Cervantes, the Shakespeare of Spain, led a life of the most romantic and adventurous kind. In fact, no novelist has ever invented a story as fascinating and varied as the bare facts of his most extraordinary career. He was a soldier, a dramatist, a patriot, a slave; and after producing, perhaps, the greatest novel ever written, a work which is the glory of Spanish literature and a delight to the civilized world, he died poor and neglected.
His family was noble and was first settled in Galicia, from whence it moved to Castile. Cervantes was born in 1547. His family, although honorable, was very poor, but he received a liberal education. He became a page, chamberlain, and afterward a soldier, and fought at the naval battle of Lepanto, "Where," he said, "I lost my left hand by an arquebuse under the conquering banner of the son of that thunderbolt of war, Charles V., of happy memory."
He also distinguished himself at the siege of Tunis, and later was taken prisoner by a Barbary corsair, and was kept in cruel captivity for five years at Algiers, It was customary with the Algerines to treat their prisoners according to their supposed rank and expected ransom. The avarice of the masters sometimes alleviated the lot of the Christian slaves; but, unfortunately for Cervantes, he was treated with extreme severity in order to compel him to obtain ransom from his friends, while he, the very soul of independence, tried to escape in order to avoid trespassing on their resources. The interest of the Moors was to pretend to believe that their captives were of exalted rank and position, in order to obtain a bigger ransom.
Cervantes, in one of his novels, makes Ricardo give an account of this notable custom in the story of his adventures. His master, Fetale, is always complimenting him upon his exalted rank, and telling him that, from a sense of honor, he should pay a high ransom. He tells him that it is not becoming his rank to remain an idle and inglorious captive, and laughs at the repeated disclaimers of his prisoner. Unfortunately, when Cervantes was captured he had in his possession letters of introduction from public personages of the day, which caused him to be highly valued. This led to cruel sufferings, inflicted in the expectation of obtaining a heavy ransom. He was sentenced to be imprisoned in a place called the Baths. The Moorish dungeons had three depths of caverns, like underground granaries. In mockery of the light of heaven, there was one small window, and that was crossed with iron bars. The sun and air never entered this awful place. The only sights were harrowing; the only company was that of convicts, thieves, murderers, and the lowest Moorish rabble; and the sounds and voices, mixed with blasphemies and oaths, were re-echoed as if from the vaults of the dead. Every sense was outraged by the accumulation of horrors that combined to disgust and horrify. Hunger, nakedness, thirst, heat, damp, and cold, all combined to swell the catalogue of their miseries and their woes. We can easily picture the sufferings of Cervantes, whose captivity was as severe as it was possible even for his Algerian master to make it. No wonder that a man so full of energy as Cervantes should try again and again to escape from his infernal captivity. On four occasions he was on the point of being impaled, hanged, or burned alive for his daring attempts to liberate himself and his unfortunate comrades. But, of all the enterprises which entered the imagination of this fearless soldier, the most generous, noble, and remarkable, as regarded its consequences, made too at a period when Europe trembled at the clank of the Ottoman chains, was that of rising upon their tyrants and destroying them in the very stronghold of their cruelty and their power.