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+--- Thread: Parker - Pirate Slave (1977) (/showthread.php?tid=2695)
Parker - Pirate Slave (1977) - WMASG - 12-15-2025
“My name?” Sandy beat his chest with one fist. “Sandy. Alexander.”
Uri nodded. “Iskander,” he repeated, the Arabic pronunciation for Alexander.
So he was no longer Joseph Alexander Short, American boy. He was Skander, slave to Arabian pirates. Accepting his new name was a first step in his mind and heart toward admitting he was now a slave. Sandy, the cabin boy from the Essex, was dead—as surely as if his throat had been cut with a knife like his shipmates’. Skander now belonged to the pirate captain. He was never going home.
It was a harsh, primitive world into which young Skander had stepped, where piracy and slave trading were respectable ways of life. But the pirates were not unkind to him. They fed him well, better than he’d been fed aboard the American merchantman. They gave him a ragged shirt and taught him to dance and brushed his fair hair. They hoped to sell him for three thousand pieces of gold.
Instead, the harsh scar-faced captain relented and made a Muslim of Skander, and the boy chose to spend his life in this new world.
A true story of Salem ships in the early days he nineteenth century lies behind this colorful novel of an exotic part of the world. Readers will identify with Sandy-Skander as his eyes are opened to the cruelties that men everywhere inflict on one another in the name of slave trading. [From the jacket cover]