English Accounts of Captivity in North Africa and the Middle East: 1577-1625.

Between 1577 and 1625, ten Englishmen wrote or dictated accounts about their captivity among the Muslims. After examining similar accounts of captivity by continental writers, Fernand Braudel argued that European governments encouraged the publication of such accounts for an ideological purpose: to alienate readers from Islam and Muslims. A close reading of the English accounts, however, shows that there was a more personal and selfish goal for the publication of these accounts than the polemical and the ideological.

In the early modern period, thousands of Christians and Muslims were captured by pirates and privateers ranging across the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to the North Sea. Subsequently, these captives either remained enslaved until their deaths, converted and assimilated into their captors' society; or escaped (or were ransomed) and returned to their countries. Of the European captives who returned from their captivity in North Africa and the Middle East, a few left accounts of their captivity, accounts which, the historian Fernand Braudel believes, the captives were encouraged by official government policy-makers to write down in order to alienate their readers from the Muslims and their world. At a time when "men flocked from Christendom to Islam, which tempted them with visions of adventure and profit -- and paid them to stay," [1] and when the number of Christians converting to Islam was by far higher than that of Muslims converting to Christianity, [2] Christian governments needed a form of propaganda that presented the Muslims in hostile terms.

Since Braudel was writing about the Mediterranean societies and their interaction, and since he paid little attention to England, the purpose of this paper will be to examine chronologically the corpus of writings by English captives from 1577 when the first account-writing Elizabethan returned from captivity to 1625 when Samuel Purchas published the last Jacobean account of English captivity in the Muslim dominions. Between these two dates, ten accounts (excluding a poem) were published, some by Richard Hakluyt and Purchas who edited and "censored" the accounts, and others by independent printers who were eager to capitalize on the market for such accounts. Two accounts overlapped and appeared both in the Hakluyt-Purchas group and in the independent group.

How far were these Elizabethan and Jacobean accounts motivated by a government-sponsored anti-Muslim ideology, as Braudel maintains? This question cannot be properly answered without taking into account an inconsistency in Braudel's thesis. In the period under study, England had by far less dealings than France with the Islamic Mediterranean, and therefore produced by far less original writings and translations about Islam and Muslims. French authors produced dozens of publications about the Levant and North Africa, and numerous lists of captives seized, ransomed, or liberated. Yet, France's first captivity account only appeared in 1608 (Henry du Lisdam, L'Esclavage du brave chevalier Francois de Vintimille), long after England had produced seven of its ten accounts. If "Western governments" encouraged "the recounting of captive 'horror stories' in order to convince their subjects of the dangers of any contact with Islam," as Ellen G. Friedman states (618 n.6), echoing Braudel, then French captivity accounts should have preceded English accounts.

The motivations for producing captivity accounts in England differed from those in France and elsewhere in Europe. These motivations can best be identified by situating the accounts not within Braudel's international polemic against Islam but within the personal ambitions and goals of the captives, and their supportive or critical views of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs.

THE ELIZABETHAN ACCOUNTS

The first "account" of an English captivity among the Muslims appears in the poem "A devise of a Maske for the right honorable Viscount Mountacute," written by George Gascoigne sometime between 1571 and his death in 1577. Despite its fictional character, Gascoigne's poem is important because it is the first narrative about English captivity among the Turks to be presented to the English reader. The poem is told in the first person voice of a boy, "Englishe borne," who had gone with his father to fight the Turks in Cyprus in 1570. The father was killed and the son was taken captive: "Amongest the which my selfe, was tane by Turkes / alas, / And with the Turkes a turkish life, in Turkie must I / passe" (79). The boy remained a captive for a year until he was released after the Turkish defeat at Lepanto.

Gascoigne's poem is more about English nationalism and anti-Turkism than about captivity, but it anticipates the later English encounters with Turkish captivity which will appear in print. The first account of an actual experience of captivity was published by Hakluyt in Navigations (1589): the captivity of John Fox in Alexandria, Egypt, and his escape on 3 January 1577. The account tells of Fox, an Englishman (with emphasis, as in Gascoigne, on the Englishness) who had been captured by the Turks in the Mediterranean in 1563, and served for the next 14 years as a galley slave in ships based in Alexandria, until he escaped with 266 other Christians.

From the start, the account views Fox's captivity and escape through a religious lens: "...to shew the ende of those, being in meere miserie, which continually doe call on God with a stedfast hope, that he will deliver them, and with a sure faith that he can doe it" (151). The escape of the captives is treated as a demonstration of the power of the Christian God over the infidel Turks: for, at numerous occasions, escape from Alexandria had appeared to the captives as impossible as it had been for the Israelites to cross the "red sea," or for the "wals of Jericho [to] fall downe," or for the Book of Daniel's three men to come out of the fiery furnace. But, "Such impossibilities can our God make possible" (153). The escape was an impossibility that was made possible by God and proved the might of "our," in contrast with the ineffectiveness of "their," God.

