Daniel J. Vitkus, ed. Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England.

Intro. Nabil Matar. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. xvi + 376 pp. illus. append. map. bibl. $52.50 (cl), $22.50 (pbk). ISBN: 0-231-11904-6 (cl), 0-231-11905-4 (pbk).

Captivity narratives are a genre associated almost exclusively with early American history and literature, but Daniel J. Vitkus' anthology of seven Barbary captivity narratives from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England expands their chronological, geographical, and cultural scope. Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption makes available to scholars and students seven complete annotated narratives of early modern Englishmen who were "delivered" from captivity and enslavement under North African Muslims. The narratives, several of which have never been reprinted, are accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, appendices of additional contemporary source materials, a bibliography of English captivity narratives from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a contextual introduction by Nabil Matar, author of Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 and Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. The complete volume offers readers an intimate and introspective introduction to a rarely disclosed world of Old-World encounters.

Vitkus' selected narratives cover the period from 1577 to 1704, during which North African Muslims became tangible people to the English, not just the shadowy, stereotypical figures of the stage or of continental derivation. Each account, whether written in the first or third person, asserts its eyewitness, "true" foundation, as opposed to that which was "all's pap in Mandeville" (130). When one reads the narratives in chronological order, notably with the benefit of Matar's general and Vitkus' individual introductions, common themes emerge--notably the religious themes of delivery and redemption--but the most striking materialization is the intensifying increase in the amount of information contained in the narratives over the seventeenth century. This trend is no doubt indicative of an escalating interest in both Mediterranean trade and traders in England following the concession of a commercial capitulation by the Ottoman government in 1580, the foundation of the Levant Company in 1592, and a consequential intensification of political, commercial, and cultural encounters with North Africans. The sixteenth-century narratives--John Fox's "Worthy Enterprise," which was originally published in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations in 1589, and Richard Hasleton's "Strange and Wonderful Things" (1595)--are as much concerned with Spaniards as Muslims in the Mediterranean. Even though Hasleton endured five years as a galley slave for Muslim masters, his account is focused overwhelmingly on the more menacing encounter with the Spanish Inquisition in Majorca on the eve of the Armada's failed invasion of England. Hasleton's personal triumph over both militant Catholicism and Islam parallels England's victory over Spain, and both are testaments to the "pleasure" of a providential God. A patriotic plea concludes the narrative, as Hasleton beseeches this merciful God, so clearly on England's side, "to prolong the days of our most gracious and renowned Queen, whose fame reacheth far and whose most happy government is in admiration with foreign princes" (95).

The themes of personal redemption, truthful and triumphant Protestantism, and burgeoning nationalism continue in the seventeenth-century narratives, but an increasingly sophisticated and avid audience, combined with more liberal publishing conditions during the English Revolution, resulted in more detailed and dramatic "news" accounts of the capture, enslavement, and liberation of Englishmen in the Muslim Mediterranean. Spain is dearly diminished as a maritime power, relegated to paying annual tributes to Algiers for the return of its captive countrymen. The major peril is now Islam, both in the Mediterranean and immediately offshore. In recounting his five-year captivity thirty-two years after the fact in "Ebenezer; or A Small Monument of Great Mercy" (1675), William Okeley utilizes both traditional anti-Islamic characterizations as well as nascent empirical and ethnographical methodologies. The narrative is a mixture of the personal and the polemical; the magnificence of Algiers is qualified by Okeley's assertion that "they may afford to build sumptuously because they build at cost and with other men's hands" (149), while the cruelty of slavery is contrasted with the "wonderful kindness" of his second "patron."

Clearly the captivity narrative is assuming its characteristic shape as a literary genre in the seventeenth century--on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. One needs to remember that before his more celebrated American captivity, John Smith endured enslavement in Constantinople and told both tales in The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine Iohn Smith in Europe, Asia, Africke, and America (1630). Okeley and other crafters and publishers of the emerging Anglophonic genre knew that they had to both affirm and surpass cultural stereotypes and take their readers to places they had never seen and to which they could never go. Captivity was a challenge and an opportunity, for both the individual and the nation.

The national interest in obtaining information about the Barbary corsairs in particular and Islamic civilization in general is evident in the concluding narratives of Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: "A True Account of the Captivity of Thomas Phelps" (1685) and "A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans" (1705) by Joseph Pitts. The former account, which has never been reprinted, is a straightforward narrative of Phelps' enslavement and escape with the descriptive detail and avowed truthfulness of a "plain-speaking Englishman." During the reign of the Catholic James II, triumphant Protestantism apparently receded in favor of assertive nationalism. As its title suggests, Pitts' treatise transcends the captivity narrative genre in the sheer magnitude of its descriptive detail, including the first English account of the Hajj. Because he fell into temptation and "turned Turk," Pitts is able to give his readers unprecedented access into the Islamic world. Upon his deliverance, he becomes that "other" world's interpreter, a role that was repeated through five editions of "Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans" before 1750 and its inclusion in several ethnographical anthologies in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The popularity of Joseph Pitts' interpretation of Islam, along with the cumulative texts assembled by Vitkus, begs the questions of their impact on British literature, politics, and perceptions, questions that scholars such as Joe Shader, Andrew Hadfield, and, most recently, Linda Colley, have begun to address. Like the genre of the captivity narrative itself, this collection transcends geographical and disciplinary boundaries, and researchers of such diverse topics as cross-cultural interaction in the early modern world, the formation of British national identity through external encounter, colonial and travel literature, western perceptions of slavery, and the early foundations of orientalism will find Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption to be both a useful and timely volume.

DONNA AMELIA VINSON 

Salem State College