White Women Captives in North Africa This Page Intentionally Left Blank White Women Captives in North Africa Narratives of Enslavement, 1735–1830

White Women Captives in North Africa This page intentionally left blank White Women Captives in North Africa Narratives of Enslavement, 1735–1830

Khalid Bekkaoui Professor, Department of English, University Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah, Morocco Compilation, Introduction, translations and editorial matter © Khalid Bekkaoui 2010 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-22198-7

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-30748-7 ISBN 978-0-230-29449-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230294493

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data White women captives in North Africa: narratives of enslavement, 1735–1830/ [compiled by] Khalid Bekkaoui. p. cm. Summary: “A fascinating anthology of historical narratives composed from the late sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries by European women abducted by Muslim corrsairs and enslaved in North Africa during the age of piracy. Many of the narratives are very rare and are by women coming from diverse social and economic backgrounds”— Provided by publisher.

1. Women slaves—Africa, North—Biography. 2. Captivity narratives—Africa, North—History. 3. Europeans—Africa, North—History. I. Bekkaoui, Khalid. HT1345.I5 2010 305.48'809061—dc22 2010027484 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 To my beloved parents To Amina, Soumayya, Tariq, Salaheddine, and Hamza This page intentionally left blank Contents

List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgements xv A Note on the Texts xvii

1 Introduction 1 1.1 Slave Hunting in the Mediterranean 1 1.2 Muslim Women Slaves in Christian Lands 6 1.3 White Women, Muslim Masters 12 1.4 Female Barbary Captivity Tales 28 1.5 Oriental Women and Christian Slaves 33 1.6 Desdemonas and the Heroes of the Black Tribe 37 2 Narratives 46 2.1 ‘Remarkable History of the Countess De Bourk’s Shipwreck, and Her Daughter’s Captivity’, 1735 46 2.2 ‘Notable History of a Spanish Girl, Slave to Ali Dey’, 1735 58 2.3 Maria ter Meetelen. Miraculous and Remarkable Events of Twelve Years Slavery, of a Woman, Called Maria ter Meetelen, Resident of Medemblik, 1748 62 2.4 Elizabeth Marsh. The Female Captive, 1769 121 2.5 Mary Velnet. An Affecting History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Mary Velnet, 1806 162 2.6 Maria Martin. History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Maria Martin, 1807 187 2.7 Eliza Bradley. An Authentic Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Mrs. Eliza Bradley, 1820 206 2.8 Viletta Laranda. Neapolitan Captive: Interesting Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of Miss Viletta Laranda, 1830 243

Appendices 256 A.1 ‘Accusations and the Confessions of Ana de Melo, a Free Christianized Muslim Woman’, 1559 256

vii viii Contents

A.2 ‘Maria de Morales’ Captivity, Release and Confessions before the Inquisitional Tribunal’, 1610 261 A.3 ‘Relation of the Fidelity of a Husband, and the Unfaithfulness of His Wife’, 1666 263 A.4 ‘My Corsair Emerges up above the Full Main’ 265 A.5 ‘The Bey Weds His Genovese Captive’, 1720s 267 A.6 ‘The Irish Mrs Jones and the Lascivious Turk’, 1747 268 A.7 ‘An Empress of Morocco Born at Mill of Steps, Parish of Muthill’, 1769 269 A.8 ‘A Particular Account of the Royal Harem’, 1791 270 A.9 ‘Letter from a Muslim Female Captive in Malta to the Sultan of Morocco’, 1790s 272 A.10 ‘Ali and the English Female Captive’, 1891 275 Notes 276 Bibliography 293 Index 299 List of Illustrations

