The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
The Books
Ramusio Map (1534). Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library
Thomas Pellow (1704 - c. 1747)
By James Aimer
In 1715, when he was 11 years old, Thomas Pellow embarked on a trip with his uncle from his home in England to Genoa, Italy. Pellow found himself regretting the commitment to make the voyage out to sea, and decided to return home immediately from Italy. Tragically, however, the return journey became a long odyssey after Islamic slave traders captured Pellow and sold him into the white slave trade of the Barbary corsairs. Pellow was subsequently taken to the palace of the sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco in Mesquinez (known today as Meknes), where the boy would become one of his personal slaves. Upon delivery to the kingdom of the sultan, Pellow was subjected to extreme torture, the purpose of which was to force him to renounce his Christian faith and declare himself Muslim. The torture had a profound effect on the young English boy, and he publicly declared himself Muslim, though he maintained in his personal accounts that he never fully relinquished his Christianity, still holding on to a vestige of his former life in England.
Returning to England from a trip to Italy when he was eleven, Thomas Pellow was captured by Barbary corsairs, who sold him as a slave in North Africa. It took him nearly twenty-five years to return home to Penryn, in southwest England.
Pellow suffered through his teenage years, and tragically, as a result of his necessary official declaration of Islamic faith, was not accepted as part of a large group of nearly 300 Britons who were released and sent home under a treaty signed between Commodore Charles Stewart and Moroccan Admiral (and later ambassador to Britain) Abdelkader Pérez in 1720. Stuck on the African continent, by the mid-1720s Pellow had received military training and risen through the ranks, and as a young adult, with a wife and child alongside, saw his fortunes improve as he was given a post guarding a Moorish castle at Tanoorah. By the end of the 1720s, following the death of sultan Moulay Ismail in 1727, Pellow’s life took a dramatic turn. The new sultan, Moulay Ahmad IV, endured a brief and tumultuous rule, twice facing deposition by his counterparts before his death in 1729. Following the end of this brief rule, Moulay Abdullah V enjoyed a longer reign as sultan, though his throne was not without contest: over the years of Abdullah’s rule, Pellow’s life was subject to instability in symphony with the ebb and flow of the fortunes of his new master. To make matters worse, in 1728 Pellow’s wife and daughter both died, leaving him desperate and longing for his English homeland. Under these new circumstances, Pellow attempted, unsuccessfully, to escape from captivity in the same year. In the years that followed, Pellow’s experiences depended largely on allegiance to the sultan’s kingdom, and while his primary trade as a soldier afforded him some freedoms, it was not a life he desired, being forced to plunder and exploit for his livelihood. Eventually, in 1738, Pellow was finally able to enact his plan for escape, wandering the lands for some time before hiding out on the coast, where he encountered other outcasts who shared his plight. Later that same year, Pellow managed to board a merchant vessel bound to Gibraltar. Once there, he secured passage to London aboard the Euphrates. He returned back to England in October of 1738, and the next year after some 23 years abroad, Pellow published his memoir detailing the ordeal.
Thomas Pellow’s trajectory reveals some of the risks and difficulties of Atlantic travel and the trials of surviving in a foreign landscape under far from ideal conditions. His struggle through 23 years of captivity offers a remarkable tale of endurance, far from the riches and glory that many Europeans found through their plundering of foreign kingdoms. Pellow’s tale reminds us that Atlantic travelers came in all shapes and sizes, and all of them could expect some travails as part of their Atlantic crossings. While being an Englishman offered Pellow some benefits, in the ‘wild West’ of the Atlantic his Englishness often proved of little use. From a very young age, he endured great suffering. Pellow had to relinquish so many elements of who he really was in order to
During the reign of Moulay Ismail, Pellow received military training and was able to rise to the ranks, eventually being assigned to guard a castle in Tanoorah. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
adapt to his captivity and survive. Becoming a slave meant subjection to horrific physical atrocities, but the toll of relinquishing other aspects of his humanity had a profound impact on Pellow too. According to Pellow, his conversion to the Muslim faith offered a strategy for survival, and though we may never know how true this claim really was, there is little doubt that such a dramatic spiritual and emotional change had a lasting effect on his psyche, particularly given the firm cultural ideals of Christianity at the time. Today, such a conversion may seem less dramatic in light of our more fluid multicultural ideals, but for Pellow, we can safely assume that such a religious conversion signified the grave nature of his plight. This sort of sacrifice occasionally had to be made by Atlantic travelers of the era, such as Elizabeth Marsh, (of Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh) and such a sacrifice, even with strategic motivations, represented the surrender of some spiritual aspect in exchange for salvation of their physical safety. In Pellow’s case, it proved to be a tragic tradeoff.
Tragically, despite his desperation to return home, Pellow’s odyssey was actually far from over once he returned to England, and his nightmare reveals something seldom understood about rapidly evolving cultural transformations and the difficulties of ongoing adjustment in the face of changing environments. Decades of suffering in northern Africa left an indelible mark that made it impossible for him to re-assimilate into England, a “civilized” country to which he no longer felt he did fully belong. Back home, in Penryn, the embattled Pellow was on his own, an outsider in his own land. So often we focus on the physical trajectories of travelers, but seldom pay attention to the mental and emotional struggles they endure on their own personal battlefields, often long after the physical toll has finished. For Pellow, returning home did not provide the catharsis he had long been searching for: ‘home’ had become something else, and like him, the people and places had changed beyond what he could recognize as familiar. In a world in motion, living between two cultures did not necessarily result in mastery of both cultural landscapes. For Pellow, life between two worlds meant being a permanent outsider: ill-fitting abroad and a stranger in his own land.
After more than twenty years in Morocco, Pellow managed to escape in 1738, during the reign of Moulay Abdullah V. Image from Pellow, The Adventures of Thomas Pellow.
References
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Baigent, Elizabeth. “Pellow [Pellew], Thomas (b. 1703/4).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 September 2004. https://doi-org.proxy.library.cornell.edu/10.1093/ref:odnb/21812
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Milton, Giles. White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam's One Million White Slaves. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
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Pellow, Thomas. The history of the long captivity and adventures of Thomas Pellow, in South-Barbary. Giving an account of his being taken by two Sallee rovers, and carry'd a slave to Mequinez ... his various adventures in that country for twenty-three years: escape, and return home. In which is introduced, a particular account of the manners and customs of the Moors ... Together with a description of the cities, towns, and publick buildings in those kingdoms ... Written by himself. Second Edition. London: Printed for R. Goadby, 1740.