The Merchants did with honour him commend Because their goods he bravely did defend. Prose narratives of this engagement are to be found in the _Calendar of Domestic State Papers_ for 1671 (pp. 536, 554). ‘King Charles in consideration of that stout and memorable action of Captain Baddison ... was pleased to order a gold chain and medal for him’ (_The Historian’s Guide_, 1688, p. 82). Another merchant captain, Robert Robertson, Charles knighted for fighting an Algerine man-of-war (Le Neve’s _Knights_, p. 2). More often weakly armed merchantmen were captured in defiance of treaties, as the narratives of captives such as Adam Elliot, taken in 1670, Joseph Pitts in 1678, and Thomas Phelps in 1684, all illustrate. A petition dated between 1671 and 1681 affirmed that since the last peace the Algerines had taken not less than 140 British ships, and had more than 1,500 English slaves, ‘who suffer and undergo most miserable slavery, put to daily extreme and difficult labour, but a poor supply of bread and water for their food, stripped of their clothes and covering, and their lodging on the cold stones and bricks; but what is more, their extreme hard and savage lading them sometimes with great burthens of chains, and shut up in noisome places, commonly adding some hundreds of blows on their bare feet, forcing out the very blood, and sometimes on the back, sometimes on the belly, and sometimes on them all, insomuch that many are long decrepit, some for ever, and some dying under their hands.’