White Slaves, African Masters is a collection of nine narratives written by Americans who were held captive in North Africa. Those narratives included are: Cotton Mather's The Glory of Goodness (1703); John D. Foss's A Journal, of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss (1798); James Leander Cathcart's The Captives, Eleven Years in Algiers (1899); Maria Martin's History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Maria Martin (1807); Jonathan Cowdery's American Captives in Tripoli (1806); William Ray's Horrors of Slavery (1808); Robert Adams The Narrative of Robert Adams (1816); Eliza Bradley's An Authentic Narrative (1820); and Ion H. Perdicaris's In Raissuli's Hands (1904).

The anthology begins with an introduction by Paul Baepler, in which he outlines the historical circumstances of the capture of these Americans, most generally the political tensions between North Africa and the United States that included the Tripolitan War of 1801-5. Baepler traces the development of several themes throughout these narratives. The nine authors all have a very strong pro-Christian, anti-Muslim message, a notion of racial "othering," and a condemnation of slavery and captivity, which may or may not be applicable to the slave system in the United States.

The Barbary captivity narrative flourished alongside the American slave narrative, the Indian captivity narrative, and the Christian conversion narrative. Various rhetorical tropes and strategies can be found in all of these narrative types, including a search for God's divine will as a reason for the captivity and minute descriptions of the captors, the surroundings, and the tortures of the captivity itself. Because of these striking parallels, White Slaves, African Masters would work well in an early American literature or history course, a course on slavery or slave narratives, or a course on conversion or confessional narratives. Moreover, the texts in the anthology provide excellent comparative resources for those working in any of the above-mentioned fields.

For instance, the Barbary narratives might be read in conjunction with Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). One may wish to juxtapose William Lloyd Garrison's "Preface" to that narrative, in which he declares that white men who have been held in slavery in North Africa lose their language skills and their trappings of civil humanity, with Jonathan Cowdery's American Captives in Tripoli and William Ray's Horrors of Slavery, allowing for fruitful investigation into the strategies of American abolitionists. It is also interesting to note that Robert Adams is the only African American included in the anthology and that the white scribe who took down Adams' story indicated that he was speaking an odd mixture of Arabic and English when he was captured, a trauma specifically mentioned by Garrison as happening to white slaves in North Africa.

For this reason, one may want to read Adams' narrative alongside other American slave narratives. His views of the continent appear to be, by and large, similar to the dominant white American culture of the nineteenth century, possibly owing in part to his white scribe. However, Adams does note that he and a fellow slave of Portuguese descent appear to have gotten special treatment from the Africans. Adams assumes this treatment comes from being lighter skinned than the Africans themselves (Adams was of mixed race origins) but not as light as the northern Europeans who were captured with them. In fact, Adams claims that he excited "uncommon curiosity" among the Moors who captured him because they "had never seen [a white man] before" (229). At the same time, the scribe parenthetically notes that Adams was "a very dark man, with short curly black hair" (229). By including Adams in this anthology, Baepler exposes multiple levels of racial ideology and prejudice existing during the 1800s.

Interestingly, the social class of the captive was used by the North Africans to determine the treatment the captive received in slavery. Cowdery's and Ray's narratives read together produce a clear picture of this system. Cowdery was a naval doctor, became the personal physician to the Bashaw of Tripoli, and spent his days treating his patients and strolling in the personal gardens of the Bashaw. Ray, on the other hand, was an enlisted seaman aboard the same vessel as Cowdery. His narrative is a corrective to the vision of North African slavery that Cowdery produces. Ray proclaims, in fact, that "when the Doctor says we, it is the very same as if he had said we officers only" for the enlisted men suffered from hunger, cold, and abuse that the officers knew nothing of (189). The officers and upper class passengers that were captured fared far better in North African slavery than the common people.

Of course, differentiation among slaves emerged in the American system of slavery. This classification system, however, was imposed on the captives by their oppressors and had no reference point in the captives' own social systems. In fact, the American system existed only to distinguish house slaves from field slaves or female concubine slaves from others. An interesting comparison may be drawn between African American women's slave narratives, such as Harriet Jacobs's and Mary Prince's narratives, and the narratives of Eliza Bradley and Maria Martin. Neither Bradley nor Martin claim to have been sexually assaulted, while a great deal of Jacobs' and Prince's stories detail their maneuverings around the sexual advances of their owners. Bradley's narrative is generally acknowledged to be fictive; the author liberally borrowed sections of the narrative from an account authored by James Riley. One must keep in mind, however, that Jacobs's narrative was also thought to be fiction (or written by a white woman) until the 1980s.

While this collection is by no means exhaustive, White Slaves, African Masters can be considered a welcome addition to early American literature and early American history. Baepler has assembled these narratives from a racially and economically diverse group of men and women cutting across many centuries. Those studying American racial or religious ideology will find his collection a convenient starting place for an archaeological comparison of dominant American thought about Africa and Africans, about Muslims, and about slavery.

Samantha Manchester Earley
Department of English
Indiana University Southeast