Hakluyt infused the account with the motifs of English election, enterprise and Christian heroism which informed the rest of his "prose epic." He also infused it with praise for the queen and her Privy Council who had extended financial assistance to Fox after his return home. Upon arriving in England, Hakluyt wrote, Fox

went unto the Councell: who considering of the state of this man, in that he had spent and lost a great part of his youth, in thraldome and bondage, extended to him their liberalitie, to helpe to maintaine him now in age, to their right honour, and to the incouragement of all true hearted Christians. (154)

Fox had been a hero, but after returning to England he had found himself in need of financial help. The Privy Council, Hakluyt told his readers, had recognized Fox's commitment to queen and country and had rewarded that commitment. Although the financial factor was not really part of the story of captivity and escape, Hakluyt put that factor to ideological use by ensuring that his readers learned how her Majesty's government cared for enterprising subjects. After undergoing enslavement and deprivation, an Englishman could be assured of financial support from his government.

The first English account of captivity fits, to some extent, Braudel's thesis since it situates Fox in the context of Christian hostility to Islam. But it also serves to express a political message about governmental action on behalf of captives: while the account reveals an anti-Islamic strain, the goal remains more personal than polemical and turns the reader's attention to the English monarch more than the Turkish sultan. A similarly strong emphasis on the personal goal appeared in another account of captivity that was published a year after Fox/Hakluyt. The account by Edward Webbe was printed for William Wright in 1590, one year after Webbe's return from Mediterranean slavery. This was the first captivity account that was printed in England as an autonomous text, and it immediately went into two other imprints, "Newly enlarged." In 1592, there were two others "by A. I. [Abel Jeffes] for William Barley," and another in 1600. The market was ready for captivity accounts.

The title captures the personality of Webbe and the character of his account: The Rare and Most Wonderfull Things which Edward Webbe an Englishman borne, hath seene and passed in his troublesome trauailes, in the cities of Jerusalem, Damasko, Bethlem and Galely: and in the lands of Iewrie, Egypt, Grecia, Russia, and Prester Iohn. Webbe writes an adventure story set in many countries stretching from Spain to Persia, and from Russia to Palestine. The line of narrative with which he ties all his observations together is his cruel captivity, both under the Turks and others, and the military actions he conducted as a gunner in the service of his Turkish masters. By writing this account, Webbe becomes the first Englishman to provide, in his own voice and words, and based on first-hand experience, a description of the captives' living conditions, their food, their humiliation, their beatings, and the pressure under which they came to turn Muslim. From Halduyt's quasi-religious story of enslavement and return, Webbe transforms the captivity account into a travelogue, describing the dominions in which the slave had found himself -- including descriptions that are clearly fabrications and woodcuts of strange and exotic creatures.

Because Webbe was ransomed by the queen's ambassador in Istanbul, he dutifully expresses his gratitude to the queen and her government and explains that his purpose in writing the account is to seek employment. Having spent years in payless enslavement, he is now having to start his life anew in England. In his dedication to the queen, he tells her that he resisted all the temptations of Islam and Catholicism in order to return and serve her:

... if in Turkie, I would haue denyed my Christ, or in my trauile woulde haue forsaken my Prince to haue serued for Spaine, threby to haue become a traitour to your Maiestic and my natiue Countrie, I needed not to haue liued in want, but in great prosperitie. (A3v)

There is no subtlety in Webbe: he wants the queen to know that had he stayed among the Spaniards, or had he converted to Islam and subsequently enjoyed the "wonderfull preferment of the Turke" (C4v), or had he stayed among the French, he would have had great employment and would have become rich. But he chose to return to her dominions whereupon he awaited her assistance: " ... let this suffise, that I shall be glad, and doe daily desire that I may be imploied in some such seruice as may be profitable to my Prince and Countrey" (D4r). Despite the polarization Webbe establishes between England and Turks, Tartars, and everybody else outside his island, his most immediate purpose in writing his account is to be able to reach the queen and through her find employment. The captivity account is a job application, which possibly includes a picture of the applicant: in the second "enlarged" version of his work, there is a woodcut of a man loading a cannon -- Webbe served the Turks as a gunner -- both after the title- page and in the text.

A similar concern for personal welfare appears in the next captivity account, printed by "A.I. for William Barley": Strange and Wonderfvll Things. Happened to Richard Hasleton, borne at Braintree in Essex, In his ten yeares trauailes in many forraine countries (1595). Hasleton was a captive among both the Spaniards and the Algerians from 1582 until 1593. His account consists of a "Pamphlet" that lay among the "store of papers and writings, of sundry mens labours" in the library of William Barley, the same man who had published Webbe's account in 1592. Hopeful of brisk sales as the Webbe account had shown, Jeffes and Barley turned to Hasleton's narrative and published it twice in the same year. [3] In their haste to produce the account, they used a number of woodcuts which had appeared in Webbe's account -- although they did not bear any thematic relevance to Hasleton's narrative.

