Skeletons On The Zahara (41 page)

In April, Willshire received a scrap of paper from Wednoon with William Porter's signature scrawled on it. In a second note, the nearly illiterate sailor managed to inform him that Robbins was in Wednoon also. Six months later, Willshire ransomed Porter for $163 and informed Riley in a letter that he had negotiated a ransom for Robbins. Porter arrived in Boston in December and reunited with Riley in New York shortly thereafter.

Riley, who included an update of Porter in the second edition of his memoir, listened intently as the sailor told him about his journey to Swearah. He was most interested in the man named Hamet who was killed while transporting Porter north. When Porter told him that the Arabs had biscuits (a Western food that could only have come from Swearah) and that each carried good double-barreled guns, Riley felt certain that this Hamet was his Sidi Hamet, who was “under a most solemn oath to do his utmost in endeavouring to prosecute the redemption of the remainder of [the] crew.” Riley was sure that Sidi Hamet had died trying to keep his word. He mourned the news, not only because he considered Sidi Hamet a good man but also because he knew that the crew's best chance for rescue had perished with his Arab friend.

Meanwhile, Robbins, like Robert Adams before him, suffered under bel Cossim's cruel son Hameda and was brutalized by bel Cossim, who one day threw a heavy stone at him, hitting him in the side and leaving him in pain for two months. Robbins began to give up hope. The Muslims of Wednoon, he wrote, “had often urged me to espouse the faith of a good Mussulman— relieve myself from slavery— take an Ishmaelitish wife, and become great. I cannot tell what increasing misery might have driven me to.” Finally, he was bought by an emissary of a wealthy Berber named El'ajjah Mahomet and taken to his house 130 miles north of Wednoon. From there he wrote Willshire and eventually was taken to Swearah. In March 1817 Robbins finally arrived there, as he described it, “clad in an old woollen frock shirt, as my whole apparel; my hair had grown at random in every direction; and my beard presented one evidence of a Mahometan.” Willshire treated Robbins with the same kindness he had his shipmates. Soon thereafter, Robbins set sail for home, arriving in Boston in May.

In Swearah, Willshire had told Robbins that two Christian slaves were on an island near an Arab fishing camp far to the south. He had sent an emissary “to find them, if possible, and bring them to him that they might be redeemed.” Robbins knew that these two men had to be James Barrett and George Williams, but neither was ever rescued. No verifiable news of the remainder of the crew of the Commerce— Dick Deslisle, John Hogan, and Antonio Michel— was ever received.

To honor the two men who helped save him and his four shipmates, the captain renamed his two youngest sons Horatio Sprague Riley and William Willshire Riley. At his request, Congress voted to formally thank William Willshire for his role in rescuing the Commerces. This acknowledgment was delivered to Willshire through the U.S. consulate at Tangier. President James Monroe also sent a letter via the British government thanking Willshire for his services.

Riley's account of the voyage of the Commerce and the captivity of her crew on the Sahara, published in 1817, was encouraged by Monroe and many congressmen and endorsed by New York statesman and abolitionist DeWitt Clinton. Aaron Savage wrote in an open letter printed in the book: “I do hereby certify that the narrative up to the time of our separation in Mogadore, contains nothing more than a plain statement of facts, and that myself, as well as others of the crew, owe our lives, liberties, and restoration to our country, under God, to [Riley's] uncommon exertions, fortitude, intelligence, and perseverance.”

Riley's memoir became legendary, propelling him to national and international fame. It was published in England that same year; French and Dutch editions followed during the next two years. Riley's son William Willshire Riley later claimed that it had been “read by more than a million now living in these United States.” Although this figure is an exaggeration that has been amplified by careless scholars, Riley's narrative did make a widespread and deep impact. Abraham Lincoln, for one, read the book as a boy and never forgot Riley's graphic tale of captivity.3 One well-known nineteenth-century Ohio historian was named Consul Willshire Butterfield, and a South Carolina man named his son Sidi Hamet.

