There they were seized by the cruel Moors, and carried as spies before the Dey, and by his command immured in the dungeons of the fortress where many unhappy captives were also confined, and had been for many years.

For eight years he was an inmate of these horrible prisons, a sickening witness of many of those tortures and cruelties which were inflicted on his fellow-prisoners, and often on himself.

All those at all acquainted with the bombardment of Algiers, so ably carried on by Admiral Sir Edward Pellew, afterwards Viscount Exmouth, an entreprise which was entered on to avenge the atrocious indignities practised by the Dey on all the unfortunate foreigners that visited his coast, can well imagine the sufferings Mordaunt had not only to witness but to endure.

On the first report of a hostile fleet appearing off the coast of Barbary, the most active and able of the prisoners were marched out to various markets and there sold as slaves.

Mordaunt was one of these: imprisonment and suffering had not quenched his youthful spirit, nor so bowed his frame as to render him incapable of energy.