1.1 Map of North Africa. Several voyages to Barbary (London: 1736). Courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University. 3 1.2 Barbary galley. Pierre Dan, Historie van Barbaryen (Amsterdam: 1684). Courtesy of the University of Leiden Library. 4 1.3 A white woman abducted by Barbary corsairs. H. Le Comte, ‘Les Pirates Algériens.’ G. Esquer, Iconographie historique de l’Algérie (Paris: 1929). Courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University. 14 1.4 European men, women, and children auctioned off at Algiers’ slave market. Pierre Dan, Historie van Barbaryen (Amsterdam: 1684). Courtesy of the University of Leiden Library. 15 1.5 Rabart and Salé. George Høst, Nachrichten von Marokos und Fes (Copenhagen: 1781). Courtesy of the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress. 18 1.6 White and coloured women sold into slavery. H. Le Comte, ‘Un Bazar d’Esclaves à Alger.’ G. Esquer, Iconographie historique de l’Algérie (Paris: 1929). Courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University. 22 1.7 A White Sultana. A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations (London: 1757–72). Courtesy of the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress. 39 1.8 Hiram Powers, ‘The Greek Slave’ at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. The Illustrated Exhibitorr (London: 1851). Courtesy of Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library. 43

ix x List of Illustrations

2.1 Meknès and Christian captives building. Several voyages to Barbaryy (London: 1736). Courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University. 70 2.2 Sultan Mohammed Ben Abdallah. Thomas Troughton, Barbarian Cruelty (London: 1751). Courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University. 92 2.3 Marrakech. Olfert Dapper, Description de l’Afrique (Amsterdam: 1686). Courtesy of the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress. 140 2.4 Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah. Courtesy of the Royal Archive, Rabat. 145 2.5 Mary Velnet. The Captivity and sufferings of Mrs. Mary Velnett (Boston: 1828). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society’s collection. 184 2.6 Maria Martin chained in a dungeon. History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Maria Martin (Philadelphia: 1809). Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 202 2.7 Eliza Bradley conducted to her master’s encampment. Authentic Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Mrs. Eliza Bradleyy (Boston: 1820). Courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library. 217 2.8 Miss Viletta Laranda’s punishment by her captors. Viletta Laranda, Neapolitan Captive (New York: 1830). Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 252 Preface

On 23 March 2007, the Iranian navy seized a small British patrol boat for having allegedly trespassed into Iranian waters, and the 15 marines on board were taken hostage. The presence of a servicewoman, Faye Turney, among the captives attracted huge media coverage and the old story of white female captives in Muslim lands was immediately brought to the fore. In an article, significantly entitled ‘Captives Again’, published in the National Post (3 April 2004), British historian Niall Ferguson reacted to Turney’s abduction by drawing an analogy between her capture and that of a British woman, Elizabeth Marsh, by Barbary corsairs in 1756, insisting that the reigning king of Morocco owes the English an apology for this past incident. Ferguson goes on to urge Britain for a tough stance against the Iranians, arguing that Turney’s kidnapping has to be interpreted in the context of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries’ North African piracy when ‘Tens of thousands of Britons … fell into the hands of the so-called Barbary Corsairs, the Moroccan and Algerian raiders who infested the Western Mediterranean.’ It is, indeed, within this paradigm that upon her release Faye Turney frames her captivity tale. Deliberately echoing Linda Colley’s book The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, whose publication coincided with the British- Iranian hostage crisis, Turney entitles her autobiography ‘Faye: My Ordeal’. The title appeared on the front page of The Sun tabloid newspaper (9 April 2007) and was accompanied in visible scripts with sensational phrases: ‘Stripped to Knickers in Dingy Cell’ and ‘I Feared Being Raped by Iranians’. Turney claims that when their vessel was intercepted and boarded by the outnumbering and heavily armed Revolutionary Guards, she feared rape, and, in the manner of Penelope Aubin’s English heroine in Life and Amorous Adventures of Lucinda (1722) when her vessel was given chase by Moorish corsairs, Turney tried to masquerade as a man to save herself from alien sexual predation. Turney’s sex was, however, soon revealed when she was ordered to take off her helmet, upon which, says Turney, the kidnappers began yelling in surprise and disbelief ‘Woman! Woman!’ As they steered ashore, they kept staring at her. In captivity, Turney was blindfolded, led away from her male comrades, incarcerated alone in a tiny cell, and stripped naked. ‘They took everything from me apart from my knickers’, says Turney, ‘They could do anything now and nobody would know.’ In addition to rape, Turney feared death when she ‘heard saws and hammers. Then a woman measured me. I feared it was my coffin’, she adds in a tone of gothic horror. It is interesting how Turney’s tale subscribes and perpetuates the formu- laic plotline of female captivity genre such as Elizabeth Marsh’s The Female

