‘My God! Suffer us not to live longer in such tortures!’
FROM THE JOURNAL OF CAPTAIN JAMES RILEY
THE DATE: 28 August 1815. The place: the west coast of Africa. The American ship the Commerce had already been at sea for the best part of three months. It had set sail from Connecticut before stopping off at New Orleans. It had then travelled across the Atlantic to Gibraltar, and now it was heading south. Its intended route: west of the Canary Islands and on to Cape Verde, where it would load up with precious salt to take back to America.
And under no circumstances was it to drift close to the wild desert land now known as Western Sahara – where, so the stories went, Christian sailors were captured by Muslim nomads and treated much, much worse than dogs.
In command of the Commerce was Captain James Riley: husband, father and career sailor, who took the welfare of his men as seriously as his own. In later years, he would become an outspoken critic of the miserable worldwide trade in slaves. There was a very good reason for this.
Captain Riley was about to become one.
And so were all of his men.
*
The two things most likely to scupper a nineteenth-century sailing ship were poor navigation and storms. At the end of August 1815, as it sailed south from Gibraltar along the African coastline, the Commerce suffered from both.
High winds and perilous currents had pushed the ship off course. The sails were full, the masts were creaking and the decks were a salty blizzard of blinding spray.
It was night – pitch black. Not realizing how close to the shore they were, Captain Riley ordered that they turn to the south-east. Then the unthinkable happened. With a horrific, gut-wrenching jolt, the Commerce ran aground.
Vicious waves pounded against the hull and broke it on the rocks. The sailors had no choice but to abandon ship. Riley ordered his men to gather as much water and food as they could, and stash it into their escape boats. Then they braved the wild ocean and prayed they would make it to shore.
Somehow they did, but they were still in very grave danger. They were shipwrecked on the western shores of the Sahara, one of the hottest, most brutal deserts on earth.
But worse than the desert were the nomad slave traders.
The sailors were in a fearful region where infidel white men were seen not as fellow humans, but as slaves to be traded – and treated worse than animals.
The ferocious desert people of the Sahara were unlikely to give them a warm welcome. But they were very likely to find them.
Sure enough, as dawn came, a figure appeared on the beach walking towards them. He had dark skin, a deeply lined, leathery face and a knotted beard stretching down to his torso.
Riley tried to make friends with the stranger. He even offered him some of their shipwrecked supplies. The man simply took what he wanted, then strode off out of sight.
The sailors feared he had gone to get reinforcements.
More tribesmen and women arrived. They carried sharp knives, axes and spears. They plundered everything the sailors had.
Riley attempted to negotiate with them. But they didn’t want to negotiate. Their leader grabbed the captain’s hair and yanked his head back. Then he rested a wickedly sharp scimitar against his throat. Riley was sure that this man was about to behead him. Instead, he simply sliced the captain’s clothes from him.
Riley and his men were no good to the locals if they were dead.
Thinking quickly, the captain told his captors where they had buried some coins in the sand. When the Saharans ran to fetch the plunder, he and his men escaped. They swam through the rough Atlantic seas back to the wrecked Commerce.
But one of their number, an older sailor called Antonio Michel, was left behind. They watched from the ship, sickened, as the tribesmen beat him to a bloodied pulp.
They then saw the nomads pile their plunder on to Michel’s back as though he was a pack horse, then beat him savagely again – like the slave he now was – and watched as they drove him on, over the dunes and out of sight.
They now had two options. Return to land and submit themselves to the barbarous tribesmen who would surely capture and enslave them. Or, they could patch up a badly damaged longboat and take their chances on the open sea.
They chose the sea.
*
Riley and his crew crowded into the longboat: eleven men, one keg of water, twelve bottles of wine and a pig who had survived the wreck.
They were crammed in like sardines. The longboat leaked water and they had no rudder. They spent their days either rowing against the strong sea currents, or bailing water out to stop themselves sinking.
Rations were scarce. Each day they shared between them a bottle of water. It was a little more than a mouthful each. For food, they had a scrap of salt-pork each day.