From what Barley indicated, the "Pamphlet" which constituted Hasleton's account was a manuscript that had been "Penned as he [Hasleton] delivered it from his owne mouth" (title-page) and which Barley proceeded to publish and dedicate to "the Worshipfvll Maister Richard Stapar." Stapar was a Levant Company merchant who had been praised by Hakluyt for reviving and increasing trade with the Levant in the late 1570s. [4] In turn, Barley praised Stapar for having been bountiful to "such as are, in their trauaile distressed with want" and for having "extended" many favors to "Hasleton in his miseries." Barley hoped that Stapar's good "ensample may lighten others to such good actions." At a time when English seamen and traders were risking their lives for monarch and country, there was a need to show them that should they get captured, their compatriots would assist them upon their return home -- as Stapar had done to Hasleton, "our neere neighbour borne at Brainetree in Essex," who had suffered "for God and our cou ntries cause" (A3r-v).

Hasleton's account serves more to assure England's seamen of public support than to urge them toward Braudel's anti-Islamic ideology Actually, and because the late 1580s and the 1590s witnessed the golden age of Anglo-Muslim relations, the account presents a sympathetic view of the Moors/Muslims: an old Moor helps Hasleton when he first arrives in Algeria after his escape from the Spaniards; later, he offers him food and shelter, and protects him from the Muslim community who is deeply suspicious of Christians. Hasleton soon finds himself being sought out for employment as a gunner, an employment that he willingly accepts (unlike Webbe who claimed that he had been forced to serve): he is also offered good wages, and is enjoined to convert to Islam and become part of Muslim society. The Moors are eager to have him become one of them, but they do not use the horrific torture methods which the Catholics had used in their attempt to convert him to Catholicism.

Actually, and because Hasleton cannot forget his horrible experience among the Spanish Catholics, he charges his account with anti-Catholic instead of anti-Islamic sentiment. As in the accounts by Fox and Webbe, Hasleton shows the reader how courageous he was in defending the honor of his queen and religion -- even at the risk of writing passages (or perhaps Barley wrote them for him) that are affected and unconvincing. Strange and Wonderfull Things includes a long debate with Spanish Catholics in which Hasleton defeats his adversaries in theological knowledge and truth (B1v-B1111 [sic]). Meanwhile, Hasleton justifies the Moors/Muslims in their attacks on Spanish/Christian shipping: he is the first English captive to explain that North African/Moorish and Morisco attacks on Christian shipping are not a result of greed and religious violence; rather, Muslims attack in order to retaliate against Christian pirates and marauders. What the Muslims do to Christians is in reaction to what the Christians do to them. [5] As Hasleton put it:

... for many times the Spaniards will passe ouer in some small vessell, and go on [the North African] shoar: and if they can catch any men of the country, they carry them away to make Gallie slaues, wherefore the Moors are very diligent to pursue them at their landing: and if it chance they take any Christian they use him in like sort. (C4v)

Neither Hasleton nor his compatriots seemed to have feared the Muslims in the way they, along with the Muslims, feared the piracy and torture of the Catholic Spaniards.

In 1598-1600, Hakluyt published his expanded version of the Navigations. The Fox account, which had been the only one about English captivity among the Muslims a decade earlier, was reprinted and was accompanied by another account about the captivity of the crew of the ship "Iesus" in 1583 in Tripoli, Libya. The author of this account is Thomas Sanders who describes a year of captivity in the galleys of Tripoli. Sanders shows how cruel and dishonest infidel kings are -- and how God always punishes the evil-doers: the Muslim ruler who had captured them, he notes, was later assassinated by his troops, and his son, who had forcibly converted two Englishmen and two English boys to Islam was later killed, along with his mother, by the Venetians. [6]

Significantly, the Sanders account ends in the same way as Fox's -- with gratitude to the

gracious Queene, for the great care her Majestie had ouer us, her poore Subjects, in seeking and procuring of our deliuerance aforesaide: and also for her honourable priuie Counsell, and I especiall for the prosperitie and good estate of the house of the late deceased, the right honourable the Earle of Bedford, whose honour I must confesse, most diligently at the suite of my father now departed, traueiled herein: for the which I rest continually bounden to him, whose soule I doubt not, but is already in the heauens in ioy, with the Almightie, unto which place he vouchsafe to bring us all, that for our sinnes suffered most vile and shameful death upon the Crosse, there to live perpetually world without ende, Amen. (2:191)

Although Sanders presents a "horror story" among the Muslims, the story has a happy ending because of the generosity of the queen and her council. Sanders's and Hakluyt's political message is again clear: the queen is dedicated to freeing the captives and helping those seamen and traders who are exploring the new world of the Mediterranean.

Another account in Halduyt's 1599 Navigations tells of the sinking of the "Tobie neere Cape Espartel" in 1593 and the capture of its crew by the Moors. This short account is written by one of the ten survivors of the crew (including one, intriguingly, called John Fox) whose names are listed at the end of the account. The plural "we" describes the shipwreck, the survivors' trek toward Cape Espartel, the English sailors' surrender to the Moors who proceed to treat them as captives, and their endurance of hunger and thirst as they are moved around the country until their final ransom by English merchants who paid "700 ounces, euery ounce in that country containing two shillings." After spending around six months in Morocco, the captives return "home poore, sicke, and feeble, into our country" (2:203). Their captivity is an ordeal whose only bright spot is the fact that the captives are quickly ransomed by their compatriots and are not left in Moorish slavery, as other European nationals were.