xi xii Preface

Captive (1769) and the History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Maria Martin (1807). For her story, Turney received more than £100,000 in a lucra- tive joint deal with The Sun and ITV channel. None of her male comrades received as much. Her story continued to attract the headlines, while theirs virtually sank into oblivion. Obviously, the account of a female hostage has a much higher media value than male tales. Another post 9/11 female captivity story that attracted huge media atten- tion and was frequently invoked in relation to Turney’s abduction is that of the American Private Jessica Lynch. On 23 March 2003, during the early stages of the Allied Forces’ invasion of Iraq, 19-year-old Lynch was captured by the Iraqis following her injury in a road accident and placed in a private room for treatment in Nassiriya hospital. When the news of her imprison- ment reached the US forces, Special Forces commandos raided the hospital and rescued her. The dramatic rescue operation was filmed and the foot- age aired on television world wide. Lynch immediately developed into a national icon and her captivity and rescue began to be framed within the rhetorics and politics of a female captivity tradition. The media made references to Lynch as a brave American female soldier with blond hair, while The Washington Postt (3 April 2003) invoked her ‘daring exploits’ in her standoff against the Iraqis, claiming that she ‘continued firing at Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds’, preferring death before being ‘taken alive’. Commenting on Lynch’s story of captivity and redemption, The New York Times (6 April 2003) says that it reads as a ‘classic happy ending of a classic American captivity story’. Miss Lynch was young, blond, pretty, and single, a perfect typecast for a captivity heroine. Like the American heroines in Indian captivity the desert captive ‘confronted dangers and upheld her faith; in so doing, she became a symbol, representing the nation’s virtuous identity to itself’. Simultaneously with this highly romanticised image of the American desert heroine, Lynch was construed as a victim of alien sexuality. ‘Heroine Tells of Ordeal: I Was Raped by Saddam’s Beasts’ reads a sensational headline in the Daily Starr (7 November 2003). In I am a Soldier, Too (2003), Lynch’s biographer, Rick Bragg, deliberately entitles one of the chapters ‘A Blonde Captive’ to associate her experience with the Oriental and Indian captivity tradition. Bragg, invoking an allegation recurrent in Western Barbary captivity discourse during the age of piracy, affirms that Lynch was cruelly tortured and sodomized. Lynch never actually claims to have been sexually abused, yet, even when she contradicts the allegation, she complicitously does nothing to prevent its circulation in her biography. The perpetuation of the stereotypical image of a rapist Muslim molesting a white female is meant not only to demonize the enemy and rally support for the war efforts but also to promote the market- ability of the captive’s tale. For her book rights Lynch signed a contract worth $1 million. Preface xiii

Lynch became the symbol of the American conquest of Iraq. The Iraqi insurgents were determined to upset the American sense of victory and heroism by trying ‘to kidnap an American woman in order to shock the American public’ (The Washington Times, 1 July 2004). This became more urgent following the release of the shocking Abu Ghraib images with an American woman, Lynndie England, sexually torturing Iraqi POWs and the reports of the systematic rape of Iraqi women detainees by US guards. The insurgents’ plan would materialize on 7 January 2006, with the abduction of 28-year-old Jill Carroll, a freelancer for the Christian Science Monitor. The captors threatened death to their hostage unless the Americans released Iraqi women from military custody. The US forces raided houses and arrested or killed Iraqis in a desperate attempt to set Carroll free. The Lynch rescue scenario, however, could not be repeated. Carroll was paraded in several videos pleading for the US to comply with her kidnappers’ demands. The image of a wretched female hostage, trembling, sobbing and begging to be released from her heavily armed captors, who pose in their black attire with threatening banners, was intended by the kidnappers to shock American public opinion and project their enemies in a position of helpless vulnerability through the metaphor of the powerless female body. Carroll was also coerced to promote her captors’ agenda. In the videos Carroll denounced the forces of occupation, describing her kidnappers as patriotic mujahideen who battle for the liberation of their country. Interestingly, in an interview on Baghdad Television following her release after about three months in captivity, Carroll still talked of her captors in positive terms. ‘I was treated very well’, she says, ‘They never threatened me in any way.’ Confoundingly, even after her homecoming, Carroll continued to humanize her abductors. In her captivity narrative ‘Hostage: The Jill Carroll Story’, serialized in The Christian Science Monitorr in August 2006, Carroll affirms that during her captivity she enjoyed many privileges: her captors treated her kindly, calling her their sister. And unlike in the case of Turney or Lynch, Carroll makes no reference to sexual threat; the real threat she faced was of a spiritual nature. Echoing a common trope in female Barbary captivity stories, Carroll says that her captors began to teach her the Qur’an and zealously endeavoured to persuade her to become a Muslim. Carroll was eager to learn more about Islam but unwilling to change her faith. A post 9/11 hostage who was willing to cross the religious and cultural boundary is 43-year-old British journalist Yvonne Ridley. Ridley was arrested by the Taliban on 28 September 2001 while trying to sneak into Afghanistan disguised in a burqa. She was incarcerated in Kabul and faced trial on sus- picion of spying. In her captivity autobiography In the Hands of the Taliban (2001), Ridley writes that on the way to Jalalabad she dreaded being gang- raped when one of the Taliban started fondling her. She was also greatly terrified at the idea of being stoned to death as a spy. However, the Taliban treated her courteously and set her free. Back home, Ridley was horrified xiv Preface to discover that during her captivity the British intelligence or the CIA had leaked false information framing her as an Israeli spy so as to have her executed by the Taliban and thereby bolster popular support for coalition air-strikes on Afghanistan. ‘Obviously if the barbaric Taliban had tortured and killed me’, she says, ‘it would have provided a wonderful piece of pro- paganda for the West’. During her captivity, a Taliban cleric tried to persuade Ridley to embrace Islam. She promised to learn more about Islam when she was back in London. She kept her word and eventually converted, adopted the veil, and turned into a bitter critic of the West. The media were perplexed at this unexpected twist in Ridley’s captivity story and quickly diagnosed it as a classic Stockholm Syndrome – the captives’ reaction to kidnapping by sympathizing with their captors. Interestingly, the post 9/11 stories by white women captives in the Orient – Turney, Lynch, Carroll, and Ridley – exhibit striking continuities with Oriental captivity. They, too, have abduction and incarceration in remote and utterly alien lands, fear of death, emotional terror, risk of cultural contamination, and, more importantly, Muslim sexual predation. These are, indeed, the ingredients that have made female captivity memoirs such a fascinatingly gripping and popular genre from the time of the Barbary pirates to the era of the ‘war on terrorism’. This anthology offers a collection of accounts by white women captives in North Africa during the age of piracy. These narratives were very popular and contributed powerfully in the shaping of Western encounters with the Islamic world. In the context of the ‘war on terrorism’, these narratives have assumed a strikingly topical significance as their tropes, rhetorics, and politics have been reproduced and recycled in the post 9/11 narratives by Western women hostages of Islam. Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude, in the writing and publication of this book, to a number of friends, colleagues, and institutions. First of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude and great appreciation to Barbara Guenther for her constant support and encouragement. Guenther has provided me with excellent reference material, invaluable feedback on the first draft of my introduction, and hosted me on several occasions while I was conducting my research at Northwestern University Library. I should also like to record my indebtedness to Nabil Matar, who read the draft of the introduction and offered insightful comments and suggestions. He has been wonderfully supportive and provided me with invaluable references and rare primary sources. Thanks are also due to Laura van den Broek for having patiently and painstakingly checked my translation of Ter Meetelen’s narrative against the Dutch original and for her translation of additional sections. She also generously provided me with priceless archival material. Without her help the translation of Ter Meetelen may never have been completed. NIMAR, the Dutch Institute in Rabat, has generously funded and facilitated the translation project and I would like to record by deep gratitude and appreciation to Jan Hoogland, director of the institute. The anonymous reader for Palgrave Macmillan has made detailed comments and significant suggestions on the manuscript, most of which I have incorporated. I am grateful to the International Development Centre at the Open University, Milton Keynes, in the person of Alcinda Honwana, for award- ing me a fellowship to conduct research in Britain in 2007. Thanks also go to Suman Gupta, the ex-codirector of the Ferguson Centre, for supporting my fellowship application and for his enthusiasm for this project. Though the fellowship was on a different project, it allowed me to acquire the nec- essary references for this book. I must also thank the Moroccan American Commission for Education and Cultural Exchange in Rabat for a Fulbright research grant in the summer of 2008 and Norththwestern University for providing research facilities. During my research visits to Britain and America, I worked at the British Library, the National Archive, the Senate House Library, the Open University Library, the Northwestern University Library, the Regenstein Library at Chicago, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress. The staff at each of these libraries were wonderful and exceptionally helpful and I would like to give them special thanks.

