Barbary Captivity Narratives Research Articles

Disentangling Eben-Ezer: William Okeley and His Barbary Captivity Narrative

Eben-ezer (1675) was the most successful Barbary captivity narrative and remains the most challenging. This article engages with debates over its authorship, publication history, purpose, and significance, and offers new information and interpretations on each aspect.

The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America by Greta LaFleur

Reviewed by: The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America by Greta LaFleur Kate Luce Mulry (bio), Jessica Choppin Roney, and Whitney Martinko Keywords Sexuality, Sexual behavior, Gender, History of sex The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America. By Greta LaFleur. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. Cloth $64.95, paper $34.95.) Greta LaFleur’s The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, recently reissued in paperback, reveals how residents of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic understood human sexuality as environmentally situated. It asks how we might rethink a history of sex outside of the body and “without the subject” (189). According to LaFleur, early modern environmental understandings of sexuality emerged in natural history texts that were engaged in debates about the relationship of environment and race. While historians of race have investigated how conceptions of porous humoral bodies shaped how early modern people understood health and inchoate ideas about race, LaFleur’s novel contribution suggests that scholars interested in the history of sexuality should be similarly attentive to how sexual behavior was seen as “highly contingent on one’s environment” (34). The book is not designed to be comprehensive but instead offers new frameworks for understanding how early Americans thought about sex and sexual behaviors. By examining natural history treatises produced by elite writers as well as multiple genres of popular print material—including Barbary captivity narratives, execution narratives, cross-dressing narratives, and anti-vice narratives in the study—LaFleur uncovers a range of writers who charted how the environment shaped human bodies and behaviors. Efforts to comprehend human difference mattered a great deal to natural philosophers, governments, colonists, and merchants during a long [End Page 651] eighteenth century of accelerated globalization and colonization. As early modern authors struggled to articulate the nature of “human variety,” their efforts regularly rested on assertions about the sexual practices of the people they described and they “began to scrutinize sexual behavior as something of a racial symptom” (6). Early modern people understood both race and sexuality as malleable features of humoral bodies that were “vulnerable” (6) to the environment. While various scholars have analyzed colonizers’ anxieties about their bodies when consuming novel foods in new colonial climates, LaFleur instead delves into how these humoralist or environmentalist beliefs also informed eighteenth-century understandings of sexual behavior.1 In doing so, LaFleur reframes scholarship on early sex by moving it away from an exclusive focus on the body. While the structure of the book is roughly chronological, the thematic structure of each chapter facilitates LaFleur’s close and incisive readings. She demonstrates that writers contributed to tangled histories of race and sex across multiple print genres, and in doing so, LaFleur “unit[es] the archives of popular narrative and natural history” (5). By investigating varied texts, LaFleur brings out the mutually imbricated and influential connection between genres and reveals an Atlantic conversation about sexuality, race, and the environment. LaFleur’s book will likely introduce to scholars to an unexpected archive by revealing the numerous popular print sources that incorporated naturalists’ investigations into the nature of human variety. If eighteenth-century science writing became a vehicle for ideas about racial difference, these lesser-known texts offer additional rich resources for investigating how writers articulated human difference through claims about sexual behavior. Indeed, the non-elite vernacular literature of the era asks many of the “same questions” (23) as authors of natural history treatises. [End Page 652] After an introduction that clearly defines the terms and parameters of the work, the first chapter, “The Natural History of Sexuality,” acquaints her readers with an array of natural history texts composed by elite authors such as Cotton Mather, Carolus Linnaeus, the Comte de Buffon, and Thomas Jefferson. These authors articulated human difference through race and sex. The “environmental logic” (6) that underpinned their claims about race similarly underpinned their claims about sex. The second chapter, “The Complexion of Sodomy,” tracks a trope that appeared consistently in Barbary captivity narratives, in which sailors within the British Empire expressed fears about what Muslims might do to their endangered and vulnerable Christian bodies and their writings “turned to the figure of sodomy to stage their concerns about...

