Dan Snow's History Hit - Nicholas Said: The Extraordinary Life of a Traveller, Soldier and Translator

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

This is the remarkable story of Nicholas Said - born into a wealthy Muslim family in the ancient Bornu Empire, his childhood was interrupted when, aged 13, he was sold into slavery. His journey would take him across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, and bring him into contact with illustrious figures like Tsar Nicholas I and Queen Victoria. As a free man, he would join one of the first African American regiments in the Union Army and fought in the American Civil War. Dean Calbreath is a journalist and author of The Sergeant: The Incredible Life of Nicholas Said, and joins us to take us through this astonishing tale.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got an extraordinary story for you today. I know I often say that, but it's often true, and this time it's true as well. This is a story about a boy born Mohammed al-Bin Saeed in a central West African kingdom, born into the upper echelons of society. It's a story about that boy and how he became a slave, then how he became a close companion and confidant to some of the grandest European royalty and nobility, and then served as an enlisted man during the US Civil War, fighting for the North, fighting for the Union Army. This is the remarkable story of a man known to history as Nicholas Said, a name he took when he arrived in Russia, where he changed his religion from Islam

to Eastern Orthodox, where he took the name of the Tsar himself, a man who he knew. It is one of the more remarkable life stories that I've ever come across. I'm very lucky to talk to Dean Kalbraith, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He has dug this story up and he has spent 10 years researching the extraordinary life of the man we know as Nicholas Saeed. And as you'll hear, even he, after all that time, hasn't been able to solve all of the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Dean, thanks very much for coming on the podcast, man.

Sure, absolutely. Tell me about the childhood of this remarkable man. As a boy, where was he born and grew up? me about the childhood of this remarkable man as a boy. Where was he born and grew up? Yeah, Nicholas Said was born in the kingdom of Borno in Central Africa, in what would now be known as Northern Nigeria. These days, not many people have heard of Borno, but back at its peak, it was one of the biggest countries in Africa, with a territory as large as the combined size of the UK and Spain. By the 1800s, when Nicholas Said was born, it had shrunken in size, but it was still a very large kingdom with an army that looked like it rode straight out of the Arabian Nights.

Borno's soldiers would charge into battle on horseback, wearing coats of chain mail and iron helmets and wielding swords and spears. They had muskets as well, but they preferred those older weapons. They preferred to use the spears, you know, which could actually be much more effective than loading a rifle at that time. Nicholas Said's father, Barcagana, was the chief general of that army. He was this amazing warrior, and he would go into battle fearlessly because he had this talisman that he thought would protect him from all harm. It didn't. He got seriously wounded a few times, and he ultimately died in battle.

But he was this amazing guy. It was said that he could take eight spears and throw them, each of them hitting their target, one after another, after another. In the 1820s, he met Dixon Denham, this English explorer, who wrote a lot about him in his books on Africa. So his name became known throughout Europe and America. Barcagana's son, Nicholas Said, was born about 1837, or around 15 years after Dixon Denham's visits. And that's the guy I'm writing about, Nicholas Said. So isn't that amazing that we have that kind of historical record for his father? That's crazy. Who I think from your book was known as the Lion. As a young man, Said would have witnessed warfare, right?

He would have been no stranger to it. His father's battles weren't all fought in some distant field. Yeah, when Nicholas Said was a young man, Borno was actually invaded by a neighboring kingdom, Bagirmi. So he got a chance to see the effects of war close up. It was during that invasion that Bar-Kagan was killed. During this successful counterattack, he was pushing the enemy back, back beyond its borders, but he and three sons got killed in that process. Now, after they were killed, Nicholas Said was sent to a boarding

school, and there he was taught Arabic and the Quran. At this time, he was a very devout Muslim, just like his father. In fact, his birth name was Muhammad Ali bin Said, a solidly Muslim name, although that would later be changed to Nicholas. He received a fine education, which could have eventually included some Turkish, as well as mathematics or astronomy if he kept going to school although unfortunately for him that did not happen but he learned enough Arabic which when added to the two African languages that his parents spoke it started him on a path of speaking nearly a dozen languages. So he's the son of a general. He's in the elite of this kingdom. How does he make the journey into enslavement? Well, slavery was very common in that part of

the world, and it took a wide variety of forms. Nicholas Said's father, Barcagana, was one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in Borno, but he was technically a slave, a slave to the country's rulers. So were some of the magistrates and governors of Borno's towns and provinces. Despite being slaves, they lived lives of luxury, which was a very different concept of slavery than in the United States or Europe. Barca Ghana had 150 slaves of his own, but they did not live lives of luxury. They tended to his animals, they worked in his fields, they cooked his food, they tended to his household, and the female slaves were often taken to his bed to be his concubines. This was how the vast majority of slaves lived, similar to slaves in

