Wonderful and Remarkable Adventures of a Twelve-Year Slavery

July 1731, off the coast of Spain. Maria ter Meetelen, a Dutchwoman who has roamed Europe dressed as a man, watches a corsair from Salé seize her ship. A few weeks later she is in Meknes, a slave of the sultan of Morocco.

Before the king, who reclines among his wives, she is promised a crown if she will renounce her faith. She chooses martyrdom instead. Widowed soon after her arrival, she is forced to take a new husband, Pieter, the leader of the Dutch captives, and begins twelve years of an extraordinary captivity.

Cunning, devout and often funny, Maria carves out a place for herself at the palace. She wins the favor of the queens, stands up to the king's scholars over two astrological globes, follows the sultan on his boar hunts, and opens an inn for the captives. All around her everything shakes: the revolt of the Black Guard, the plague of 1736, the famine of 1737-1738, sultans deposed and restored as revolution follows revolution. The Dutch embassies of Lynslager and Joost Sels raise hopes of ransom, then dash them.

Written at Medemblik in 1748, this first-person account is one of the very few testimonies by a woman held captive in Barbary. It is a frank voice, telling the court of Meknes without varnish, and her own stubborn determination to remain free at heart. The fox, she says, was too cunning for them: will she stay so to the very end?