Defoe’s Unchristian Colonel: Captivity Narratives and Resistance to Conversion

Daniel Defoe’s fictional autobiographies often contain a puritanical conversion narrative, but Colonel Jack’s narrator is unique in his problematized relationship to Christian conversion. Alert to the negative implications of mercenary conversion, Defoe presents in Colonel Jack a hero who not only revels in his complex ploys to evade the law, but explicitly rejects conversion to Christianity at several points in the narrative. By reading Colonel Jack alongside narratives of European enslavement and incarceration, I suggest that in this text Defoe deliberately reproduces the form of the popular Barbary captivity narrative. This subgenre of narrative portrays conversion as a force to be resisted, informs Jack’s reluctance to embrace Christianity, and ultimately suggests that living in a Christian nation may actually be a hindrance to conversion, making Catholic South America a milieu more conducive to the protagonist’s religious transformation than Protestant Virginia.

Quixotism, Federalism, and the Question of American National Identity in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive

Abstract This article places Royall Tyler’s novel, The Algerine Captive, within the socio-political context of the early American Republic which was acutely concerned with the problem of defining its national identity. As a multi-genre text juxtaposing the picaresque format patterned after Henry Fielding’ Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones with the travelogue and the Barbary captivity narrative, The Algerine Captive is a novel which mirrors the incoherent and disjointed character of America in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, in formal as well as generic terms. By the same token, the variegated adventures of the protagonist/narrator Updike Underhill both at home and abroad reveal social, political, legal, religious and racial differences meant to challenge the Federal meaning of nation as an isolated and self-reliant land under the John Adams government. I examine the link between Tyler’s critique of Federalism taken as national insularity and the status of Updike Underhill as a quixotic character. His return to America as a patriotic citizen after escaping from slavery in Algiers is not a traditional quixotic “cure,” i.e. a return to the Federalist status quo. Underhill’s return to his native country enables him to make American society better, not by simply parroting federalist principles, but by upholding and testing cross-cultural differences and global experiences on native soil as a cosmopolitan citizen.

Susanna Rowson’s Barbary Captivity Narrative, or the Struggle for the Freedom of American Women in Algiers

This research explores the feminist dimensions of Rowson's play, Slaves in Algiers or, a struggle for freedom (1794), from historicist and dialogical perspectives. More particularly, it looks at the play within the context of the politics of the early American republic to uncover how Rowson deploys the captivity of American sailors in Algiers (1785-1796) as a pretext to deconstrust the established gender power relations without hurting the sensibilities of her audience in its reference to the issue of black slavery. The research also unveils the many intertextual relationships that the play holds with the prevalent captivity culture of the day, sentimental literature, and more specifically with Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

