NINE

OVER 3000 MILES FROM BERMUDA, ACHILLE ZABANA SAT ON HIS haunches on a hill overlooking the rabble village below him. The sun was just coming up in the east and already a few villagers were creeping about, building cooking fires, and fetching water from the well located in the center of the small courtyard. It was there that he would call the villagers together to bear witness to the power of the dey of Algiers to deal with infidelity and rebellious behavior.

Zabana was a Frenchman whose mother was Turkish, his father unknown. The cruelties against a mixed race in Marseilles molded a young man in obvious and hidden ways, and he became unmoored, seeking revenge for the indignities heaped upon him by school mates, society and a religion taught but not accepted.

At twelve, he stowed away on a ship that was captured by corsairs sailing for the dey of Algiers. He was sold as a slave but offered freedom if he would convert to Islam. He accepted the offer, for Muslims could not be slaves. He quickly rose to become a clerk of sorts to the dey, speaking French as well as Turkish, and exercised the soft power of his office broadly, assuming authority he did not really have. He was despised for it, naturally, by those both above and beneath him.

At twenty-one he volunteered to quash a rebellion in a village in a far province, was granted the chance, and adopted the powerful strategy he had witnessed in Revolutionary France. Zabana had a portable beheading cart, or guillotine, built to be carried on his ship and landed ashore near the village. Then it was pulled by slaves away from the harbor and finally rolled into the village to the most public area he could find. He then sent spies to bring forth the wealthiest and most influential among the villagers; and they came, bewildered and trembling. Each of these unfortunates was forced to kneel before the cart and place his head on its cradle. Then the victim’s arms were put through holes in the lower base of the cradle to hold his head. Next, Zabana ordered the terrible blade raised as all in the square looked on in horror. The victims’ heads were cut off and fell into their hands, which surprisingly retained a momentary ability to hold them. Within a half hour the rebellion and disquiet were effectively over. Zabana loaded the beheading cart back onto his ship and sailed for home to an exultant dey.

Thereafter, Zabana was the man for the most difficult jobs, the most dangerous jobs, and he sailed with his beheading cart to many fractious villages, bringing them all under control easily. Finally, after so much success, he was named head of the dey’s corsairs, those pirates who took any ships venturing into the Mediterranean from countries who did not pay a tribute to the dey for safe passage.

In this, too, Zabana was inordinately successful—and merciless. Hundreds of ships fell to his corsairs. Though they seized the ships and cargoes, of course, the most valuable cargo of all was human, the captain and crew and passengers who could be sold as slaves.

Today, as he looked at the awakening village below, Zabana felt strong and righteous. He would teach the lessons of power again, as he had so many times before. The village was fully alive now, and Zabana rose to signal to his men to roll the cart down the hill.

At that moment, Wilhelm Visser was awakening to another working day in Algiers, a day on the docks unloading lading from a recently captured prize with a handful of other slaves. He was 70 and had been in fair health when his ship had been captured. But the labor he endured and food he was given had reduced him and he’d physically shrunk under the weight of captivity.

Zabana had ordered his men to torture him into giving up his name and home; after three days of burning his skin with hot irons he would have given up his mother and God. Now he was a broken man, physically and emotionally, with no hope of escape.

Yet he knew his lot was better than most. He was being held for ransom and given lighter work than others faced each day. Most captives were sold in the bedestan, or slave market, and he’d seen Danes and Russians and Germans there, as well as Americans like himself. Apparently the dey’s raiding parties extended to land as well as sea as his corsairs roamed Europe’s coastline in search of slaves from all nations. Some of the slaves went to households, others to the quarries to break rocks for breakwaters around the harbor. The women and young children were pawed and leered at by old men who bid against one other to stock their harems or purchase companions. For many, rape was worse than death. It was disgusting and barbaric and Wilhelm Visser was totally incapable of preventing it.

He was lucky to be alive himself. He had been assured by other American merchants that, as long as the U.S. paid tribute to the Barbary rulers, it was safe to pass by Gibraltar to the Mediterranean. Either the dey had changed his mind, or the tribute hadn’t been paid, or both. The explanation depended on whose lie you believed.

As he looked at the prize he was unloading—the ship appeared to be Venetian—he thought back briefly to his own ship’s capture. His crew had fought valiantly but there was very little wind and the sweeps of the xebecs had brought the pirates right up to the side of his ship quickly. The heathens had climbed aboard, screaming and shouting and, in an instant, the ship was theirs.

The xebecs then took his ship in tow and the sweeps went to work, pulling him towards a future that he could never have imagined.