Algiers is a pivotal stop in Casper Gutman’s purported history of the black bird. In his account, the city is where Barbarossa brought the jeweled falcon after seizing the galley carrying it, and where it remained for more than a century before Sir Francis Verney supposedly carried it away. Algiers thus gives the falcon’s history a concrete hinge between its alleged capture and its later movement through Europe, while Gutman’s qualifications leave the story’s certainty unsettled.

The Falcon Arrives in Algiers

Gutman tells Sam Spade that Grand Master Villiers de l’Isle-Adam commissioned a foot-high jeweled bird, made by Turkish slaves in the castle of St. Angelo, and sent it toward Charles in Spain aboard a galley commanded by the French knight Cormier or Corvere. The bird never reached Spain. Barbarossa, whom Gutman identifies as a famous admiral of buccaneers sailing out of Algiers, seized the Knights’ galley and the falcon; in Gutman’s version, the bird then went to Algiers.

To support this leg of the story, Gutman invokes Pierre Dan, a French historian who wrote in a letter from Algiers that the bird had been there for more than a hundred years. Gutman treats that report as sufficient grounds for belief, but his wording preserves a gap between documented certainty and his own conviction: Pierre Dan believed the bird was there, and that is good enough for Gutman. Algiers is therefore both a named place in the claimed chain of custody and a point where the tale’s evidence depends on an old report rather than a continuous record.

Departure and Uncertain Provenance

Gutman says the bird was later carried away by Sir Francis Verney, an English adventurer who spent time with the Algerian buccaneers. Yet he immediately makes room for doubt, conceding that the bird’s passage through Verney’s hands may not be established. Gutman has also checked Lady Francis Verney’s memoirs and found no mention of the bird; he says it is fairly certain Verney did not possess it when he died in a Messina hospital in 1615, since he was stony broke.

The account proceeds from Algiers to Sicily, where Gutman says the falcon appeared and eventually came into the possession of Victor Amadeus II, who gave it to his wife after abdicating. He then traces it to a Spanish family and, after the Carlist War, to Paris, where it was disguised beneath black paint or enamel and passed among private owners and dealers. Within this sweeping history, Algiers marks the transition from the bird’s seizure by the buccaneers to its alleged recovery by a European adventurer; the chain is vivid, but its own narrator repeatedly distinguishes what he calls fact from what he can only infer.

A Place in the Modern Hunt

Algiers also belongs to the modern background of the search through Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s account of her earlier movements. She tells Spade that she met Floyd Thursby in the Orient and came to San Francisco with him from Hongkong. Gutman later reveals that Brigid had given the falcon to Captain Jacobi in Hongkong to bring it across on the Paloma while she and Thursby took a faster boat. These details do not place Brigid in Algiers, but they connect the city’s old buccaneer history to the novel’s present-day passage of the bird between intermediaries and across seas.

That present-day chain is marked by incomplete information and competing claims. Brigid says Thursby betrayed her but declines to explain how; she admits that she had been involved in helping others get the bird from a Russian named Kemidov, while dismissing the details as none of Spade’s business. Gutman, meanwhile, says his group knew Brigid well enough to conclude that Thursby was not the one who knew where the falcon was. Algiers belongs to Gutman’s historical case for the bird’s identity, but its narrative significance also lies in the contrast between an expansive, centuries-long provenance and the guarded, fragmented accounts surrounding the bird’s latest journey.