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By Root 1036 0

buy a boat and come back for the others; you will find me on my father’s country estate, which is near the Babazón Gate, 9 close to the ocean, where I must spend the summer with my father and my servants. At night you could safely take me from there to the boat; remember that you must marry me, because if you do not, I shall ask Marién to punish you. If you do not trust anyone else to go for the boat, pay your own ransom and go yourself; I know you are more likely to return than any of the others, for you are a gentleman and a Christian. Try to learn where the estate is, and when you come out to the roof I shall know the bagnio is empty, and give you a good deal of money. Allah keep you, Señor.

This is what the second letter stated and declared; when everyone had heard it, each man offered to be the one who was ransomed, promising to go and return quickly, and I also made the same offer; this was opposed by the renegade, who said that under no circumstances would he consent to one man escaping to freedom until all of us could escape together, for experience had taught him how badly free men kept the promises made in captivity; important prisoners had often used this same plan, ransoming one man so that he could go to Valencia or Mallorca with enough money to equip a boat and return for those who had ransomed him, but those men never returned, because, as he said, the freedom they obtained and the fear of losing it again erased from their memories every obligation they had in the world. As confirmation of the truth he was telling us, he recounted briefly an incident that had occurred very recently to some Christian gentlemen, the strangest that had ever happened in that place where astounding and remarkable things happen every day.

Eventually he said that what we could and should do was to give the ransom money to him so that he could buy a boat there in Algiers, pretending that he planned to become a merchant and trader in Tetuán and along the coast; when he was master of the ship, it would be easy to devise a way to get all of us out of the bagnio and on board. Especially if the Moorish lady did as she said and gave us enough money to ransom everyone, for when we were free, it would be extremely easy for us to go aboard, even in the middle of the day; the greatest difficulty was that the Moors do not permit any renegade to buy or own a boat, unless it is a large vessel used for making pirate raids, because they fear that if he buys a boat, especially if he is a Spaniard, he wants it only to go to Christian lands; he would avoid this problem by taking on a Tagarino10 to be his partner in the purchase of the boat and to share in the profits, and by means of this deception he would become master of the ship, and then all the rest would be simple. Although my comrades and I thought it would be better to buy the boat in Mallorca, as the Moorish lady had said, we did not dare contradict him, fearing that if we did not do as he wished, he would betray us and endanger our lives by revealing our dealings with Zoraida, and to protect her life we would certainly have given our own; and so we resolved to put ourselves in the hands of God and the renegade, and we replied to Zoraida, telling her we would do everything she advised because her advice was as good as if Lela Marién had told her what to say, and it was entirely up to her whether the plan should be delayed or put into effect immediately. Again I offered to be her husband, and then, on the following day, the bagnio happened to be deserted, and using the reed and the handkerchief several times, she gave me two thousand gold escudos and a letter in which she said that next Jumá, which is Friday, she was going to her father’s country estate, and before she left she would give us more money, and if it was not enough, we should tell her, and she would give us as much as we asked for because her father had so much money he would not miss it, especially since she had the keys to everything.

We gave five hundred escudos to the renegade so that he could buy the boat; with eight hundred