Whenever we read about slaves, we generally think of them as slaves captured from Africa.

I just started reading a book, that tells a completely different story!

WHITE GOLD: THE EXTRAORDINARILY STORY OF THOMAS PELLOW AND ISLAM’S ONE MILLION WHITE SLAVES.

Apparently it all started when the Spanish deported people to North Africa.

They set up shop near Rabat, Morocco, and started a new brand of piracy!

They raided Europe, and collected slaves!

I know some of enjoy reading similar book, so this might be just up your alley!

I am enjoying reading it.

Slavery has been a regrettable institution for centuries. Historically, it had little to do with race either by the enslaved or the slavers. It always had to do about power. In the U.S. it has all been about race. That ignores that the folks that captured and sold those people into slavery were themselves African for the most part.

I'm not defending the practice by any means. I just think everyone should be knowledgeable about the history and few people are.

Agree. Other than the fact slavery isn’t even really over, reading the historical accounts puts a great deal of things in perspective. It is a human problem and will be for a long time.

The story of Zanzibar is fascinating. In today’s language it was people of color raiding and stealing other people of color to sell to other people of color to sell yet again to more people of color. And it only ended 11 years after the Civil War and then (probably) only technically ended.

Slavery still around today. Do a search on Human Trafficking, PC for slavery. Also American slavery was not about color. My family been here since 1700, and my 4th great grandfather was a slave, and no blacks in my background. Again, if researched, will find plenty of White Slaves brought here too, and, indeed, the word slave comes from Slav(ic). Look for book, THey Were Whte and They Were Slaves.

Yes.

Slavery is still thriving with us.

In England they actually passed a law allowing it for big corporations.

They call it ZERO HOUR labor.

All factories in China making all the Western gadgets are employing slave labor.

No one cares.

I want to report the death Friday evening, of Paul (Kambada) Grobler, formerly of Zimbabwe. He grew up in Zimbabwe, which was still Rhodesia when I hunted with him in 1972. Book on his life titled African Epic,by Harlan, is out there. I was his 2nd hunting client when he first got into the guide business. He had become very successful and not only still had the hunting business, but also a fishing fleet, build homes, had crocodile famring business. But when Mugabe came into power, he was eventually told he and his family had to leave. They had lived in Australia for some years. His son and dil, and grandkids live there still. His wife, Marie, died about 2 years ago.

I am not sure how many "current, modern, hunters know of him, but was well repected. If this information can somehow be let out to the members on Accurate Reloading would be great. I tried to find someway to list it, but couldn't. Thanks

The uneasy peace was not to last long. The Salé corsairs, who depended upon slave trading for their livelihood, pleaded with Sidi Mohammed to abandon the truce. They argued that King Charles I had not respected his side of the agreement, having sent just four cannon, and reminded the marabout that the English king had displayed a singular lack of interest in attacking the Spanish. When it dawned on Sidi Mohammed that no military assistance was to be forthcoming, he ordered a series of spectacular new raids on England’s southern coast. Within a few months, Salé’s dungeons were once again filled with English captives. In one month alone—May 1635—more than 150 Englishmen were seized “and eight of them in Morocco circumcised perforce, and tortured to turne Moores.” The king’s patience finally snapped. When he learned that there were almost 1,200 captives in Salé, “amonge which there is 27 woemen,” he vowed to crush the slave traders once and for all. Diplomacy had failed. Now, the only answer was war.

Thank you Saeed
Gotta love Amazon, I just ordered it 6 am on Sunday

The Barbary corsairs were indiscriminate when it came to choosing their victims, seizing even merchants and mariners from the colonies of North America. In 1645, a fourteen–gun ship from Massachusetts was the first colonial American vessel to be attacked by an Islamic pirate vessel. The crew managed to fight off this assault, but many of their seafaring comrades were not so fortunate. By the 1660s, a steady trickle of Americans found themselves captured and enslaved in North Africa. The corsairs scored their greatest coup when they captured Seth Southwell, King Charles II’s newly appointed governor of Carolina. It was fortuitous for the king that one of his admirals had recently detained two influential Islamic corsairs, who were released in exchange for Southwell. The Sallee Rovers continued to plunder English shipping, in spite of the treaties they had signed. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the West Country fishermen were at their wits’ end. Virtually every coastal port had been touched in some way by the white slave trade, and there seemed no hope of ending the crisis. In 1672, there was—at long last—a glimmer of good news. The ruling sultan was dead and Morocco looked certain to plunge into civil war. It was hoped that in the ensuing chaos, the nations of Christian Europe could finally put an end to the trade in white slaves.

Gotta love history
And it repeats itself on and on and on and nobody is immune to doing bad deeds...welcome to “humanity”

Yes I heard of that there were more than any in the America’s

CAPTAIN ALI HAΚEM had sailed from Salé in the company of Admiral el-Mediouni. The two corsair vessels had been stalking the English ships for several hours.

