Horrors of Slavery

William Ray's Barbary captivity narrative takes us on a wide-ranging journey through genres and geographies: from Philadelphia to North Africa, in prose and in poetry, Ray narrates the remarkable history of his experiences as a sailor, prisoner, and keen political observer during the Tripolitan War. This superb edition of RayÆs text marks a key contribution to the genre of the captivity narrative in early American literature and provides a window onto an important historical episode of the early national periodùnamely, the earliest military encounters between the U.S. and Islamic states.

~Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, author of The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public