www.iconfilms.co.uk/whiteslaves/notconvinced.html
A white slave is inspected at market - from "The Slave Market" by Jean-Leon Gerome 1866. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA.
NEVILLE OLDHAM "Well at the beginning, when we found the wreck, we found coin and we found cannon. We investigated merchants, we looked in all the records to see if we could find of a ship being lost here; and also we started looking at all the merchants in the area, because we found a seal and a pewter bowl with the initials MR on the bottom; and we thought as we had found that we would obviously be able to find the owners of it and get to know what had happened here. There were other clues: the ship was also carrying a large cache of gold ornaments. VENETIA PORTER "The jewellery is very interesting and very important it consists of a large part of these earrings, which were worn not actually in the ears, but on headdresses. Whats also interesting is that not a single piece of this jewellery, whether its this little, probably an amulet case is actually intact, in fact it the whole of this looks like the whole of this looks like very much a bullion horde." But the pieces of jewellery tell Neville Oldham another story. NEVILLE OLDHAM "The jewellery is all cut perfectly in half and this was standard procedure by pirates to divide any treasure they found to stop argument, and then half could go to the ship, the captain and the crew. The other half could go to the people who put the money up to send this ship out on these raids." The gold was simply being prepared for melting down into these finger ingots found on the wreck. VENETIA PORTER "Colleagues in the scientific research department here at the British Museum have discovered that the ingots, and the jewellery and the coins have definitely come from the one source and it has to be African Gold, because it bears very close parallels to earlier North African gold coins." Straddling the harbour, the armed defences of the twin cities of Sale and Rabat as powerful reminders of Moroccos freebooting past.
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