economists, although not counteracted, but on the contrary increased, by trade transactions with Mohammedan centres like Constantinople and Aleppo, and added to by all the privately paid ransoms. Sir Anthony Sherley ransomed two Portuguese gentlemen for ten thousand pounds, who had been enslaved sixteen years, and for one of whom three ransoms had been sent, each of which had been captured by pirates. The statement already made about all forms of life insurance being censured as gambling must be modified in connection with slavery, for both the law and public opinion approved of a man paying premiums to assure a ransom being paid, and that promptly, in the event of his capture; and the system seems to have been in frequent use,[148] although it must be admitted that not one of these travellers seems so much as aware of its existence. The expenses of protection against pirates may be imagined from the estimate for the outfit of the galley intended to carry the Provençal deputation to Constantinople in 1585, referred to earlier. The galley-slaves numbered two hundred; the deputation fifty. Sixty soldiers were to be taken for defence, whose wages for the eight months were to be nineteen hundred and twenty crowns of the sun; in addition to which was their keep, nine thousand and forty crowns, and arms and gunpowder, five hundred crowns, the total equalling about twenty-seven thousand pounds of our money. Of Turkey Sir Henry Blount says that in assuring himself against loss of liberty lay "the most expense and trouble of my voyage." And Blount's opinion is the better worth having, seeing that he would have been the last to fail in the exercise of courtesy and tact, the absence of which is the commonest cause of martyrdom. Several times he had to use his knife to avoid being pushed into a house, and hardly a day passed without his Janizary being offered a price for him. His defences against it in general were to cultivate or buy friends and to make a practice of pretending he had no friends and little money, and that all that remained to him was wagered against his return, because enslavement would be more in hope of ransom than service.