These several volunteer interferences, though undertaken with good
intentions, run directly counter to our plan; which was, to avoid the
appearance of any purpose on our part ever to ransom our captives, and
by that semblance of neglect, to reduce the demands of the Algerines to
such a price, as might make it hereafter less their interest to pursue
our citizens than any others. On the contrary, they have supposed all
these propositions directly or indirectly came from us; they inferred
from thence the greatest anxiety on our part, where we had been
endeavoring to make them suppose there was none; kept up their demands
for our captives at the highest prices ever paid by any nation; and
thus these charitable, though unauthorized interpositions, have had the
double effect of strengthening the chains they were meant to break, and
making us at last set a much higher rate of ransom for our citizens,
present and future, than we probably should have obtained, if we had
been left alone to do our own work in our own way. Thus stands this
business then at present. A formal bargain, as I am informed, being
registered in the books of the former Dey, on the part of the Bulkeleys
of Lisbon, which they suppose to be obligatory on us, but which is to be
utterly disavowed, as having never been authorized by us, nor its source
even known to us.
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