The Pirate Coast(16)

In the courtyard, Murad and Yussef now told the American prisoners they expected to convert the potent Philadelphia to Islam, as it were, and have it lead the Tripoli fleet. Murad immediately claimed command; Yussef, listening to the marabout’s advice, planned to rename it: Gift of Allah.

Yussef directed questions in Italian about America’s military to Murad, who in turn translated them to the crewmen. The American sailors shamelessly exaggerated. Yussef, tired of the hyperbole, asked if there were any skilled men, such as blacksmiths and carpenters, among the crew. Several men raised their hands, and Yussef informed them that if they were willing, they would be paid to work for him. The prisoners were now even more baffled as to what Barbary slavery would be like.

Murad and Yussef departed, and soon after, the 270 crewmen were marched through byways so narrow two loaded camels could barely pass abreast to the castle’s main gate. They exited into the old city and were herded to a run-down warehouse, full of sacks of grain, lumber, and assorted rubbish. The overseers ordered them to haul everything outside. Just like the boatswain’s mates on the ship, the overseers beat the slaggards.

Ray estimated the dimensions of their new prison to be fifty feet by twenty feet, with a twenty-five-foot-high roof. Three shafts of daylight illuminated the gloomy place, one from a small skylight and the other two from barred windows. The men soon discovered that, just like aboard ship, there wasn’t enough space for all of them to lie down at once. Quick calculations reveal that of the one thousand square feet, each of the 270 prisoners would have less than four square feet in which to stand or curl up.

Finally, after twenty-six hours without food, the men were each fed one small white loaf of bread. They were then ordered to march single file into the prison so they could be counted; upon re-entering, they were instructed to doff their hats to the head jailor, Abdallah, a bushy-bearded Moor, whom the men quickly dubbed “Captain Blackbeard.” Some prisoners preferred braying to hat-doffing.

The following morning and every morning afterward, the American sailors learned the new rhythm of their lives as slaves on the coast of Barbary. The overseers—from a crooked-legged kindly old Greek nicknamed Bandy to a fierce rod-swinging Tripoli native, Red-Jacket—woke the men just before dawn and quickly parceled them out for various tasks, from hauling pig iron ballast out of the stinking hold of the Philadelphia to the far more pleasant job of carrying a cauldron to a harem. (Ray marveled: While the women in the streets were “muffled up in blankets, which conceal their faces and shapes except one eye,” the women of the harem “were fantastically wrapped in loose robes of striped silk; their arms, necks and bosoms bare, their eyelids stained round the edges with black, their hair braided, turned up . . . with a broad tinsel fillet. They had three or four rings in each ear as large in circumference as a dollar.”)

Despite all the harsh tales they had heard about slavery in Barbary, they were surprised to discover that when the overseers that day couldn’t find enough tasks for 270 men, the unassigned were allowed to wander around the city, so long as they returned to the prison at sundown. Christians and Jews ran taprooms, and anyone who had a coin or something of value could buy date palm liquor or some other alcoholic drink.

The second evening of slave life, a handful of sailors returned drunk to the barracks. Captain Blackbeard ordered the bastinado, that preferred North African punishment. The men’s feet were twirled in the rope, their bare soles lifted and exposed, as the overseer whacked them with a date palm tree limb, about three feet long like a “walking stick . . . hard and very heavy.” The next morning the punished men, who could hardly walk, were forced to do their labors while dragging twenty-pound chains at each ankle.

Hunger also remained a constant nagging annoyance. They were fed once a day, at noon. Each man, working often from sunup to sundown, received two twelve-ounce loaves of black sour bread, made of poorly ground flour chocked with unchewable stalks and chaff. And each night at lockup, the men fought in a mad scramble for floor space to sleep and often wound up sprawled all over one another. Fastidious Private Ray preferred to doze sitting up.

Over the next week, the men—running errands, doing tasks—also began to gather a sense of Tripoli. The city itself, Ray observed, rose up from a lush coastal plain of gardens and endless rows of date palms. The stone houses were cobbled together, built and rebuilt, on the ruins of preceding civilizations such as Greek and Roman; a vegetable market of squatting sellers now occupied the Triumphal Arch of Marcus Aurelius. Thick high medieval walls ringed the entire land side of the city; three heavily guarded gates opened at sunrise and closed at sunset. The bulbous domes of a handful of mosques defied the monotony of white flat-roofed terraced houses, while the minarets, where strong-voiced muezzins called the faithful to prayer, stood like exclamation points of faith. Perched at the highest point of the city overlooking the harbor, the Bashaw’s walled castle enclosed a maze of salons and rooms; from the outside, the castle was a nondescript mishmash, but inside, it was ornate, with colorful tiles setting off pious calligraphy, and elaborate carpets quieting footfall.