Peter Parley in Tripoli: Barbary Slavery and Imaginary Citizenship

Peter Parley in Tripoli:Barbary Slavery and Imaginary Citizenship Jacob Crane (bio) At first glance, Samuel Griswold Goodrich's short work "Story of Robert Seaboy" (1833) seems a straightforward morality tale about the kind treatment of animals and the importance of family—the type of story that still fills children's bookshelves today. The story begins with the titular Seaboy as an old man encountering a group of mischievous young boys who are shooting birds for fun. Seaboy scolds the boys and implores them to be "the friends, not the enemies, of birds."1 To reinforce this lesson, he tells them the story of when, as a boy, he once stole a nest full of baby robins. Despite his attempts to care for the stolen chicks, they died the next day. Today's readers would recognize this conventional story as one told countless times before and since 1833. However, in this case, the story does not end with the chicks' deaths. Not content to leave the boys with the specter of his own regret, Seaboy punctuates his lesson in dramatic fashion: When I was fourteen years old, my father took me to sea. We sailed across the Channel, and entered the Mediterranean. This sea was frequented at that time by sea-robbers, called corsairs. One day, we were met by a [End Page 512] corsair vessel, and a sharp battle followed. I was on the deck of our vessel, when some of the pirates sprang from their own ship, and entered ours…. One of the pirates laid his strong arm around my waist, and sprang back into his vessel…. The robbers escaped, and I was carried into captivity. For nearly two years, I remained at Algiers, suffering great cruelty and hardship. At length, I was released, and returned to my parents. I was now happy; but during my captivity, I frequently dwelt upon my cruelty to the little birds; and I suffered the more keenly from remembering, that I had as little mercy upon these helpless creatures, as the Algerines had upon me.2 For modern readers, this sudden escalation of violence may seem out of place within what had at first appeared to be a simple didactic short story. Why, of all possible villains, did Goodrich choose Algerian pirates to punish Seaboy for his animal cruelty and his disregard for family bonds? From the broader perspective of nineteenth-century literary history, this African intervention invokes a genre integral to early American discussions of race and slavery: the Barbary captivity narrative. After the Revolutionary War, American shipping, removed from the protection of British treaties, repeatedly fell prey to corsairs from the North African states of Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis. During this period, which lasted until approximately 1816, when European and American naval power finally suppressed the corsair threat, hundreds of American sailors were captured and enslaved, sometimes waiting as long as a decade to be ransomed. Once freed, a number of these sailors, including John Foss, Thomas Nicholson, and William Ray, wrote popular accounts of their captivity. These American [End Page 513] Barbary narratives, published between the 1790s and the 1810s, were distinct from older European accounts because writers drew explicit and implicit connections between North African and North American slavery, critiquing the limits of American liberty.3 As Goodrich's "Robert Seaboy" demonstrates, the popularity of these narratives extended into the nascent field of children's literature. In fact, Barbary pirates and slave masters would continue to appear in Anglo-American children's works throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, long outlasting the actual threat of Barbary piracy.4 Would Goodrich's young readers have recognized the reference to a series of national crises that had ended almost two decades earlier? Why do these North African figures remain so prevalent in children's literature for so long, and what can their continued circulation tell us about the enduring influence of Barbary narratives and of the discourse surrounding white slavery in Africa? Such questions point to larger concerns about the relationship between the fields of children's and adult literature in the period: How do the genres and tropes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature circulate within...

The narrative’s ‘general truth’: Authenticity and the mediation of violence in Barbary captivity narratives

Abstract With the end of the American Revolution and as British treaties no longer sheltered American vessels in the Mediterranean, Barbary pirates captured a series of US ships and individuals, exacting ransom and tributes for captives. These captures also initiated a proliferation of narratives regarding the north African region that were produced and reproduced as being ‘authentic’, without necessarily adhering to any actual events or lived experiences. Drawing from both actual as well as fictional accounts of the period, this article explores how images of violent encounters with the Muslim Orient were produced, borrowed and reconstructed within the American literary and national landscape. In this respect, this article seeks to address the artificiality of these narratives, where the production of a ‘general truth’ (as the editors of The Narrative of Robert Adams defined it), is more essential than the account’s adherence to factuality. At the same time, this article explores the manner with which representations of violence by ‘merciless Barbarians’, although referring to acts of immediate violence and calling for an immediate response, were also heavily mediated both in their production and consumption, contributing in this manner to the ideological processes of constructing new ‘imagined communities’ in the American post-revolutionary nation.

“Cleane cutte of[f]:” Circumcision and Identity in Early Modern English Barbary Captivity Narratives

L’expérience chrétienne de la captivité dans les États barbaresques d’Afrique du Nord constituait l’un des cas les plus radicaux de rencontre culturelle pendant la première modernité. Comme l’a fait observer Nabil Matar, « c’était la seule rencontre avec un peuple non-européen qui non seulement réduisait [des chrétiens] en esclavage, mais encore les détournait de leur histoire et de leur religion » (Matar 1996, 194-95). On pouvait « se faire Turc » –– selon l’expression consacrée pour désigner la conversion à l’islam –– pour diverses raisons, dont la captivité est la plus saillante. Des critiques comme Matar, Robert Davis, Daniel Viktus ou Linda Colley, entre autres, ont raconté cette histoire dans des perspectives historiques et littéraires variées, offrant à cette fin de nouveaux aperçus en termes de conflits religieux, d’identité nationale, et de représentations théâtrales. Le présent article envisage les manières dont l’évocation de la captivité et de la conversion se concentre sur la violation physique du corps chrétien, en particulier sur la peur et les soupçons engendrés par la menace de la circoncision chez les captifs masculins.

