ICELANDERS IN ALGIERS – PART 6 – Corsairs & Captives

(This post is a continuation of Icelanders in Algiers – Parts 1 – 5. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read that post before continuing on here.)

This week continues the series of excerpts from Stolen Lives (the book my Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I published last year) dealing with the captive Icelanders’ experience in Algiers.

Last week’s post described how the captive Icelanders were put up for sale at the Badestan—the slave market—to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. This week, we continue with the details of the sales process.

In other times and other places, people with money speculated on things like currency exchange, trade goods, the stock market—all in an attempt to make a profit and increase their wealth. In Algiers, those with money speculated on human beings, buying and selling them at a profit.

In the Badestan, captives were sold at auction like cattle, and just as with a cattle auction, there was a standard process by which the “merchandise” was sold. Last week, we started looking at how that process played out in the Badestan, using excerpts from narratives from the time to provide the details.

Here is another such contemporary description. It provides us with more of those details, including some of the content of the sales patter used during the auctioning process:

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There we stood from eight o’clock in the morning until two in the afternoon (which is the time limit for the sale of Christians) and had not the least bit of bread allowed us during our stay there. Many people were curious to come and take a look at us while we stood there exposed for sale. Others, who intended to buy, came to see whether we were sound and healthy and fit for work.

The slaves are sold at auction, and the auctioneer tries to make the most he can of them. When the bidders are at hand, he cries out, “Behold! What a strong man this is! What limbs he has! He is fit for any work. And see what a pretty boy this is! No doubt his parents are very rich and are able to pay a great ransom!” With sales pitches like these, the auctioneers try to raise the price.

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Here are some further details, not only about the selling process and the sales patter, but also about the dickering that went on between seller and buyer:

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Their manner of selling slaves is this: they lead them up and down the fair, or market, and when a dealer bids any money, they cry, “a-Rache! a-Rache!” which is their way of saying, “Here is so much money offered. Who bids more?”…

The first priority of the buyers is to look into the captives’ mouths, for a good, strong set of grinders will advance the price considerably. Their next step is to feel the limbs of the captives to see if there are any fractures or dislocations in the bones, anything analogous to spavin or ringbone [in horses], for these will bring down the market price dramatically, just as being clean-limbed and well jointed will raise the price considerably.

The seller praises his goods to the sky. The buyer, on the other hand, will try to undervalue them. The true market price lies between, but this is the same all over the world. “See!” cries the seller. “Mark what a back this one has, what a breadth he had between his shoulders! What a chest! How strongly set! How fit for work and for carrying burdens. He will do too much work!” “Pish,” says the buyer. “He looks like a petty criminal, like a timid creature.”

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Perhaps the most moving description of what occurred in the Badestan is one by Father Pierre Dan, the Trintarian friar, in which he describes the auctioning off of a group of a hundred or so captives abducted from Baltimore, Ireland, in a raid led by Jan Janszoon/Murat Reis (the very same man who led the Salé corsairs on their raid on southwest Iceland in 1627):

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They [the captives from Baltimore] were brought to Algiers, where it was a pitiful thing to see them put up for sale. Women were separated from husbands and children from fathers. Husbands were sold on one side, wives on the other, their daughters snatched from their arms, without hope of any of them ever seeing each other again.

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The captive Icelanders would have undergone the same sort of wrenching experience in the Badestan as that described in the excerpts above.

It is easy enough to imagine the scene.

The sellers would have hauled them stumblingly into the crowded, noisy marketplace and paraded them about, shouting “Arrache! Arrache!” as an initial offer was made, in order to attract more buyers and boost the sales price.

The constant hubbub of commerce, the haggling back and forth over prices, stopped momentarily while people looked the captives over. Buyers began clustering around, poking and prodding the Icelanders, examining their hands and teeth critically, interrogating them as far as is possible with the aid of translators (it is unlikely that anybody in Algiers spoke Icelandic, but quite a few Icelanders during this period spoke at least some German), all accompanied by a constant animated chatter, completely unintelligible to the Icelanders, as seller and buyer harangued each other.

Rough hands stripped the clothing from them, and they were made to jump about or bend over or stretch in front of cold, appraising eyes. The women and girls had to endure far more intimate inspections. Families who survived the voyage from Iceland together were broken apart as their members were sold to different buyers. Friends were separated. Children were taken from their parents, at times no doubt literally ripped from their parents’ arms, wailing hysterically.

The auction in the Badestan was not the end of the sales process. The captives—now officially slaves—were brought back to the Dar al-Soultan for the Pasha to look them over once more, for he had the right to purchase any of them he might want at the price they had gone for in the Badestan. According to some accounts, there was also a second round of bidding, and the captives had to again endure the indignity of being put up for auction. This second sale occurred because the Pasha (or the public authorities, accounts differ somewhat) got to pocket the difference between the original and the new price.

After this visit to the Dar al-Soultan had been concluded, the sales process was finally complete, and the Icelanders were handed over to their owners, who marched them away to begin a new chapter in their lives—as slaves.

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The blatant cruelty of all this is disturbing, and it is all too easy to envision the Algerines as inhuman monster devoid of pity—or indeed of any warm human emotion.

It’s important to retain a sense of perspective here, though.

Look at the following quote, for instance:

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If you had ever seen them as they were taken, you would have wept blood. Children were separated from their mothers, and husbands from their wives. For the loss of their loved ones, tears streamed down their cheeks. The virgin was paraded in the open, after her hijab was torn away from her, and the enemy watched gleefully as tears choked her moans

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The author of this extract was from the Muslim side of the Mediterranean. The Barbary States did indeed prosper economically from violent robbery and human trafficking. But the European states of the time did much the same thing. There were slave markets in North African cities like Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Salé, but there were also slave markets in European cities like Naples and Livorno, and in Valetta, on the island of Malta.

Human trafficking was not limited exclusively to North Africa; it was one of the things that generally characterized the times.

For those who may be interested…

The first description of the sales process (where slaves stood from eight o’clock in the morning until two in the afternoon) can be found in Paul Auchterlonie, ed., Encountering Islam: Joseph Pitts: An English Slave in 17th-century Algiers and Mecca, pp. 119-120.

The second description (in which the writer observes that a good, strong set of grinders will advance the price considerably) can be found in William Okeley, Eben-ezer, or, A small Monument of Great Mercy, 1675, pp. 9-11.

The third description (about the sale of captives from Baltimore, Ireland) can be found in Pierre Dan, Histoire de Barbarie, et de ses corsaires, des royaumes, et des villes d’Alger, de Tunis, de Salé, et de Tripoly (History of the Barbary and its Corsairs and Kingdoms, and of the Cities of Algiers, Tunis, Salé, and Tripoli), 1649, p. 313.

The quote from the Muslim side of the Mediterranean is from a work by an Arab writer named Abu Bakr Albu Khasibi, quoted in Nabil Matar, “Piracy and Captivity in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Perspective from Barbary,” in Claire Jowitt, ed., Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550-1650, p. 56.