s, found the city in
such consternation that he liberated the whole body of British slaves
(English, Scots, Irish, and Channel Islanders) for a trifling sum.
Nevertheless, four years later, the Earl of Inchiquin, notorious as
"Morough of the Burnings," from his manner of making war, and his son,
Lord O'Brien, were caught off the Tagus while engaged in one of those
foreign services in which royalists were apt to enlist during the
troubles at home, and it took the Earl seven or eight months'
captivity and 7,500 crowns to obtain his release. In the following
century the remnant of the brave Hibernian Regiment, on its way from
Italy, was surrounded and overcome, to the number of about eighty, and
was treated with peculiar barbarity. It was no rare thing to see
British ships--once even a sloop of war--brought captive into Algiers
harbour, on some pretext of their papers being out of form; and the
number of slaves continued to increase, in spite of the philanthropic
efforts of some of the wealthy merchants, like William Bowtell, who
devoted themselves to the humane attempt.

Very often it was the captive's own fault that he was taken.
Frequently he was serving on a vessel of a power then at war with
Algiers. The system of passes for the Mediterranean opened the way to
a good deal of knavery; ships sailed under false colours, or, being
themselves at war with Algiers, carried passes purchased from her
allies. The Algerines were shy of contracting too many alliances, lest
there should be no nation to prey upon, and we read of a solemn debate
in the Divan to decide which nation should be broken with, inasmuch as
the slave-masters were becoming bankrupt from the pacific relations of
the State. This was when the cupidity of the Dey had led him to accept
a heavy bribe from Sweden in return for his protection, and the
Corsairs rushed excitedly to the palace declaring that they had
already too many allies: "Neither in the ocean nor narrow sea can we
find scarce any who are not French, English, or Dutch; nothing remains
for us to do, but either to sell our ships for fuel, and return to
our primitive camel-driving, or to break with one of these
nations."[88] Thus there was generally one favoured nation--or perhaps
two--to whom the Algerines accorded the special favour of
safe-conducts over the Mediterranean, and it was the object of all
other traders to borrow or buy these free passes from their happy
possessors. The Algerines were not