CERVANTES.
which he speaks of him as “a soldier as deserving as he was unfortunate; who, by his noble virtue and gentle disposition, had won the esteem of his comrades and his chiefs.” In August, 1575, he set sail for Naples on board the galley El Sol, but five years more were to elapse before he was again to tread the shores of Spain.
In the following month, El Sol was attacked within sight of the Spanish coast by a squadron of Algerine pirates. In the unequal contest which followed, Cervantes is reported to have borne himself with characteristic gallantry, but such an encounter could have but one issue, and the captured Spaniards were divided up among the Moors as spoils of victory. Cervantes became the prize of a Captain, named Delí Mamí, a renegade Greek, who had earned the distinction of being one of the most ferocious of that notoriously savage and revengeful race of corsairs. For the following five years Cervantes endured a tyranny of serfdom as rigorous and unrelaxing as ever slave suffered in the mines of Spain. He was already known as el manco de Lepanto; he was now to earn, if not to wear, the title of el manco de Argel.
It is not our purpose here to give a detailed description of the sufferings he bore with knightly fortitude and undaunted spirit for those long five years. The particulars are preserved to us in official documents, but a brief summary must find a place in our sketch.
According to the testimony of Father Haedo, in whose Topography of Algiers, published in 1612, we have the most valuable authority for this period of Cervantes’ life, and who was an eye-witness to the cruelties practised upon the Christian slaves, the captivity of Cervantes was one of the hardest ever known in Algiers. Mr. Watts has given us an eloquent account of our hero in this bondage. It was borne, he says, with a courage and constancy which, had there been nothing else to make his name memorable, must have sufficed to rank Cervantes among the heroes of his age and country. No episode more romantic is contained in the books of chivalry. No adventures more strange were encountered by any knight-errant. Not Amadis nor Esplandian, nor any of those whose fabled deeds had kindled his youthful imagination, displayed a loftier spirit of honour, or more worthily discharged his knightly devoir, than did Miguel de Cervantes when in duress in Algiers. A slave in the power of the bitter enemy of his creed and nation, cut off in the heyday of his fame from the path of ambition which fortune seemed to have opened to him; no lot could be more cruel than that which, in the fulness of his manhood and genius, fell to his share.
Nor is there any chapter of his life more honourable than that record of the singular daring, fortitude, patience and cheerfulness with which he bore his fate during this miserable period. With no other support than his own indomitable spirit, forgotten by those whom he had served, unable to receive any help from his friends, subjected to every kind of hardship which the tyranny or caprice of his masters might order, pursued by an unrelenting evil destiny, which seemed in this, as in every other passage of his career, to mock at his efforts to live that high heroic life which he had conceived to himself; this poor maimed soldier was looked up to by that wretched colony of Christian captives (including among them many men of higher birth and rank) as their chief counsellor, comforter, and guide. In his formal information, laid before the commissary of the Spanish Government at Algiers, Father Juan Gil, of the Order of the Redemptorists, very particular testimony is borne by Cervantes’ fellow-captives to his character and conduct, as one who bore himself always as a faithful Christian, who cheered those who were despondent, who shared with the poor the little that he possessed, who helped the sick in their necessities, who risked every danger in the cause of the faith, behaving himself always like a true soldier of the King and a noble gentleman—all of which good record is confirmed by the honest Father himself of his own personal knowledge.
The daring escapes that Cervantes planned, the intrepid courage with which he set himself to invent new schemes when the old ones miscarried; the indomitable cheerfulness he always maintained, and especially the spell he exercised over his master, the brutal Hassan Pasha of evil memory, are sufficient to mark him as a man of extraordinary resource, magnetism, and force of character. Delí Mamí, misled by the letters which were found upon the person of his captive, regarded Cervantes as a man of position and substance, and the treatment meted out to him was the more severe, in order that his family would the more speedily effect his release. These Algerine pirates lived upon the ransoms which they extorted from the friends of their captives; and at the time of Cervantes’ bondage, no fewer than 25,000 Christians, including many men of rank and fortune, were waiting the arrival of the price of their freedom, and frequently enlivening the monotony of their servitude by attempting to escape. Cervantes earned a peculiar celebrity among this army of captives by the ingenuity and persistence of the plans he put into practice in order to achieve the ambition of every bondman. But while his courage became proverbial, and his craft amazed both his captors and his fellow-prisoners, his ill-luck ever intervened to frustrate his best-laid plans.
A further reference may be permitted here to the influence which Cervantes exercised upon his barbarous gaoler, Hassan Pasha, who had purchased him from Delí Mamí for the sum of 500 gold crowns. The author of Don Quixote has told us (Part I., Chapter xi.) of “the unheard-of and unseen cruelties which my master practised on the Christians. Every day he hanged a slave; impaled one; cut off the ears of another; and this upon so
