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مدونة علمية أدبية شاملة : " لا أحب الكتب لأنني زاهدٌ في الحياة .. ولكنني أحب الكتب لأن حياة واحدة لا تكفيني .. ومهما يأكل الإنسان فإنه لن يأكل بأكثر من معدة واحدة، ومهما يلبس فإنه لن يلبس علي غير جسدٍ واحد، ومهما يتنقل في البلاد فإنه لن يستطيع أن يحل في مكانين .. ولكنه بزاد الفكر والشعور والخيال يستطيع أن يجمع الحيوات في عمرٍ واحد، ويستطيع أن يضاعف فكره وشعوره وخياله كما يتضاعف الشعور بالحب المتبادل، وتتضاعف الصورة بين مرآتين .." العقاد

الجمعة، 18 مارس 2016

Horrors Of Slavery Or The American TARS IN TRIPOLI - William Ray ...

Horrors Of Slavery Or The American

TARS IN TRIPOLI

William Ray , 1771-1827

Edited and with an Introduction by Hester Blum

rutgers university press

new brunswick, new jersey, and london

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the American Antiquarian Society, particularly Joanne Chaison and Caroline Sloat; Sandy Stelts of the Penn State Special Collections Library, who secured a copy of William Ray’s Poems for me; and the Library Company of Philadelphia, where I first read Horrors of Slavery. Brad Verter invited me to propose an edition of a Barbary captivity narrative, and I am grateful for his guidance in the early stages of this project. I thank Kendra Boileau as well for her initial help with the edition. I also owe thanks to my fellow speakers on a panel addressing piracy at the 2006 American Historical Association Conference: Gillian Weiss, Larry Peskin, and especially Isaac Land, the panel’s organizer; this edition is the indirect result of that panel. Samantha Guss transcribed Horrors of Slavery in its entirety, and I am lucky to have had her invaluable assistance. The English Department at Penn State University provided research support to make this edition possible, and I thank my terrific colleagues and students.

I am very grateful to Leslie Mitchner for her expertise and insight, and thank Rutgers University Press for its willingness to publish noncanonical works of literature.

I am most thankful, as ever, to my daughter Adelaide and to Jonathan Eburne, whose own occasional rhymes have all of William Ray’s wit and none of his venom.

Introduction

In Horrors of Slavery (1808) William Ray describes his experience as a captive American sailor in North Africa during the Tripolitan War (1801–1805), the first military encounter of the United States with the Islamic world. Ray had been a schoolteacher and a failed shopkeeper in New York State in the 1790s. In poverty and near-suicidal desperation after his hopes of securing a newspaper editorship in Philadelphia were frustrated, he enlisted on a U.S. frigate bound for the Mediterranean in 1803. Along with more than three hundred crewmates, he spent nineteen bitter months in captivity after his ship, the Philadelphia, ran aground in the harbor of Tripoli and was captured. Imprisoned and consigned to hard labor, Ray witnessed—and chronicled—many of the signal moments of America’s military engagements with Tripoli and the other North African Barbary states. This conflict came at a late moment in the broader, centuries-long struggle between the Barbary states and Europe. His narrative describes the trauma of his enslavement, focusing on the poor conditions the American prisoners faced, as well as how their captivity registered within the broader context of the Tripolitan economy and society. But Ray’s complaints are not solely with the Tripolitan Pasha, or the Bashaw, as he calls him (this introduction follows Ray’s usage), or with Barbary piracy more generally. His account details the abuses inherent in the American naval system of discipline and hierarchy as well. Throughout his captivity narrative, and in his post-captivity writings, Ray decries injustice in all forms. Horrors of Slavery brings to light a little-known yet crucial episode in the early history of American relations with Islamic states, and provides a searing condemnation of tyranny, whether practiced by Barbary pirates, American naval officers, or societal and political institutions more broadly.

Ray came to terms with the “horrors” of his captivity by writing about his experience while still incarcerated in Tripoli, in modern Libya. He would continue to write, in a variety of media and on a variety of topics, upon his return to New York State after his redemption. Horrors of Slavery is unusual, both in its tone and in its content, within the context of the dozen or so Barbary accounts also published at the turn of the nineteenth century. These include captivity narratives by John Foss and James Leander Cathcart, Algerine captives; Jonathan Cowdery, a Tripolitan captive; and James Riley and Judah Paddock, Saharan captives, among others.1 For one, while most former captives were primarily scandalized by North African society, Islam, and their own treatment, Ray finds much to condemn in Western, Christian nations as well. Another difference lies in his narrative’s titular emphasis on “slavery,” which is likely a gesture toward the abolition of the slave trade in the United States in 1808, the same year his narrative was published. His attention to injustice in a comparative context is not typical, and the form of his narrative similarly resists easy categorization. By turns a captivity narrative, naval memoir, ethnographic study, political and diplomatic history, reformatory class polemic, and poetry collection, his account reflects many different genres of literary production. Most notably, Ray uses a form employed by two indigenous American types of literature: the Indian captivity narrative and the slave narrative. No matter the mode, his voice is distinct: prickly, humorous, and always provocative. Ray is aware that as an ordinary sailor, rather than a captain or commodore, he was not endowed with the literary authority that was a perquisite of higher status. But he does not shy away from this fact, instead claiming his own experience as endorsement enough.

We see this most clearly in the final lines of the lengthy poetic “Exordium,” or opening statement, in which Ray anticipates criticism and promptly refutes it:

If in the following, then, you find

Things not so pleasing to your mind,

And think them false, why, disbelieve them;

For sev’ral facts make some excuses;

And when you’re captur’d by a Turk,

Sit down, and write a better work.

The closing couplet is representative of the combative yet playful tone throughout Ray’s writings. These final lines stress that his experience is its own authority, one that grants him literary license. More broadly, the “Exordium” itself is representative of his remarkable literary style: it is hard to imagine another American firstperson narrative of experience, for example, opening with 421 lines of verse. Such diversity and inventiveness of form is reflected in his further forays in the wider sphere of letters. His later writings include poetry, an autobiographical sketch, and a novel entitled Sophia; or, The Girl of the Pine Woods; he also edited three local newspapers in upstate New York and had a habit of writing long, spirited letters, partly in verse. From his humble beginnings, Ray stands as provocative figure within the early stages of nineteenth-century America’s professionalization of authorship.

Ray’s attention to the inequities inherent in social classes and hierarchies is central to his ethic. In addition to offering a compelling history of a little-known war whose impact, until recently, has registered mostly in military and political annals, Horrors of Slavery presents the valuable perspective of an ordinary seaman concerned with the rights of citizens and the injustices of the U.S. Navy. The first third of Ray’s narrative makes a case for the increased application of the ideals of revolutionary liberty to the welfare of sailors and other disenfranchised Americans, alternating fervent moral appeals with sentimental and sensational tales of the tyrannical treatment of his shipmates. Early in his narrative he condemns chattel slavery in America within the context of his ongoing concern with hypocrisy, writing in the “Exordium,”