The Fighting Sailor Turn'd Peaceable Christian: The Life of Thomas Lurting

Among the autobiographies of the first Quaker generation, Thomas Lurting’s little book stands almost alone. It does not begin in a meetinghouse or on a country road, but on the gun-deck of a man-of-war, with a boy of fourteen pressed into the wars and a cannon-ball passing close enough to feel. Lurting (c. 1632–1713) was a fighting seaman before he was anything else. He had served through some of the hardest sea-battles of his age, risen to be a boatswain’s mate with two hundred men under his command, and stood at the guns when the shot was flying and the decks ran with blood. The wonder of his story is that it tells how such a man came to lay down his sword and never take it up again.

First printed at London in the early eighteenth century under a title that says everything in a phrase — The Fighting Sailor Turn’d Peaceable Christian — the narrative carries the reader from Lurting’s impressment as a boy, through the wars against the Dutch and the Spaniard, to the four deliverances he counted in a single afternoon at the battle of Santa Cruz under General Robert Blake. Then comes the slow, costly turning: convinced of the Quaker truth in the unlikeliest of congregations, a handful of plain men aboard a warship, Lurting found at last that he could no longer serve the gun. His account of the standoff that followed — the captain’s drawn sword, the seaman who would not lift a hand to defend himself — is the peace testimony of the Quakers reduced to a single man on a single deck, with his life on the issue.

The book closes with the episode that made Lurting’s name. In 1663, sailing in a small merchant vessel, he and his shipmates were taken by Barbary corsairs out of Algiers. By seamanship and nerve they retook their own ship without killing a single man — and then, instead of selling their captives or holding them for ransom, they sailed to the Barbary coast and quietly set the ten Turks ashore, free men, in their own country. When the story reached England, King Charles II and the Duke of York sent for Lurting and asked him plainly why he had let his enemies go free. His answer is the moral of the whole book, lived out where kings could see it. This Friends Illuminated edition presents his narrative in lightly modernized English, with the plain speech of Friends preserved where he used it, and scripture and historical references linked throughout.