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By Susan
Piracy in the 21st century is more likely to take place in cyberspace than on the high seas. However, after hearing for some years of the crimes of Somali pirates, we’re now being warned of piratical activity off the coast of West Africa.
An 18th-century Spaniard who read (or heard read) their chapbooks would have been acutely aware of the threat of Ottoman pirates active closer to home in the Mediterranean. Such pirates were real enough, but popular accounts of them naturally perpetuated motifs from earlier literature or even folklore.
In its collection of 18th-century Spanish chapbooks the Library has 10 items recounting encounters between Spaniards and the Muslims of Tunis, Algiers and Constantinople.
A case in point is the first-person narrative, in verse, of one Francisco Hernández, a soldier of Puerto de Santa María, who is captured off the coast of Oran, then a Spanish possession, by pirates from Algiers. (These chapbooks like to record the place of origin of their protagonists; this I see as confirmation that home has a particular importance even in tales set far away.) He is bought by a Moor called Mustafa, who makes him his majordomo. They treat each other with the inter-faith chivalry which has a long history in Spanish literature from the Cid onwards.
However, after a year his master asks him to convert and marry his daughter Zelima. Francisco refuses, denouncing Mustafa’s faith as a religion of ‘tricks’ and ‘false prophecies’ founded by a ‘sorcerer’.
Such accusations are the common currency of interfaith insult. The chivalrous relations between Muslim and Christian are broken and the narrative moves into clearly ideological drive. Francisco is treated like an animal, doing hard labour at the noria (a waterwheel, normally powered by mules) and being fed on barley. When his captors destroy his rosary he kills two Moors, for which he is sentenced to the stake. His life is saved by a storm which extinguishes the flames.
Francisco Hernandez doing hard labour. BL 1074.g.23(61) (Whitehead N26)
His tormentors then shut him in a chest, which is transported by the intervention of the Virgin Mary to a Christian ship which takes him home. The chest now bears a sign reading:
Aqui dentro hay un Cautivo,
que Yo la Virgen Maria,
esta noche lo he sacado
de dentro de Berberia.
[Herein lies a captive whom I the Virgin Mary this night have taken out of Barbary]
Although works of undoubted fiction, these tales have a basis in historical fact, or rather they address an anxiety which was justified by contemporary events. As Ellen G. Friedman says: “It is clear that during most of the 18th century, when North African piracy was ostensively in decline, the overwhelming majority of Spanish captives in North Africa had been victims of piracy, and the Spanish coasts were the source of more than half the total” (p. 31). In the more fictionalised versions in the chapbooks the captures take place at sea, in accordance with the romance motif of the sea as a locus of flux and instability.
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This post was previously published on bl.uk and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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