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Not Just the Tudors
British Barbary Slaves
00:45:19
How British people were enslaved by North African pirates
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
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- [01:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Between the early 1600s and the late 1700s, thousands of Britons, sailors, fishermen, merchants and unlucky coastal villagers were captured and enslaved by North African pirates known as Barbary Corsairs. These raiders proud the Mediterranean and and even the English Channel, seizing ships, storming beaches and dragging their captives back to the slave markets of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. This August marks the 400th anniversary of one such attack, the 1625 raid on Mounts Bay in Cornwall, where 60 men, women and children were taken into slavery. Faced with brutal conditions, back breaking labor, forced conversion, and the constant threat of violence, these men, and sometimes women and children, endured years, even decades, in captivity. Some escaped, some were ransomed, many were never heard from again. Their fates became a source of fear and fascination across Britain, inspiring sermons, plays, pamphlets and parliamentary debate. How, many, asked, could a proud Christian kingdom allow its people to be enslaved by Muslim powers? At a time when Britain was expanding its maritime reach, this trade in white Christian slaves was a national humiliation and a moral crisis. It spurred rescue missions, diplomatic wrangling, and even military interventions. Yet it also raises uncomfortable questions about empire, religion, and Britain's own complicity in slavery elsewhere. Joining me today to uncover this gripping and yet often forgotten story is Professor Bernard Capp, Fellow of the British Academy. An emeritus professor at the University of Warwick, Professor Capp is the author of many paradigm shifting books about the early modern period, including British Slaves and Barbary Corsairs, 1580-1750, the first comprehensive study of the thousands of Britons captured and enslaved in North Africa in the early modern period. It's a book that brings to life the voices of those captured, the politics that failed them, and the turbulent Mediterranean world in which they were forced to survive. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Professor Capp, welcome to the podcast. It's an absolute pleasure to speak to you. I think you probably know, but you are such a great inspiration for me over the years with your work. Your work on women in early modern England was one of the great books that I hoped to try and imitate when I was writing about France. I'm beyond honored to have a chance to speak to you about this book.
- [05:19]
Professor Bernard Capp
Oh, that's really kind of it.
- [05:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So it seems rather extraordinary that British subjects being captured and enslaved was such a huge concern to people in the Stuart period, and yet why do you think it's been neglected in the historiography of the of early modern Britain?
- [05:40]
Professor Bernard Capp
It is extraordinary. My book is the first to give an overall account of this and I've even found to my amazement, actually, that quite a lot of academic colleagues were completely unaware of the whole thing, maybe partly because it doesn't throw a very positive light on Britain itself. And we like to think of ourselves as a great power or a seafaring power with great navy. And yet, as you were saying in your intro, the story for certainly the first half of the 17th century and the late Elizabethan period was rather a humiliating one. We were not the dominant power. We were the rather timid or rather nervous and very vulnerable outsiders. So maybe there's a kind of complicity.
- [06:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In forgetting and yet so many people were captured that we have this slave account genre emerging in this period, kind of parallel to the captivity narratives of North American Puritans, who were captives of indigenous North American people at the time. Why were so many people writing about their experiences of enslavement, do you think?
- [06:46]
Professor Bernard Capp
Well, I wouldn't say there were a lot. I mean, There are about 20 accounts we have, and only about half of those were actually published in the 17th century. The rest remain manuscript accounts until the 20th century or even later. But those who did escape and were able to write up their stories, well, they were fascinating narratives, really. Exciting mixture of, I suppose, amazement at the luck and the heroism of those who did escape, but also hearing about the exotic, strange world they'd escaped from and the experiences that undergone, the experiences of capture itself traumatic, but also the experience of the slave market, when English and indeed continental European captives were paraded around, very much in fact, like black African slaves in the Americas, and were auctioned with people, prospective buyers, poking and prodding them. So there's a sort of mixture of horror and fascination, I think, for the readers discovering these were the things that were happening to their own country folk.
- [07:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And have you found that these accounts always portrayed the Barbary world as being, I suppose, you know, backwards and savage?
