Factoid of the day

I was aware that Cromwell sent thousands of Irish into slavery to the West Indes (actually "indentured servants") but I wasn't aware of this factoid:

from the BBC:

The fishermen and coastal dwellers of 17th-century Britain lived in terror of being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery in North Africa. Hundreds of thousands across Europe met wretched deaths on the Barbary Coast in this way....

Morgan also noted that he had a list, printed in London in 1682' of 160 British ships captured by Algerians between 1677 and 1680. Considering what the number of sailors who were taken with each ship was likely to have been, these examples translate into a probable 7,000 to 9,000 able-bodied British men and women taken into slavery in those years. Not content with attacking ships and sailors, the corsairs also sometimes raided coastal settlements...
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In the 1600s, no one's racial background or religion automatically destined him or her for enslavement. Preachers in churches from Sicily to Boston spoke of the similar fates of black slaves on American plantations and white slaves in corsair galleys; early abolitionists used Barbary slavery as a way to attack the universal degradation of slavery in all its forms.

And Sept 24 is the feast day of Our Lady of Ransom....originally a feast day to pray for the captives...and the BBC site notes the work of several Catholic orders to rebuy/ransom the slaves.


headsup RomanMiscellany...