THE PROBLEM WITH RANSOMS: THE CORRUPTING POWER OF LARGE SUMS OF READY CASH

Being captured by Barbary corsairs and sold into slavery like a beast of burden was a devastatingly traumatic experience.

Everything such captives knew was ripped from them, and they found themselves in a strange land filled with strange people with inexplicable customs, where they could not understand the language, and where they were not considered to be people but property, to be dealt with as their owners saw fit.

However, as has been mentioned in previous posts in this blog, slavery in North Africa was different from slavery in the Americas. If you were a slave in the Americas, you were a slave for life; your value lay in your labor. In North Africa, slaves were also valued for their labor, but their value came from other things as well.

As has also been previously mentioned in this blog, the Barbary corsair enterprise was just that: a business enterprise. There may indeed have been an element of jihad in the enterprise, but, fundamentally, corsairs trafficked in human beings to make a profit.

The largest profits didn’t come from the buying and selling of slaves or from befitting from the free labor they provided. The largest profits came from demanding exorbitant ransoms for them.

With few exceptions, any slave who could manage to raise the required money could be freed.

Raising the money was seldom easy, though. Except for those few captives/slaves who were genuinely wealthy, raising the needed money was a hugely difficult task—ransoms were expensive.

There was another problem too, though.

Corruption.

Barbary corsairs demanded cash for their captives, so once the money was raised, somebody had to physically bring it to the place where the captive was.

There were times when having that sort of cash on hand proved too much of a temptation for those transporting it.

Exactly this sort of thing happened in Algiers in 1635 to a group of Icelanders who had been captive there for eight years.

Iceland was a poor country back then, and it was exceptionally difficult for Icelanders to raise money. Somehow, though, the task was managed, and men were chosen to transport it to Algiers.

Which was when the problem happened.

Below is an excerpt from a letter written by an Icelandic captive in Algiers.

As you’ll see, the writer is angry, angry at having been a slave for eight years while his countrymen lived in comfortable freedom back in Denmark (Iceland was a Danish possession in those days), angry at having to wait so long for ransom to come, and, most of all, angry that the longed-for ransom funds had been misused.

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The Lord who sits in judgment over the terrestrial globe, the moon, the sun, and all the stars in the firmament is witness to the sluggishness of the hearts of men, to their unscrupulousness, to the dwindling of charity, to the contempt men have for their poor brethren, and to their obliviousness of the last day of judgment. The blood of Abel is not yet cold, even though it was shed hundreds of years ago. It still reveals itself in bloody-handed violence and heartfelt tears sent up to heaven. Is there now no mercy, no charity, no awakened conscience? Are there no God-fearing men? Do we have no merciful King? Are we without righteous masters and defenders? Without God-fearing preachers? Without parents, friends and brothers, that they do not feel in their hearts our mortal distress and anguish? A blood-stained rod hangs over us, so that we suffer in despair and darkness in the power of the Turks, those destroyers, fettered by heavy chains.

God knows that it is a pain as sharp as a double-edged sword, and more bitter than death, yes, more hurtful than bloody injuries to know that those who have been here twice to Algiers with our ransom money have used it instead for trade to make profit for themselves, and have stolen our liberty, for they never admitted that they could free anyone, or even that they were here to do so. Instead, they told us to petition our gracious master the King, in the name of God, for our freedom, and then they filled simple minded, poor fellows with fair words and went on their way, one with hides, the other with chests of sugar, leaving behind them only the smoke of their lying words.

They were here under our praiseworthy King’s name, but they left us only God’s name to call upon. Those dissemblers! Those companions of Judas! We can now only trust in the living God’s forgiveness and pray for our excellent lord the King’s mercy, and that, because of his coronation oath, and for justice in the name of God, he will remember us and deal righteously with those who work against our freedom. These two men believe, perhaps, that they will never have to answer for their deeds, so long as the crime is not found out or looked into. But it is obvious that they have cheated us!

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So what happened, then, was that two men appeared in Algiers with ransom money for the captive Icelanders. But instead of paying the ransoms and freeing the captives, they enriched themselves.

Since Algiers was a corsair port, the markets there was stuffed with stolen goods. European traders could buy items like hides or sugar cheaply (they were, after all, stolen goods) and then re-sell then at a large profits in places like Livorno—with no questions asked. The two men mentioned in this letter apparently (mis)used the ransom funds they had been entrusted with to buy “black market” goods and enrich themselves—at the expense of the poor captives.

There is no documentation beyond this single letter to confirm any of this. But it is not hard to imagine that such things must have been lamentably common, given the corrupting power of large sums of ready cash.

Little wonder that the writer of this letter was so angry.

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For those who may be interested, the letter written by the Icelandic captive excerpted in this post comes from The Travels of Revered Ólafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627.