- [07:56]
Professor Bernard Capp
No, it's rather more nuanced, actually, and complex than that. And the Barbary States were technically, at least under the authority of the Ottoman Empire and they owed some sort of obedience to them. And the Ottomans in this period were in fact, the. A superpower. And England, like other European states, most of them, recognized that the Ottomans were far more powerful than they were, certainly far more powerful than England was in Barbary itself and Algiers and Tunis and so on. It's a more mixed picture. There was a temptation to write them off as savage barbarians because of their cruelty. Yet at the same time, contemporaries, English contemporaries, traders, and indeed some of the slaves themselves recognized that Algiers was a very powerful city, a very large city, far too strongly defended to be attacked by English forces. So there was a mixture of wary respect as well as hostility to their religion and what the English insisted on calling their piracy. Even though they're not actually technically pirates.
- [09:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. Do you want to explain that distinction? Because piracy is the word that's used a lot of the time, but as you say, it's not fully accurate, is it?
- [09:12]
Professor Bernard Capp
No, it's not really accurate at all. In fact, I mean, England sometimes. Well, English had its own pirates, especially in the Elizabethan period and just after, also privateers who were sent out with the king authority, Queen's authority. But there was also the Royal Navy, whereas in the Barbary countries there was no navy, apart from the Corsairs. And though they were private enterprises, they were authorized by the ruling powers in Barbary, and there were strict rules and regulations about how they operated and how the booty was shared out between different groups. So given that they were authorised by Barbary, they can't be written off simply as pirates.
- [09:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. They're either authorized or they're pirates. They cannot be both.
- [09:59]
Professor Bernard Capp
Yes.
- [10:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So to what do we owe the sort of uptick in the number of enslaved Britons, at least from the end of the 16th century, do you think?
- [10:09]
Professor Bernard Capp
Well, two factors, I think. One is that in the 16th century, right up to the great battle of Lepanto in 1571 between Spain and the Ottomans, that was the scene of action in the Mediterranean. And in fact, very few English merchant ships ventured into the Mediterranean for much of the 16th century. Most English maritime trade in Henry VIII's Rome, for example, early Elizabeth, was essentially around the North Sea, the English Channel, down to Spain, but not much further than that. But then at the later in the Elizabethan period and right through the 17th century, then English trade with the Levant, the Mediterranean, Greece, eastern Mediterranean, grew very rapidly. So this is where the Corsairs and the Bollebridge parents, who originally had been concerned with fighting the Ottomans, now turned their attention to Western commercial shipping. And they're finding that England was now sending lots of merchant ships which were at least to begin with, very rich prey.
- [11:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And in fact, the problem gets so bad that one scholar has argued that Charles I's failure to deal with the Barbary problem was a contributing factor when it came to the English Civil War. This is quite a claim. What do you make of it?
- [11:24]
Professor Bernard Capp
It's quite a claim, but I mean, to say it's one factor I think is okay, it was extremely humiliating for the Crown not to be able to defend its own people. And then, after all, security is the number one responsibility of whatever form of government you have. And it was manifestly failing to do that. The situation was so bad in the early 1600s or 1620s that James I actually did send a fleet to the Mediterranean against Algiers. First time an English navy had gone that far, in fact, to stay there. But it was completely unsuccessful. You know, the navy was not strong enough, didn't have the force or the resources to crush Algiers. So it became a growing embarrassment for Charles I and events like the raids on Cornwall, at Mount's Bay and Fowey and Loo and several other places. And added to the humiliation, not only are English people at sea at risk, even people sitting in church or in their beds at market, they're now at risk, too. So what on earth is going wrong? Something has to be done. But what can be done if the state doesn't have the money or the naval resources to deal with this by force? I mean, ideally, the state would send an army or a navy and crush them, but it soon it recognized, and everybody recognized that we simply didn't have those resources at that time. Anyway, that situation Only changes in the middle and then the later 17th century when parliament and Cromwell build up a huge fleet and a navy in the Restoration period is maintained in Age of Samuel Pepys. And gradually, over about 40 years, 50 years, the Navy and the wealth of the state become sufficient to curb, to put an end to the Corsair threat. But it's a long, drawn out process.
- [13:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, and how interesting that it really is a sort of source of national humiliation. Meanwhile, what's the sort of scale of this? Because I would like to know if we have any sense of the numbers. I guess it must be quite difficult to be precise, but also what proportion of those that we think were enslaved were British or Irish?
