When a prize was brought into Algiers the captives were required to declare their quality and condition, and a flagging memory was revived by a taste of the bastinado. The dey selected one prisoner in ten for himself, his preference being generally for skilled workmen and, of course, for young and beautiful women. The others were sold by public auction in the slave-market for the benefit of the owners of the galleys and their crews. Incredible as it may seem, the European powers tacitly accepted this piracy and slave-hunting by maintaining consuls at Algiers, through whose agency those of the captives whose friends could find the ransoms demanded were, after much delay, released, though it is said that they had to pay for the water they drank at the public fountains during their incarceration. Perhaps the most successful agency for the release of Christian captives, however, was the religious order of Trinitarians, or Redemptionists, as they are now called, who collected vast sums of money for the purpose, and, when other means failed, offered themselves in exchange for Christian captives. Though for three hundred years and more the most powerful states of Europe paid tribute to the corsairs and tolerated their insults, they had only themselves to blame, for the continuance of African piracy was wholly due to European jealousies. France openly encouraged them during her long, fierce rivalry with Spain; and when she had no further need of them they were supported against her by England and Holland. Indeed, British statesmen of the eighteenth century saw no shame in asserting that Barbary piracy was deserving of British encouragement because it served to check the competition of Britain’s Mediterranean rivals in the carrying trade. (Which serves to remind us that even to-day British public men are supporting the opium trade with China for equally sordid reasons.) Yet, in view of the weakness of their fleets as compared with those of the European powers, it remains a matter for profound astonishment that the corsairs succeeded in playing their great game of bluff so long. When William Eaton, the American consul at Tunis, who himself in later years smashed the power of the Tripolitan pirates by his amazing desert march on Derna,[5] was sent in 1799 to negotiate a treaty with the dey of Algiers, he wrote, “Can any man believe that this elevated brute has seven kings of Europe, two Republics, and a Continent tributary to him, when his whole naval force is not equal to two line-of-battle ships?”