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At approximately the same moment that Mary Rowlandson wrote of her deliverance from the "barbarities" of King Philip's supporters, another Puritan captive offered his pleas for redemption from the Barbary pirates. Joshua Gee, whose son would eventually share the pulpit with Cotton Mather at Boston's North Church, set sail from Boston harbor on January 25, 1680. His story of seven years of slavery in Algiers, which remained unpublished until 1943, gives us the first Barbary captivity narrative from America. That his narrative exists solely in fragments can perhaps explain why his plight has been ignored: his story is simply difficult to piece together and read coherently.(1) But Joshua Gee's manuscript points to a long tradition of Barbary captivity narratives, many of which were written in English. Their appearance at roughly the same time as Indian captivity narratives suggests that the two were mutually influential and that we should reconsider a long-held belief about American literature: that the Indian captivity narrative, often considered the first indigenous American genre, had, if not precedents, then at least influences as far away as Africa.(2) Cotton Mather would most likely have recognized this cross-influence himself, for his father not only wrote the introduction to Mary Rowlandson's famous narrative but he himself preached two sermons on colonials enduring African slavery, and in these sermons, he included short Barbary captivity narratives.
While these accounts bear a resemblance to those of Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dustan, John Williams, and others, their concern with white slavery in the distant continent of Africa necessarily suggests a connection to slavery at home. Indeed, these writings give us a rare glimpse of how the British and early Americans imagined Africans and both justified and questioned institutionalized slavery in this country. Barbary captivity narratives are most often framed in religious terms, and in the course of celebrating God's hand in the preservation of the captive, the narrator often denounces his African captor as heretical, monstrous, cowardly, ignoble, and sexually deviant. Gee's testimony rarely participates in this assertion of racial and national superiority, but he is in the minority. To what degree the Barbary captivity narrative contributed to predisposing Americans to accept African slavery is difficult to say, though it seems clear that these accounts could be profitably read against...