- [13:37]
Professor Bernard Capp
Well, in terms of total numbers of Europeans captured and taken to Barbary, we're looking at figures around a million over that whole period. It's a huge number. So figures of British people, overwhelmingly English people, were in the order of perhaps 20,000. So it's a big number for England to worry about, but it's actually a tiny percentage of the European wide problem. And that probably explains why Spain, for example, or France were much more focused earlier in trying to find ways to deal with it and get their victims back home again, before England got very far in working out possible solutions and remedies. But the figure of 20,000 for the English may not sound a huge amount, but in that period, the second largest city in England was Norwich with a population of 30,000. So the British slaves are 20,000 relatively, talking quite big numbers.
- [14:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. We are talking the population of a city at the time. Absolutely.
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Professor Bernard Capp
Yes.
- [14:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, that is extraordinary.
- [14:40]
Professor Bernard Capp
I suppose one other factor, just so I think of it, is in the introduction you mentioned Cornwall. A lot of the victims, certainly in the later period, are from Cornwall and Devon and small fishing communities in the southwest, rather than, say, in London. And that might help to explain why it doesn't have as much prominence in the national histories, at least that it ought to have in terms of the numbers overall. There's a contemporary account of a man, a diarist living in Lancashire, whose son was eventually captured or at risk of being captured. And he suddenly he hadn't heard from his son. He started getting very worried. And he admits that until his own family was involved, he'd never really thought about the Barbary Corsairs. But now it's become personal. Then of course, he's obsessed in reading the newspapers and looking out the news. So I guess different parts of England were much more affected than other parts.
- [15:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And to what extent was it seen as a Peripheral problem at the time. Did it preoccupy the Metropole, as they say, you know, the people in the capital?
- [15:44]
Professor Bernard Capp
It did, because a lot of the ships of the period were coming from London. So it is London and the far southwest, I guess, still the most preoccupied. And when you look at lists of prisoners who were slaves who had been around some of this oars, quite a high precaution of people from the London dockside parishes. And as you mentioned earlier on, it does crop up quite repeatedly in parliamentary debates. It is a national issue, even though it's a sort of patchy one.
- [16:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You mentioned earlier that there is this persistent and incorrect view that Barbary captivity was not as harsh as African slavery in the Americas. And obviously Barbary slavery is not on the same scale as the enslavement of Africans. And we want to avoid the water boundary phenomenon. How should we compare them?
- [16:33]
Professor Bernard Capp
It is a curious situation today, actually, that when I was writing the book, I found a certain amount of resistance from people who write about black African slavery in the Americas, still insisting that, well, this Barbara thing didn't really count as slavery, it wasn't proper slavery. Some argued that it was more like people being captors of war. I don't buy any of that. I mean, after all, slavery has been around for thousands of years and it's taken a whole multitude of different forms. Greek and Roman slavery, different from medieval forms, different again from. We're talking about today. If you were captured at sea or in your Cornish village and carted off to Algiers and sold in the slave market, you could be sold again, resold, you could be flogged at the owner's ransom, virtually to death. That sounds like slavery to me. And the fact that it's different in form from the American version. Well, so what? You know slavery as many different forms. One key difference, actually, I suppose. Well, two key differences. One is that Europeans had at least a possibility of being rescued or ransomed, which of course didn't apply to black Africans in the Americas. And also especially the English slaves in Barbary were 95% plus were men. Given that most of the victims had been captured at sea, so there was no way they could marry or have sexual relations with English slaves, women slaves, and therefore you don't get kind of slave families or dynasties, generations going down. You either died there and that was it, or you got back home again. You didn't leave behind descendants in Barbary, whereas in the American system, of course, you know, you have generations of slaves.
- [18:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, that's very interesting. So who were the corsairs who were doing the enslaving?
