Page:Daring deeds of famous pirates; true stories of the stirring adventures, bravery and resource of pirates, filibusters & buccaneers (1917).djvu/122

 ship. The Admiral was doubtless nervous lest with so many English seamen a mutiny might break out. So some were set upon a strange land to fare as best they might. Villa Rise, the Vice-Admiral, ordered Rawlins and five of his company to go aboard Villa Rise's ship, leaving three men and a boy on the Nicholas. To the latter were sent thirteen Turks and Moors—a right proportion to overmaster the other four, in case mutiny should be meditated. The ships then set a course for Algiers.

But the next night a heavy gale sprang up, so that they lost sight of the Nicholas, and the pirates were afraid their own ships would likewise perish. On the 22nd of November Rawlins arrived at Algiers, but the Nicholas had not yet come into port. In this piratical stronghold he found numerous Englishmen now as slaves, and there were a hundred "handsome English youths" who had been compelled to turn Turks. For these inhuman Moslems, these vipers of Africa, these monsters of the sea, having caught a Christian in their net would next set about trying to make him change his Christianity for Mohammedanism. If he refused, he would be tortured without mercy, until some of them, unable to endure these terrible sufferings any longer, yielded and declared they would become Turks, being yet Christians at heart. These poor, ill-treated English slaves, though bowed down with their own troubles, welcomed this latest batch and, says the contemporary narrator, "like good Christians, they bade us 'Be of good cheer! and comfort ourselves in this! That God's trials were gentle purgations; and these crosses were but to cleanse the dross from the gold, and bring us out of the fire again more clear and lovely.'"

But if these Algerine pirates and taskmasters were ordinarily cruel towards English seamen they were now the