Des Ekin - The Lionkeeper of Algiers: How an American Captive Rose to Power in Barbary and Saved His Homeland from War

A relived life I wish for.

Isaac Stephens

J n alphabetical order

John and Abigail Adams moved into the Presidents House in Philadelphia one month after they welcomed home the Algiers captives in 1797. John succeeded George Washington and, in 1800, became the first president to occupy the White House. He built the US Navy. Abigail died in 1818, leaving a historical treasure trove of wise and perceptive letters. She shares with Barbara Bush the distinction of being the wife of one US president and the mother of another (in her case, John Quincy Adams, 18251829). John Adams died, aged ninety, in 1826.

Joel Barlow stayed in Algiers until July 1797 and hated every minute of it. Upon leaving, a surly Barlow said that he was handing all of Barbary back to the devil. He helped draft the peace treaty for Tripoli, including its controversial clause stating that the US government was not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. After reuniting with his wife in Paris, he returned to America where he worked on his enormous epic poem The Columbiad. However, he is best known today for his lighthearted early poem The Hasty Pudding, which appears in many school poetry textbooks. A town in Ohio bears his surname.

Interesting fact: According to one biographer, this man who helped to liberate more than seven dozen captives from Algiers returned to Americaand bought a Black couple to serve as his personal slaves in his Washington household. (He later sold them for $400 but stipulated in the deal that they should be freed after another six years of work.) Barlows death was Tolstoyan. He became caught up in the French armys retreat from Russia and died of exposure, aged fifty-eight, in a Polish village during Christmas 1812.

Isaac Brooks, the sailor and journal keeper who was captured along with John Thomas in the ship President, went almost totally blind in Algiers as a result of the miseries of this unparalleled servitude. Back home in Philadelphia, he turned this challenge into an advantage by dictating his memories of life in Algiers to a ghostwriter named James Wilson Stevens. His accounts were featured in a best-selling book with the unelectrifying title An Historical and Geographical Account of Algiers. Stevens paid tribute to Brooks as a gentleman of veracity and intelligence. The book was dedicated to Joel Barlow.

James Cathcart lived to seventy-six. His near half-century of life post-Algiers must be reserved for another book, but heres a quick gallop through it.

His tenure as a consul in Tripoli ended abruptly in 1801 when the pasha had the flagstaff at the US consulate chopped down in a declaration of war. The conflict that later became known as the First Barbary War lasted until 1805 and established the reputation of the new American navyas celebrated in the phrase the shores of Tripoli in the Marines Hymn. After a US naval blockade of Tripoli proved unsuccessful, Cathcart helped concoct a plan to provoke a regime change. A force of four hundred men under General William Eaton marched across five hundred miles of desert and were about to move toward the capital when a peace deal was brokered. Cathcart went on to serve as US consul in Leghorn, Madeira, and later Cadiz before taking domestic positions.

It would be nice to report that he lived happily ever after, but he was as damaged as one might expect of a man who had been subjected to severe physical and psychological torture during nearly eleven years of traumatic captivity. Crippled by rheumatism in limbs that had been distorted by systematic beatings and hard labor, he became increasingly crabbed and querulous. Jobless in his fifties, he was forced to write humiliating letters to his government seeking employment. He married and raised a family of twelve childrenborn in different places around the worldwhom he described as my wandering tribe of Africans, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Americans.

He died on October 6, 1843. It was only after his death that the government finally agreed to pay $30,000 to his family in compensation for the huge personal expense hed incurred in saving the peace with Algiers.

John Foss, the American hostage and indefatigable diarist, took a very long time getting home. When most of his freed countrymen headed directly home from Marseilles, Foss volunteered as first mate on a trading mission in the Mediterranean, along with a captain and fourteen crewmen who were all former US captives from Algiers. Staying with the same ship, La Fortune, they sailed to Bona, near Algiers, to pick up a cargo of wheat to bring back to Marseilles. But near the coast of France, they were captured by two British ships, taken to Elba, and given the choice of either joining the Royal Navy or being left stranded. A few crewmen agreed to join the navy but Foss and the othersabandoned in Elba without money or clothesrefused and had to beg a passage back to Leghorn on another ship.

After much shuttling around the Mediterranean, he finally secured a ticket on a passenger ship to Philadelphia. On the way he was captured again, three times, by Spanish and French privateers and once again by the Royal Navy. On each occasion he was set free.

Foss hadnt even cleared the Mediterranean when he was captured for a fifth time near Gibraltar, again by privateers from Spain. By this time Foss was growing antsy, and he lashed out with a sword, wounding one of his attackers on the arm. He was chained up and thrown into a dungeon in Ceuta in Spanish North Africa.

Once he was freed and headed for America, his troubles didnt end. A Spanish privateer attacked his homebound ship in the open Atlantic and stripped it of almost all its provisions before setting it loose. The men subsisted for forty days on a starvation ration of less than one biscuit a day until they were lucky enough to encounter an American ship and obtain food and water. Foss finally arrived in Philadelphia in April, promptly fell ill, and did not arrive home in Newburyport until late Augustmore than a year after leaving Algiers. He was one of only four survivors of the brig Polly.

John Foss had written his diary in Algiers in an attempt to take his mind off the daily drudgery of his life as a captive. He thought no one would ever read it, but when it was published in two editions in 1798, it became an instant success and was the forerunner of a series of similar captivity narratives. It remains a valuable resource for historians of this period.

Hassan, Dey of Algiers, died in 1798 after a reign of seven years, when a leg wound was left untreated and became gangrenous. Although utterly ruthless and unprincipled, Hassan had the vision to see the potential of the United States as a trading partner in the modern sense but missed the opportunity to drag Algiers out of the medieval era. Just like every dey before him, he was stuck firmly in the piratical hit-and-run ethos of an earlier epoch and could not adapt to a changing world that would soon be carved up by giants of commerce and naval superpowers.

David Humphreys, the US minister in Lisbon, moved on to Madrid and served two years there before leaving the diplomatic corps. His later life was surprising: he obtained permission from the Spanish government to import a hundred merino sheep into America, and, after their superior quality wool proved an instant sensation in the New World, he became acknowledged as the founder of the US woolen industry. A celebrated wit, he also wrote a hit play, The Yankee in England, that introduced the stock character of the innocently comical Yankee abroad, which remained popular as a theatrical and Hollywood stereotype until the mid-1900s. He died in Connecticut in 1818.

Thomas Jefferson became, of course, the third president of the United States in March 1801 and served two terms. His presidency is remembered for his tough stance against the Barbary corsairs and for the United States westward expansion. Later, he went on to found the University of Virginia. Apart from his master achievement, the Declaration of Independence, he is best known today for his quirky neo-Palladian mansion Monticello. His shining reputation as a champion of equality has dimmed in the modern era with the increasing acknowledgmenthardly a revelationthat he owned hundreds of slaves and enthusiastically encouraged others to invest in this free source of human labor. Most historians now accept that he fathered four children with his enslaved concubine Sally Hemmings, whom he never formally emancipated. However flawed, Jefferson remains a towering figure in world history.