White Gold

Book excerpt: Giles Milton's White Gold tells the true story of white European slaves in eighteenth century Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco. "An elegantly discursive retelling . . . customarily elegant prose." --Simon Winchester, The Boston Globe In the summer of 1716, a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow and fifty-one of his comrades were captured at sea by Barbary corsairs. Their captors--Ali Hakem and his network of Islamic slave traders--had declared war on the whole of Christendom. Pellow and his shipmates were bought by the tyrannical sultan of Morocco. Drawn from the unpublished letters and manuscripts of Pellow and survivors like him, Giles Milton's White Gold is a fascinating glimpse at a time long forgotten by history.