When Englishman Thomas Pellow was 27, he led a slave-hunting expedition to the West African coast. His orders were to plunder the villages, kill the adults and capture the children.
But Pellow was not a mercenary employed in the transatlantic slave trade, which sent millions of its victims across the ocean. He was a slave himself – taken prisoner as a child by the Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail. And 300 years ago, he was far from alone.
The sultan owned an estimated 25,000 European slaves, many seized in raiding expeditions on the south coast of England as well as countries as far afield as Iceland.
Though it is almost forgotten today – suppressed, perhaps, by some squeamish historians – the Muslim trade in both black African and white European slaves was deeply feared for three centuries.
Yet, at the time, dozens of memoirs, many of them bestsellers, were published by former slaves who had escaped from captivity, with horrendous stories of torture, rape and cold-blooded murder.
Now, a book by historian Justin Marozzi unflinchingly reveals the extent of slavery in Arab countries, which was conducted with unequalled brutality.
More shocking still, he shows that it continued in much of the Islamic world well into the 20th century – and, for hundreds of thousands of West Africans born into life as slaves, carries on to this day.
For Marozzi to investigate these stories, let alone publish, is courageous. His book invites an inevitable backlash from Left-wing academics and broadcasters who focus solely on the slave trade triangle between Europe, West Africa and the Americas that operated from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
Though it is almost forgotten today – suppressed, perhaps, by some squeamish historians – the Muslim trade in both black African and white European slaves was deeply feared for three centuries (pictured: a handout from Justin Marozzi’s book Captives and Companions)
Moroccan Sultan Moulay Islamil owned an estimated 25,000 European slaves, many seized in raiding expeditions on the south coast of England as well as countries as far afield as Iceland
To accuse Arabs, Turks and other Muslims of complicity in slavery is likely to be met with accusations of ‘Islamophobia’. Yet, as Marozzi’s research proves beyond doubt, slavery in the Muslim world has existed for far longer, caused even more deaths and misery and inflicted tortures that exceed anything imagined by the worst of the transatlantic traders.
As a single example: in the Victorian era, Sudan exported countless thousands of eunuchs to serve as slaves in Turkey and the Arab countries. Eunuchs, male slaves who had been castrated as pre-pubescent boys, were valued for their inability to procreate, and so could be trusted not to get sexually involved with their master’s wives and consorts.
An estimated 35,000 pre-pubescent boys died from botched castration in Sudan every year, in order for 3,500 to survive without a penis or testicles.
Thomas Pellow escaped castration. But he suffered the worst a life of slavery could inflict in many other ways for more than 20 years.
He was an 11-year-old cabin boy on a ship skippered by his uncle, sailing out of Falmouth, Cornwall, in 1715, when he was taken captive. Off Cape Finisterre on Spain’s Atlantic coastline, his craft was set upon by North African pirates and, after a battle in which young Thomas nearly drowned, he was taken in chains to Meknes in Morocco as a gift for Moulay Ismail – self-styled Prince of the Faithful.
The sultan gave Thomas to his own son, Moulay Spha, who forced him to convert to Islam. The boy, brought up a Christian, resisted for months, despite beatings during which he was suspended by the ankles to have the soles of his feet thrashed – a torture known as bastinado.
Thomas still refused to renounce Christianity, later writing: ‘My tortures were now exceedingly increased, burning my flesh off my bones by fire.’ Eventually, he pretended to submit – but ‘I always abominated them and their accursed principle of Mahometism’.
His youthful defiance must have impressed the Arabs because he was soon back in the sultan’s service.
Captives and Companions unflinchingly reveals the extent of slavery in Arab countries, which was conducted with unequalled brutality
Marozzi shows that it continued in much of the Islamic world well into the 20th century – and, for hundreds of thousands of West Africans born into life as slaves, carries on to this day
Pellow was put in command of a slave-hunting expedition to Guinea, with an army of 30,000 soldiers – all slaves themselves – and 60,000 camels. He was so trusted that the sultan even made him guardian of his 4,000 slave concubines.