the United States, but with a few more rights as well as a few more pathways to freedom. So this is how Nicholas Saik grew up as a child of a very privileged slave who was surrounded by slaves that his family used to handle its hard labor. That changed when he was in his teens, when he went on a hunting trip in the northern plains of Borno near the Sahara Desert. You know, he went on this hunting trip to celebrate his graduation from classes in Arabic and the Quran at his school. He went with several other of his students. But in the Sahara, there was this nomadic group known as the Tuaregs. And they made a lot of their money by capturing people and selling them as slaves. So they rounded up Said and his hunting buddies, and they sold them as

slaves. And they put Said on a path that would eventually take him through Libya and Turkey. Said on a path that would eventually take him through Libya and Turkey. So we're not talking the West African slave trade here. He's being shipped across the Sahara Desert into what we'd call the Middle East these days. He walked 2,000 miles barefoot through the Sahara Desert in a slave caravan that took him first to Marzouk in Libya, where he was forced to work in the fields of a local merchant, and then to the port of Tripoli, where he was forced to work in the fields of a local merchant, and then to the port of Tripoli, where he was sold to the owner of a huge tobacco emporium. Would it have been known that he was somehow kind of of noble birth, and would that have made a difference to his position as an enslaved person?

Totally. The first time he was sold to that merchant in Merzik, the merchant didn't know anything about his background, didn't know that he was the son of Barcagana. And he brought him to work in his vegetable fields, which under the hot sun of the Sahara can be very grueling work. Now, Nicholas Said had never done this kind of work before. Remember, his family had its own slaves to handle this work. So now he had to do the work of a slave, drawing water out of a well to pour into the fields and picking fruits and vegetables when they were ripe. And all this time he had this slave overseer who would whip him every day, every single day, because he wasn't working as hard as a slave should work. After three weeks, he complained to the owner saying, you know, I can't do this work.

I'm the son of Barcagana. And the owner says, Barcagana? I knew Barcagana. I went on an expedition with him once. So the owner decides that the son of Barcagana shouldn't be working as a field slave. Instead, he gave him two choices. Either he could be set free, or he could be sold to another owner, a Turk or an Egyptian, who might give him a little easier work. Now, in the 21st century, we would assume that he would want to be set free. But Nicholas Said was a teenager who had just walked a couple thousand miles barefoot across the desert. He'd walked past the skeletons of

countless slaves who could not survive that journey. And it was hard for him to imagine walking back, especially since he was going to be penniless. His owner wasn't offering him any food or any money for the journey. He was just offering to let him go free and let him make his own way back home. That did not seem like a good prospect. But what he knew was that the Turks had a reputation for allowing their slaves to eventually work their way to freedom. In fact, that was true in a lot of areas in the Muslim world.

It was a fairly common practice to allow slaves to be free eventually after, you know, sometimes after years or decades of service. But the Turks were known for providing their slaves with allowances that they could eventually save up to buy their own freedom. Again, this is very different from the way slavery was practiced in the United States. So, Said eventually ended up working for an Ottoman businessman in Tripoli. And that's where he learned a major skill. You know, it doesn't seem like a major skill to us maybe,

but he learned the skill of serving tobacco in pipes and hookahs. The thing is that he was on the fringe of the Ottoman Empire now, and tobacco was a very important part of the Ottoman way of life. If you wanted to hold business meetings or engage in strenuous dealings or even just to have a night out with a friend, then it involved copious amounts of tobacco. And if you were rich, you had slaves or servants who would specialize in preparing the pipes and the hookahs. There was a lot of ritual that went along with it. It was like serving tea in China or Japan. And that would turn out to be a key skill for Nicholas Said,

especially after his owner in Tripoli shipped him away across the Mediterranean to be sold in Turkey. And how does he then end up in the possession, I suppose is the right way of talking about it, of Russians? Okay. Now, when Nicholas Said got to Turkey, the Ottoman Empire was right on the verge of entering the Crimean War. He was sold to the Turkish foreign minister, who was involved in these intense negotiations with England and France and Russia to stave off the war. All of those negotiations involved large amounts of tobacco. So whenever the Turkish foreign minister met with these foreign ambassadors, he would bring his tobacco server along, which gave Nikolai Said a first-hand view of these negotiations. ostensibly there to ensure the peace, but who seems to have been working to bring on the war since Russia thought it could gain a lot of territory if it went to war with the Turks.

