on him were
taken to prove that he was a man of importance in a position to pay a
high ransom, he was put under special surveillance. With undaunted
courage and persistence he organized plans of escape. In 1576 he induced
a Moor to guide him and other Christian captives to Oran; the Moor
deserted them on the road, the baffled fugitives returned to Algiers,
and Cervantes was treated with additional severity. In the spring of
1577 two priests of the Order of Mercy arrived in Algiers with a sum of
three hundred crowns entrusted to them by Cervantes' parents; the amount
was insufficient to free him, and was spent in ransoming his brother
Rodrigo. Cervantes made another attempt to escape in September 1577, but
was betrayed by the renegade whose services he had enlisted. On being
brought before Hassan Pasha, the viceroy of Algiers, he took the blame
on himself, and was threatened with death; struck, however, by the
heroic bearing of the prisoner, Hassan remitted the sentence, and bought
Cervantes from Dali Mami for five hundred crowns. In 1577 the captive
addressed to the Spanish secretary of state, Mateo Vazquez, a versified
letter suggesting that an expedition should be fitted out to seize
Algiers; the project, though practicable, was not entertained. In 1578
Cervantes was sentenced to two thousand strokes for sending a letter
begging help from Martin de Cordoba, governor of Oran; the punishment
was not, however, inflicted on him. Meanwhile his family were not idle.
In March 1578 his father presented a petition to the king setting forth
Cervantes' services; the duke de Sessa repeated his testimony to the
captive's merits; in the spring of 1579 Cervantes' mother applied for
leave to export two thousand ducats' worth of goods from Valencia to
Algiers, and on the 31st of July 1579 she gave the Trinitarian monks,
Juan Gil and Anton de la Bella, a sum of two hundred and fifty ducats to
be applied to her son's ransom. On his side Cervantes was indefatigable,
and towards the end of 1579 he arranged to secure a frigate; but the
plot was revealed to Hassan by Juan Blanco de Paz, a Dominican monk, who
appears to have conceived an unaccountable hatred of Cervantes. Once
more the conspirator's life was spared by Hassan who, it is recorded,
declared that "so long as he had the maimed Spaniard in safe keeping,
his Christians, ships and city were secure." On the 29th of May 1580 the
two Trinitarians arrived in Algiers: they were barely in t