Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption

by Daniel J. Vitkus (Editor)

These narratives recount the harrowing experiences of Englishmen abducted by the Barbary pirates of North Africa. After being sold into slavery, the narrators succeeded in returning to their homeland where their stories were printed. Never before available in a modern, annotated edition, these tales describe combat at sea, extraordinary escapes, and religious conversion, but they also illustrate the power, prosperity, and piety of Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean. Each narrative is preceded by a brief introduction, and Nabil Matar's genera introduction provides important new information about the historical context of captivity and slavery in North Africa.

Genres: History

416 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2001

About the author

Daniel Vitkus earned his Master's Degree in English Language and Literature at Oxford University (Hertford College) and his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
He is currently Professor of English at UC San Diego.

Reviews

[Jindřich Zapletal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really luxurious collection of captive narratives, letters, and other documents related to English captives/slaves in Algiers and Morocco in 17th century. To me, its greatest virtue is its variety. We get one exceptionally sober and well-traveled ethnographic study by a renegade, one story of a successful mutiny on a pirate ship, an escape story of a member of the enslaved workforce building the royal city of Meknes, even a story of someone who after a pirate galley shipwreck at Mallorca decided to escape the clutches of Spanish Inquisition by paddling his way back to Algerian captivity. The reader must have a good command of the 17th century Mediterranean context to appreciate the book.

Obviously, these stories are not typical, but they are what came down to us. A great contribution to the social history of Great Britain and North Africa.