The adventures of Robinson Crusoe make our childhood familiar with one of its forms. Among his early trials was his piratical capture by a rover from Sallee, a port of Morocco on the Atlantic Ocean, and reduction to slavery. "At this surprising change of my circumstances," says Crusoe, "from a merchant to a miserable slave, I was perfectly overwhelmed; and now I looked back upon my father's prophetic discourse to me, that I should be miserable and have none to relieve me, which I thought was now so effectually brought to pass that it could not be worse." And Cervantes, in the story of Don Quixote, over which so many generations have shaken with laughter, turns aside from its genial current to give the narrative of a Spanish captive who had escaped from Algiers. The author is supposed to have drawn from his own experience; for during five years and a half he endured the horrors of Algerine slavery, from which he was finally liberated by a ransom of less than seven hundred dollars.[5] This inconsiderable sum of money--scarcely the price of an ordinary African slave in our own Southern States--gave to freedom, to his country, and to mankind the author of Don Quixote. [5] The exact amount in our money is left uncertain both by Smollett and Roscoe, in their lives of Cervantes. It appears that it was five hundred gold crowns of Spain, which, according to his Spanish biographer, Navarrete, is equal to 6,770 reals, in the currency of the present day. (Vida de Cervantes, p. 371). The real is reckoned at ten cents.