John Rawlins

Abstract

John Rawlins was born in Rochester, and lived for 23 years in the port of Plymouth, on the southwest coast of England. Employed by two Plymouth merchants as the master of their ship, the Nicholas, Rawlins set out late in 1621 on a trading voyage to Gibraltar, on which his ship was taken by Turkish corsairs. The English prisoners were taken to Algiers: two younger men were “by force and torment … compelled … to turn Turks,” and the rest were sold as slaves. Rawlins himself, by reason of a lame hand, was last to be sold, finally being purchased by his own captor for the equivalent of seven pounds ten shillings on account of his experience as a pilot and master. Yet when he proved slow at shipboard work, his owner threatened to sell him upcountry if he could not furnish a ransom of twice his purchase price. At this moment, a converted Englishman named John Goodale and his associates had bought and begun fitting out another English prize, the Exchange of Bristol. As both Goodale, the master, and Henry Chandler, the captain, were English converts, they “concluded to have all English slaves to go in her”; among those purchased were two of Rawlins’s men, James Roe and John Davies. Being asked where a skilled pilot and navigator might be found, Davies informed them that Rawlins was for sale, and accordingly he was purchased. The text that follows records what happened on the voyage, as told by an unidentified captive from the Nicholas: Rawlins’s discontentment with his lot, his recruitment of other slaves, free workers, and converts among the crew, and finally his successful mutiny and return to England along with his fellow captives and those officers and crew who had joined them, some willingly and some under coercion. The text that appears here is taken from the abbreviated version printed by Samuel Purchas in 1625 (Purchas his Pilgrimes, vol. 2, part 1, book 6 [London, 1625], 889–96); the original, printed in 1622—the year of the Exchange’s return—survives in a single copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.