White Gold Read online

  For Barbara and Wolfram

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  1 - A NEW AND DEADLY FOE

  2 - SULTAN OF SLAVES

  3 - SEIZED AT SEA

  4 - PELLOW’S TORMENTS

  5 - INTO THE SLAVE PEN

  6 - GUARDING THE CONCUBINES

  7 - REBELS IN THE HIGH ATLAS

  8 - TURNING TURK

  9 - AT THE COURT OF MOULAY ISMAIL

  10 - ESCAPE OR DEATH

  11 - BLOOD RIVALS

  12 - LONG ROUTE HOME

  EPILOGUE

  Also by Giles Milton

  About the Author

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  ILLUSTRATION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Copyright Page

  PROLOGUE

  THE CLATTER OF a chariot broke the silence. It was hidden from view by the towering battlements, but could be heard squeaking and rattling through the palace gardens. As it passed through the Gate of the Winds, there was a muffled rumble of footsteps and wheels.

  In the ceremonial parade ground no one stirred. The imperial guard stood rigidly to attention, their damascene scimitars flashing in the sunlight. The courtiers lay prostrate beside them, their robes splayed theatrically across the marble. Only the vizier, sweltering in his leopardskin pelt, dared to wipe the beads of sweat from his brow.

  The stillness intensified as the chariot drew near. From beyond the courtyard there was a furious cry, followed by the crack of a whip. The hullabaloo grew suddenly louder, echoing through the palace courts and corridors. Seconds later, Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco entered the parade ground in his gilded chariot, drawn not by horses but by a harnessed band of wives and eunuchs.

  This unfortunate team staggered up to the assembled courtiers before allowing their reins to slacken. As the sultan leaped down from his chariot, two statuesque blacks sprang into action. One whisked flies from Moulay Ismail’s sacred body, muttering obsequies all the while. The other, a young lad of fourteen or fifteen, shaded the sultan with a twirling chintz parasol.

  Such was the ritual that habitually attended an audience with the great Moulay Ismail, who demanded absolute deference from his subjects and was punctilious in his observance of protocol. But on a sweltering summer’s morning in 1716 the sultan scarcely noticed the courtiers groveling in the dust. His eyes were drawn instead to a band of wretched Europeans herded together in the far corner of the square. Fifty-two Englishmen, bruised and barefoot, stood in mute bewilderment. Seized at sea by the corsairs of Barbary and marched inland to Morocco’s imperial capital, they were about to be sold as slaves.

  Their story was to cause outrage and horror in their home country; it would also expose the utter impotence of both the British government and its navy. Yet the seizure of these men was neither unique nor unusual; for more than a century, the trade in white slaves from across Europe and colonial North America had been destroying families and wrecking innocent lives.

  One of the newly captured men—Captain John Pellow of the Francis—had been forewarned of the perils of his trading voyage to the Mediterranean. Yet he had shunned the danger with characteristic bravado, sailing from Cornwall to Genoa in the summer of 1715. His seven deck-hands included his young nephew, Thomas Pellow, who was just eleven years old when he bade farewell to his mother, father and two sisters. It would be many years before his parents would receive news of their unfortunate son.

  Two other ships were captured on the same day. Captain Richard Ferris of the Southwark had attempted to rescue the Francis ’s crew, but had also been captured by the corsairs. So, too, had the good ship George, which was making its return voyage to England. The terrified crews of these three vessels now stood side by side in the palace courtyard.

  “Bono, bono,” cried the jovial sultan as he inspected his slaves. He passed along the line of men, poking their muscles and examining their physique. The captives were still reeling from the treatment they had received on their arrival in the imperial city of Meknes. Crowds of townspeople had gathered at the palace gates to abuse them, “offering us the most vile insults … and giving us many severe boxes.”

  The sultan, oblivious to their fears and anxieties, was delighted to see that these hardy mariners were in good shape and noted that many years of service could be expected of them. He paused for a moment as he sized up the young Thomas Pellow. There was something about the boy’s plucky demeanor that intrigued the sultan. He muttered a few words to his guardsmen, at which young Pellow was seized and taken to one side.