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Professor Bernard Capp
Well, they're Moors in North Africa. Some of them had been Moors living in Spain until the Moorish community, most of it was expelled in the very early 1600s by the Spanish government and came across. And they'd become very prominent, in fact, driving the corsair business in Algiers. And also some of them made it down to Morocco. Sale is now part of Rabat, and they sort of dominated the slave trading or taking business there. But also there are quite significant numbers of renegades of one sort or another. So there are some lists of corsair galleys or later corsair ships and their commanders. And quite a high proportion of them were actually Greeks or some Italians or people from the Levant, you know, what is now Syria and places like that. So it's quite a hodgepodge to begin with. In the later 16th century, the mayor target was to capture ships and rich cargoes to plunder them. But eventually English ships and French ships and so on became stronger and more heavily armed and were able to fight off many of the corsairs. So later, most of the victims are in fact in quite small boats and fishing vessels with crews of maybe only 10 or a dozen had no chance whatsoever of fighting off one of these huge attacking corsairs. So then the corsair's main target now is to capture people for ransom or labor or both?
- [19:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. I mean, one is struck by, as you explain in your book, the difficult choice that one faced or the limited options on encountering a corsair. You know, what could you do?
- [20:00]
Professor Bernard Capp
But if you had any sense, you just submit gracefully. There are a variety of options. If you're in a, a decent sized ship rather than one of these fishing boats, you might try to fight it out. And several did. Occasionally they survived in escapes. Quite often they were sunken. Most of them were captured anyway. You could try to escape, raise all your sails and try to escape. But the corsair vessels were much faster than any merchant ship, so that never worked. So generally, if a ship approached, you got close and you recognized it was a corsair ship, the sensible option was to surrender and just hope for the best. And increasingly that's what most of them did.
- [20:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you've already given a bit of a sense of how traumatic an ordeal captivity would have been. Can you talk me through that treatment of fresh captives?
- [20:54]
Professor Bernard Capp
Yes. When they're first captured at sea, they're just often beaten and thrown into the hold and they're deliberately semi starved and treated Humiliatingly to make well, to break their will to resist or try to escape. And they might be at sea in that situation for several weeks before the Corsair ship goes back to Algiers or to Tunis or weather. And then when they get back there, they are chained and they're paraded through the streets to the slave market. And several accounts English, but also French and Italian, and some of how they were treated there like animals, that that phrase is used by the people giving the narratives. Prospective buyers would poke and prod them, would look at their muscles, would look at their teeth, look inside their mouths and so on. And it's partly because they were perhaps seen as no more than commodities. You know, we are buying a commodity for our use or possibly for resale. So let's see what it's like. But this feeling of being treated like an animal is something that crops up over and over again and deeply humiliating and astonishing, I think, for English people, perhaps even more so as you go later into the 17th and early 18th century, when the English by then were starting to think of themselves as a rather superior race. And, you know, it's these black Africans who are the inferiors. Then suddenly they find themselves. It's the other way around. You know, we are now the inferiors being treated like animals by Africans and some in Morocco, sometimes by black Africans. And that was a huge shock to the system. Also, there's the sense that our religion is obviously the true one, and yet now we're being treated as infidels and despised as dogs. Infidel, Christian, dog, Christian. And the true religion is Islam. So you've got several shocks to the system. Well, shocks in several different levels and dimensions. And some of them, of course, eventually do become converts, if that's the right word. They turn Turkis, the phrase went. I mean, you can see why it might be tempting. If you've given up hope, you're again getting back home, you're being treated horribly. Maybe if we become Muslims ourselves, we'll be treated a little bit better. And it's easy to make the switch. You don't have to learn much about the faith. All you have to say is, I believe in God and Muhammad as his prophet. And that pretty much is it. So a proportion, maybe, I don't know, 10, 15% of the. Of the English slaves did eventually adopt Islam. And those who were captured when they were still children or teenagers were often taken apart, kept separate when they were first captured, and they almost invariably became converts at that age. It was very difficult to resist.
- [23:41]
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you've indicated that the vast majority of those who enslaved were men. But of course, on some of those coastal raids there would have been women and children. Do we know anything about how women were treated differently to men? Was it different?