The book remained in print through the end of the nineteenth century. Walking along blustery Cape Cod beaches and imagining himself on the desert, Henry David Thoreau thought of Riley's narrative, “notwithstanding the cold,” as he stated in his collection Cape Cod. Anecdotal evidence of the Narrative's impact and long popularity can be found in an 1876 history of education in Ohio:

One pupil read from the family Bible, another from Poor Richard's Almanac, while still a third read thrilling passages from some highly prized volume, such-as Captain James Riley's Narrative of Shipwreck and Captivity among the Arabs. If the reader of the last chanced to possess some elocutionary power, the whole school, teacher included, suspended operations and with open mouths and eyes listened intently to the interesting narration.

Riley's son William would claim that “no private citizen of this country, whose name has been altogether unattended by any official station to give him consequence in the opinion of the world, has made himself so extensively or so favorably known as has Capt. Riley” (Sequel, pp. iv-v).

Riley's book made the survivors of the wreck of the Commerce celebrities of sorts in their communities and in their travels, though this did not necessarily help them materially. The brutal conditions of captivity had left a lasting mark on each of them. They suffered from various health problems, and two died within seven years of returning home.

James Clark was plagued by swellings in the neck and chin, which were diagnosed as scrofula, or tuberculosis of the lymph glands, and deemed incurable. Dr. Felix Pascalis examined him in November 1816 and in a letter described a broken man with kidney pain, incontinence, depression, and a swelling in the neck so painful that Clark begged him to cut open his glands. “He was emaciated, of a pale, sallow, and dark spotted appearance,” Pascalis observed. “His weakness was extreme; he could not move without difficulty, as if his joints were stiff; and his thinking powers seemed also slow or suspended.” Under Pascalis's care, which included alkaline baths and poultices, applications of potash to his glands and sores, and the use of ammonia, phosphate of soda, opium, bark, and wine, Clark made a remarkable recovery, but he lived only a few years longer, dying in 1820, at age twenty-nine, in New Haven.

Shortly after returning to East Haddam, Thomas Burns remarried, to Jane Lord, who soon gave birth to a daughter, Agnes. The family eked out a living on a rented farm, though Burns, who had suffered from two concussions in Morocco, exhibited questionable behavior. In November 1818, under rather odd circumstances, he shot twenty-three-year-old Ezekiel Fox. “Burns having been annoyed, as he says, by a white Cat, loaded his gun, and went out in the evening for the purpose of shooting it,” the Connecticut Courant reported. “Perceiving something moving, as he supposed, along the top of the wall, which he thought to be the white cat, he fired and shot the young man dead on the spot.” Burns claimed that Fox's white vest and cravat had fooled him. He was apparently never prosecuted. Five years later, Burns, then forty-nine, his wife, and daughter all became ill and died. The Courant obituary identified Burns simply as “one of the unfortunate sufferers with Capt. Riley, on the great desart of Sahara.”

Aaron Savage married Martha Edwards of Middletown Upper Houses in 1817 and died in Stonington, Connecticut, on May 16, 1831, at the age of thirty-six. In 1842, his daughter Margaret married Captain Riley's son William. They gave their child Sarah, born the following year, the middle name Willshire.

Nothing else is known of William Porter's life except that he died in Stow, Ohio, on September 11, 1847, at age sixty-three.

After returning to Connecticut, Archibald Robbins published his own narrative recounting the shipwreck and his captivity, which lasted the longest of any of the survivors'. In matters of fact, Robbins's work largely confirmed Riley's, the fate of Antonio Michel being the chief difference between the two, along with Robbins's omission of the theft of the bottle of wine. Like Riley's book, Robbins's was an immediate sensation and went through twenty printings by 1830. Robbins remained a mariner and became master of a brig in the West Indies trade. He was later captured by Spanish pirates, who plundered his vessel and tried to extort more money from him by hanging him upside down until he was nearly dead. Eventually, they released him. In 1823, he earned a large profit ferrying workers up the Hudson to dig the Erie Canal. That same year, he married George Williams's niece Almira, and they gave their first son, William, born in 1826, the middle name Riley. Robbins, judiciously, left the sea to become a storekeeper and postmaster. After Almira died, in 1835, Robbins married her sister Elizabeth. They moved to Solon, Ohio, where Robbins, a father of nine, died in 1860.

