Part 2

The inadequacy of the Spanish garrison left for the protection of Tunis, and the growing boldness and activity of the combined Moors and Turks, called for prompt measures; and, in 1574, Don Juan held himself in readiness with a fleet to restore Spanish prestige in Africa. But the delays, caused by the procrastination of Philip, proved fatal. Before the squadron received the supplies and materials required for the expedition, the allies, after a desperate military and naval engagement, captured the Goletta, and obtained possession of Tunis. With this last prospect of active service dispelled, Cervantes, weary of inaction, disgusted with the unchivalrous termination of the Crusade which had commenced so gloriously at Lepanto, and eager for the sight of his native land, obtained leave to return to Spain. The high opinion in which he was held by “men of state and of might” with whom he had come in contact, is shown by the fact that this private soldier received from the Commander-in-Chief, Don Juan, a letter to the King, strongly recommending him as “a man of valour, of merit, and of many signal services,” while the Viceroy of Sicily, the Duke of Sessa, provided him with letters to Philip, and to his Council, in

which he speaks of him as “a soldier as deserving as he was unfortunate; who, by his noble virtue and gentle disposition, had won the esteem of his comrades and his chiefs.” In August, 1575, he set sail for Naples on board the galley _El Sol_, but five years more were to elapse before he was again to tread the shores of Spain.

In the following month, _El Sol_ was attacked within sight of the Spanish coast by a squadron of Algerine pirates. In the unequal contest which followed, Cervantes is reported to have borne himself with characteristic gallantry, but such an encounter could have but one issue, and the captured Spaniards were divided up among the Moors as spoils of victory. Cervantes became the prize of a Captain, named Delí Mamí, a renegade Greek, who had earned the distinction of being one of the most ferocious of that notoriously savage and revengeful race of corsairs. For the following five years Cervantes endured a tyranny of serfdom as rigorous and unrelaxing as ever slave suffered in the mines of Spain. He was already known as _el manco de Lepanto_; he was now to earn, if not to wear, the title of _el manco de Argel_.

It is not our purpose here to give a detailed description of the sufferings he bore with knightly fortitude and undaunted spirit for those long five years. The particulars are preserved to us in official documents, but a brief summary must find a place in our sketch.

According to the testimony of Father Haedo, in whose _Topography of Algiers_, published in 1612, we have the most valuable authority for this period of Cervantes’ life, and who was an eye-witness to the cruelties practised upon the Christian slaves, the captivity of Cervantes was one of the hardest ever known in Algiers. Mr. Watts has given us an eloquent account of our hero in this bondage. It was borne, he says, with a courage and constancy which, had there been nothing else to make his name memorable, must have sufficed to rank Cervantes among the heroes of his age and country. No episode more romantic is contained in the books of chivalry. No adventures more strange were encountered by any knight-errant. Not Amadis nor Esplandian, nor any of those whose fabled deeds had kindled his youthful imagination, displayed a loftier spirit of honour, or more worthily discharged his knightly devoir, than did Miguel de Cervantes when in duress in Algiers. A slave in the power of the bitter enemy of his creed and nation, cut off in the heyday of his fame from the path of ambition which fortune seemed to have opened to him; no lot could be more cruel than that which, in the fulness of his manhood and genius, fell to his share.

Nor is there any chapter of his life more honourable than that record of the singular daring, fortitude, patience and cheerfulness with which he bore his fate during this miserable period. With no other support than his own indomitable spirit, forgotten by those whom he had served, unable to receive any help from his friends, subjected to every kind of hardship which the tyranny or caprice of his masters might order, pursued by an unrelenting evil destiny, which seemed in this, as in every other passage of his career, to mock at his efforts to live that high heroic life which he had conceived to himself; this poor maimed soldier was looked up to by that wretched colony of Christian captives (including among them many men of higher birth and rank) as their chief counsellor, comforter, and guide. In his formal information, laid before the commissary of the Spanish Government at Algiers, Father Juan Gil, of the Order of the Redemptorists, very particular testimony is borne by Cervantes’ fellow-captives to his character and conduct, as one who bore himself always as a faithful Christian, who cheered those who were despondent, who shared with the poor the little that he possessed, who helped the sick in their necessities, who risked every danger in the cause of the faith, behaving himself always like a true soldier of the King and a noble gentleman--all of which good record is confirmed by the honest Father himself of his own personal knowledge.