  As the rest of the men were led away by a black slave-driver, Pellow prayed that his nightmare would soon come to an end. In fact, he was beginning twenty-three years of captivity as one of North Africa’s forgotten white slaves.

  I TRAVELED TO Meknes in the spring of 1992 when the Boufekrane valley was carpeted with wild mint and the little river was brimful with icy water. My traveling companion belonged to another world—an eighteenth-century padre, whose colorful account described the city at its apogee. His duodecimo volume—bound, appropriately enough, in tooled morocco—evoked a city of unparalleled grandeur. But it also revealed a far darker and more sinister story.

  When my padre traveled here, the imperial palace of Meknes was the largest building in the northern hemisphere. Its crenellated battlements stretched for mile upon mile, enclosing hills and meadows, orchards and pleasure gardens, its sun-baked bulwarks looming high over the river valley. This impregnable fortress was designed to withstand the mightiest army on earth. Each of its gates was protected by a crack division of the black imperial guard.

  The sultan’s palace was constructed on such a grand scale that it came to be known simply as Dar Kbira, The Big. Yet Dar Kbira was just one part of a huge complex. A further fifty palaces, all interconnecting, housed the sultan’s 2,000 concubines. There were mosques and minarets, courtyards and pavilions. The palace stables were the size of a large town; the barracks housed more than 10,000 foot soldiers. In the sprawling Dar el Makhzen—another vast palace-town—scheming viziers and eunuchs kept their courts. The fabled hanging gardens, perpetually in blossom, rivaled Nebuchadnezzar’s fantasy in Babylon.

  My padre had never seen anything like it and returned home with tales of bronze doors cast in fantastical arabesques and porphyry columns that sparkled in the sun. The courtyard mosaics were wrought with geometric perfection—a dizzying chiaroscuro of cobalt and white. There were slabs of jasper and Carrara marble, costly damasks and richly caparisoned horses. The Moorish stucco was most extraordinary of all; chiseled and fretted into an intricate honeycomb, it appeared to drip from the cupolas like snow-white stalactites.

  Every inch of wall, every niche and squinch, was covered in exquisite ornamentation. The glasswork, too, was extraordinarily fine. Chinks of azure, vermilion and sea green were designed to catch and refract the brilliant African sunlight. In the hours before sundown, they scattered hexagons of color over the tessellated marble paving.

  Palace doorways were emblazoned with the emblem of the sun, prompting visitors to wonder whether the sultan was vying to outdo his French contemporary, King Louis XIV, the Sun King. In truth, the megalomaniac sultan hoped to build on a far grander scale than the recently constructed palace of Versailles. His vision was for his palace to stretch from Meknes to Marrakesh—a distance of 300 miles.

  Three centuries of sun and rain have not been kind to this sprawling palace, built of pise, a mixture of earth and lime. The winds of the Atlas Mountains have blasted the pink walls, reducing them in places to a powdery heap. Arches lie broken and towers have been eroded to stumps. The earthquake of 1755 caused the greatest devastation: the fabric of the great palace shuddered, groaned and expi
red. What had taken decades to construct was torn apart in minutes. Cedarwood ceilings were ripped from their rafters, and stucco crumbled and collapsed. Whole quarters of the palace slumped in on themselves, crushing furniture and antiques. The court fled in panic, never to return. The broken imperial shell, reduced to a sorry hodgepodge of roofless chambers, was quickly colonized by the poor and wretched of Meknes.

  I approached the city through the Bab Mansour, the greatest of all Meknes’s ceremonial gateways. It opened the way to a world of giants, where ramparts towered over palm trees and courtyards were as big as the sky. A second gateway led to a third, which contracted into a series of alleyways. These labyrinthine passages, festooned with telephone wires and cables, plunged me deep into the heart of the palace. To this day, people—indeed, whole families—live in the ruins of Dar Kbira. Front doors have been carved into the bulwarks and there are windows hacked out of the pise. Ancient chambers have become modern bedrooms; courtyards are strewn with marble rubble.