- [25:36]
Professor Bernard Capp
Yes, it was different. Many of the men were doing heavy labor, building in the dockyards or indeed being made galley slaves, things like that. The women, most of them ended up as domestic servants or domestic slaves. Less violent, less extreme, but kept apart from European men. So there's very little contact of any sort between the women's slaves and the men's slaves. Just a handful, the most attractive, I suppose, and the youngest ended up in the harem of the Pasha the day, or the Sultan of Morocco. One extraordinary case in the very early 1700s actually becomes one of the creams of the Sultan of Morocco. Obviously she has to convert, is beaten until she does agree to convert. But she then becomes quite a prominent figure in the court of Sultan for many years. And it's astonishing that we've got records of the English government being aware of this and actually sending diplomatic messages and even presents to our Queen Balkish of Morocco. But she's the just one or two others. They are the lucky exceptions. Most of the women slaves and you know, they're only about 5% maximum. Less than that probably. Of the overall numbers, they disappear into obscurity. We mentioned the raid on Mount Bay and similar ones in Cornwall. There was one in southern Ireland in Baltimore, where they attacked in the middle of the night when people were literally captured in their beds and carted off over 100. And most of those were actually women, and most of them never got back home again. And their fates are unknown. And almost certainly they died in Morocco.
- [27:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Gosh. There are such contemporary resonances. Did social and economic status affected captives treatment?
- [27:25]
Professor Bernard Capp
Yeah, very, very much so. If the captors realized or suspected that one of their captives was maybe a merchant or had rich connections, whatever, they will be treated differently, because the main incentive then was to try to get a big ransom. So they would be encouraged to write back home to England. And it was actually facilitated that correspondence would get back to England with ransom demands. And sometimes they were actually treated worse. So the poor victim would say, I'm being flogged almost to death, so please, please find a ransom for me. Some actually were treated quite well if it was certain that a ransom would be forthcoming. But they're, by definition, they're a very small minority. And the great majority of ordinary sailors, ordinary villagers, they were never going to be able to raise a ransom. So for them, the prospects were, you do labor, slave labor, until you die, or you hope that the state might eventually, the king, the government might eventually do something, send a fleet, send an ambassador, send money, send the navy, whatever, and get us ransom that way. And that eventually, I suppose, is what happens in the later 17th century. In the first half of the century, I think most of the victims died in Barbary. In the second half of the century, England now had established a system of raising funds to ransom ordinary English slaves and send a naval force at the same time. So it's a mixture of putting pressure on Algiers but also offering money to Algiers, and the combination they hoped would be sufficient to get people released and also get a peace treaty, which might last at least a few years.
- [29:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And as you say, you know, for ordinary seamen, their families, resources would have been so slender. So what role did local communities and institutions like Trinity House play in raising those sort of ransom funds?
- [29:21]
Professor Bernard Capp
Well, ordinary people, they tried with their friends and family relations to raise money, but it was very hard actually to raise enough. You find cases of women and wives wandering around miles, around the whole country or half the country, begging village by village. And church wardens would often give a few pence to these people, but again, it would probably take years to raise enough Trinity House, their records are fascinating because they did help, but generally they only helped shipmasters and perhaps the you know, master's mate, they said, we haven't got enough money even to try to ransom the ordinary sailors. So eventually, parliament in the 1620s and then again later in the century, came up with a system of nationwide church collections, voluntary collections, but in every parish across the nation. And that proved to be quite effective. The first one raised a few thousand later ones in the restoration period, 20,000 pounds, which is quite a lot, and then that was done through the church, but then the state would sort of send the money and a diplomat to negotiate in Algiers to try to get people released. And increasingly that became quite an effective model.
- [30:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you said earlier that the Spanish and French were, you know, quicker on the uptake when it came to working out methods to ransom or release captives. So how did the English system of these ransoms differ from the Continental models?
- [30:55]
Professor Bernard Capp
Well, the French and the Spanish and the Italians actually had certain religious orders, the Trinitarians, the Mercedorians, religious orders that focused explicitly or very heavily on trying to run some Spanish slaves or French slaves, whatever. And of course, after the Reformation, there were no religious orders in England, so that particular method didn't apply. Even so, the religious orders didn't raise enough money to ransom all those national victims. So again, it was a combination of some of the victims, the better off victims, trying to raise funds for private arrangements, private ransoms, and the state itself supplying a certain amount of money to ransom others. The state was mainly concerned about getting back healthy and fit soldiers and sailors didn't care much about ordinary villagers. So I think in the first half of the period, the Italians and the Spaniards, for example, were ahead of the English in terms of dealing with the problem or ransoming victims. Probably in the second half of the period, the English were better than the neighbouring countries. And of course, by the end of the 17th century, England had a bigger, stronger navy than anyone else. So that became a more effective lever than it had been under James I in the early 1600s.
