The first half of the seventeenth century was the heyday of the Barbary pirates. More than twenty thousand captives were said to be imprisoned in Algiers alone. Those possessed of property could redeem themselves, but the poor were sold at auction like cattle, though occasionally their masters would give them their freedom upon their professing Mohammedanism. But thousands died from fever, from exhaustion, or under the lash. The women were less fortunate: they were taken into the harems and became concubines of their masters. A long list might be compiled of persons—not only Italians, French, and Spaniards, but English, Dutch, and German travelers in the South—who were captives for a time in Barbary. Don Miguel de Cervantes, the author of “Don Quixote,” and his brother Rodrigo were captured by Barbary corsairs in 1575 off Marseilles and taken as prisoners to Algiers. As the letters found upon the former were taken to prove that he was a man of importance and in a position to pay a high ransom, he was put under special surveillance. Their father made every effort to effect their release, but the money which he sent to Algiers by two priests of the Order of Mercy was sufficient only to ransom Rodrigo. Miguel and his companions in misery made several daring efforts to escape, which were, however, invariably discovered or betrayed, whereupon he always chivalrously took the blame upon himself, being sentenced on one of these occasions to two thousand strokes of the lash; but the Turkish viceroy remitted the sentence, which was tantamount to death, and thereby rendered an inestimable service to literature. In 1580, just as Cervantes was being sent to Constantinople, two Trinitarian monks arrived in Algiers and effected his release by paying a ransom of two hundred gold ducats—equivalent to about a thousand dollars—not a high price, it would seem, for one of the greatest writers of all time. Speaking of authors, it will be recalled that Defoe’s immortal hero, Robinson Crusoe, before setting out on his voyage to the South Seas, was captured by a Sallee rover and worked as a slave in Barbary—an incident which was probably founded on one of the adventures of Alexander Selkirk. [Illustration: VEILED WOMEN SLIP LIKE SHEETED GHOSTS Through the dim and narrow streets, flanked by high, blank walls, of the corsair capital]