The daring escapes that Cervantes planned, the intrepid courage with which he set himself to invent new schemes when the old ones miscarried; the indomitable cheerfulness he always maintained, and especially the spell he exercised over his master, the brutal Hassan Pasha of evil memory, are sufficient to mark him as a man of extraordinary resource, magnetism, and force of character. Delí Mamí, misled by the letters which were found upon the person of his captive, regarded Cervantes as a man of position and substance, and the treatment meted out to him was the more severe, in order that his family would the more speedily effect his release. These Algerine pirates lived upon the ransoms which they extorted from the friends of their captives; and at the time of Cervantes’ bondage, no fewer than 25,000 Christians, including many men of rank and fortune, were waiting the arrival of the price of their freedom, and frequently enlivening the monotony of their servitude by attempting to escape. Cervantes earned a peculiar celebrity among this army of captives by the ingenuity and persistence of the plans he put into practice in order to achieve the ambition of every bondman. But while his courage became proverbial, and his craft amazed both his captors and his fellow-prisoners, his ill-luck ever intervened to frustrate his best-laid plans.

A further reference may be permitted here to the influence which Cervantes exercised upon his barbarous gaoler, Hassan Pasha, who had purchased him from Delí Mamí for the sum of 500 gold crowns. The author of _Don Quixote_ has told us (Part I., Chapter xi.) of “the unheard-of and unseen cruelties which my master practised on the Christians. Every day he hanged a slave; impaled one; cut off the ears of another; and this upon so

little occasion, or so entirely without cause, that the Turks would own he did it merely for the sake of doing it, and because it was his nature.” This “homicide of all human kind,” as Cervantes stigmatises him in another place, was so inexplicably dominated by fear and respect of his slave that he was wont to declare that, “if he had this maimed Spaniard in safe keeping, he would reckon as secure his Christians, his ships, and his city.” But the most difficult feat of his governorship--Hassan Pasha was at this period Viceroy and virtual King of Algeria--was to retain his intrepid prisoner in custody. Twice the hangman’s rope was drawn upon his neck, and twice his head was, at the last moment, taken from the noose. On one occasion he was ordered 2,000 blows with a stick by “the most cruel tyrant of all those who have been kings of Algiers,” but the rod never descended upon his body. Yet it is known that he did not volunteer one word on his own behalf, or urge a single plea in extenuation of his designs. When the viceroy’s soldiers captured a little band of Christians, on the eve of their embarkation on a frigate sent to their relief, it was Miguel de Cervantes who went forward alone to meet the captors, declaring that he alone was the instigator of the whole plot, and that none of his companions had any part or blame in the business. He repeated his statement in the presence of Hassan Pasha, and although “threatened with torture and instant death, with the spectacle of many of his companions hanged or mutilated before his eyes, Cervantes refused to implicate any one in his schemes of flight.”

In 1577, Cervantes, recognising the unpreparedness of the Algerians, the weakness of the city’s fortifications, and the numerical superiority of the Christian population to support from within a systematic scheme to capture the city, made an ineffectual appeal to the king to come to the rescue of his captive subjects. The petition, if ever it came to Philip, fell upon deaf ears; and the arch-plotter, disappointed but undeterred, sent a secret message to Don Martin de Cordova, the Governor of Oran, praying him to provide men to assist in a general escape. The miscarriage of this adventure, through the capture and death of the messenger, brought Cervantes once more within an ace of the rod and the halter, but the irrepressible schemer was presently surprised in hatching still another device to obtain his liberty, and had to seek refuge with a friend from the rage of the viceroy. A proclamation, threatening instant death to anyone sheltering the fugitive, was published in Algiers, and rather than expose his concealer to this danger, Cervantes voluntarily presented himself before Hassan Pasha, who vainly endeavoured, by threats of torture and death, to extort from him the names of his accomplices.

