On April 10th, 1682 (O.S.), “Articles of peace and commerce between the most serene and mighty Prince Charles II., by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, etc., and the most illustrious (sic) Lord, the Bashaw, Dey, and Aga, Governor of the famous city of Algiers in Barbary,” were concluded by “Arthur Herbert, Esquire, Admiral of His Majesty’s Fleet.”  It need hardly be said that such a treaty as this was not worth the paper on which it was written; that the barbarians by whom it was signed were as ignorant as they were unprincipled, and that the only argument which they understood at that, or any other time, was that of the right of the strongest.

When we of the present day read of the deeds of the corsairs we are filled with horror, we fail to understand how such things could have been tolerated, we seek for some explanation.  When we hear of a “League of Christian Princes,” and find that all its members could accomplish was to turn their arms the one against the other, we are even still more puzzled.  What was it, then, that lay at the root of this problem?  The answer would appear to be in the ethical standpoint of the sixteenth century.  We are so accustomed in the present day to hear of the rights of man that we are apt to forget that, in the time of Barbarossa, of Dragut, of Charles V., and the Medicean Popes such a thing did not exist, and the only rights possessed by the common man were those vouchsafed to him by his sovereign lord.  We have also to take another factor into consideration, which is that what we call “humanity” simply did not exist, the result being that the raids of the Sea-wolves were not judged by the great ones of the earth from the standpoint of the amount of suffering which they inflicted, but in what manner these proceedings affected the wealth and power of the lord of the territory which had been despoiled.  So differently was society constituted in those days that the very victims acquiesced more or less meekly in their fate, each one unconsciously voicing that most pathetic saying of the Russian peasant that “God is high and the Czar is far away.”

The fact of the intolerable lot of the common man in these times helps us to understand one thing which otherwise would be an insoluble problem:  which was, why did Christian soldiers so often become renegadoes and fight for the corsairs under the banner of those who were the fiercest and most irreconcilable foes of themselves and their kindred?  The life of the common soldier or sailor did not offer many advantages; it was generally a short and anything but a merry one, and the thing by which it was most profoundly affected was capture by the corsairs.