http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/global.php?id=848208
Should The Islamic World Apologize For Slavery? – Part One (excerpt)
On March 24, 1620, Owen Phippen (also called Owen Fitzpen) was captured by corsairs and held as a slave for seven years until his escape. A memorial stands in St Mary’s Church in Truro, Cornwall, erected by the rector, Owen’s brother.
By the time Owen Phippen was captured, the population of white slaves in Algiers alone numbered more than 20,000, according to Paul Baepler of the University of Minnesota. A decade later, the figure had risen to 30,000 men and 2,000 women. Sailors were not the only victims of the Barbary slave raiders.
In July 1625, a raiding party of corsairs landed at Mount’s Bay in Cornwall, and swept into the parish church where the locals were worshipping. Sixty men, women and children were abducted and carried onto the corsairs’ boats. Looe, a small Cornish port, was also attacked, though its inhabitants had tried to hide or flee. Eighty men were taken and the village was burned. The mayor of Plymouth reported that “27 ships and 200 persons (were) taken”. A second fleet of corsairs arrived soon after the first. The mayor of Plymouth would later record that 1,000 vessels had been destroyed in that summer’s raids, and the same number of villagers had been abducted into slavery.
On a moonlit June night in 1631, the inhabitants of the coastal village of Baltimore in County Cork, southwestern Ireland, were asleep, unaware that by daybreak their lives would be changed forever. A small flotilla of boats had sailed into the bay unnoticed. These boats, called xebec by their crews, had sailed from Sale in Morocco. They bore 230 musketeers, Muslims to a man, and they had come looking for slaves to sell in Algiers. They had no mercy for any of the town’s inhabitants as they burst into homes, setting the crofts alight. When one villager, Thomas Curlew tried to resist, he was hacked to death, and his wife was carried off. All of the elderly villagers were murdered, and by morning, the Barbary corsairs sailed off, carrying with them 130 men, women and children.
The leader of the abductors at Baltimore was himself a former slave. He went under the name of Murad Reis, but originally he came from Harlem in the Netherlands, where he had been known as Jan Jansen or Jan Jansz. After being captured at Lanzarotte in 1618 he became a convert to Islam, and married a Moroccan woman, even though he had left a wife and daughter behind in Harlem. His raids took him far from the Barbary coast; he even raided Iceland in 1627, taking 400 captives into slavery. He became governor of Oualidia in 1640. Many of those who became slaves opted to convert to Islam, though this was no guarantee of freedom from servitude.
According to Robert C. Davis of Ohio State University, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters (2004), in 1544, 7,000 captives were seized by Algerian corsairs in the Bay of Naples. In 1554, Vieste in Calabria, Italy, was raided and 6,000 people were carried off. In Granada, Spain, 4,000 men, women and children were taken into slavery in 1566...
(Some estimates are that over one million europeans were taken into slavery.)