In addition to his British, Spanish, Portuguese and French slaves, the sultan was estimated to own nearly a quarter of a million black Africans. To breed more slaves, he staged mass weddings for up to 1,600 people, marrying couples by pointing to them and declaring: ‘That one takes that one.’
Pellow wrote: ‘He always yokes his best complexioned subjects [i.e. white males] to a black helpmate, and the fair lady must take up with a negro . . . as firmly noosed as if they had been married by a pope.’
Muslims considered all children born to slave mothers to be slaves themselves, regardless of who their fathers were.
Brave Thomas finally escaped after 23 years as a captive, fleeing over the Atlas Mountains and reaching his parents’ home in Cornwall months later, in 1738, after ‘long straying and grievous hardships’.
His resulting book proved a sensation, promising ‘a particular account of the astonishing tyranny and cruelty of their emperors, together with a description of the miseries of the Christian slaves’.
Even Samuel Pepys addressed the topic in his famous diaries. In February 1661, he recorded how he’d been drinking until four in the morning with two British men who had been slaves in Algiers, a Captain Mootham and Mr Dawes.
They had survived on bread and water, he wrote, and were regularly beaten on their feet and their stomachs. At night, any slave, male or female, could be ordered to their master’s tent and raped.
Even Samuel Pepys addressed the topic in his famous diaries. In February 1661, he recorded how he’d been drinking until four in the morning with two British men who had been slaves in Algiers
Christian slaves pictured in Algiers in 1706. For Marozzi to investigate these stories, let alone publish, is courageous
Muslim pirates sailing out of Algiers raided all along the Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic as far as Madeira. By the 1620s, 10,000 European slaves were being held in the city’s dungeons, including Scots, Irish, Dutch, Danish, Slav and Spanish captives. Others included Japanese and Chinese victims.
The Flemish aristocrat Emanuel d’Aranda, who spent two years as a prisoner doing punishingly heavy labour before he was ransomed, calculated that 600,000 European Christians were enslaved in Algiers between 1536 and 1640 alone. That tallies with the generally accepted estimate that a million white Europeans were enslaved from the 1500s to the 1800s.
Raids on coastal villages were horrific and bloody. Devon and Cornwall suffered repeated slave raids in the 1620s; and in 1627, two bands of slavers hit south-east Iceland, capturing more than 400 men, women and children. A man named Bjarni Valdason, who tried to escape, was clubbed over the head and killed, his body butchered into small pieces ‘as if he were a sheep’, according to one witness.
Houses were torched. One young mother and her two-year-old toddler were hurled into a blazing building and burned to death: ‘When she and the poor child screamed and called to God for help, the wicked Turks bellowed with laughter. They struck both child and mother with the sharp points of their spears, forcing them into the fire, and even stabbed fiercely at the poor burning bodies.’
Those are the words of Olafur Egilsson, a Lutheran minister in his 60s, who was beaten until he could no longer stand, as the pirates tortured him to find out if the villagers had hidden treasure.
Distressing and deeply shocking as these individual stories are, they are a few cases among millions. The scale of slavery in the Muslim world was vast beyond imagination.
‘At one time,’ the eminent historian Professor Robert Tombs says, ‘everyone knew about it. It was one of the main hazards of Mediterranean commerce for Western sailors. But today, most people are completely unaware it ever happened.’
Partly, that is due to the current insistence that the British empire was the source of all historical evils. It does not suit the politically correct narrative to admit that Muslim slave traders were the scourge of Africa, long before the Europeans arrived . . . and long after they left.
Pottery and other artifacts found in the shipwreck of a pirate ship from the city of Algiers dating back to the mid-1700s
A 1681 painting by Flemish painter Laureys a Castro depicting a sea battle between European ships and Barbary corsairs
Citing the Encyclopedia Britannica, Marozzi estimates that in 1861, at the start of the American Civil War that would put an end to U.S. slavery, there were more slaves in the Muslim states of West Africa than in the Confederate states of the Deep South of America.
