White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives

It has been said that the Indian captivity narrative, in which kidnapped or captured colonials reported the hardships of imprisonment at the hands of native people, is the first truly American literary genre. In White Slaves, African Masters, historian Paul Baepler shows that this genre had a precursor in the so-called Barbary captivity narrative, in which some unlucky European (or, later, American) describes life as a slave of the Algerian and Moroccan pashas, rulers of the Barbary Coast. Such narratives form part of Cervantes's Don Quixote and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; they also make up a large canon of literary, historical, and autobiographical works that are scarcely known today, even among historians. Yet in their time, these writings were widely circulated. Cotton Mather, the famed New England cleric, used several of them to denounce the Muslims of North Africa, proclaiming from the pulpit that being their prisoner was "the most horrible captivity in the world," and Benjamin Franklin drew on Barbary captivity narratives to decry the slave trade of the Southern United States.

In this one-of-a-kind anthology, Baepler gathers several noteworthy examples from American sources, beginning with Cotton Mather's sermons, continuing through post-Revolutionary War writings, such as Jonathan Cowdery's "American Captives in Tripoli" (whose daring rescue by U.S. marines provided us with the phrase "the shores of Tripoli"), and ending with a bogus narrative by one Eliza Bradley, whose 1820 memoir went into 13 U.S. editions. The narratives, Baepler reminds us, point to the long pattern of mutual misunderstanding that has prevailed between the United States and the Muslim world. Read as history and literature, these narratives also help illuminate a dark corner of the past. --Gregory McNamee