The above Elizabethan accounts reveal how the Hakluyt accounts and the independently printed accounts concur in showing the dangers of Mediterranean trade among the Muslims and Catholics, and in praising the queen for her ceaseless activity on behalf of captives. Such praise was well-deserved since the queen did indeed exert every effort to help her subjects: in 1579, she and her Council encouraged "charitable collections" to be made every Easter "in every parish, in answer of the Privy Council's letters concerning the captives taken in Turkey"; [7] in 1584, a request was made to her by merchants trading in Algiers to hold a "general collecting" in order to ransom captives there. [8] By the end of the century, the queen had established such cooperation with the Moroccan ruler, Mulay Ahmad al-Mansour, that the Dutch asked her to intercede on their behalf for the liberation of Dutch captives -- which she successfully did. [9]

Throughout her reign, Queen Elizabeth was able to reduce the number of captives seized by Moors and Turks or to effect their speedy release by means of commercial and diplomatic treaties. It is no coincidence, therefore, that every captivity account published after Hakluyt's account of Fox was not about captives who had escaped, but about captives who had been ransomed through the intervention of the queen and the Privy Council. The accounts were written (and published) more for purposes of praising the queen and her sense of national responsibility than for indulging in polemic and in the vilification of Islam. They served a domestic rather than an international goal.

THE JACOBEAN ACCOUNTS

The accession of James to the throne drastically changed England's relations with the Muslim world. The king was antithetical to Islam and reduced diplomatic relations with Muslim rulers while issuing letters of marque to his subjects that encouraged them to seize Muslim ships and passengers. James never realized that his short-sighted policy, along with his inattentiveness to the navy, would bring ruin on many a merchant ship in the Mediterranean and in the African and European Atlantic: for as he adopted a confrontational stance with Islam, the naval capability of the Barbary Corsairs was growing so much so that they were able to attack the western coast of England and southeast Ireland. Furthermore, the number of the Corsairs rose dramatically as a result of the 1609 expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain who took with them to North Africa new skills and a deep hatred of Christians -- a hatred that did not always distinguish between Protestant and Catholic, English and Spanish. It is no wonder that the numbe r of English and Scottish ships that were seized by the Corsairs rose significantly in the Jacobean period. [10]

No original account of captivity was published in the early Jacobean period, but five years after the accession of James, Fox's escape story was appropriated by Anthony Munday and published under the title The Admirable Deliverance of 266. Christians by Iohn Reynard Englishman from the captiuitie of the Turkes (1608). Munday was a hack writer who, alert to the absence of new captivity accounts and new English heroes, sought to make some profit by re-telling Fox's story. To emphasize the fox-like craftiness of the captive, Munday translated the name to French and presented the escape story in non-religious language: he replaced Hakluyt's Christian imagery with the classical "Gods of the Sea (the windes)" (A2v), and instead of Jesus he referred to Neptune who at one time became "drunke in the blood both of Christians and Turkes mingled together" (A4v). Throughout the account, and in complete contrast to Hakluyt, Munday did not a make a single biblical allusion or comparison.

This omission of the religious motif is not surprising since Munday's English sailors go into the Mediterranean not to fight Islam but to engage in commerce, that

chayne which bindes kingdomes in Leagues, begetts loue betweene princes farre remoued asunder, and teacheth nations, different in qualitie, in colour, in religion, to deale faithfully together as brethren. (A2r)

Munday turns Fox's account into an exciting story about the dangers of the sea: where Hakluyt spends a few lines on the capture of the Englishmen, Munday uses the first half of his lengthier account to describe the naval battle between the heroic English and the numerous Turks. The reader is given a blow-by-blow description of the battle and the admirable deeds of the English sailors in resisting unto near-death. Of course, because the battle is between Englishmen and Turks, it is seen as a battle between Christians and "Christs professed and open enemies" (C3r), between English heroes and Turkish "bears" and "bulls" and "rats." Munday animalizes the Turks and denigrates them, but he does not demonize them theologically, nor does he credit the heroism of the English mariners to divine inspiration or election. The battle is not between Christianity and Islam: that is why the subsequent defeat and capture of the English is not a religious but a naval defeat.

In the second part of the account, Munday turns to the description of the Englishmen's captivity in, and escape from, Alexandria. And here he changes his tone. No more are there classical allusions, although the Christian element does not take over either. Now Munday focuses on the "hero" of this adventure, John Reynard, and describes the Englishman's determination to escape, the overwhelming odds against him and his compatriots, their prayers that "the hand of heauen woulde so guide them" (C4v), their actual escape after they take possession of the best galley in the harbor, and finally their arrival to safety in Christendom. The ideological motive is not as much anti-Islamic as pro-English: Reynard is a great English hero which is the reason why Munday includes a list of the 266 other European nationals (whom he carefully breaks down into 14 countries of origin) who are saved by the three Englishmen. The escape demonstrates not only Englishmen's superiority over the Turks, but over the Irish, the Scotts, t he Greeks, the "Muscovites," and others. That is why when Reynard arrives in Crete, he is praised by the priests of Gallipoli who proceed to treat his sword as a relic and give the Englishman a certificate testifying that he is "the chiefest that did accomplish that great worke, whereby so many christians haue recouered their libertie" (Dr). Later, the Pope gives him another recommendation whereupon he is hired by the Spanish king for "20 pence by the day" Despite this well-paying employment, Fox leaves the Spaniards and returns to England. The account ends on an abrupt note: "But the loue of his owne country calling him from thence hee forsooke Spayne, and his preferment there, and retourned to England" (C4r).

