Barbarian Cruelty. Being a true history of the distressed condition of the Christian captives under the tyranny of Mully Ishmael, Emperor of Morocco, and King of Fez and Macqueness in Barbary. In which is likewise given a particular account of his late wars with the Algerines. The manner of his pirates taking the Christians and others. His breach of faith with Christian princes. A description of his castles and guards, and the places where he keeps his women, his slaves and negroes. With a particular relation of the dangerous escape of the author, and two English men more from thence, after a miserable slavery of ten years. By Francis Brooks.

Bookseller Notes

Scarce to market, with no auction records beyond the present copy, is this account of an English sailor sold into slavery in Meknes, Morocco.Francis Brooks was aboard the William and Mary in 1681 when it was boarded by Algiers corsairs off the coast of Tangier. 'Cut and wounded' by the pirates, the crew was subdued, and carried to Sal, a city state and entrept for the Barbary slave trade. Brooks and his surviving crew mates were sold as chattel, becoming labourers in the imperial capital of Meknes, where they worked on the palace complex and fortifications of Sultan Moulay Isma'il (1672-1727).Brooks' account is full of detail of his time spent in captivity, of the organisation of Meknes, and of the structures by which Isma'il maintained control. Brooks' overseers were members of Isma'il's 'Abid al-Bukhari, a group of enslaved Africans 'who served the emperor in various capacities as bodyguards, governmental administrators, warriors, and slave drivers' (Beach). Brooks' comments on this group, and on his understanding of their status in relation to his own, is now considered a landmark in the perception of slavery as a racialised phenomenon (ibid.). He prefixes the work with an appeal to the monarchs William and Mary, bringing to their attention 'the deplorable and miserable condition' of their subjects enslaved under Isma'il. See: Adam R. Beach, "African Slaves, English Slave Narratives, and Early Modern Morocco." Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 46, no. 3, 2013, pp. 33348.