nited vengeance of all
Christendom. Many a youth of family and fortune, of delicate
constitution has been captured and sold in the slave market. His labor
through the long hot days would be to cleanse out the foul bed of some
large empty reservoir, where he would be made to strip, and descending
into the pond, bring up in his arms the black stinking mud, heaped up
and pressed against his bosom; or to labor in drawing huge blocks of
stone to build the mole; or in building and repairing the
fortifications, with numerous other painful and disgusting tasks. The
only food was a scanty supply of black bread, and occasionally a few
decayed olives, or sheep which had died from some disorder. At night
they were crowded into that most horrid of prisons the Bagnio, to sleep
on a little filthy straw, amidst the most noisome stenches. Their limbs
in chains, and often receiving the lash. Occasionally an individual
would be ransomed; when his story would draw tears of pity from all who
heard it. Ladies were frequently taken by these monsters and treated in
the most inhuman manner. And sometimes whole families were enslaved.
Numerous facts, of the most heart-rending description are on record: but
our limits oblige us to be brief.

A Spanish lady, the wife of an officer, with her son, a youth of
fourteen, and her daughter, six years old, were taken in a Spanish
vessel by the Algerines. The barbarians treated her and both her
children with the greatest inhumanity. The eldest they kept in chains;
and the defenceless little one they wantonly treated so ill, that the
unhappy mother was often nearly deprived of her reason at the blows her
infant received from these wretches, who plundered them of every thing.
They kept them many days at sea on hard and scanty fare, covered only
with a few soiled rags; and in this state brought them to Algiers. They
had been long confined in a dreadful dungeon in the Bagnio where the
slaves are kept, when a messenger was sent to the Aga, or Captain of the
Bagnio, for a female slave. It fortunately fell to the lot of the
Spanish lady, but at the instant when she was embracing her son, who was
tearing himself from his mother with haggard and disordered looks, to go
to his imperious drivers; and while in despair she gazed on her little
worn-out infant, she heard herself summoned to attend the guard of the
prison to a family that had sent for a female slave. She obtained
permission to take her little daughter wit