JÓN JÓNSSON: A CAPTIVE’S TALE – PART 3

(This post is a continuation of Jón Jónsson: a Captive’s Tale – Parts 1 & 2. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)

Jón Jónsson was brought aboard his new Algerian master’s ship. Nobody consulted him on the matter. You don’t consult with property. It’s easy enough to imagine him standing at the ship’s railing, a young man barely out of college, looking back despairingly at Salé as it disappears in the distance, forced to leave his kin behind—not knowing what might become of them—and embark on a journey to a place entirely strange to him where he knew not a single soul.

We don’t know for sure, but Jón was likely bought because of his education. Well educated slaves were relatively rare—and useful in a myriad of ways. So his new master would probably have intended to put him to work on some sort of clerical capacity.

For a slave in Algiers, there were worse fates.

Arriving in Algiers, though, would have been a severe shock for Jón.

Seen from the sea, seventeenth century Algiers presented a quite spectacular sight. The city was located on the northwestern horn of a large bay—15 kilometers across—ringed by verdant mountains. The buildings of the city ascended a mountain slope, tier after tier, up from the harbor to the mountain’s crest, 400 feet (120 meters) above sea level. Every structure was whitewashed frequently (by slaves), so that they all gleamed brightly in the sun. More than one writer described this mass of whitened buildings, framed by luxuriant green mountains, as resembling a glittering diamond in an emerald setting. (See the illustration above for one artist’s rendition of the city as seen from the sea.)

Jón would not likely have been in any state of mind to properly appreciate such a spectacular sight, but it would have been too dramatic a vista for him to ignore. Standing on the deck of his master’s ship, he would have seen the white, gleaming lozenge of the city in its verdant green frame emerging in the distance when the bay of Algiers came into view. As the ship drew closer, the tiers of brilliantly white buildings would have risen up out of the sea, higher and higher, until they completely dominated the shoreline—a human-made alabaster mountain. Jón would never have seen—never imagined—anything even remotely like it.

When corsair ships approached the city of Algiers, they passed by an island fortress bristling with cannon. A mole—a long, rocky causeway extending for about 1,000 feet (300 meters)—connected this fortress with the city itself and served as a breakwater to create a sheltered harbor.

If a corsair expedition had been successful, the Captain ordered a celebratory cannonade. The more successful the expedition, the more exuberant the cannonade would be.

In response, the city would have come alive. An Englishman—at the time a slave chained to a rowing bench on a galley as it returned in triumph from a successful cruise—wrote that the ship he was on was greeted with “acclamations of joy by the inhabitants, all the house tops being covered with women crying, “Allaluah! Allaluah!” with salutations of cannons and a general rejoicing of the people.”

Those rejoicing people would all have rushed to the harbor to greet the newly arriving corsair ship.

The principle reason for their excitement was profit. The economic driver of Algiers during this period was piracy: the violent capture by Algerian corsairs of goods and people and their subsequent resale—on a grand scale.

In the late 1620s (when Jón arrived), the Algiers corsair fleet included somewhere between seventy and eighty square-rigged sailing ships, each mounting twenty-five cannons or more, a dozen or so oared galleys of varying sizes, and a horde of smaller ships of all sorts. Algerian corsairs hunted a huge swath of territory, including not only the whole of the Mediterranean but also the waters all along the Atlantic littoral of Europe. During the corso season—typically late April to early October—they hunted indefatigably, a swarm of ships, large and small, bringing back an enormous haul of booty and captives every year.

The varied merchandise and the human captives taken in these raids were brought back to Algiers and sold. The merchandise—such items as sugar, salt, oil, timber, leather goods, woolen cloth, silk, wine, spirits, tobacco, and much, much more—was offered at cut-rate prices (it was all stolen goods, after all) in the Badestan, the premier market in Algiers. (See the 3-part Algiers Slave Market series of posts here in the Background section of this bog, December 2018, for details about the Badestan.) Many of the buyers were merchants who specialized in purchasing the stolen European goods cheaply and then shipping them back to European ports like Livorno, in Italy, to be sold for a hefty profit.

The human captives were auctioned off in the Badestan to the highest bidder.

Jón would have been spared that (he’d already been auctioned off back in Salé).

He would not have been spared the rowdy crowds at the harbor, though.

The crowds were there because a large portion of the city anticipated that, one way or another, they would benefit from the outflowing of wealth that came with each successful corsair ship’s return.

For a rural Icelander like Jón, the sheer mass of people that came rushing exuberantly to the harbor would have been a stunning shock.

Iceland had no cities at this time, hardly any real towns, even. The total population of the island was less than 50,000 people. Algiers had a population of about 100,000. This may not sound like all that much by modern standards, but for the time it was huge. Even the very largest European cities of this time—like Paris and London—had populations of no more than 300,000 – 400,000. The only city in the Mediterranean basin with a significantly larger population than Algiers was Naples.

For Jón—rural Icelander that he was—the variegated nature of the crowds would have been just as shocking as their numbers. The population of Algiers was a swirling mixture of peoples: indigenous North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, Ottoman Turks, and Europeans, both renegades and slaves. Here is a partial list of the types of renegades in the city, compiled in the late 1500s:

Muscovites, Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Danish and Norwegians, Englishmen, Flemish, Frenchmen, Basques, Castilians, Portuguese, Valencians, Sardinians, Corsicans, Venetians, Bosnians, Albanians, Greeks, Syrians, Abyssinians of Prester John, as well as Indians from the Portuguese Indies [India], from Brazil, and from New Spain [Mexico].

Not only would Jón have seen a mass of strange faces staring at him—dark, light, round, narrow, bearded, bald, turbaned, black-eyed, blue-eyed, scarred, tattooed… He would also have been buffeted by a myriad of strange and incomprehensible languages.

Added to all of this, the city of Algiers itself would have seemed enormous to Jón (Iceland, remember, had no cities). The Algiers harborfront was close to two kilometers across. A protective city wall, 30 feet (9 meters) high and nearly 10 feet (3 meters) thick, ran the entire length of it, in places coming right down to the seashore, so that the waves broke against it. Beyond the massive barrier of this wall, Jón would have seen the tops of the minarets of the city mosques and, behind them, the long, white slope of the city rising up into the sky.

Jón would have had to try to process all this as he was hauled ashore and then dragged through the crowds and into the depths of the city.

To begin his life there as a slave.

For a continuation of Jón’s story, and for more of what happened to him in Algiers, go to Jón Jónsson: a Captive’s Tale – Part 4.

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For those who may be interested…

The quote about the “acclamations of joy” that greeted corsair ships returning to Algiers comes from  A Relation of Seven Years Slavery Under the Turks of Algier, Suffered by an English Captive Merchant, by Francis Knight, first published in 1640, p. 10.

The list of European renegades in Algiers comes from An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam: Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers (1612), a translation by Maria Antonia Garcés & Diana De Armas of the first book of Antonio de Sosa’s Topographia, e historia general de Argel (Topography and General History of Algiers), first published in 1612, p. 125.