In 1825, Horace Savage became master of the Hartford schooner Spartan and the following year of the Albion. He eventually moved to Mexico, where he lived and traded for some years. Despite his urging, his wife, Lavinia, refused to move there from Wethersfield, where she remained with their daughter, Jane. Horace later returned to Wethersfield, where in 1882 he died, the last known survivor of the Commerce, at the age of eighty-two.

His book sales notwithstanding, Riley's Sahara ordeal left him broke and battling chronic arthritis. In 1818, he went west on horseback, hoping to improve his health and find new opportunities. He worked as a government surveyor in northwest Ohio, a low-paying job in wilderness so fierce that in one swamp the ravenous flies killed his horse. Yet Riley saw promise in these wilds. He bought 360 acres on the St. Mary's River, settled his family there in a log cabin, and established a town, which he named Willshire. “My object,” he wrote with his defining zest in a letter to his friend John F. Watson in New York, “was to Establish mills, to build up a town, which would be likely to perpetuate the Name of my benefactor, to Establish my children in a new Country, where with proper industry and energy and good conduct they might rise with the Country.” His hope was that by river and canal, he would be able eventually to establish trade with the East Coast.

But Riley was still pursued by his personal demons, memories of his captivity on the desert and anxiety over the fate of his shipmates left there. “Overcome by this crowd of sensations which torment me almost incessantly,” he wrote in a letter in 1819 to Ohio governor Ethan Allen Brown, “I endeavour to shake them off by sleep, or laborious employment, but all in vain; if sleeping, my agonized soul is harrowed up by phantoms.”

But if Riley was forever troubled by his experiences in Africa, he was also improved by them. He became an outspoken advocate for abolition. “When the subject of slavery is brought forward— every nerve & sinew about my frame is strangely affected . . . my whole body is agitated,” he wrote in the letter to Brown, protesting the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state. Having suffered “cruelty & religious intolerance and bigotry,” he now cherished freedom and religious tolerance and could not accept the enslavement of black Africans, "who have been snatched & torn from their native country . . . by professors too of moral & political freedom & christian benevolence.

“Men though covered with a black skin are not brutes,” he concluded. “The hypocritical advocate of slavery shall be detested by all mankind.”

The arduous life of a pioneer suited Riley. He thrived and was elected to the General Assembly of Ohio in 1823. But wolves, mosquitoes, isolation, and recurring illness often made life miserable for his family. In 1826, weakened by fever, Riley suffered an attack of what was then called phrenitis, an inflammation of the brain now known as encephalitis. He suffered from painful swelling of his throat and neck and partial paralysis. Finally, he had to be transported to New York heavily dosed with opium.

Riley's doctor told him he should return to the sea, where the air would do him good, and during a short passage off the coast he found his health wholly restored. After more than a decade on land, he decided to resume the life of a merchant captain. Three years later, he was joyfully reunited with Horatio Sprague in Gibraltar. Since the time of his captivity, Riley had spoken out on a number of causes, and now he suggested reforms to strengthen America's international trade.

In a long, lucid, and impassioned letter to U.S. Senator John Forsyth, he argued that the nation's consular system was outmoded and needed to be revamped. Among its shortcomings was the fact that it employed many foreign nationals whose commercial interests conflicted with those of the U.S. merchants they were supposedly serving and who sometimes did not even reside in the port where they were consul. At the same time, Riley made an appeal for Sprague, a “feeling, liberal, talented, honorable and independent” American citizen, to be named consul at Gibraltar.

Because of his widely read book and his outspokenness, Riley was well known in Washington. Although he remained an outsider there and something of a gadfly, several times failing to receive promised political appointments, his letters to top government officials were often heeded. On April 30, 1832, much to Riley's satisfaction, the senate approved President Andrew Jackson's appointment of Sprague as American consul at Gibraltar.

The following June, Riley returned to Swearah. He was too late to see Rais bel Cossim, who, having remained close to Willshire— conducting other missions for him and often inquiring about Riley— had died suddenly in 1825. Willshire had written to inform Riley of the news, saying, “By the Boston and other newspapers, you will most probably hear of the death of your liberator, Rais bel Cossim,” indicating, by the suggestion that the press would report the Moor's death, the extent to which Riley's story had become known.