being built as a conscious attempt by Mulay Ismail to outshine his French contemporary, King Louis XIV, whose Palace of Versailles had been completed a few years earlier. The sultan's slaves – among them Pellow and his 51 shipmates – were compelled to work on the palace's construction. It was gruelling physical labour made worse by the brutal slave drivers who beat any slave who slacked in his work. Milton's narrative draws on original documents, unpublished diaries and manuscript letters housed in The National Archives and the British Library manuscript collection. White Gold also makes use of the published narrative written by Pellow himself. One English slave, Abraham Browne, left a detailed account of his life in the days prior to being sold. He was fed "fresh vitteles [victuals] once a daye and sometimes twice in abondance, with good white breade from the market place." Browne correctly surmised that the bread was "to feed us up for the markett [so] that we might be in some good plight agaynst the day wee weare to be sold." Once bought, most slaves never again saw freedom. The vast majority were to die in captivity. Thomas Pellow had a different fate: he would eventually escape and make his return to England. He found passage aboard a ship bound for Penryn, Cornwall. When he arrived home in 1738, 23 years after leaving home, Pellow's parents did not recognise their son. Milton quotes Professor Robert. C. Davis when trying to estimate the number of white slaves between 1530 and 1780. He wrote "there were certainly a million, and quite possibly as many as a million and quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary coast". Samurai William Samurai William is an historical portrayal of the life and adventures of William Adams – an Elizabethan adventurer who was shipwrecked in Japan in 1600. William Adams's story inspired the 1975 best-selling novel Shōgun by James Clavell, recounting the history of early European contacts with the Japanese shōgun and the ultimately doomed attempts of the English East India Company to forge profitable trading links with Japan. William Adams set sail from Rotterdam in 1598, having been employed as pilot on the Dutch ship Liefde (Love). The Liefde was one of five vessels whose ostensible purpose was to head for the Spice Islands or Maluku Islands of the East Indies. But the expedition's financiers also encouraged