Human Bondage

Slavery has been the scourge of humanity since the dawn of time and we are all familiar with the mass transportation of Africans across the Atlantic for the better part of two hundred and fifty years.

Some estimates say that as many as 15 million Africans were transported in that time to North and South America and the Caribbean.

It wasn't until 1807, after 20 years of campaigning that Britain outlawed the importation of slaves to it's colonies and even then the Slavery Abolition Act was not passed into law until 1833.

What is less well known is that a similar trade had been going on at the same time in North Africa, operating along the coast, from as far East as modern day Libya to the Atlantic coast of Morocco, at the time commonly called The Barbary Coast.

From the early 1600's to August 1816, an estimated 1.25 million European Christians were abducted by Barbary pirates.

Operating out of three main centres, Tunis, Algiers and the port of Sale on the Moroccan Atlantic coast, they targeted merchant shipping, fishing fleets and coastal villages.

In the case of the latter records show that on occasion they took whole communities.

Spain suffered the most, not only because of it's proximity to Africa but also in revenge for the expulsion of Muslims after the victories of Ferdinand and Isabella.

In England the coastal villages of Cornwall suffered repeated attacks.

The Corsairs, as they were referred to even captured Icelanders and Americans, all to disappear into the slave markets of North Africa.

Surviving testimonies make harrowing reading, with forced conversion to Islam, the norm.

Those who resisted usually only lasted about six months and in the case of women a matter of weeks.

The Apostates, as they were referred to in Europe were those who succumbed under torture and new that their governments would do nothing to recover them because of their conversion.

Probably one of the most detailed accounts concerns a Cornishman called Thomas Pellow, who was captured when his uncle's merchantman was overrun in the English Channel.

Thomas was eleven years old at the time and along with the rest of the crew was taken to Sale in Morocco, where he suffered six months of hell in the slave pens, before being brought into the service of the son of Sultan Moulay Ismail.

In order to force Thomas to convert to Islam, his new owner subjected him to sustained bouts of torture using a method called the Bastinado, where the boys feet were strapped together and the soles repeatedly beaten with wood.

It is a testament to his character that it took nearly six months before the boy succumbed to this torment.

He was held in captivity suffering many privations for twenty three years, before he finally managed to escape on an Irish merchantman and at long last make his way back home to Penryn in Cornwall.His homecoming makes emotional reading, for his parents were still alive.

Europe seemed totally incapable of dealing with this trade and it wasn't until August 1816, when Admiral Edward Pellew arrived off the coast of Algiers, with a Royal Navy Squadron.

He gave the Dey of Algiers 24 hours to release all slaves and cease the trade forever or he would turn his guns on the city.

Needless to say the Dey refused and thus Admiral Pellew reduced the city to rubble and destroyed the entire Corsair fleet.

The operation took little more than a day, and at the end of which the Dey surrendered unconditionally, releasing the slaves and revoking slavery forever.

Once news of this spread along the coast, all other centres of the trade complied, thus ending the trade in Christians.

It is interesting to note that Admiral Pellew was a direct descendant of the Thomas Pellow who made it back to Cornwall some seventy years earlier.

In the final analysis it would still take Britain another 17 years to outlaw slavery in the Empire and a civil war in America to obliterate the obscenity of human bondage in that country.

Sadly we have still not removed this crime from the World, the United Nations estimates that there are still some 27 million people on the planet living in some form of servitude.