Sub-Saharan regions were not the only parts of Africa for which European ships laden with goods set out to obtain people. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch and English, in particular, periodically sought slaves from the Mediterranean ports of North Africa. Here, however, the slaves were invariably white, and their fate, after their African owners had received the appropriate amount of goods, was not hard labor in the Americas but rather reentry into the nascent West European free labor market. In striking contrast to their attitudes toward non-Europeans a little to the south, European governments extended “Compassion to the Poor Slaves” and negotiated the redemption of their compatriots after the Barbary Powers had enslaved the latter. Down to the 1640s there were more English slaves in North Africa than there were African slaves under English control in the Caribbean. Release of the former became feasible when the “Emperor of Fez and Morocco … [sent] word what English Comodities he will have in Exchange for them ….” Clearly by the seventeenth century there was a slave-free dichotomy within Europe that followed the divide between Africans and Europeans. Why did a century or more have to pass before significant numbers of Europeans found similar compassion for Africans carried across the Atlantic? Indeed, why, from a broader perspective, should Europeans feel it necessary to seek the release of their fellows held in captivity?