They rowed east, hoping to hit the Canary Islands, but the wind and the current were against them. They made very little headway.
On the third day they slaughtered the pig. As they cut its throat, the blood spilled out. The sailors carefully collected it, then drank it down to slake their thirst. Then they devoured the moist, oozing liver.
But still, the heat and the strenuous work dehydrated them dramatically. As they emptied the water bottles, they refilled them with their own urine to keep and then drink.
As the days passed, their tongues grew thick and furry with dehydration. Their hearing deteriorated as the moisture in their inner ears dried up. They were cramped, feverish and dying of thirst.
Their skin, unprotected from the sun, was burned raw and covered in weeping sores where it rubbed against the wooden oars and the salt. Each day, the crew shared out pitiful quantities of raw pig flesh, which was already turning rancid. And as the water supplies dwindled, they allowed themselves only enough urine to moisten their parched mouths.
As the urine passed through their body, only to find its way back into the sailors’ bottles, it became more and more concentrated. Undiluted, it was now a thick, stinking poison. Riley described it as a ‘wretched and disgusting relief’.
But it was all they had.
The sea and the sun were beating them. No question.
The sailors’ condition was so monstrous that, when land came into view again, it was almost a relief. They headed straight for it. They knew full well how cruel the local people could be, but they decided that nothing could be worse than this remorseless torture at sea.
They were wrong about that.
*
They washed up on a tiny, barren stretch of sand. They had no idea where they were (in fact they had drifted 200 miles south). They chose to head east, into the harsh terrain of the Sahara.
The next morning they started their march.
There aren’t many places on earth where it’s harder to survive than this. The Sahara stretches for 3,000 miles in one direction, 1,200 in the other. Humidity levels can drop as low as 5 per cent. The men found no plants, no animals and no water. They started hallucinating through thirst as they staggered, close to death, through this hostile wasteland. Their mouths were cracked and bleeding, and they would gladly have given their own lives for just a sip of water.
When they saw the light of a fire in the distance, they had no choice but to stagger towards it. They knew they would get a hostile welcome, but it was that or die on the burning Saharan dunes.
They prayed together. Then they crawled towards the light.
They found one man, two women and some children gathered around a well. The man instantly brandished his scimitar and forced Riley and two of his crew – George Williams and Aaron Savage – to remove their clothes. Then he stalked towards a fourth sailor called Deslisle. He forced Deslisle to carry his companions’ clothes.
The implication was clear. The four sailors belonged to him now.
The women forced the rest of the men to strip naked. Suddenly, though, a cloud of dust kicked up and a crowd of tribesmen – some on foot, some mounted on camels – thundered towards them. A huge fight ensued among the natives. Scimitars flashed and blood flowed as they fought over possession of the eleven slaves.
After an hour, the fight subsided. The slaves had been divided up. Riley and Deslisle were now the property of the nomad they had first seen. His name was Mohammed, and the women were his sisters. Mohammed dragged his slaves to the well, where the sisters beat their meagre, dehydrated bodies with thick sturdy sticks.
Other women, though, brought them bowls of foul, stale water. It was a stinking, putrid liquid, but it was nectar to these men dying of thirst.
When you’re chronically dehydrated, you have to resist drinking too quickly. Your body can’t handle the sudden intake of liquid. Riley knew this, but he couldn’t stop himself. He and Deslisle drank deeply and without stopping. Almost immediately, their stomachs cramped in on themselves and explosive spurts of diarrhoea gushed down their naked legs.
The other men – all of them now slaves – joined them. As they drank they suffered the same symptoms. Their sweat sizzled on their scorched skin.
The nomads prepared to leave the well with their camels and their new slaves. One by one, the sailors were taken away from their companions. Finally only Riley and four of his men were left.
The nomads instantly put them to work hauling water up out of the well for their camels, then forced the wretched sailors to follow them out into the desert. Riley and his four companions were so weak that they simply fell to their knees. At first, the nomads laughed at them. Then they whacked their scalding backs with thick sticks once again, until the burnt skin peeled off and the flesh underneath oozed blood.