xv xvi Acknowledgements

I likewise thank warmly Brian Edwards for having provided me with references, encouragement, and much needed assistance and for his enthu- siastic support of my application for the Fulbright Grant. My great appreciation goes also to Ricardo Larémont for giving me excellent feedback on my translation of the pieces included in the appendices. Paul Baepler and Felicity Nussbaum have kindly provided me with very useful material. Thanks are also due to Mohammed Laamiri who has been a special source of inspiration to this and other projects. Larbi Rddad and his gracious wife hosted me during my research visit to New York. They made my visit a very fruitful and enjoyable experience and I wish to thank them warmly. Some sections in the introduction have appeared in ‘White Women and Moorish Fancy in Eighteenth-Century Literature’ in The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and Westt (eds) Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). I thank the publisher for permission to use this material. A Note on the Texts

This selection of female Barbary narratives includes eight texts, published over a century, from 1735 to 1830. The first four, printed in Europe, are historical. The other four, printed in America, claim to be historical but they are almost certainly fictitious. The anthology is arranged in chronological order of the date of publication. The narratives went through various editions; in most cases I have used the first edition, except in the case of Velnet where the 1806 edition has been used, instead of the 1800, because the original is hard to read, and in Martin where the 1807 edition has been used, instead of the 1806, because this edition enjoyed a wide circulation. The present English translation of Maria ter Meetelen’s autobiography, Miraculous and Remarkable Events of Twelve Years Slavery, of a Woman, Called Maria ter Meetelen, Resident of Medemblik, is based on the French translation by G. H. Bousquet and G. W. Bousquet-Mirandolle, L’Annotation ponctuelle de la description de voyage étonnante et la captivité remarquable et triste (Paris: Larose, 1956) and checked by Laura van den Broek against the Dutch ver- sion she co-edited in Christenslaven: De slavernij-ervaringen van Cornelis Stout in Algiers, 1678–1680, en Maria ter Meetelen in Marokko, 1731–1743 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2006). Ter Meetelen’s style is very awkward, ungrammatical and sometimes obscure. The present translation has tried to be as faithful to ter Meetelen’s queer style as possible. The original spelling of proper and geographical names have also been preserved. Some of the notes in van den Broek’s edition have been incorporated in this English translation. Elizabeth Marsh’s The Female Captive was published without the name of the author. Dates and names of several people and places have been erased and replaced by long dashes. I have supplanted most of the erased information by relying on a number of sources: first the unique original manuscript Elizabeth Marsh composed soon after her arrival in England under the title The Following Narrative Was Written by Miss Elizabeth Marsh, During her Captivity in Barbary in the Year 1756, available at the Special Collections of the University of California, Los Angeles. Second, the copy of The Female Captive at the British Library (Shelfmark: 1417.a.5) contains manuscript notes by Sir William Musgrave, who seems to have been acquainted with Mrs Crisp’s family, divulging several of the erased names, places, and dates. His notes have been silently incorporated into the present edition. I have also benefited from the letters related to Marsh’s captivity available at the National Archive and from Linda Colley’s biography The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (2007).

xvii xviii A Note on the Texts

The texts are reproduced in their entirety, including prefaces. However, the list of subscribers in Marsh’s The Female Captivee and the ethnographic accounts annexed to Velnet, Martin, Bradley and Laranda have been omitted. I have retained all original forms of spelling and punctuation and typographical inconsistencies (chearful/cheerful) exactly as they appear in the original. I have however modernized ƒ into s and u into v and vv into w and in very few cases corrected obvious typographical errors.