FREE WHITE GOLD: THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF THOMAS PELLOW AND NORTH AFRICAS ONE MILLION EUROPEAN SLAVES PDF Giles Milton,Roland Philipps | 352 pages | 09 May 2005 | Hodder & Stoughton General Division | 9780340794708 | English | London, United Kingdom White Gold by Giles Milton A rather startling account of the fate of more than 40, Europeans captured by North African pirates and enslaved in Arab states, held to White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africas One Million European Slaves, occasionally rising to positions of power, or more A wonderful evocation of the white slave trade in Morocco during the 17thth centuries. Milton is a very good writer who brings the story of the slaves and their captors to life. I had never heard Giles Milton. The true story of white European slaves in eighteenth century Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco In the summer ofa Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow and fifty-one of his comrades were captured at sea by the Barbary corsairs. Their captors--Ali Hakem and his network of Islamic slave traders--had declared war on the whole of Christendom. France, Spain, England and Italy had suffered a series of devastating attacks. 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. 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. An extraordinary and shocking story, drawn from unpublished letters and manuscripts written by slaves and by the padres and ambassadors sent to free them, White Gold reveals a disturbing and long forgotten chapter of history. He lives in London. A side order of couscous | Books | The Guardian It is commonly accepted that more than 15 million Africans were brutally enslaved in the 17th and 18th centuries, the majority of them captured in west Africa by Arab traders. In White Gold, Giles Milton illuminates the less-well-known history of the Europeans who were captured for the north African slave markets by Barbary pirates. He asserts that there may have been one million such "white slaves" seized from Spain, France, England and even the fledgling American colonies. The "Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow" is a lens through which the wider story of the relationship between the emerging European maritime powers and the long-established sultanates of Barbary is told. Two remarkable characters form the linchpins of this story: Pellow, a Cornish boy, and Sultan Moulay Ismail, the ruler to whom he was enslaved. The year-old Pellow was unfortunate enough to be taken prisoner along with the rest of the five-man crew of the Francis in the summer of They had set sail from Cornwall en route to Genoa with a cargo of salted pilchards. The voyage was the beginning of 23 years' imprisonment at the hands of a savage despot. Taken to the enormous Moroccan imperial palace at Meknes, Pellow's first sight of the sultan was on a gilded chariot being drawn by a harnessed band of wives and eunuchs. Sultan Moulay Ismail appears almost like a pantomime emir, "wrapped in fabulous silks and damasks, with a voluminous silk turban, his waist-length cloak wrought all over with silver and gold and bright red riding boots Milton reveals a man whose "common diversion was, at one motion, to mount his horse, draw his scimitar and cut off the head of the slave who holds his stirrup". Displeased at news that some of his concubines had been visiting one another without permission, he punished more than a dozen of them by extracting all of their teeth. Unsurprisingly, Pellow had a miserable time as a young slave. After months of torture, which included the infamous bastinado being suspended by the ankles and beaten on the soles of the feethe converted to Islam. While Pellow later wrote that his conversion was made purely under duress, and that God would forgive him, "knowing that I never gave up the consent of the heart", his conversion had serious practical consequences. First, it meant he would suffer a brutal circumcision, and more seriously he would not be eligible for ransom, since apostates gave up their right to Christian salvation. Pellow's strength of character and quick mind impressed the sultan. He ordered that Pellow be instructed in Arabic and put to work as a palace retainer. He was eventually made a guard in the royal household on the fringes of the royal harem. He was on duty one night when the sultan banged on the outer door demanding to be let into the harem. According to protocol he was supposed to send advance warning of a conjugal visit. The boy now 15 shouted through the door telling Ismail that "he must be an impostor" since the real sultan was so honourable that he would never break palace protocol in such a way. Pellow then fired a warning shot to frighten the "impostor" away, and listened while the sultan described the revenge he would take in the morning. Yet the sultan recognised Pellow's loyalty and he rose further within the household, eventually becoming a personal attendant and carrying a wooden club with which Ismail would frequently "knock his people on the head". Further adventures included being sent to command a remote garrison fort, being assigned a Muslim wife with whom he had a child, and two failed attempts at escape. The deaths of Pellow's wife White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africas One Million European Slaves daughter perhaps provided him with White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africas One Million European Slaves final incentive and, after a slave-capturing expedition across the Sahara, he eventually found passage on a ship to the British colony at Gibraltar. He reached London in In an Odysseus-like homecoming to Penryn, he was amazed to find his parents still alive. He eventually went on to write a best-selling account of his travels - a document on which Milton understandably draws heavily. It is not just Pellow's extraordinary life that holds the attention in White Gold. Behind Moulay Ismail's despotic personality Milton detects "vainglorious dreams of restoring Morocco to a position in which the country would be considered the equal of the great powers in Europe". Capturing large numbers of white slaves was part of a strategy to gain leverage over "the great powers of Christendom". We can only be awed by the financial power that allowed Ismail to order giant platters that could hold enough couscous to feed people or to command the laying of foundations for 50 adjoining palaces at Dar al Makhzen with stables for 12, horses. White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africas One Million European Slaves behind it all lay what Milton calls a fanatical religious devotion "that was provoking a growing backlash against Islam in almost every nation White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africas One Million European Slaves Europe". When Moulay Ismail sent a Moroccan ambassador to the court of Charles II, the diarist John Evelyn reported that the delegation "drank a little milk and water However, on their return to Morocco Ismail accused the ambassador and his men of being too friendly with their Christian hosts. The ambassador was put in chains and his companions castrated. Gripping though such details are, it is in Milton's almost casual asides that the repetitive and painful echoes of history are most keenly felt. In dealing with the plight of hapless slaves taken from New England, for example, he tells us that "Few in colonial North America were interested in understanding the world of Islam, and even in Britain there was almost no desire to peer beneath the surface of the frightening world of Barbary". If there is a fault in this book it lies perhaps in Milton's brief attempts to infiltrate himself into the narrative. These interludes are rather tentative compared to his confident recounting and reconstruction of 18th-century Moroccan life. But Milton has ingeniously retrieved and polished a hidden nugget from the remarkable treasure house of British history. Education Schools Teachers Universities Students. A side order of couscous. Giles Milton's remarkable tale of 18th-century slavery, White Gold, is a hidden nugget from the treasure house of history, says Tim Ecott. Buy White Gold at Amazon. Tim Ecott. White Gold by Giles Milton | Waterstones Our Number One name White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africas One Million European Slaves popular history is back with an explosive new paperback, a sensational new cover look and a 'fiction' style marketing campaign that will strike gold in summer This is the forgotten story of the White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africas One Million European Slaves white Europeans, snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of North Africa to be sold to the highest bidder. Ignored by their own governments, and forced to endure the harshest of conditions, very few lived to tell the tale. Using the firsthand testimony of a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow, Giles Milton vividly reconstructs a disturbing, little known chapter of history. Pellow was bought by the tyrannical sultan of Morocco who was constructing an imperial pleasure palace of enormous scale and grandeur, built entirely by Christian slave labour.