Where Halduyt ended his account by praising the queen and the Privy Council for helping Fox, Munday ends without making any mention of that financial factor, for such assistance was no longer available under James I. The king took little interest in his captive subjects and turned their affairs over to Trinity House; and although Trinity House formalized the process by which money could be raised for captives, it could not protect sailors nor could it always help them financially after their return. By omitting reference to government assistance and mentioning Spaniard employment and generosity, Munday directs a cautious criticism at the king since one of the few facts which people continued to remember about Fox, until the end of the Jacobean period, was Queen Elizabeth's help to him. The author of "The Relation of the Jacob" (published by Purchas in 1625 but describing events in 1621) recalled that after Fox had returned to England, "the Queene (being rightly informed of his braue exploit) did graciously e ntertaine him for her Servant, and allowed him a yeerely Pension"(888). In the few lines dedicated to Fox in "The Relation," the information about the queen's reward had been important enough to recall. By omitting reference to what the public seemed to remember, Munday may well have reflected his compatriots' anxiety at the plight of English captives in North Africa.

Such anxiety was justified. A year after the publication of Munday's account, North African privateers began a series of attacks on English and Scottish ships in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic that resulted, between 1609 and 1616, in the capture of 466 ships. In 1616, a "Turkishe pirat" entered the Thames and reached Leigh in Essex, just a few miles above Southland; by 1618, Lord Carew informed Sir Thomas Roe that the "Turkish pirates do great harm to our ships in the Mediterranean; if they are not destroyed, the Levant trade will be at an end; they also damage the coast of Spain much." [11] In 1621, Sir Henry Mainwaring, who had been a pirate with the Tunisians before returning to serve in the English navy, reported that a battle had taken place between Turkish and English ships in which six English ships were lost; in that same year, the English fleet unsuccessfully tried to attack Algiers in order to free the captives. [12] Not only had the Barbary Corsairs grown stronger, but England's (and other Eur opean countries') naval defenses had grown weaker -- a fact that the seventeenth-century Tunisian historian Ibn Abi Dinar confirmed: European Christians of the early seventeenth century, he wrote, did not send out large ships, as a result of which the privateers who sailed in frigates, were able to capture much booty (192).

Against the background of such maritime and naval weakness, and perhaps to raise Englishmen's spirits, Nathaniel Butter published the first original account by a Jacobean sailor of his captivity among the Muslims: John Rawlins' The Famous and Wonderfull recoverie of a Ship of Bristoll, called the Exchange, from the Turkish pirates of ARGIER (1622). The account is written by Rawlins himself, "an unpolished worke of a poore Sailer" as the dedication states, but it is presented in the third person voice -- a literary technique not uncommon in seventeenth-century writing. Rawlins opens his account by establishing a theological purpose: "to manifest the power and glory of GOD" against the infidels. Rawlins' polemical agenda is clear: to offer his experience as an exemplary tale of captivity, endurance, and "redemption" by God. That is why he divides his account in the manner of a sermon, beginning with a verse from the Scriptures and the words "Hearken then I pray you to the following relation" (A3v). This serves as the "preamble or introduction" from which Rawlins moves to the "matter it selfe" which is the account of his capture and subsequent escape. The danger in the capture, he informs his reader, is not only the physical but also the spiritual captivity since the Turks try to capture the soul too: "aboue a 100 hansome youths [were] compelled to turn Turkse ... all English" (Br). The lesson thus to be learned, Rawlins urges, is that captivity is a divine trial after which the captive emerges victorious: "Gods trials were gentle purgations, and these crosses were but to cleanse the drosse from the gold, and bring vs out of the fire againe more cleare and louely" (By).

Like Fox, Rawlins tells a story of captivity and escape that is carried out by his heroic English determination and by his reliance on a God who helps Christians. By so doing, Rawlins promotes the kind of anti-Muslim propaganda which Braudel identifies in the captivity accounts. Such hatred did he have for his captors that after he overpowered them, and despite their cries of mercy, he killed them, cutting them down with their axes or throwing them overboard in their chains. But Rawlins's account did more than gloat over the destruction of the Muslims: Rawlinshad opened with a dedication to the Duke of Buckingham which, after adumbrating the necessary platitudes of loyalty to king and love of (Christian) God, ends rather joltingly:

For though you [Duke of Buckingham] haue greater persons, and more brauing spirits to lie ouer our heads, and hold inferiours in subjection; yet are we the men that must pull the ropes, weigh up the anchors, toile in the night, endure the stormes, sweat at the Helme, watch the Biticle, attend the Compasse, guard the Ordnance, keepe the night houres, and be ready for all impositions: If then, you vouchsafe to entertaine it, I haue my desire. For, according to the oath of Iurors, it is the truth, and the very truth: If otherwise you suppose it triuiall, it is only the prostitution of my seruice, and wisdome is not bought in the market. (A2v)

These are bold and angry words. They suggest that Buckingham does not care for the "small" sailors who man the English fleet. While Buckingham is clearly a man of power and status (Rawlins includes all of the Duke's titles and functions, taking up 12 lines), he is not a man of the sea and does not seem to know or care about what sailors endure on their journeys. Rawliuns hopes that his account will enlighten the Duke about how defenseless England's poorly-paid sailors are against the Turks in the absence of government protection at sea. But Rawlins suspects that Buckingham will ignore the account and treat it as a prostitution of service.

There can be little doubt that such a dedication, along with the subsequent account that shows how captives had to rely solely on themselves (and God) but not on their country's fleet, is not written to support the government nor any of its policies. Although Rawlins vilifies the Muslims ("cruell Mahometan dogs"), his personal goal is to alert the uncaring Admiralty to the plight of sailors. He also wants to join his voice to the other voices that are complaining about the inefficiency of the fleet. In October 1621, the Venetian ambassador in London had reported "wide lamentation at the news of the severe losses inflicted by the Barbary pirates upon the Scots in the capture of fifty trading and fishing ships and of some 2,000 men." And then in cipher, he continued: "Such, exclaim the people, are the fruits of the fleet which has been kept at sea at such great expense to guard the coasts of Spain," and not of England. [13] In 1622, four men from Bristol fought off Algerian pirates and returned as heroes to Eng land. Significantly, in the publication that appeared describing their feat, A Relation Strange and True, there was sourness at the difference between the way these "small" seamen had been received and the way commanding officers and nobility would have been celebrated:

Had Iohn Cooke beene some Collonell, Captaine, or Commander, or William Ling, some nauigating Lord, or Dauid Iones some gentleman of land and riches, or had Robert Tuckey beene one of fortunes minions, to haue had more mony then wit, or more wealth then valour, oh what a triumphing had heere beene then, what rare Muses would haue toyld like Mules, to haue gallopt with their flattering encomiums, beyond the 32 points of the compasse; whilst these 4 rich caskets of home-spun valour and courage, haue no pen to publish their deserued commendations, no inuention to emblazon their saltwater honour, but the poore lines of a freshwater Poet. (B2r-v)

In this account, the bitterness expressed by Rawlins had turned into a blunt declamation against hierarchy and social division. Three years later, dissatisfaction with the navy had reached the Commons and in August 1625, a member of the House complained that "the Kinge's shipps doe nothinge, goeinge up and downe feastinge in every good porte." [14] From the common sailor to the Member of Parliament, there was criticism of the Lord Admiral and his poor administration of the navy.

Given this criticism, Purchas was cautious, and when he published Rawlins's account in his Pilgrimes of 1625, a text which he dedicated to Charles just before the latter succeeded to the throne, he presented the account, as he noted, "heere abbreuiated" (289). Purchas did not deem it wise to include Rawlins's words about Buckingham, the man who was dearly loved by both King James and his successor: he shortened the account and deleted, without making any mention of it, the dedication.

Purchas's Pilgrimes of 1625 not only re-introduced readers to Rawlins but to a captive who was, unlike all the previous captives, not of common stock. Sir Henry Middileton was a merchant and a sea-captain whose brother John was one of the directors of the East India Company in 1599. [15] In 1610, he sailed on the sixth voyage organized by the Company to the Far East, to Mocha on the western coast of the Arabian peninsula. The sixth Voyage, set forth by the East-Indian Company in three Shippes appeared in Purchas as part of an extensive account of the travels and trades of Middleton. The account, written not from a journal but from memory as Middleton himself explains (255), tells of the "treacherie" of the Turkish basha in Mocha, Middleton's captivity with some of his men, their long trek into the hinterlands of Yemen, and their final escape.

In the account, Middleton vilifies the basha who was responsible for his captivity, and praises others who helped him, especially Hamet Waddy, "an Arabian Merchant" who "stood my friend very much" (256). In his experience of captivity, Middleton met with good Muslims and bad Muslims, as a result of which his account is not dominated by an anti-Muslim ideological motive: actually, there is not a single biblical allusion or religious reference in the whole account. Instead, Middleton uses the account to show his dedication to the East India Company: believing himself the first Englishman to go there (wrongly so as he had been preceded by John Jourdain), [16] he gives a detailed description of the cities and terrains in Arabia. Specifically, he describes the different temperature zones because such information was needed by the cloth makers in England who produced one of the chief commodities of exchange with the Turks. He also describes the tribes he met, the distances he traveled, the landscapes he crossed, a nd the treatment he and his fellow captives received. When Purchas published the account in 1625, it constituted the first description in English of a territory hitherto unknown to the Company and to the public at large.