Loaded with chains, and guarded with unceasing vigilance, he was now kept for five months in the closest confinement, but the viceroy still refrained from visiting the defiance of his prisoner with stripes or personal indignity. As Cervantes has recorded, in his modest reference to this period of captivity in _Don Quixote_: “The only one who held his own with him (Hassan Pasha) was a Spanish soldier, called De Saavedra, to whom, though he did things which will dwell in the memory of those people for many years, and all for the recovery of his freedom, his master never gave him a blow, nor bade anyone to do so, nor even spoke to him an ill word, though for the least of the many things he did we all feared he would be impaled, as he himself feared more than once.” This story is confirmed by Father Haedo, who says that while the captivity of Cervantes was “one of the worst ever known in Algiers,” he was never beaten, or hurt, or abused in his person; and the worthy Benedictine monk, in his _Topografia e Historia General de Argel_ (1612), further declares that “had his (Cervantes’) fortune corresponded to his intrepidity, his industry, and his projects, this day Algiers would belong to the Christians; for to no other end did his intents aspire.”

While we must deplore the wounds which Cervantes received in the wars, and sorrow over the duress he suffered in Algiers, it must be always remembered with pride that it was to his personal valour, and nobility in adversity, that we owe the full and particular account that we have of these years of his career. As he gained the commendation of Don Juan in action, he won in adversity “great fame, praise, honour, and glory among the Christians” in Algiers. And that the record of his unswerving loyalty to creed and country, his “mingled genius and greatness,” and his magnanimous refusal to inculpate anyone in his many attempts to escape, should not be lost, a base Dominican, one Blanco de Paz, circulated such calumnies against Cervantes that he demanded the charges should be investigated before Father Juan Gil. Cervantes had, at this time, been ransomed by the efforts of his family and the generosity of the local merchants, who supplemented the 600 ducats his mother and sister had managed to raise by a contribution of a further 400 ducats, with which Hassan Pasha was satisfied. The inquiry lasted for twelve days, and ended in the complete acquittal of Cervantes, who was declared to be deserving, for his conduct in captivity, of all the praises which he had received. The abstract of these proceedings, signed by Father Juan Gil, are still reserved in the archives of Simancas, and from these we obtain the materials for the biographical account of Cervantes’ career during his Algerine captivity. “Had there survived no other record than this of the life of Cervantes,” Mr. Watts justly remarks, “had he not written a line of the books which have made him famous, the proofs we have here of his greatness of soul, constancy, and cheerfulness under the severest of trials which a man could endure, would be sufficient to ensure him lasting fame. The enthusiasm, the alacrity, and

the unanimity with which all the witnesses--including the captives of the highest rank and character in Algiers--give their testimony in favour of their beloved comrade, are quite remarkable, and without precedent. They speak of him in terms such as no knight of romance ever deserved; of his courage in danger; his resolution under suffering; his patience in trouble; his daring and fertility of resource in action. He seems to have won the hearts of all the captives, both laymen and clerics, by his good humour, unselfish devotion, and kindliness of heart.” His liberation was effected on the 19th September, 1580; the inquiry held by Father Gil was concluded on the 22nd October; and in the last days of the same year he landed in Spain, and learned from experience the truth of his confident declaration: “There is not a satisfaction on earth equal to that of recovered liberty.”

Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, whose study of Cervantes’ life and character is instinct with a wholesome sanity and a freedom from all sentimental adulation, does not fail to detect the extravagant sanguineness which inspired many of these attempts at escape. To him, “the whole story of this captivity reads like a page from some wild impossible romance;” but while his judicious biographer can smile at Cervantes’ “sublime self-confidence,” and regard his _affairé_ with the unknown Portuguese lady without hysteria, and is not even convinced that Christendom was saved on the great day of Lepanto, by the single arm of our hero, he is not lacking in sincere appreciation of the many virtues of the author of _Don Quixote_. Cervantes was not a great poet, or a great dramatist, or a great man of business; viewed in the light of the age in which he lived, and Mr. Kelly never fails to bear this fundamental condition in mind, he was an honourable, right-living man, who made no pretentions to being an ascetic or a saint. Mr. Kelly can detect the minor blemishes of a nature which had the defects of its own virtues; he realises that his frequent and fruitless dashes for liberty, which only intensified the severity of his captivity, were inspired by a reckless, uncalculating optimism; but he is not blind to the sympathetic, generous spirit which not even malignant oppression could imbitter, or to the buoyant temperament which the sternest fates could not deaden.

“To say that when Cervantes left his home of servitude,” Mr. Kelly writes, “he was in every respect the same man as when he entered it, would be to say that he was deaf to the voice of wisdom, and blind to the disillusioning teaching of experience. He had had borne in on him ‘the sense that every struggle brings defeat,’ and had realised the width and depth of the vast abyss which yawns between the easy project and the painful, nebulous, far-off achievement. Something of the invincible confidence, the early ardour, the unquestioning trustfulness of youth had passed with the passing years, and melted into the grey, sombre ether of the past; but nothing misanthropic mingled with his splendid scorn, his magnificent disdain for the base and the ignoble; nothing of the cruel, fierce indignation of Swift gleamed from those quiet, searching eyes, which watched the absurdities of his fellow-men with a humorous, whimsical, indulgent smile. In the squalid prison life his strenuous courage, his iron constancy and self-sacrificing devotion had drawn every heart towards him with one exception--that of the scandalous, shameless friar, Blanco de Paz.”

After seven years of intermittant activity, and yet another five of terrible captivity, in the service of Spain, we find Cervantes, at the age of thirty-three, the “captain of his fate,” but attached to no regiment; the “master of his soul,” but master of nothing else. He carried his honourable wounds and the traces of his duress with pride, but so far as worldly advancement went, they did not serve him. He might well have cried, in the spirit and words of W. E. Henley:

“Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody but unbowed;”

but the king, for whom he had shed his blood, was unmindful of him; his patron, Don Juan of Austria, was dead, and he had perforce to commence the business of life over again, without a friend and with a financial liability in the matter of his ransom, which was to take him four years to pay off. But he would appear to have been without regrets or repinings--he had regained his liberty, and we know in what measure he prized it. He must have been re-living the emotions he experienced on his return to his native land, when he made Don Quixote declare to his faithful squire: “Liberty ... is one of the most valuable blessings that heaven has bestowed upon mankind. Not all the treasures concealed in the bowels of the earth, nor those in the bosom of the sea can be compared with it. For liberty a man may--nay, ought--to hazard even his life, as well as for honour, accounting captivity the greatest misery he can endure.”

History tells us that even in the comparatively brief period of Cervantes’ captivity the decline of the mighty Empire of Spain had commenced. The inherent meanness of Philip’s spirit, his religious intolerance, his incompetence as both statesman and soldier, and the dominant power of the priests, had sapped the nation’s energy, and crushed national ambition. The character of the king set the seal on the country’s destiny. He abhorred letters, and was jealous of intellectual eminence; he was feeble and timorous in his foreign policy, and starved the soldiers upon whom the burden of maintaining the Empire rested; his one love and ambition was for the Church, which was sapping the life blood of the nation. Of the 50,000,000 people who constituted the population of his dominions, no fewer than a million persons were in the service of the Church. There were archbishops by the score, bishops by the

hundred, and lesser ecclesiastes by the hundreds of thousands. The Holy Office alone offered a sure road to advancement and position, and many there were that walked therein.

