play by Miguel de Cervantes, a slave for five years in Algiers before his ransom was paid and he returned to Spain, where he later wrote “Don Quixote.” *