The Arab slave trade dated back long before the beginnings of Islam in the 7th century. The Prophet Mohammed owned 70 slaves including Persians, Ethiopians, Copts (Christians from modern-day Egypt) and Syrians.
Between that time and the First World War, up to 17 million people were taken prisoner and used as slaves in Muslim armies and in brothels, on building sites and in private homes. That could be 50 per cent more than the total number of Africans transported across the Atlantic, a figure usually put at 11 million to 15 million.
By sickening tradition, the treatment of women was especially brutal. A witness at the Persian court of Musa al-Hadi, in the 8th century, described how the caliph once left in the middle of a meal after receiving a message from a eunuch.
When they returned, the eunuch was carrying a platter covered with a napkin, and trembling. Hadi whipped away the cloth, revealing, ‘the heads of two slave girls, with more beautiful faces and hair, by God, than I had ever seen before’.
Hadi explained, as though nothing unusual had occurred: ‘We received information that these two were in love with each other. So I set this eunuch to watch over them and report to me. I found them under a single coverlet committing an immoral act. I thereupon killed them.’
The castration of boys to make them into eunuchs was still practised as recently as the 19th century. The French aristocrat and explorer Count Raoul du Bisson saw it performed in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), calling the operation ‘barbarous and revolting’.
‘The little, helpless and unfortunate prisoner, or slave, is stretched out on an operating table,’ he wrote in 1863. ‘His neck is made fast in a collar fastened to the table, and his legs spread apart, and the ankles made fast to iron rings; his arms are held by an assistant. The operator then seizes the little penis and scrotum, and with one sweep of a sharp razor removes all the appendages.’
An illustration shows enslaved Christians seized by corsairs arriving in the port of Algiers to be ransomed
A bamboo catheter was then inserted into the urethra, to prevent it from scarring over, and hot oil, honey, tar or mule dung smeared over the cuts. The boy, typically aged between six and 12, was buried in warm sand up to his neck to stop him from moving while his wounds healed.
A majbub, or eunuch without his penis, fetched a much higher price at slave markets than a khasi, one who had merely had his testicles removed. A khasi was more likely to serve as a soldier or policeman than a majbub, who could be trusted in the harem. British people 200 years ago were no less repulsed by such stories than we are today.
As well as leading the way in ending the transatlantic slave trade in the 19th century, Great Britain put intense pressure on the Ottoman empire in Turkey and the whole of the Arab world to end slavery.
‘Even while suppressing the transatlantic slave trade,’ says historian and ethicist Professor Nigel Biggar, ‘the British empire was busy trying to suppress the Arab slave trade in Africa – especially East Africa – including using the Royal Navy to intercept slave ships between Zanzibar and the Middle East.’
But in much of West Africa, slavery continues today. In Bamako, the capital of Mali, Marozzi met an escaped slave named Hamey, in his late 50s, who was living in destitution with his two wives and 12 children.
‘I didn’t choose to be a slave,’ he said. ‘My father was a slave, my grandfather was a slave, and many more generations before them. I was a slave until the day I refused to go on. I’d had enough of it. And that’s when the violence began.’
Hamey spoke out because he was sick of seeing his wives and daughters raped. ‘They can do it whenever they like. I could never accept that. My master used to tell me: “She may be your wife but I can take her whenever I want her.” ‘
But when he pleaded for his family to be given their freedom, Hamey was set upon by the head of his village and a group of young men. ‘They ripped off my clothes and, while I lay naked in the dirt, they whipped and kicked me and beat me in public. Everyone was watching. The whole community. They were cheering and filming it all on their phones.
‘It lasted five hours, then the youths rushed to my house and drove me and my family out. They took my cows, my goats and my sheep. Suddenly, I had nothing, but I still had everyone to feed.’
It’s a bleak prospect: slavery or starvation. And for an estimated one million slaves in Mali, an Islamic country, that is all life holds to this day.
l Captives And Companions: A History Of Slavery And The Slave Trade In The Islamic World, by Justin Marozzi, is published by Allen Lane.
