The fate of these captive sailors is illustrated by a ballad published about 1684, called _The Algiers Slave’s Releasement, or the Unchangeable Boatswain_ (p. 88). Such captives were usually redeemed by the contributions of the charitable, under the authority of warrants known as ‘briefs’ licensing collections in churches for the purpose. (W. A. Bewes, _Church Briefs_, pp. 193-206). Some were ransomed by the king himself, others recovered by treaty or recaptured. Squadrons under Allin, Spragge, Narbrough and other commanders were successively sent to the Mediterranean to coerce the pirate states. The _Diary_ of Henry Teonge, who served as chaplain on various ships engaged in that service from 1675 to 1679, contains some account of Narbrough’s proceedings against Tripoli, and throws a flood of light on the conditions of life in the navy during the reign of Charles II. It was published in 1825. Teonge’s _Diary_ contains a ballad on the destruction of a vessel belonging to Tripoli by the English frigate Assistance in 1675 (p. 63), besides other specimens of his muse, mainly of an amatory nature (pp. 73, 79, 168, 241, 259). Still more curious than Teonge’s _Diary_ is along narrative poem describing a cruise in the Mediterranean, from May 1669 to April 1671, under Sir John Harman. It is called _The Straights Voyage or St. David’s Poem_, was published in 1671, and was written by John Balthorpe, a clerk on board the St. David, Harman’s flagship. It appears to have escaped altogether the notice of naval historians. One of the heroes of this war was Captain Thomas Harman, sometimes said to be the son of Sir John, and certainly a kinsman. There is a ballad on his capture of the Dutch frigate Schaherlaes in February 1675 (p. 53), but his career began in the Mediterranean. On May 8, 1671, Sir Edward Spragge’s squadron destroyed seven Algiers men-of-war and their prizes in the harbour of Bugia. The boom which defended the Algerines was cut by three of Spragge’s boats, thus making way for a fireship to enter. Harman seems to have been in command of one of the boats. ‘The Admiral,’ says a contemporary letter, ‘had every man killed and wounded in his boat, save Mr. Harman, who is deservedly commended and is said to have cut the boom in half pistol shot under their biggest castel (where the chains reached not) and heads of their men-of-war’ (_Cal. State Papers_, Dom. 1671, p. 249). Dryden, in some lines addressed in 1677 to Nat Lee on his play of _Alexander the Great_, refers to these two exploits of Harman’s to prove the proposition that some men’s merits are too pre-eminent for rivalry: for instance, Lee’s as a dramatist or Harman’s as a sailor: ‘’Tis here as ’tis at sea; who farthest goes, Or dares the most, makes all the rest his foes. Yet when some virtue much outgrows the rest, It shoots too fast and high to be opprest, As his heroic worth struck envy dumb, Who took the Dutchman and who cut the boom.’