James Riley (Captain)

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James Riley (b. 1777, Middletown, Conn., d. 1840 at sea) was the Captain of the American merchant ship Commerce. He led his crew through the Sahara Desert after they were shipwrecked off the coast of West Africa in August 1815, and wrote a book on their ordeal detailing his memoirs. The book was published in 1817 and is titled Sufferings in Africa: The Astonishing Account of a New England Sea Captain Enslaved by North African Arabs, and comes down to us today as a startling switch on the usual master-slave relationship.

This true story describes how they came to be shipwrecked, and their travails in the Sahara Desert. Lost in this unknown world, Captain Riley feels responsible for his crew and their safety. We are told of the events leading to their capture by marauding natives who kept them as slaves. Horribly mistreated, they were beaten, sun-burnt, starved, and forced to drink their own and camel urine. A slave would be worked until close to death, and then either traded or killed and possibly eaten.

The Arab nomad tribes who lived in the region believed that white westerners were slave gifts from their God according to their religion.

1 Story outline of Sufferings in Africa
2 Influence on Lincoln
3 References
4 See also
5 External link

[edit] Story outline of Sufferings in Africa

Upon landing in the ship's leaky boat, we hear how Captain Riley and his crew began to make repairs to return to the ship, rather than face a desert rescue. But the boat was unfinished when a native with a spear came upon the scene, and proceeded to help himself to their meager supplies. After filling up his arms with what he could carry off he left and returned with two others also carrying spears. Riley stayed back to distract the Arabs and give his men a chance to escape in the loaded and unfinished boat.

They made it, but without Riley, who offered his captors money in exchange for his life. With their agreement, a crew member named Antonio Michele swam to shore to pay them, at which point Riley ran out into the water to join his men. After Riley was safe in the boat all he could do was watch while an Arab stabbed Michele in the stomach and dragged his body away, which caused Riley tremendous feelings of guilt.

As the ship, still aground, was unuseable, unable to reach what are now the islands of Cape Verde, the crew decided to sail to the South while hoping for rescue, which did not come. After nine days, out of food and water, they returned to the shore at an isolated beach 200 miles further South, with the realization that they would probably be killed just as quickly as Michele. They reached the shore, which was surrounded by high cliffs. Riley told his men to begin digging for water while he himself discovered a path to the top which he climbed, and then found himself staring at the edge of a vast expanse of flat desert.

His crew joined him, and together they started to walk inland hoping for rescue by a friendly tribe. But soon they were without hope, enduring 120 degree heat during the day, and freezing temperatures at night. Now out of food and water, Riley resolved that they should either accept death, or offer themselves as slaves to the first tribe they encounter.

Which is what happens. A large gathering of men and camels appears on the horizon, and the crew approaches them. The tribe starts to fight among themselves, to determine who will become the slave-owners. The crew became separated when they were taken as slaves by different groups, which then went their own ways.

Riley recounts in his memoirs the terrifying days spent in their servitude. After a while, he had learned some of the language, and was able to communicate in a rudimentary way. One day during his captivity some Arabs arrived seeking a trade with his master. Riley asked the man whose name was Seti Hamet and his brother if they would buy him and his fellow shipmates and bring them to the closest city which was Mogadore, hundreds of miles away to the North. Seti Hamet was moved by Riley's wanting to save his friends and agreed to buy them if Riley would pay him cash and a gun when they arrived at the city. Riley promised that he had a friend there who would pay him upon their safe arrival, which was totally untrue, for Riley knew nobody. Hamet promises to slit his throat if he is lying. The time comes for Riley to write the note, and he is terrified. How can he write a note to a perfect stranger, begging him for several hundred dollars? He has no choice. In the note he explains who he is and his situation.

Traveling through the desert caused all to suffer - master and slave alike. There was very little food for the already starving American men, and very little water for everyone. Amazingly, they traveled the distance to the city - several hundred miles, constantly in fear of marauding hunter tribes. And especially a father-in-law of the brothers, who is out to settle a debt.

Eventually they arrive at the outskirts, and Hamet takes the note into town, which is addressed to the town's consul. He meets a young man in the city, who, it turns out, works as the assistant to a British merchant who also acts as a kind of consul and agent. Hamet tells this man about his "friend" and gives him the note. William Willshire, for that was his name, impressed by the sincerity of the note, agrees to pay. They ride out in a group to meet the men as they wait outside the city and Willshire greets Riley with hugs and tears.

To conclude the memoir, we learn that Riley sends his remaining men home to America, but stays behind for just a few days. Seti Hamet, his former master, promises that he will return to the desert to look for the missing crew members. Riley goes back to America, and is reunited with his wife and their five children in Connecticut. Two of the missing men are later returned to the States, and Riley hears of two Arabs who were stoned to death out in the desert, and is convinced that they were his former Masters, trying to keep their word.

Riley devoted himself back on shore to the politics of anti-slavery work, but eventually returned to a life at sea, where he died of sickness in his sixties. The lives of his crew were foreshortened, no doubt from complications caused by their time in the African desert. However, the last surviving crewman was the cabin boy - who lasted until the age of eighty-two.

[edit] Influence on Lincoln

When Abraham Lincoln listed the books that had most influenced him, one was Sufferings in Africa by James Riley. Riley's account of his life as a slave is said to have influenced Abraham Lincoln's attitude toward slavery in the United States.

Riley was the founder of the small mid-western village of Willshire, OH, which he named for William Willshire.