But Cervantes, undashed by ingratitude and undaunted by hardship, retained his loyalty, and relinquished not a tittle of his chivalrous conceptions and aspirations. He was still desperately sincere in the convictions, which never left him, that “there is nothing in the world more commendable than to serve God in the first place, and the King in the next, especially in the profession of arms, which, if it does not procure a man so much riches as learning, may at least entitle him to more honour.” As the profession of arms had won him no honour, so he was to learn by experience that learning would deny him riches; but the knowledge that he had deserved the one, and had been instrumental in the accumulation, if not in the participation, of the other, may have afforded him some slight comfort. That he revelled in the desperate chances, as well as in the prospect of winning honour, which the soldiers’ life had to give, may be gathered from the exhortation which he makes _Don Quixote_ give to the young soldier: “I would not have you be uneasy with thoughts of what misfortunes may befall you; the worst can be but to die, and if it be a good, honourable death your fortune is made, and you are certainly happy.... For suppose you should be cut off at the very first engagement by a canon ball, or the springing of a mine, what matters it? it is but dying, and there is an end of the business.”

We may be sure that some such reflections filled the mind of Miguel de Cervantes when he rejoined his old regiment, now known, from its exploits in the Low Countries, as the _tercio de Flandes_, and marched under his old commander, Lope de Figueroa, to the subjugation of Portugal. He was serving God in the first place, and his King in the next, believing that at the worst he would find fortune and happiness in “a good, honourable death.” His lifetime rival and disparager, “that prodigy of Nature,” Lope de Vega, has told us that he carried a musket in the same campaign; but it is unlikely that he was animated by the same honourable philosophy.

The conquest of Portugal was a simple undertaking, the land forces of Don Antonio making but a feeble show of resistance; but with the aid of France, the illegitimate son of Luis, the brother of Joam III., made a more formidable opponent on the seas. His fleet, which had its base in the Azores, was joined by some sixty French ships, under Philippo Strozzi, and six English privateers, and this flotilla gave battle to the Spanish squadron, commanded by the Marquess of Santa Cruz, off Terceira, in the Summer of 1582. Cervantes was serving on the flagship _San Mateo_, which was opposed to three of the enemy’s vessels, and again our hero failed to obtain advancement, or achieve a good, honourable death. The engagement ended in a signal victory for the Spaniards, but it benefited Cervantes not at all, and he left his regiment (probably in the late Autumn of 1582) as poor and unfavoured as he had rejoined it. Many years afterwards, in May, 1590, in his petition addressed to Philip II., praying for one of the offices then vacant in America, as a compensation for his sufferings, and in acknowledgment of his services on behalf of the King, he recapitulates his engagements at Lepanto and Tunis, alludes to his period of captivity, and refers to his campaign “in the Kingdom of Portugal and in the Terceiras with the Marquess of Santa Cruz.”

This Portuguese campaign is interesting, so far as Cervantes is concerned, as recording the only instance of a liason that is known in his career. Most of his biographers have either glossed over the fact, or declined to believe it, but it is a matter that calls for neither apology nor incredulity. We know that he entertained a very favourable opinion of the Portuguese, and was loud in his appreciation of the beauty and amiability of the Portuguese ladies. The identity of the fair, frail one who won his good will is wrapped in mystery; but the memory of this _affaire_ must have been with him when he wrote, nearly a quarter of a century later, “the passion of love is to be vanquished by flight alone, and that we must not pretend to grapple with so powerful an adversary since, though the force be human, Divine succours are necessary to subdue it.” The fruit of this amour was a daughter, called Doña Isabel de Saavedra, who became his life companion, and who, after his death, entered the convent of the barefooted Trinitarian nuns at Madrid.