- [32:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And once they had that money to ransom them, what's the actual process of getting captives released?
- [32:17]
Professor Bernard Capp
Yes, good question. Mainly you had to go through middlemen. There were dealers in Algiers, there were dealers in Italy, mainly in Ligono, near Florence, including quite a lot of Jewish people acting as many raisers, money lenders, intermediaries. So there were ways in which money could be transferred. Sometimes the arrangement was an English ship would take a cargo to Algiers, sell the cargo there and then use the money that cargo produced to pay ransoms to buy certain people back. So it's a strange horse Trading arrangement. There were a handful of merchants, English merchants, living in places like Algiers and Tunis, sometimes doing legitimate trade, but sometimes they also double in ransom deals and things of that sort. But your chances of getting ransomed depended very much actually on your family background, your status, and what kind of connections and leverage you might have. We mentioned most of the people that captured were relatively obscure, but there were one or two famous or interesting victims. The victim was the Earl of Inchi Quinn in the middle of the 17th century, and being an earl, he was very quickly ransomed by Charles ii. As soon as Charles II got the throne back at the Restoration, the Earl was ransomed. But the most bizarre victim, perhaps in a sense, was a man called Seth Southall, who was on his way to America to be governor of Carolina, who was captured and enslaved, and he eventually got ransomed. But the bizarre bit is that when he goes back to the Americas, he becomes a notorious slave owner on a big scale himself, with no sense of any discrepancy between having been enslaved and seeing the horrors of slavery firsthand to then becoming a very harsh slave owner in a different context, himself.
- [34:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, let's remember that, because I want to come back to that question just thinking about the fact that if you're of certain status, you're more likely to be ransomed. So say you're an ordinary sailor and you've been enslaved. How feasible was escape if you were enslaved by Barbary Corsairs?
- [34:30]
Professor Bernard Capp
Well, there was one historian who, when I first started on this project, who enraged me by saying it was very easy to escape, which is the exact opposite of the case, because where could you go? If you went south, you finished up in the Sahara. If you went either east or west, you finished up in other slave owning Muslim societies. So the only possible escape was by sea. And how on earth could you do that? So very few people did escape. A few managed it by managing to slip aboard a European ship while it was docked in Tunis or Algiers. And either the captain kept them hidden or they managed to stay hidden themselves until the ship was out at sea. Some really desperate people literally just swam out, got to the beach, swam out in the hope that they might be picked up and rescued by a European ship not too far away. Most of them probably drowned, I guess. And the third possibility was trying to construct some ramshackle boat of some sort from bits and pieces and smuggle it to the beach and then paddle your way out and hope for the best. And there's one particular narrative by a man called Willie Moakley. It's a fabulous story. I've done a separate article on him, he and his group, only five of them managed to do that and they were paddling their way through the Mediterranean for a week with virtually no food and no drink. But they took some water with them but it got spoiled by seawater and they were almost dead by the time they were washed up in Mallorca. It's an amazing story and it became something the bestseller and it's been in print, well reprinted from time to time ever since. But you know, they are literally sort of 0.001, I guess of the overall number of captives.
- [36:21]
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- [37:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So what difference does that make to you as a historian then, given the fact that most of the sources, the narratives that you have come from those very few rare individuals who are escaping or who have been ransomed. What might be missing in that infamous phrase? What are the unknown unknowns here?