  I squeezed through a fissure in the battlements and found myself in a whole new jumble of ruins. A shattered porphyry column lay half embedded in waste, casually discarded like household junk. A twirl of acanthus betrayed its Roman past, pillaged from the nearby ruined city of Volubulis.

  I wondered if this lost quarter had once been the forbidden harem, whose looking-glass ceiling was propped up by just such columns. Arab chroniclers speak of crystal streams and tinkling fountains; of sculpted marble basins filled with brightly colored fish. Pausing for a moment in this roofless chamber, I scooped up a handful of the cool earth. As the powdery dust filtered through my fingers, a precious residue remained: fractured mosaic tiling in a myriad of shapes—stars, oblongs, squares and diamonds.

  If my padre was to be believed, these tiny chunks were evidence of one of the darkest chapters in human history. Every hand-glazed mosaic in this monumental palace, every broken column and battlement, had been built and crafted by an army of Christian slaves. Flogged by black slave-drivers and held in filthy slave pens, these abject captives were forced to work on what the sultan intended to be the largest construction project in the known world. Moulay Ismail’s male slaves were said to have toiled for fifteen hours a day and were often forced to work at night as well. The female captives were even more miserable. Dragged to the harem and forcibly converted to Islam, they had the dubious honor of indulging the sultan’s sexual whims.

  Morocco was not the only place in North Africa where white captives were held as slaves. Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli also had thriving slave auctions, in which thousands of captives were put through their paces before being sold to the highest bidder. These wretched men, women and children came from right across Eu–rope—from as far afield as Iceland and Greece, Sweden and Spain. Many had been seized at sea by the infamous Barbary corsairs. Many more had been snatched from their homes in surprise raids.

  Almost six years were to pass before I first began to search for written records of the Barbary slaves. I had assumed that such archives—if they had ever existed—would have disappeared long ago. But it gradually became apparent that a great many letters and journals had survived. There were plaintive descriptions of the ordeal of slave labor and blood-chilling reports of audiences with the Moroccan sultan. There were anguished recollections of the macabre humor of the slave merchants and petitions from “slave widows” that begged for mercy and relief. I even found missives written by the sultan himself—grandiloquent tracts demanding that the kings of Britain and France convert to Islam.

  Many of these accounts were to be found only in manuscript. The extraordinary journal of John Whitehead, a British slave in Meknes, remains unpublished to this day. Others were printed in such small quantities that only a handful of copies survive. A very rare volume by the French padre, Jean de la Faye, turned up in St. Anthony’s College, Oxford.

  The most fascinating testimonies were those written by the slaves themselves. The story of the white slave trade is one of individuals caught up in a nightmare far beyond their control. Most were to end their days in a hellish captivity, but a fortunate few managed to escape the clutches of their owners. Those who made it back to their homelands were invariably destitute. One of the ways in which they could restore their fortunes was to publish their tales, in the hope of earning a few shillings.

  The white slaves who survived their ordeal invariably emerged from incarceration in deep shock. Writing helped them come to terms with the past and reintegrate themselves into a society they had thought to be lost to them forever. All who recorded their stories had undergone raw and harrowing experiences, and they left tales that even today have the power to be profoundly moving. They rarely make for pleasant reading, yet are illuminated by flashes of heroism and selflessness. A touch of kindness from a slave guard; the warm embrace of a padre. Such gestures reminded the captives that they were still a part of humankind.

  One of the most remarkable stories of the white slave trade centers around Thomas Pellow and his crewmates on the Francis. Pellow would be witness to the barbaric splendors of Sultan Moulay Ismail’s imperial court and would experience firsthand the ruthlessness of this wily and terrifying ruler. But his story was to prove far more extraordinary than that of a mere observer of events. As a personal slave of the sultan, Pellow unwittingly found himself thrown into the very heart of courtly intrigue. Appointed guardian of the imperial harem, he would also lead slave-soldiers into battle and take part in a perilous slave-gathering expedition to equatorial Africa. He would be tortured and forced to convert to Islam. Three times he would attempt to escape; twice he would be sentenced to death.

