This was in 1535. Only a few short years before, in 1517, he had granted to a Flemish courtier the exclusive privilege of importing four thousand blacks from Africa into the West Indies. It is said that Charles lived long enough to repent what he had thus inconsiderately done.[29] Certain it is, no single concession, recorded in history, of king or emperor, has produced such disastrous far-reaching consequences. The Fleming sold his privilege to a company of Genoese merchants, who organized a _systematic_ traffic in slaves between Africa and America. Thus, while levying a mighty force to check the piracies of Barbarossa, and to procure the abolition of Christian slavery in Tunis, the Emperor, with a wretched inconsistency, laid the corner stone of a new system of slavery in America, in comparison with which the enormity that he sought to suppress was trivial and fugitive. [Footnote 29: Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, vol. i. p. 38.] Elated by the conquest of Tunis, filled also with the ambition of subduing all the Barbary States, and of extirpating the custom of Christian slavery, the Emperor, in 1541, directed an expedition of singular grandeur against Algiers. The Pope again joined his influence to the martial array. But nature proved stronger than the Pope and Emperor. Within sight of Algiers, a sudden storm shattered his proud fleet, and he was obliged to return to Spain, discomfited, bearing none of those trophies of emancipation by which his former expedition had been crowned.[30] [Footnote 30: Robertson's Charles the Fifth, book vi.; Harleian Miscellany, vol. iv. p. 504;--A lamentable and piteous Treatise, very necessarye for euerye Christen manne to reade, [or the Expedition of Charles the Fifth,] truly and dylygently translated out of Latyn into Frenche, and out of Frenche into English, 1542.] [Illustration]