The nomads treated their new slaves like the lowest forms of life. But when it was clear that they simply couldn’t walk through the desert, they forced them to sit on the camels, just behind the hump. The camels’ rough skin ground against the slaves’ naked flesh. Blood slathered down the inside of Riley’s legs, dripping constantly on to the sand below.
He found himself looking around for a stone with which to beat himself to death. He found none. He had no choice but to keep going.
The following day, they were forced to walk again. The soles of their feet wept with blood.
The nomads didn’t care. The sailors were just possessions now. They could treat them however they wanted.
*
It was the habit of the desert dwellers to wander in small groups, but now and then they joined other caravans of nomads. So it was that Riley saw some others of his fellow sailors in the days and weeks that followed. They were in a similarly bad state. George Williams had huge folds of skin hanging off him. Underneath, Riley could see the new skin already plastered with angry red sores.
But the next time he saw the wretched man, he was even worse.
The outer layer of his skin had completely burned away in the sun. One of the nomads had smeared camel fat all over his raw flesh in an attempt to save him. It was clearly not working. The fat simply sizzled in the sun, cooking the sailor-slave from the outside in.
Riley could do nothing to help the dying man. Williams’s master just led him away into the desert – never to be seen again.
Riley was bought and sold among the nomadic tribe. Each master was as cruel as the last. They poked at their slaves’ raw skin, and laughed when they howled. And, of course, the slaves were kept on the brink of starvation and thirst. Whenever Riley saw a camel urinating he would rush to cup his hands under the stream. The urine tasted foul, but at least it was fresh (and therefore sterile) and wet.
It kept them alive, but the symptoms of dehydration were getting worse. Their joints ached as the fluid in them dried up. Their bodies became incapable of producing either saliva or tears.
The slaves had all heard rumours that cannibals lived in the Sahara. But as the weeks passed, the sailors became cannibals themselves. As their burned skin flaked from their arms and legs, they gobbled it up hungrily. They were literally eating themselves alive.
And, on one occasion, Riley learned that some of the slaves travelling with him had abducted an Arab child. Driven mad for want of something to eat, the slaves were preparing to slaughter the child.
Riley stopped them just in time, and tried to reassure them: as slaves, they were no good to their masters dead. The nomads would keep them alive so that they could eventually be sold.
In theory, he was right. But there was another problem. The nomads themselves seemed to be wandering aimlessly around the pitiful desert. They, too, were running dangerously low on water and food.
When push came to shove, the nomads would let the animals die before themselves.
And they’d let the slaves die before the animals.
It seemed to Riley that, out here in the forgotten wastelands of the Sahara, they needed a miracle.
Sometimes, miracles come in strange disguises.
*
It was midday. Riley’s masters were sheltering in their tents from the extreme sun. Two men approached out of the desert. Their skin was scarred and they carried muskets.
Riley’s master invited the strangers to join them, as was the desert custom. One of the men was called Sidi Hamet. He was accompanied by his brother.
Sidi Hamet appeared a little kinder than Riley’s current master. He even gave him some fresh water.
Riley spotted an opportunity. These desert wanderers were traders. Everything had a price. Riley had only one thing to trade: his own life, and that of the sailors who remained with him.
He approached Sidi Hamet. In a mixture of pigeon Arabic, French and Spanish, he explained what had happened to him and his shipmates, adding that he had a wife and children waiting for him back home. To his astonishment, Sidi Hamet shed a tear. He too had a family. He understood.
Had Riley found a small stream of goodness in this desert of horror?
So far, he had told Sidi Hamet the truth. Now he told a lie. He said that he had a friend in the nearest city, Swearah. If Sidi Hamet would purchase Riley and as many shipmates as they could locate from their cruel masters, his friend would buy them back for fifty times what he’d paid.
‘What is the name of this friend?’ Sidi Hamet asked.
