Algiers

Algiers is a pivotal stopping point in the Old Woman’s account of captivity: there, a promised rescue turns into another sale, and a devastating plague nearly ends her life. The city is not presented as a settled home but as a place where diplomatic dealings, slave trading, and epidemic disaster intersect before her forced journey continues.

Arrival and Betrayal

The Old Woman reaches Algiers after a Sallee corsair has captured her and carried her to Morocco. There, she encounters a eunuch who recognizes her as the young princess he had once helped raise. He tells her that he had been sent by a Christian power to negotiate with the Emperor of Morocco for military stores and ships, intended to weaken the commerce of other Christian governments. With his mission complete, he says he will take her to Italy. Instead, he brings her to Algiers and sells her to the Dey. The reversal makes the city the destination of a failed escape, not the refuge she had been led to expect.

Plague and Survival

Soon after the sale, plague breaks out in Algiers with great force. The Old Woman recalls facing it at fifteen, after poverty and enslavement, the death of her mother, famine, and war. She herself falls ill but survives. The eunuch and the Dey die, as do almost all the people in the seraglio. The outbreak therefore transforms her circumstances while offering no lasting release: those who controlled her are gone, but she remains enslaved.

Sale and the Route Beyond

After the first violence of the pestilence subsides, the Dey’s slaves are sold. A merchant purchases the Old Woman and carries her to Tunis. From there, she is sold successively to other merchants and transported through Tripoli, Alexandria, Smyrna, and Constantinople. Algiers thus marks one link in a continuing chain of forced transfers across regions; survival in the city does not restore her freedom, but precedes another sale and another departure.

Narrative Significance

Algiers concentrates the account’s recurring reversals: a diplomatic envoy becomes a captor, a promised journey to Italy ends in a sale, and survival of the plague leads not to freedom but to renewed trafficking. The city’s brief place in the narrative connects political arrangements among governments with the Old Woman’s personal vulnerability, while the onward route shows that her captivity is sustained by repeated transfers rather than a single ordeal.