Resourceful, resilient, and quick-thinking, Pellow was selected by Moulay Ismail for special treatment, and was one of the fortunate few who survived to tell his tale. Pellow and his shipmates were bought by the tyrannical sultan of Morocco, Moulay Ismail, who was constructing an imperial palace of such scale and grandeur that it would surpass every other building in the world, a palace built entirely by Christian slave labor. Thousands of Europeans had been snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of Algiers, Tunis, and Sale in Morocco, where they were sold at auction to the highest bidder. France, Spain, England, and Italy had suffered a series of devastating attacks. Their captors-Ali Hakem and his network of Islamic slave traders-had declared war on the whole of Christendom. In the summer of 1716, a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow and fifty-one of his comrades were captured at sea by Barbary corsairs. White Gold is the remarkable true story of white European slaves in eighteenth-century Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco, told in inimitable style by one of our finest popular historians.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |