This week we continue the series of posts about Algiers, describing what the experience would have been like for European captives who were brought into that city. Last week, we finished looking at the auctioning process by which slaves were sold in the Badestan. This week we look at what a save’s life was like.
So what was life in Algiers like for those unfortunate captives sold into slavery?
Human beings are resilient creatures. They can survive against punishing odds. Many of the enslaved European captives did just that. They recovered from the shock of being abducted and sold like livestock and adjusted to their new lives, re-connecting with those they had been captured with (after the process of sale, people were scattered all across the city) and carrying on as best they could.
Their new lives were not easy, though. The economy of Algiers was based on the free labor provided by the city’s mass of slaves—in a city of about 100,000 people, there were between 25,000-30,000 slaves.
Slaves did everything.
Female slaves, if not bought as concubines, were typically put into domestic service. Male slaves were either set to a variety of tasks by their owners or rented out as laborers. Father Dan (the Trinitarian friar who was in Algiers in the summer of 1634 as part of a French ransom expedition) provides a list of (male) slave occupations. Here is a sampling:
Those who are old or frail are employed by their owners to sell water in the city, with donkeys loaded with great skins full of water to serve the baths and workshops and other places where there are no wells. They also sell water through the streets from a large jug they carry on their shoulder. If they fail to sell as much water as their owners command, they are beaten with truncheons, without any consideration that it is not their fault.
There are others whose owners rent them out to clean up the filth outside the city and to haul away excrement from the streets and the houses. It is likewise their duty every fifteen days to whitewash all the walls of all the houses, using lime, so that the houses appear very white.
There are also those who are forced to till the land outside the city, being attached to the yoke, with a donkey or a horse, according to the pleasure or caprice of their masters.
When large stones are needed in Algiers, mainly for the maintenance and rebuilding of the Mole, slaves are forced to haul carts, heavily laden with the stone, to which they are attached by ropes. I have seen as many as forty tied to a single cart. Horses are not used for this task because the streets are too narrow, and so the carts must be drawn by these poor captives. If they do not work hard enough, they are beaten with truncheons.
The galleys, which the Algerians use for their raiding, are terrible for the poor Christian captives who are forced, by blows, to row in them. Their feet are shackled by large iron chains, and from sunrise to sunset they experience the constant drudgery of the oar.[1]
For most enslaved captives, daily life would have been a hard slog filled with exhausting labor of one sort or another. How hard often depended on the character of their owners.
——
In the summer of 1627, corsairs from Salé and Algiers raided Iceland. The Algerine corsairs capture close to 400 people—men, women, and children (including infants)—whom they brought back to Salé and auction off in the Badestan.
One of those captured Icelanders was a prosperous farmer from East Iceland named Guttormur Hallsson. During his time as a slave, Guttormur wrote letters home, one of which—dated 1631—has miraculously survived the centuries.
Here is Guttormur Hallsson’s opinion on the character of slave owners:
There is a great difference here between masters. Some captive slaves get good, gentle, or in-between masters, but some unfortunates find themselves with savage, cruel, hardhearted tyrants, who never stop treating them badly, and who force them to constantly labor and toil with scanty clothing and little food, bound in iron fetters, from morning till night. Many have had to endure unfair beatings. God in heaven alone knows all that we Christian people have had to suffer here in this terrible place at the hands of these vicious criminals. I will say no more of this now.
Our Lord knows of the wickedness that transpires in this town. There is nothing here except fear and fright, grumbling and quarrel, murder and manslaughter, haughtiness and arrogance and demoniacal possession, day after day. It may truly be said that we live here in Earthly torments. [2]
The tone of Guttormur’s letter makes clear one of the hard realities of life in Algiers for those enslaved there: though people did manage to survive the rigors of their servitude, the stresses of life as a slave—Guttormur had been enslaved for nearly four years when he wrote his letter—could be quite overwhelming.
And Guttormur’s situation was, by Algiers standards, a relatively easy one: he was one of those who—as Father Dan put it—were forced to till the land outside the city.
Here is Guttormur’s description of his situation:
I have a Turkish man as my master, an elderly man, but his wife is very young, and they have four children, all young. They have both been gentle with me, especially the wife, so that I have neither been beaten nor insulted. When my master has shouted rebukes at me—the Turks are quick to anger—his temper has subsided due to his wife’s kind interventions. May God be praised!
When I first came to this land, after I had been here for two weeks, I fell sick with an ague that lasted almost five weeks. I was in great distress because this is not a good place for sick people. Once I recovered enough strength and could walk a little, I was set to work ploughing my master’s fields outside the city. I had to walk to and from home daily, in bad weather and good, a distance about twice that between two farms [about 2 – 3 miles/3 – 5 kilometers].
The hardest time in this country, when the labor is most difficult, is from the winter moon in November (the first month of winter) until the seventh week has passed of summer. During the rest of the year, when I am not ploughing, I must walk the town selling water, which is a difficult labor and one that many Christian people must endure.
We must pay our masters a certain amount of money every day. If we can get more than that amount, it is to our profit, and we can use it to feed and clothe ourselves. But if we cannot earn the required amount, then it is taken out of our clothing and our food. Oh, God, how miserable we are in this terrible place.[3]
As Guttormur’s text makes clear, a slave’s life was not a happy one.
This prompted some slaves to try to escape. Fleeing the city and achieving freedom, however, was a dauntingly difficult task.
Guttormur was not the only Icelander enslaved in Algiers who wrote letters that have survived. A young man name Jón Jónsson from Grindavík in southwest Iceland, a newly minted graduate from Skálholtsskóli (Skálholt’s school), one of the two schools in Iceland at the time, was in Algiers at the same time as Guttormur.
Here is Jón’s take on the chances of escape (excerpted from a letter he wrote to his parents dated 1630:
It is virtually impossible to escape from here. The closest Christian town is Oran [a Spanish presidio in those days], which is 50 Spanish miles [150 miles/240 kilometers] from here, and, in between, there are numerous Moorish towns. The moors get 20 pieces of eight when they can capture escaped slaves.
Those they recapture are tied by their masters to a wooden post and flogged on their naked bodies. Afterwards, they are manacled in iron chains. After being so chained up, they are helpless to escape again.[4]
For most slaves, the chances of escape were vanishingly slim.
For more accounts of what it was like to be a slave in Algiers in the early seventeenth century see the next post here in this blog.
[1] Pierre Dan, Histoire de Barbarie, pp. 405-407.
[2] The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, pp. 112-113.
[3] The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, pp. 113-114.
[4] The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, pp. 125-126.
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
The story of the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in 1627
Amazon listing