<i>Women & Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives & American Identity</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Women & Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives & American Identity Patrick Gleason Women & Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives & American Identity. By Robin Miskolcze. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. xxii + 220 pp. $45.00. In the ambitious book Women & Children First, Robin Miskolcze marks an important intervention in the current revaluation of maritime studies by arguing that images of women at sea were intertwined with a national crisis in masculinity and political identity in nineteenth-century America. Drawing on the work of Atlantic studies scholars such as W. Jeffrey Bolster, Donald P. Wharton, and Paul Gilroy, Miskolcze reveals how national dramas were often played out on the seas, particularly through narratives involving women and maritime disaster. Her central argument revolves around anxieties over the capitalist drive toward individualism in the latter eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, particularly as ideas defining manhood through duty to community and family gave way to the nineteenth-century cult of the self-made man. Shipwreck narratives involving women made use of the selfless behavior of men in saving women and children as a means to measure the moral scope of national manhood, providing a justification for American exceptionalism. These narratives, Miskolcze argues, were highly malleable. They provided both didactic materials for religious leaders to enforce Christian ideals of divine punishment and salvation and counterbalances to the morally destabilizing self-made man. They also allowed for white men of virtually any economic class to display valor and selfless behavior. Miskolcze singles out the international humiliation that the United States faced after the sinking of the USS Arctic, in which panicked officers and sailors saved themselves but left 314 of the 400 passengers to perish, including all of the women and children. This disgrace, Miskolcze argues, helped to codify the emerging maritime adage of "women and children first" (xi). Following the introduction, Miskolcze continues with chapters on Middle Passage narratives, Englishwomen and US shipwreck narratives, and the figure of the cross-dressed female sailor in antebellum US literature. The section on the Middle Passage contains some of the author's strongest claims, highlighted by an original and important analysis of its symbolic role in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Middle Passage, [End Page 164] Miskolcze claims, provided Jacobs with the central metaphor of her enslavement: her hiding in the small attic space in her grandmother's shed as her means of escape. Even though Jacobs was not taken across the Atlantic herself, Miskolcze reads her description of the confining space as drawing on the experiences of slaves in the holds of ships, what she terms "a reshaping of the cultural memory of the Middle Passage" (77). Reading Jacobs's reference to Robinson Crusoe as an attempt to shift from slave ship to shipwreck narrative, Miskolcze highlights Jacobs's refashioning of herself from object to subject as she associates herself with the reasoning narrator and dynamic survivor of Daniel Defoe's tale of shipwreck (78–79). Analyzing the references to maritime travel and peril as structuring Nancy Prince's writing, Miskolcze here also persuasively demonstrates how African American women in the nineteenth century made use of the cultural memory of the Middle Passage in diverse and productive ways (74–77). The remainder of the book is concerned with English and American women at sea, both in the highly popular early-nineteenth-century Barbary captivity narratives and as cross-dressing sailors in works such as Fanny Campbell, The Female Marine, and James Fenimore Cooper's maritime novels. In these chapters, Miskolcze argues that shipwreck narratives and maritime novels "[use] the sea as a site for acting out the social concerns of the dominant social imaginary" (101). These concerns took the form of challenges to US national identity in the wake of the War of 1812, as with the publication of highly popular accounts of British femininity at risk on the seas and through Cooper's naval trilogy, in which anxieties of westward expansion for a new generation of American men are represented through the figure of the cross-dressed sailor. Such texts intriguingly move east into the Atlantic to explore the West in imaginative fashion, substituting the open sea for...

Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century Audrey A. Fisch (bio) Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright, editors. Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century University of Toronto Press. 270. $55.00 Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century is a collection of essays about discourses of 'various forms of captivity' in the nineteenth century. The volume is divided into three sections: 'The Subject of Captivity,' 'Captivating Discourses: Class and Nation,' and 'Captivating Otherness.' Texts under consideration include Russian serf narratives, American slave narratives, Barbary captivity texts, and prison narratives written by prisoners and wardens in the United States, England, and Ireland. Many of the individual essays in the volume are interesting, informative, and represent important works of scholarship. Jason Haslam's examination of the prison narrative of suffragette Lady Constance Lytton, for example, is careful, compelling, and well informed by the existing scholarship; he traces Lytton's complex attempts to 'transmute her privileged individual identity into membership in the suffragette collective [End Page 444] identity.' John MacKay's consideration of the rhetorical strategies employed by writers in the genre of Russian serf narratives to establish a voice and identity is similarly rich. This essay draws explicit contrasts between the serf narrative and the slave narrative, noting in particular the turn for the serf away from religion (in contrast to slave narratives) and towards 'the myth of the Tsar' as father/protector; the essay also explores the rhetorical manipulation of the Other (Jews, Muslims) as alien, non-Russian, in order to solidify for the serf his Russian identity. Also notable is Frank Lauterbach's interesting if less surprising discussion of the prison in late Victorian discourse as 'an emblematic, totemic boundary between respectability and "savage" forms of criminality ... expressed through the notion of class.' For the largely 'gentleman writers' who form the subject of this essay, what is central is not a concern with the reality or abuses of the prison but the need to dissociate from the ethically unacceptable, socially different, and racially disparate populations that form the criminal subculture. The prison can 'emblematically be used both to accept the existence of this subculture and to displace it: criminals were literally and rhetorically contained in prisons in a way that allowed them to serve, to be colonized, and to be repressed as a social and moral Other.' One of the most compelling essays in the volume is Jennifer Costello Brezina's exploration of the narratives of Barbary captives, white Americans captured into slavery in North Africa. Brezina argues that these narratives allow the new United States nation to define itself 'through conflicts with an Orientalized Other' and through narratives of 'captivity and insurrection' which, unlike Indian captivity narratives, 'lay the imaginative groundwork of nation-building.' This essay also persuasively pushes readers to reflect on why these Barbary captivity narratives, unlike the Indian captivity narratives that now form a central place in the classic American historical/literary narrative, 'have been mostly forgotten.' If many of the individual essays are satisfying, the organization and rationale of the volume is somewhat less so. As the editors explain, the 'trajectory from section to section is thus not historical, but telescopes outward, from an emphasis on identifying the writing subject by gender, class, and race, to identifying groups within the nation by class or political affiliation, to classifying nations within an international (and orientalist) framework.' Since many of the writers under consideration engage and blur these identities and classifications, this rationale for the trajectory of the volume feels illusory. At the same time, the editors provide no explanation for why certain texts and authors deserve a place in the volume. Olaudah Equiano's Narrative is the only slave narrative to receive sustained attention, and neither the author of the essay on Equiano nor the volume editors make the case that his eighteenth-century slave narrative should be considered as representative. More broadly, and notwithstanding the accomplishments of some of the individual essays, the volume as [End Page 445] a whole doesn't achieve the major and perhaps overly ambitious claim advanced in the introduction: that it sheds 'new light on...

The Barbarous Voice of Democracy: American Captivity in Barbary and the Multicultural Specter