Middleton uses the account to present information about the southwestern part of the Arabian Peninsula, but his more immediate goal is to justify his handling, or rather mishandling, of the events in Mocha. Although after his release Middleton received congratulations from other English captains in the Red Sea, [17] he anticipated questions about what had happened in Mocha. Word had spread that Middleton had sailed to Mocha despite warnings that he and his English crew were getting dangerously close to the Muslim holy cities of Makka and Madina, which were forbidden to Christians. Even two years after the episode, there was still talk about it. In June 1613, Samuel Calvert wrote to William Trumbull explaining what Middleton had really done in Mocha:

Middleton, employed at sea by the East India company, and through his own indiscretion or boldness having received some wrong at Tripoly, where a Bashaw circumvented him in a feast, and kept him prisoner till order from hence went to release him; after his liberty, took his course through the Red Sea and in revenge of three men slain, searched three Turkish ships, and satisfied himself out of goods and men. The rumour of this reaching Constantinople, the Chief Vizier Nassuff Bassa, hearing of this, complained to our ambassador of the overthrow of their trade through the spoil on the Grand Signor's subjects by English pirates, and threatened to dismiss all the English out of the country. [18]

Evidently, Middleton's captivity had not been a result of Turkish deceit but of Middleton's piracy and aggression. And as Calvert noted, Middleton had nearly precipitated a foreign relations disaster.

It was because of the controversy surrounding Middleton that Purchas printed the The sixth Voyage in order to rehabilitate the name of a man who, two years after the Mocha episode, was killed in the course of Company duty. But despite Purchas's publication, infamy continued to surround Middleton's name, and sometime after 1625 another account about the journey was written by a companion of Sir Henry (but not published until 1732). It opens with a narrator who (using the plural "we") describes the setting and the situation that developed between the English traders and the Turks in Mocha. Five pages into the account, the "we" is replaced by the "Words of Sir Henry himself, only abridging some Things here and there for Brevity's sake." [19] After Middleton ends his "Words," which are taken from Purchas, the "we"/editor takes over again and completes the narrative.

The editor writes that the purpose of the account is to "recite" the "Circumstances of his [Middleton's] Captivity" and to "explain the Occasion of the Journey from thence [Mocha] to Zenan or Sanaa." [20] Why there should have been a need for such a "recitation" after the appearance of Purchas's text is not clear since the editor does not really add any new information to Purchas. But from the start the editor is eager to show Sir Henry as an Englishman of courage, dignity, and fearlessness. In this respect, and as with the Purchas account, this account of Middleton's captivity and escape does not center on anti-Muslim ideology. Rather, both accounts seek to portray a heroic English captain, rehabilitate his reputation, and justify his actions.

The need for justification was occasioned by the suspicion under which sailors (and captains) fell who returned to England after having lost their ships or having been captured by Muslims. Upon meeting with a Turkish man-of-war, many were accused of not putting up a fight but of surrendering both ship and cargo to the enemy. As a result of such allegations of collusion, the captivity/escape accounts always showed how heroic seamen had been in fighting off the rapacious adversaries. Middleton used his account to explain himself to the East India investors and to justify the losses he incurred. That is why he specifically mentioned how the Muslim soldiers had "pillaged" him and taken "from mee such money as I had about mee, and three gold Rings, whereof one was my Scale, the other had seuen Diamonds which were of good worth, and the third a Gimmall Ring" (252-53). He added that he had endured deprivation and torture, even the threat of execution, but still, he did not yield the ship to the Turks and did everyt hing in his power to protect the Company's investment.

Even in accounts published about seamen who had succeeded in fighting off the Turks, the suspicion surrounding them still prevailed: the accounts praised them for having resisted and saved not necessarily themselves from slavery, but the ships from loss. In A Fight at Sea, Famously fought by the Dolphin of London against five of the Turkes Men of Warre (1617), the author noted that after the sailors had successfully fought the Turks, they returned to London "to the great ioy and comfort of the Owners thereof" (B4r): what had been important about defeating the Turks was saving the shipowners' investment. Whether the accounts told of successfully defeating the Turks or of submitting to their enslavement, there was a need to justify and exonerate the seamen, both the common sailor such as Fox, and the captain such as Middleton.

English captivity accounts between 1577 and 1625 do not present a monolithic anti-Islamic ideology. Rather they reveal a variety of differences in emphasis and construction, in style and in tone, between the Hakluyt-Purchas group and the independently printed group, and between the Elizabethan and the Jacobean accounts.

The Elizabethan accounts show gratitude on the part of captives to the queen and to their ransomers; since the queen reduced the captivity of her subjects through amicable relations with the Muslim states and through effective intervention by her factors and ambassadors, there was no criticism of the government nor the fleet. Neither was there a strong anti-Islamic strain either: Muslim pirates were denounced, but not the commercially lucrative world of Islam nor the legitimacy and validity of trade with Muslims. During the Jacobean period, however, the praise that had been lavished on the previous monarch was discontinued: it is not surprising that the three Jacobean accounts that appeared in print are about captives who escaped and returned home without any royal or government help. Under James, the captivity accounts turned into vehicles of what the government and Purchas might well have viewed as anti-establishment.

