By these our Highness's letters we
certify thee that the Right Honourable William Harebrowne, Ambassador
in our most famous porch for the most excellent Queen's Majesty of
England, in person and by letters hath certified our Highness that a
certain ship, with all her furniture and artillery, worth two thousand
ducats, arriving in the port of Tripolis, and discharged of her lading
and merchandise, paid our custom according to order, and again the
merchants laded their ship with oil, which by constraint they were
enforced to buy of you, and having answered in like manner the custom
for the same, determined to depart. A Frenchman, assistant to the
merchant, unknown to the Englishmen, carried away with him another
Frenchman indebted to a certain Moor in four hundred ducats, and by
force caused the Englishmen and ship to depart, who, neither suspecting
fraud nor deceit, hoisted sails. In the meantime, this man, whose
debtor the Frenchman had stolen away, went to the Pasha with a
supplication, by whose means, and force of the Castle, the Englishmen
were constrained to return into the port, where the Frenchman, author
of the evil, with the master of the ship, an Englishman, innocent of
the crime, were hanged, and five-and-twenty Englishmen cast into
prison, of whom, through famine and thirst, and stink of the prison,
eleven died, and the rest were like to die.
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