On 25 July 1785, a Boston schooner named the Maria, bound for the Mediterranean on a trading voyage, was commandeered by a fourteen-gun Algerian xebec plying the waters off the coast of Portugal. The “Mahometans” who boarded the six-man vessel demanded to see its flag and papers. “[O]f the first they had no knowledge,” writes James Cathcart in his account of eleven years in Barbary captivity, “and the papers they could not read and Mediterranean pass we had none.”1 With this terse assessment of national nonrecognition and the international legal jeopardy it occasioned, the American nation’s political relationship with the Islamic world opened its first violent chapter. The ongoing history of this relationship is proving to be a complex narrative. Of late, scholars and historians have compared the United States’ engagement in the Barbary Wars (1801–05; 1815) with the nation’s current “war on terrorism,” which once again pits the United States against stateless Muslim actors and the Islamic states that give them harbor.2 Indeed, the two eras have striking parallels. The just-marked two-hundredth anniversary of the United States’ first foreign military engagement, the Tripolitan War (1801–1805), presents an appropriate time to survey the arc of American political, military, and rhetorical relations with the Islamic world. Americans first came to know this world through American narratives of Barbary captivity and the wider public discussions to which this white slavery gave impetus. According to Paul Baepler, although “the Barbary captivity narrative in English existed for more than three centuries, it caught the attention of American readers primarily during the first half of the nineteenth century. Between John Foss’ 1798 narrative and The Barbarous Voice of Democracy: American Captivity in Barbary and the Multicultural Specter

Strategies for Teaching Elizabeth Ashbridge's Narrative to Reluctant Readers

Strategies for Teaching Elizabeth Ashbridge's Narrative to Reluctant Readers Emily B. Todd (bio) My title is perhaps unfair to my students. The students who enrolled in my upper-level seminar on Early American Autobiography in Spring 2003 were some of the best I have had: eager, hard-working, good writers. But it must be admitted that they were, if not reluctant, certainly frustrated readers of early American personal narratives. In their weekly online responses to the readings, a pattern of complaint emerged. Students found the language in the narratives difficult, the religious preoccupations remote, and the texts, well, sometimes just boring. But the most common complaint was that these personal narratives did not reveal enough personal details. The week we read selected Barbary Captivity narratives, one student wrote, "I'm becoming accustomed to being disappointed at not learning much about the personalities of these autobiographical writers," and a few weeks later, this same student wrote with mock excitement, "Thomas Shepard tells us his birthday and why he was named Thomas . . . An autobiography with personal details!"1 When we turned to Elizabeth Ashbridge's Quaker autobiography, Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge, midway through the semester, students seemed happier. They particularly were drawn to the drama of Ashbridge's personal life and to the memorable character of Sullivan. In their online postings on Ashbridge, two English majors referred to Charlotte Temple (as Daniel Shea does in his introduction to the narrative ["Elizabeth Ashbridge and the Voice Within" 127]), drawing parallels between Charlotte's and Ashbridge's struggles upon arriving in the American colonies. I thus decided to build on students' impulse to connect the narrative to fiction, as a way to get them excited about Ashbridge and, in the process, to help them become close readers of the "self " and the characters she creates in her spiritual autobiography. This approach—reading [End Page 357] for action and character in Ashbridge—allowed me to lead students to an interpretation of what Cristine Levenduski, in her 1996 study of Ashbridge, calls the "dual purpose" (61) of the narrative, the secular and spiritual strands in her text.2 Without reading secondary criticism as a class, we nonetheless addressed key issues in the narrative about the significance of Ashbridge's rebellions and of her turn toward Quakerism. This approach also gave us a chance to consider the relationship between fiction and autobiography, leading in turn to a more complicated theoretical understanding of the genre of autobiography. Nellie McKay's essay "Autobiography and the Early Novel," in The Columbia History of the American Novel, helps to frame questions about autobiography and fiction.3 She writes, In autobiography, there is always a necessary relationship between the life of the subject and the life in the text, but the separations between fact and fiction are not always clear. Literature is less chaotic and infinitely more manageable than life and so imagination more than absolute historical truth grounds the autobiographical text. Undeniably, autobiography is a fictional form—a realization that need not diminish its social, historical, or literary value. For autobiography and fiction together provide complementary strategies for the art of writing the self. (45) I have found that students need to be taught to see autobiography in this way, as a "fictional form"—because, in my experience, students more readily want to grant early American autobiography status as history, and then they see the history these narratives represent as distant and dry. They read for details about what happened, but they forget to attend to how the autobiographer tells her story. Students seem to be better readers of autobiography when they use their skills analyzing characters and dramatic action in first-person narratives. There is plenty of drama in Elizabeth Ashbridge, as almost every critic of her narrative notes. In fact, it is a commonplace in Ashbridge criticism to list her multiple identities, as a way to emphasize the "uncommon Occurrences" (Ashbridge 147) of her life. Etta Madden, for example, catalogues Ashbridge's experiences, which include, Madden writes: "her elopement with a stocking weaver in England at the youthful age of fourteen . . . widowhood within a year; indentured servant hood, which provided...