- [37:37]
Professor Bernard Capp
Some of those that we don't know were ransomed, as I say, in the later 17th century. Quite a lot of the English people were ransomed with effectively money raised by the nation. But of the huge numbers who died there, what we don't know is whether they had lives of misery the decades until they died, or were they eventually kind of came to terms. Something we haven't touched on is that some slave owners literally were vicious, violent, bad tempered characters, exploiting their victims to the ultimate. Others were reasonable human beings. I mean, this man Oakley I've just mentioned, he had, I think, three owners during his time as a slave. The first two, he said were really evil, horrible people. But the third one actually was a very nice gentleman. He calls him a gentleman who treated him well and gave him money and good food and good clothes and so on, and offered to make him manager of the slave owner's farm complex. So he said, I can't really complain about my treatment, but I am a slave. I miss home, I miss my family, and if this nice elderly owner dies, I'LL be sold again, and the next owner might be another of these really horrible characters. So there's a mixture of experiences, but there's always this element of uncertainty. Even if your owner is quite a decent person, he might die or he might have to sell you for whatever reason, and then you might be back to square one with a really terrible person. But others did come to terms, as Oakley himself admits. You know, several people say, well, it's not a very enjoyable life, but we get by. You know, we can cope with it. And those who agree eventually to become converts, some of them after 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, that they're so now acclimatized to this new world, they find it almost impossible to think of going back to becoming English and Christian again. One or two who did go back actually said, we can't cope with this. We now feel outsiders in England and chose to go back to North Africa and Islam.
- [39:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That is so interesting because it's the case with some of those captivity narratives I mentioned earlier from the North American Puritans, that they have that as well. And I suppose we could probe a little deeper into this experience of faith. We've talked about some who chose to inverted commas, turn Turk. But do we have evidence otherwise of those whose belief in divine providence influenced their resilience as Protestant captives? Or by contrast, you know, for those who did become. Do we have evidence of them finding solace in that?
- [40:19]
Professor Bernard Capp
Yes, we've got examples of both of those. Several of the narratives do stress God is a Protestant God, not only a Christian God, but a Protestant God, and he will save us. And some of these narratives that were published do put a heavy emphasis on. On the faith that kept them going and the providential hand of God that saw them eventually escape or be ransomed or whatever it is. What we don't know, of course, is whether they actually felt this at the time when they were still slaves, or whether they emphasize the providential side of things once they're back home again. We've got one or two cases where we know that slaves managed to keep hold of an English Bible, which does suggest the commitments and clinging on to a faith. And I'm sure that is a significant factor of those who did become Muslim, but actually turning Turkish better than becoming Muslim, because there was no sense of. You had to do study of Islamic faith, etc. And sign up to it. It was a very simple process. If you just declare that you now accept Muhammad as God's only prophet and so on, be circumcised and that was it. But some of them do become convinced or at least firmly committed to their new Muslim faith and wanted to actually go on het Hajj to Mecca. Obviously, we've deeply moved or deeply committed to want to do it in the first place. And we've got cases of, for example, of Spanish captives who'd become converts, were later recaptured by Spanish warships and told, you'll be freed if you convert back to Christianity again, but who refuse and say, no, we'd rather be galley slaves in Spanish galleys than give up the Muslim faith. So over time, they become completely absorbed, if you like, and, of course, if you've been living for 10, 20, even longer years, in some cases, they've forgotten what little they knew, perhaps, about Christian doctrines and services. And sometimes they'd actually forgotten their English or Irish or Spanish language. So coming back, in a sense would be just as traumatic as when they were captured the first time around.
- [42:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's so interesting. So what finally brought an end to the threat of the Corsairs?
- [42:33]
Professor Bernard Capp
Essentially, the growth of the English navy. The navy was quite modest in the time of James I and Charles I or Elizabeth earlier on. Parliament and Cromwell then built up a huge navy because they were worried that England might be invaded by everybody else. And in the Restoration period, the navy is still pretty powerful to fight off wars against the Dutch and the French. And that means that England now had a naval force that could operate in the Mediterranean for long periods. It could provide convoys, which kept many of the ships, English ships, safe. And the state from the mid and later 17th century raised far more in taxation than it had been able to do in the days of Elizabeth or the early Stuarts. So it could now afford to pay all this. And the Corsairs never wanted to find battles because that wasn't their game. They were, quote, semi pirates. But in the later 17th century, the English naval forces were more or less able to blockade places like Algiers and Tunis and in Admiral Blake's case, to destroy a fleet at anchor, a fleet of Corsair ships. So the Algerians, well, the Tunisians first, and then the Algerians decided gradually it might be more sense to do a deal and stop attacking English ships in return for payment of ransoms by the English. So it's this combination of growing naval force with the bribe of money to solve the problem of Barbary. Morocco carried on rather longer. It was a problem right into the 18th century, partly because Morocco didn't have really massive ports where the English could bombard and fire artillery at them. They had Smaller ships operating out of a very shallow river. And that made it much harder to deal with. So in the case of Morocco, it takes another 50 years eventually, before they are brought to heel, as it were. But as I say, the emphasis would be on naval strength. And other countries like Spain, actually carried on suffering from the Corsairs much longer into the very early 1800s.