  Pellow’s tale is filled with a colorful cast of characters. He writes of lusty eunuchs and brutal slave-drivers, imperial executioners and piratical scoundrels. At the heart of his story is the towering figure of Sultan Moulay Ismail, who through the course of his long reign became increasingly obsessed by his opulent fantasy palace.

  It was long believed that Pellow’s Adventures—reworked for publication by a Grub Street editor—strayed far from reality. It is now clear that this is not at all the case. The early chapters are corroborated by letters written by his own shipmates, while the later years accord with reports written by European consuls who met him in Morocco. Arab records, too, support his version of events. The newly translated Chronicles of Muhammad al-Qadiri reveal that Pellow’s account of the Moroccan civil war is remarkable for its accuracy. His revelations about life in Meknes also tally with Moroccan sources. Both Ahmed ez-Zayyani and Ahmad bin Khalid al-Nasari paint a strikingly similar picture of life in the imperial capital.

  Thomas Pellow and his fellow shipmates were captured at a time when North Africa’s slave population had diminished, but conditions were as wretched as ever. Their incarceration coincided with one of the last great flurries of slave trading, when virtually every country in Europe found itself under attack. But the story of the white slave trade begins almost ninety years earlier, when the Barbary corsairs launched a series of spectacular raids on the very heart of Christendom.

  1

  A NEW AND DEADLY FOE

  THE PALE DAWN sky gave no inkling of the terror that was about to be unleashed. A sea mist hung low in the air, veiling the horizon in a damp and diaphanous shroud. It enabled the mighty fleet to slip silently up the English Channel, unnoticed by the porters and fishermen on Cornwall’s southwestern coast.

  The lookout who first sighted the vessels was perplexed. It was not the season for the return of the Newfoundland fishing fleet, nor was a foreign flotilla expected in those waters. As the mists lifted and the summer skies cleared, it became apparent that the mysterious ships had not come in friendship. The flags on their mainmasts depicted a human skull on a dark green background—the menacing symbol of a new and terrible enemy. It was the third week of July 1625, and England was about to be attacked by the Islamic corsairs of Barbary.

  News of the fleet’s arrival flashed rapidly along the coast until it reached the nav
al base of Plymouth. A breathless messenger burst into the office of James Bagg, vice admiral of Cornwall, with the shocking intelligence of the arrival of enemy ships. There were at least “twentye sayle upon this coast”—perhaps many more—and they were armed and ready for action.

  Bagg was appalled by what he was told. Over the previous weeks he had received scores of complaints about attacks on Cornish fishing skiffs. Local mayors had sent a stream of letters informing him of the “daily oppression” they were facing at the hands of a little-known foe. Now, that foe appeared to be preparing a far more devastating strike on the south coast of England.

  Bagg penned an urgent letter to the lord high admiral in London, demanding warships to counter the threat. But it was far too late for anything to be done. Within days of their being sighted the corsairs began to wreak havoc, launching hit-and-run raids on the most vulnerable and unprotected seaports. They slipped ashore at Mount’s Bay, on the south Cornish coast, while the villagers were at communal prayer. Dressed in Moorish djellabas and wielding damascene scimitars, they made a terrifying sight as they burst into the parish church. One English captive would later describe the corsairs as “ugly onhumayne cretures” who struck the fear of God into all who saw them. “With their heads shaved and their armes almost naked, [they] did teryfie me exceedingly” They were merciless in their treatment of the hapless congregation of Mount’s Bay. According to one eyewitness, sixty men, women and children were dragged from the church and carried back to the corsairs’ ships.

  The fishing port of Looe was also assaulted. The warriors streamed into the cobbled streets and forced their way into cottages and taverns. Much to their fury, they discovered that the villagers had been forewarned of their arrival and many had fled into the surrounding orchards and meadows. Yet the corsairs still managed to seize eighty mariners and fishermen. These unfortunate individuals were led away in chains and Looe was then torched in revenge. The mayor of Plymouth informed the Privy Council of the sorry news, adding that the corsairs were steadily ransacking the surrounding coastline. The West Country, he said, had lost “27 ships and 200 persons taken.”