They knew that surprise was their most devastating weapon and continued to monitor the movements of the Francis and the George for some time, safe in the knowledge that their low-sided ships were invisible to their English prey.

In the tense hours that preceded an attack, it was customary to slaughter the sheep that had been given by the marabout. This was a solemn, if bloody, affair.

According to Joseph Pitts, an English captive who witnessed one of these sacrifices, the captain first chopped off the head of the sheep. Then, the crew “immediately take out the entrails and throw them and the head overboard.”

After skinning the legs and belly, “they cut the body in two parts by the middle.” One part was thrown over the right side of the ship, and the other was thrown over the left. This was done, wrote Pitts, “as a kind of propitiation.” Once the sacrifice was complete, the corsairs closed in on their prey. It had long been their custom to raise false colors in order to lure their unsuspecting victims to within striking distance.

Only when the target vessel was at close quarters did the corsairs reveal their true intent by dramatically switching flags. Unfurled by the wind, these piratical banners usually depicted an arm brandishing a curved scimitar and were designed to frighten the hapless mariners into submission. Captain Pellow and his crew were caught completely off guard by the two Salé xebecs. Young Thomas would later note that none of the crew had spied their pursuers until it was too late and they were “very unhappily surprised.”

He writes little of the ensuing attack, perhaps because almost a quarter of the century would pass before he recorded the story of his capture. Other victims recalled their sheer terror at the sight of the corsairs, whose shaved heads, bare arms and flashing scimitars left them quaking with fear. To Joseph Pitts, a cabin boy like Pellow, the experience was forever seared into his memory. “The enemy seemed to me as monstrous ravenous creatures,” he wrote, “which made me cry out ‘Oh master! I am afraid they will kill us and eat us.’” The ship’s captain had replied with uncanny prescience: “‘No, my child, … they will carry us to Algier and sell us.’”

On the back of my edition of this book is a blurb by Reza Aslan of the Post: A fascinating account...a fun and fanciful story from a little-known chapter in history.”

Fun?

The matamores were underground cells, which each accommodated some fifteen or twenty slaves. The only light and ventilation came from a small iron grate in the roof; in winter, rain poured through this opening and flooded the floor. The grate provided the only access to the outside world. On the rare occasions when slaves were allowed out, a rope was suspended from the iron bars and they had to clamber up, using muscles that had often not been exercised for many weeks. But the luxury of fresh air was rare indeed. For weeks on end—until the next slave auction—the pitiful captives were held underground in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. Many slaves left accounts of these horrendous places, but only one—written by Germain Mouette—charts the full horror of life in this subterranean hell. The largest of Salé’s

subterranean dungeons, which was often used for the most recently arrived captives, was supported by brick pillars. It was so deep in the earth that water and sewage frequently bubbled up from the mud floor in the wet winter months. “In this, the Christians for the most part cannot lye on the ground as they do in the others,” wrote Mouette, “because there is water in it knee deep, six months in the year.” To avoid getting soaked, “they make a sort of hammocks, or beds of ropes, hanging by great nails one above another, in such manner, that the lowermost almost touch the water with their backs.” All too often, the topmost hammock would come crashing down, “and then he and all under him certainly fall into the water where they must continue the rest of the night.” Although the smaller dungeons were not so deep in the earth, they were overcrowded and extremely claustrophobic. Mouette said that there was so little room in the cells that the captives were forced to lie in a circle with their feet meeting in the middle. “There is no more space left,” he wrote, “than to hold an earthen vessel to ease themselves in.” The arrival of Captain Pellow and his men coincided with the worst of the summer humidity, which covered the rush matting they were given as bedding with a thick layer of mold. According to Mouette, these mats had “such a noisome scent caus’d by the dampnes of the earth that the place becomes intolerable when all the slaves are in, and it grows warm.” The smallest of the matamores were usually “filthy, stinking and full of vermin,” and death was all too often a blessed release.

What don’t make sense with slavers, that they let slaves suffer and die, being expensive commodity at the same time
I can see those matamores being for maybe prisoners but for slaves/ goods?
Slavers don’t seem to have business sense then...

Same philosophy as the sexual human traffickers. They view it as there's more where those came from. They have no compassion for their victims and view them as totally fungible, Those "people", if you can call them that, are the lowest of the low and should be exterminated.

Many of the white slaves the sultan took were to gain leverage against the European countries.


Once you consider a group of people as subhuman, you can do an awful lot to them before your conscience kicks in. The Rape of Nanking comes to mind.

All those white slaves changed the genes of North Africa forever. I wonder how many white and Asian slaves there were in history compared to black slaves. Human nature is immutable and sadly we have slaves to this day.

If you want to read about white slavery (1800's in the southwest USA) research "The Valley of the Tears"