PROLOGUE
Unprepared and Unprotected
Picture to yourself your Brother Citizens or Unfortunate Countrymen in the Algerian State Prisons or Damned Castile, and starved 2/3rd’s and Naked. . . . Once a Citizen of the United States of America, but at present the Most Miserable Slave in Algiers.
—Richard O’Brien, Diary, February 19, 1790
As a fast-moving ship approached the Dauphin off the coast of Portugal, Captain Richard O’Brien saw no cause for alarm. On this warm July day in 1785, America was at peace, and there were many innocent reasons for a friendly ship to come alongside. Perhaps it was a fellow merchant ship needing information or supplies. Perhaps the ship’s captain wanted to warn him of nearby pirates.
By the time O’Brien realized that the ship did not approach in peace, it was too late. The American ship was no match for the Algerian vessel armed with fourteen cannons. A raiding party with daggers gripped between their teeth swarmed over the sides of the Dauphin. The Algerians vastly outnumbered the American crew and quickly claimed the ship and all its goods in the name of their nation’s leader, the dey of Algiers.
Mercilessly, the pirates stripped O’Brien and his men of shoes, hats, and handkerchiefs, leaving them unprotected from the burning sun during the twelve-day voyage back to the North African coast. On arrival in Algiers, the American captives were paraded through the streets as spectators jeered.
The seamen were issued rough sets of native clothing and two blankets each that were to last for the entire period of captivity, whether it was a few weeks or fifty years. Kept in a slave pen, they slept on a stone floor, gazing into the night sky where the hot stars burned above them like lidless eyes, never blinking. Each night there was a roll call, and any man who failed to respond promptly would be chained to a column and whipped soundly in the morning.
Together with men of another captured ship, the Maria, O’Brien’s Dauphin crew broke rocks in the mountains while wearing iron chains Saturday through Thursday. On Friday, the Muslim holy day, the Christian slaves dragged massive sleds loaded with rubble and dirt nearly two miles to the harbor to be unloaded into the sea to form a breakwater. Their workdays began before the sun rose and, for a few blissfully cool hours, they worked in darkness.
Their diet consisted of stale bread, vinegar from a shared bowl at breakfast and lunch, and, on good days, some ground olives. Water was the one necessity provided with any liberality. As a ship captain, O’Brien was treated somewhat better, but he feared that his men would starve to death.
“Our sufferings are beyond our expression or your conception,” O’Brien wrote to America’s minister to France, Thomas Jefferson, two weeks after his arrival in Algiers.1 Those sufferings would only get worse. Several of the captives from the Maria and the Dauphin would die in captivity of yellow fever, overwork, and exposure—and in some ways, they were the lucky ones. The ways out of prison for the remaining prisoners were few: convert to Islam, attempt to escape, or wait for their country to negotiate their release. A few of the captives would be ransomed but, for most, their thin blankets wore out as year after year passed and freedom remained out of reach. Richard O’Brien would be ten years a slave.
America had not yet elected its first president, but it already had its first enemy.