This anti-establishment strain helps explain why no captivity account was published in England from 1625 until 1640. In those fifteen years, the numbers of British captives in North Africa reached the highest yet in England's and Scotland's history: thousands of men, women and children were captured by Algerian, Tunisian, Tripolitanian, and Moroccan privateers, some to be ransomed, but others to remain in captivity. There were so many captives that families, especially women, were driven to actions unprecedented in English history: wives of captives took to the streets and petitioned the king, Parliament, the Privy Council, and any body in authority for assistance. [21] In such an atmosphere of anxiety and social agitation, it would have been quite logical, had Braudel's theory been tenable in the English context, for the government to encourage the publication of captivity accounts that would deflect attention from its policy failure and put the blame for the suffering of the captives on the shoulders of th e nefarious "Mahometans."

But not a single account about captivity was published. The only exception is a chapter in a book by James Wadsworth published in 1629. As the title shows, however, the purpose of the book is to slander the Catholics not the Muslims: The English Spanish Pilgrime. Or A New Discoverie of Spanish Popery, and Iesviticall Stratagems. Wadsworth includes a chapter on his captivity among the Moors (38-47), but the focus of his book is on his defection to Spanish Catholicism, his disillusion, and his return "into his true mothers bosome, the Church of England" (title-page). For the author and his English public, the danger to king and country comes not from the Muslim Turks but from the Catholic Spaniards.

The beleaguered Charles I -- who had insisted on poundage and tonnage from disgruntled Parliaments which he subsequently dissolved, and who was facing numerous mass-generated petitions on behalf of forgotten husbands and brothers in North Africa -- was not a king who would have favored the publication of captivity accounts that showed the brutality of the Muslims and, by the same token, the incompetence of his administration. [22] An account about "Turkish" captivity would be a judgment on the king's failure to protect the seas, and an account of a seaman's or a trader's escape would be a reminder that the captives were really on their own -- that all the money the king was raising through much-contested taxation had not been used effectively. Thus, as long as Charles was in firm control of the press, not a single account was published to remind the public of the unransomed thousands in North Africa and other parts of the Ottoman Empire. Only when censorship was lifted in 1640 was the first account of captiv ity and escape published -- and republished -- in the same year: Francis Knight's A Relation of Seaven yeares Slaverie under the Turkes of Argeire, suffered by an English Captive Merchant.

Captivity accounts were written in the context of anti-Islamic fear and conflict, but their immediate purpose was often more national than international, more personal than ideological. Captives viewed themselves not as warriors against Islam who had returned from a crusade, but as seamen who had sailed into the Mediterranean in search of work and pay to support their families: they were employees not religious soldiers. They had encountered the Muslims and endured captivity, but upon returning home their most pressing priority was to find new employment, to remove any suspicion of collusion with the Turks, and to alert readers and the public-at-large of the poor condition of these seamen who were risking their lives in expanding England's commercial ventures. The captivity accounts of early modern England belong to the history of maritime trade more than to religious polemic and anti-Islamic diatribe.

FLORIDA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 

(1.) Braudel, 2:799.

(2.) Matar, 1998, chap. 1.

(3.) As the STC shows, only one copy of the first imprint survives today, at the Marsh Library in Dublin. Unfortunately, I was unable to acquire a copy of this imprint. A copy of the second imprint survives at the Huntington Library, which is the copy I am using. The first imprint was reproduced with modernized spelling by Beazley, 2:151-85.

(4.) the biography of Stapar in Willan, 191-93.

(5.) As Stanley Lane-Poole put it three centuries later, "The Corsairs of Algiers only served their enemies as they served them" (217).

(6.) Byron, 193, mentions that 50 Moors, 75 Turks, 174 Christian converts, and 45 women who were on that ship, were killed.

(7.) HistoricalManuiscripts Commission, 1:68.

(8.) Calendar of State Papers (hereafter CSP), Foreign Series, 18:330.

(9.) Moroccan ambassador who visited England in 1600 brought with him a number of freed Dutchmen; see Castries 2:149-51.

(10.) See the studies of captives and captivity in this period by Hebb, and Matar, 1999, 71-81.

(11.) Maclean, 51; CSP Domestic ... 1611-1618, 9:515.

(12.) CSP Domestic ... 1619-1623, 10:273.

(13.) CSP ... Venice, 17:155.

(14.) Gardiner, 117.

(15.) See entry in Dictionary of National Biography.

(16.) Jourdain, 81-114.

(17.) CSP Colonial series, 213, for summaries of letters from Captain Downton and Gyles Thornton to Middleton. See also the reference to the "'Letter of advice to al English ships to shun the Red Sea.' Setting forth the tyrannous treatment of the Turks to those of the sixth voyage," 224.

(18.) Qtd. in Hinds, 4:124.

(19.) Laroque, 256 [mispaginated 265].

(20.) Ibid., 251.

(21.) Matar, 1997.

(22.) Matar, forthcoming.

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