- [44:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Gosh, that's a long time. So let's go back to that question then, thinking about what this means for ideas about slavery. That governor of the Americas who had been enslaved but then becomes an enslaver himself, is that general, how did the experience of British Barbary slaves change perceptions of African slavery?
- [44:54]
Professor Bernard Capp
Not as much as we think it ought to have done. That man wasn't the only one. One of the narratives, in fact, is by a man who was enslaved in Morocco but had also lived in the Caribbean and knew about black slavery there. And he doesn't make the connection at all. You know, for him, the enslavery of Europeans is absolutely appalling. What happens in the Americas to black people, native Indians, that's separate. He makes no connection. And that's an extraordinary. And there's a literary parallel, actually, and it's story of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. At one point, the hero himself is enslaved, but later on, after escaping from his life as a hermit castaway, he becomes a slave trader. And he too sees no moral problem with this. So it's strange sensibilities that don't overlap. As I say, I mentioned at the beginning, English people, especially in the Civil War period, was banging on about the English people had been slaves under the tyranny of ship, money and Charles the First and whatever it might be, they relate that to Barbary. They don't relate it to what their own countrymen were doing in the Americas. And the same is true of the French and the Spaniards and the Dutch.
- [46:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
To what can we attribute that blind spot? As I mean, is the answer just simply racism?
- [46:08]
Professor Bernard Capp
Yes, I think it is. Actually. The English and the other Europeans recognize the Ottomans, the Turks as a culture and society at least equal to theirs and maybe even better, certainly stronger and more sophisticated, more powerful. They don't regard black Africans in the same light, whether it's black Africans in Africa or slaves in the Americas. It seems bizarre looking back, but of course it remains the case for a long, long time. The sort of values that don't apply, apply in Europe don't apply when you're dealing with black Africans. And one of the upsetting aspects of the English Civil War period. We want about the harsh treatment of Irish Catholics by Cromwell and others, which wasn't announced at the time. A lot of people said Cromwell's a monster, but at least, you know, he massacred the Irish. And there's a pamphlet to describe the Irish in that period as white Negroes. You've got that same clash of sensibilities. They might have white skins, but they're not really civilized people. And therefore the values we would apply fighting each other or fighting the French or the Dutch or whoever don't apply if we're dealing with the Irish because they're really barbarians or savages. And that seems to be what is preventing the English and the other Europeans making any equivalence between slavery in Bowling Gray and slavery in the Americas.
- [47:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's always fascinating when we find these moments which seem to us so very obvious that there's an absolute hypocrisy there. Why I find it so interesting is because it makes me wonder what it is we can't see that centuries hence they'll look back at us and say, but did they not see it might be something to do with how our mobile phones are produced. Perhaps. But thank you so much for this amazing insight into this important and forgotten history of the Barbary slaves. Your work is fascinating and this has been an inspiration. Thank you.
- [48:09]
Professor Bernard Capp
Oh, thank you. And I hope the subject does become better known in general. It really deserves to be and needs to be, perhaps.
- [48:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Quite agree. Thank you, Professor Kapp.
- [48:20]
Professor Bernard Capp
Thank you. Susanna.
- [48:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorsistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from historyhit.
- [49:04]
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- [49:19]
Professor Bernard Capp
Beth, you're in charge of ordering the tacos for the meeting today.
- [49:22]
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- [49:24]
Professor Bernard Capp
Uh, what?
- [49:25]
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- [49:33]
Professor Bernard Capp
Nice.
- [49:34]
Doritos
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- [49:37]
Professor Bernard Capp
No, I'm going to easy mail them. Where's my music?
- [49:41]
Doritos
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Professor Bernard Capp
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- [49:48]
Professor Bernard Capp
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