White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives

Abstract

White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of Barbary Captivity Narratives. Edited and with an introduction by Paul Baepler. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. xiii, 310. Illustrations. Cloth, $46.00; paper, $19.00.) It is not well known that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 white men and women were held as slaves in North Africa from roughly 1500 to 1830. Most were taken at sea, in raids on coastal towns, or captured on shore after shipwrecks. A handful of English merchant seamen who ventured into the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century became victims. At least one pamphlet resulted, the first known Barbary captivity narrative by an Englishman, which Richard Hakluyt included in his Principle Navigations. Barbary captivity was a topic of considerable interest in America from early settlement into the antebellum era. Merchants and seamen during the 1600s feared Moroccan corsairs who raided communities as far north as Iceland, and took vessels in north Atlantic waters. Eighteenth-century British shipping was less vulnerable to attack. Monetary tribute and the Royal Navy kept the peace between Britain and most of the Barbary powers most of the time. Although fewer British seamen suffered captivity in North African bagnios, the shipping news in colonial newspapers reported that vessels of weaker nations were still being taken at sea by Algerines. Hundreds and possibly thousands of Christians still labored for Islam as slaves. After the Revolution, vessels lost British protection and were targeted by corsairs almost immediately. By 1796, 119 seamen from thirteen vessels were enslaved in Algiers. John Foss, returning home after almost three years' slavery, published the first Barbary captivity narrative in 1798, an ordeal only half his shipmates survived. The plight of captured seamen engaged a public imagination already sensitive to perceived infringements of liberty. Seven of the nine publications Paul Baepler included in White Slaves, African Masters were printed during the early republic. The two women's narratives went into twelve editions each, and two narratives not included exceeded twenty. Clearly, tales of Barbary captivity resounded with the conflicting concerns and sensibilities of readers. What surprises, then, is the relative absence of recent scholarship placing this experience, these narratives, within any kind of emerging cultural context. There are a few notable exceptions. Robert J. Allison, in The Crescent Obscured ( 1995), considered the myriad ways in which early republican America constructed an Islamic world as a counterpoint to praise Western virtue or to criticize Western hypocrisy. A generation earlier in his classic The Slave Community (1979), John W. Blassingame used the memoirs of white slaves in Barbary to illuminate the process of acculturation for African slaves traumatized by violent capture, subjugated by an alien people, and humiliated by white disdain. Paul Baepler's book contextualizes these narratives in several ways. It makes excerpts from nine representative, but uncommon Barbary captivity narratives readily available to interested readers, and quite suitable for inclusion in a course syllabus. Each story is compelling in its own right. Baepler does not explain his editing rationale except to state how he defines American narratives, nor does he indicate what portions of the originals have been extracted. However, the balance and character of the selections are the strength of his book. …