The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam

by (Historian) Simon Webb

They had not forgotten those decades of neglect by the king and also the suffering at the hands of the Barbary corsairs, with no navy to protect them. For over 50 years, any fisherman setting out on his business was liable to be seized and carried off into slavery and there seemed nothing that their rulers were either willing or able to do about it. It seems almost beyond belief that this terrible period of British history could have been forgotten, but there it is. Let us look at some specific incidents from the time. Between 1609 and 1616, a total of 466 English ships were boarded and the crews taken to North Africa as slaves (Brown, 1970). In April 1625, three ships from Cornwall and one sailing from Dartmouth in Devon were captured by corsairs and their crews taken. The following month, an entry in the Calendar of State Papers lamented that, ‘The Turks are upon our coasts. They take ships only to take the men to make slaves of them.’ Because the Barbary Coast was part of the Ottoman Empire, whose caliph was in Turkey, all Muslims were regularly referred to in England at this time as ‘Turks’. The bold seizure of English vessels was bad enough, but there was worse.