The power of the Barbary States was now at its height. Their corsairs became the scourge of Christendom, while their much-dreaded system of slavery assumed a front of new terrors. Their ravages were not confined to the Mediterranean. They penetrated the ocean, and pressed even to the Straits of Dover and St. George's Channel. From the chalky cliffs of England, and even from the distant western coasts of Ireland, unsuspecting inhabitants were swept into cruel captivity.[31] The English government was aroused to efforts to check these atrocities. In 1620, a fleet of eighteen ships, under the command of Sir Robert Mansel, Vice Admiral of England, was despatched against Algiers. It returned without being able, in the language of the times, "to destroy those hellish pirates," though it obtained the liberation of forty "poor captives, which they pretended was all they had in the towne." "The efforts of the English fleet were aided," says Purchas, "by a Christian captive, which did swim from the towne to the ships."[32] It is not in this respect only that this expedition recalls that of Charles the Fifth, which received important assistance from rebel slaves; we also observe a similar deplorable inconsistency of conduct in the government which directed it. It was in the year 1620,--dear to all the descendants of the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock as an epoch of freedom,--while an English fleet was seeking the emancipation of Englishmen held in bondage by Algiers, that African slaves were first introduced into the English colonies of North America--thus beginning that dreadful system, whose long catalogue of humiliation and woes is not yet complete.[33] [Footnote 31: Guizot's History of the English Revolution, vol. i. p. 69, book ii.; Strafford's Letters and Despatches, vol. i p. 68. Sir George Radcliffe, the friend and biographer of the Earl, boasts that the latter "secured the seas from piracies, so as only one ship was lost at his first coming, [as Lord Lieutenant to Ireland,] and no more all his time; whereof every year before, not only several ships and goods were lost by robbery at sea, but also Turkish men-of-war usually landed, and _took prey of men to be made slaves_."--Ibid. vol ii. p. 434.] [Footnote 32: "Purchas's Pilgrims, pp. 885, 886; Southey's Naval History of England, vol. v. pp. 60-63. There was a publication especially relating to this expedition, entitled Algiers Voyage, in a Journall or briefe Repertory of all Occurrents hapning in the Fleet of Ships sent out by the Kinge his most excellent Majestie, as well against the Pirates of Algiers as others. London. 1621. 4to.] [Footnote 33: Bancroft's History of the United States, vol. i. p. 187.] [Illustration]