‘Consul,’ said Riley.
Sidi Hamet accepted the deal, with one proviso: ‘If you are lying to me,’ he said, ‘I will cut your throat and recoup my losses by selling the rest of your men.’
The deal was done. Sidi Hamet bought Riley and three others.
But they weren’t safe yet. Not by a long shot.
*
It was several hundred miles to Swearah. They needed food, so Sidi Hamet bought an old camel for slaughter.
He killed it at midnight, pulling its neck back as far as its hump and cutting its throat. He siphoned the blood into a big pot, which he placed on the fire. The blood congealed, and Hamet allowed Riley and his men to scoop out great handfuls and feed.
Later, when they were crazed with thirst from trying to digest the congealed blood, he allowed them to drink a foul green fluid straight from the gaping stomach wound of the slaughtered camel.
This was real desert survival.
The journey to Swearah continued to be grim beyond belief. Unlike Sidi Hamet, Riley and his men were not used to these conditions. Their bodies continued to deteriorate. Riley wrote in his journal: ‘The remaining flesh on our posteriors, and inside of our thighs and legs, was so beat and literally pounded to pieces, that barely any remained.’
Occasionally they found water. When they did, they drank their fill. Otherwise, they had to make do with handfuls of camel urine. And when the camels stopped urinating through thirst, they had nothing.
Occasionally they came across other nomads who shared their food, or sold them animals for slaughter. The slaves happily feasted on raw goat entrails, uncleaned and still warm from the slaughter, or on camel blood. But then, for hundreds of miles, they saw nothing but the hard, stony desert floor or the sand dunes, where barely anything could live. Their hunger soon returned.
The desert contained other threats, in the form of bandits. Despite the dreadful state their bodies were in, Riley and his enslaved companions were a valuable cargo. Sidi Hamet had to defend himself from evil cut-throats who would gladly kill him and his brother, before stealing the slaves and condemning them to a life of utter hopelessness.
But, for now, hope was the one thing they had. And amazingly, after a trek across the desert that almost took as much out of the nomads as it did out of their slaves, they reached Swearah.
A very strange thing had happened. Sidi Hamet and Riley, master and slave, had become friends. But only after a fashion. Hamet still insisted that if it turned out Riley was lying about having a friend in Swearah who would buy their freedom, he would still cut the captain’s throat.
Riley knew he meant it.
And so, knowing that if he played this wrong he would surely die, Riley wrote a letter to the consul, a man named William Willshire.
Willshire came good. He arranged the money, and their freedom. After all their sufferings, they were free.
At Riley’s urging, William Willshire was able to locate and free one more of the enslaved sailors, a man named Archibald Robbins, whose experiences had been at least as harsh as those of Riley and his companions.
But of the remaining sailors, nothing was ever heard again. We don’t know how long they lived or what indignities and suffering they endured. All we know was that they must have lived out their lives in an almost unendurable state of misery, degradation and slavery, before death came as a bitter relief.
When Captain Riley returned to America he published his memoirs, which he called Sufferings in Africa. It became a bestseller, even in a land where slavery was commonplace, as it was in the Southern states of America at the time. The story of a white man condemned to slavery was a sickening irony. Could some good finally come from Riley’s horrific ordeal? Certainly the young Abraham Lincoln read Sufferings in Africa, and later said that Riley’s story had a great influence on him.
Sometimes we have to see things back to front in order to understand their purpose. Riley had experienced the servitude that was being inflicted on untold men and women in the Deep South at the time. And as he later said, ‘Men, though covered with a black skin, are not brutes.’
It was a controversial opinion in those less enlightened times.
Had Riley not been so determined to survive, he could never have told this tale.
Robbins, one of the crew members who endured this ordeal, later wrote that ‘the crew of the Commerce seem to have been designed to suffer themselves, that the world, through them, may learn’.
And there is little doubt that Riley’s story of survival, at the very edge of what the human spirit can endure, has been a continuing inspiration to many people ever since.
Myself included.