The Barbary Captivity Narrative in American Culture

The Barbary Captivity Narrative in American Culture

Pirated Tars, Piratical Texts: Barbary Captivity and American Sea Narratives

Pirated Tars, Piratical Texts: Barbary Captivity and American Sea Narratives

:Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England

List of IllustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsNote on Editorial MethodIntroduction: England and Mediterranean Captivity, 1577--17041. John Fox, Worthy Enterprise of John Fox, in Delivering 266 Christians Out of the Captivity of the Turks, in Richard Hakluyt, AeMDUL Principal NavigationsAeMDNM (1589)2. Richard Hasleton, Strange and Wonderful Things Happened to Richard Hasleton... in His Ten Years' Travails in Many Foreign Countries (1595)3. John Rawlins, The Famous and Wonderful Recovery of a Ship of Bristol, Called the Exchange, from the Pirates of Argier (1622)4. News from Sally of a Strange Delivery of Four English Captives from the Slavery of the Turks(1642)5. William Okeley, Ebenezer or, A Small Monument of Great Mercy, Appearing in the Miraculous Deliverance of William Okeley (1675)6. Thomas Phelps, True Account of the Captivity of Thomas Phelps(1685)7. Joseph Pitts, True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans, with an Account of the Author's Being Taken Captive (1704)AppendixesAppendix 1. Two BalladsThe Algerian Slave's Releasement or, The Unchangeable BoatswainThe Lamentable Cries of at Least 1,500 Christians (Now Prisoners in Algiers Under the Turks)Appendix 2. Letters from Captives to Their Families in EnglandSamuel Harres to His Father (1610)Robert Adams to Captain Robert Adams (1625)Thomas Sweet and Richard Robinson (1647)Appendix 3. Letter and Depositions Describing Turkish Corsair Raids on the West Country Sent by Thomas Ceely to the Privy Council (1625)Letter to the Privy CouncilDeposition of William KnightDeposition of William DraperDeposition of William CourtAppendix 4. Petition Sent by English Captives in Morocco to King Charles I (1632)Appendix 5. Laudian Rite for Returned Renegades (1637)Appendix 6. Parliamentary Ordinance for Collections to Be Made for the Relief of Captives in Algiers (Issued April 25, 1643)Appendix 7. Letter from Philip Lloyd, the English Factor in Tunis, to King Charles II (1680)Bibliography of English Captivity Narratives from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Reviews

Andreas Embirikos Voyage to Russia. Diary and Photographs, December 1962 Maria Kostaridou Nicholas R. Clifford, A Truthful Impression of the Country: British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1914 Felipe Fernández-Armesto Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Tim Mackintosh-Smith (ed.), The Travels of Ibn Battutah Anastasia Valassopoulos Dayrell R. Oakley-Hill, An Englishman in Albania, Memoirs of a British Officer 1929–1955 Bernd J. Fischer Loredana Polezzi, Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation Cesare Poppi H. Rider Haggard (ed. Stephen Coan), Diary of an African Journey: 1914 Antje M. Rauwerda Susan Roberson (ed.), Defining Travel: Diverse Visions Pere Gifra-Adroher Daniel J. Vitkus (ed.) and Nabil I. Matar (intro.), Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England Mark G. Aune

Daniel J. Vitkus, ed. Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press. 2001. Pp. xvi, 376. $22.50 paper. ISBN 0-231-11905-4.

Daniel J. Vitkus, ed. Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press. 2001. Pp. xvi, 376. $22.50 paper. ISBN 0-231-11905-4. - Volume 35 Issue 1

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

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

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

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. …

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

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