An American SLAVE in Barbary
A Homeric American Novel
An American Slave in Barbary: The Odyssey of Winston Prescott Jones is the story of a first-generation American student whose commercial ship is captured in the summer of 1801 by Moslem pirates.
He spends the next sixteen years as a captive in Algiers. He rises to become a confidant to the Dey of Algiers, who is desperate to know what made the American shopkeepers and farmers believe they could defeat the British war machine, and how they intended to rule themselves.
In the genre created by Homer, it is a tale of suffering, sin, and redemption, and a young man's epic journey to regain his freedom.
Now, as the sun lowered in its westward descent toward the Atlantic, my thirst and my need to know if my brother might have survived left me no choice. I walked out the dunes, across the flat beach, down onto damp sand that descended at a steep angle into the surf. Without worrying if anyone could see me, I made my way toward Sale. I reasoned that unless, by an unlikely twist of fate, I was found by some friendly villager who wished to take me in and hide me, I would turn myself over to the mercies of the Moroccan authorities of Sale and or their agents, in exchange for a cup of water.
As I reached the portion of the beach near the outskirts of the city, two natives in a horse-drawn cart rode toward me near the waterline. The cart held an unarmed man driving and, next to him, a man armed with a scimitar, pistol, and ammunition belts strapped across his torso. The cart stopped abruptly in front of me. The armed man leaped out of the cart and ran toward me with his sword drawn, pointing at me. “Infidel, don’t move! Come here,” he yelled at me in Arabic as he motioned that I move toward the back of his cart.
As he led me there, I saw in the rear bed two of my shipmates and close friends, Moore and Etheredge. “Jones!” they cried in unison. As I climbed into the back of the cart, they reached out their hands to mine with tears welling up in their eyes.
My new jailor was remarkably a man I recognized as one who boarded our ship when we were captured in the Mediterranean and was among the pirates who sailed it off into the storm. As he ran a chain through the ring in my ankle iron, which I still wore from our original capture, I said, “Lads, do you know if my brother, Robbie, made it ashore?”
Their looks told me what I feared had to be true. They shook their heads while looking down at the floor of the cart.
Larry Kelley
Kelley has written scores of columns on the dangers of Western complacency. In his tenure as a political commentary writer, he has made a significant impact.
His first book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, is the result of ten years of research, and received critical praise as a saga that begins on the plain of Marathon in 490 BC and whose main character is Western Civilization.
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