Beyond that, though, for more than a century, Russia had a habit of purchasing bright young slaves and bringing them to St. Petersburg or Moscow, setting them free and then hiring them out as well-paid workers for the households of the elite. Now, sometimes this was just to add an exotic flair to their households, but sometimes these Africans could achieve very high status. The most famous one was probably Abram Petrov Ganybal, who was a protege of Peter the Great. And eventually he became the number three general of the Russian army. He was a man who was intensely involved in the military and built fortifications that actually stood up against Adolf Hitler in World War II, 200 years or so after they were built. You listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about the extraordinary life of Nicholas Said.

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Indeed, Dean, the exciting news, little diversion here, is that my wife and thus my children are descended from one of said West African slaves, Gannibal, who was early in the 17th century. So this is a particularly exciting story for me because a previous generation of enslaved person went to St. Petersburg and my kids are descended from him. So it's very cool. So tell me, he gets taken to Russia where he has an extraordinary experience. So Menchikov bought Nicholas Said and had him taken to St. Petersburg, where he was set free and eventually hired to be the valet de chambre of another Russian prince, Nicholas Trubetskoy. Trubetskoy was the son of a war hero during a previous war between Russia and Turkey,

and he was the godson of Tsar Nicholas I, which is where he got his name, Nicholas. Vallée de Chambres was a gentleman's gentleman. It was nothing like a regular servant. He was more of a personal assistant. A lot of them thought of themselves as being true gentlemen. But for Nicholas Said to hold that spot, Trebeskoy insisted on two things. First, he needed to speak a civilized language. And for Trebeskoy and most Russian aristocrats, that did not mean Russian. It meant French. That was the language they spoke among themselves. But second, he needed to be baptized into the Russian Orthodox

Church, especially when Russia is going after committing war on the most powerful Muslim kingdom in the world at that time. It would not look good for this guy to have a Muslim as was Valeriy Deshamb. Now, Nicholas Said was not an enthusiastic convert to orthodoxy. He later complained that he didn't even understand what the baptism ceremony was all about. But it was when he got baptized that his name was officially changed from Muhammad Ali bin Said to Nicholas Said, named for his employer and godfather, Nicholas Trebetskoy, who in turn was named for his godfather, Tsar Nicholas I, which meant that Said was indirectly named for the Tsar. Now, Tsar Nicholas was one of Russia's most tyrannical leaders, and that says a lot because

Russia has had its fill of tyrannical leaders. He kept an iron grip on its aristocrats, including his godson, Nicholas Trebetskoy, and essentially banned them from leaving the country for fear that they would pick up democratic ideas from abroad. As soon as Tsar Nicholas died in 1855, though. There was this great flow of Russian aristocrats that were leaving the country because they had wanted to get to Western Europe for years and had been banned from it. And one of the first people to go was Nicholas Trebetskoy, who got his passport and a passport for Nicholas Said less than a week after the Tsar died. Saeed less than a week after the Tsar died. So for the next five years, Nicholas Trebetskoy and Nicholas Saeed toured Europe, doing this circular tour from Germany to Italy to France to England, and then back through Belgium to Germany again to start the whole process over again year after year. They encountered leaders like Queen Victoria and Emperor Louis Napoleon and the Pope. And as they went along, Nicholas Said was picking up all these

languages of the countries that they went through. So by the end of their time together, he could speak Russian, French, German, Italian, English, besides Turkish and Arabic and the two African languages his parents spoke. And this isn't only him saying this. This is the people that he met along the way saying how impressed they were that he mastered these languages. He was a true sponge for language. Now, after five years of constant travel, though, he decided he had enough and it was time for him to return to Buono. Trebesco begged him to stay as his valet de chambre, but finally let him go, giving him enough money to fund his travel home. He was in London and he was scouting for a trip that could take him back to Tripoli for the first leg of his journey when a Dutch nobleman offered him

a job. This nobleman, who went by the name Count Isaac Jacob Rocheson, says, listen, I'm about to get married to this nice English woman, and we're about to take a honeymoon into the Americas. Now, I need Valet Duchamp to go with me on this journey. And this is going to let you see a part of the world that you haven't seen yet. It's a sick movie for a year. By the time that year is over, you'll have enough money to go back to Africa as a rich man. Now, Nicolas Saeed later wrote that his love of adventure trumped his desire to return home, at least temporarily. You know, he loved Africa, but he loved adventure more. Now, as it turned out, Count Rucheson was a bit of a conman,

including the fact that he wasn't even a count. Apparently, the primary reason for his marriage was that he thought his bride was rich enough to help him pay down his debts. But much to his surprise, he found out after they were married that she was as penniless as he was. They got this huge diary from the bride's aunt, who was rich, and that helped fund the honeymoon. And we went and saw the Bahamas and Haiti and New York and Niagara Falls. But by the time they reached southern Canada, they had run out of cash and they eventually found themselves stranded in Detroit, Michigan. Now, Nicholas Saeed was in Detroit when the Civil War began. And even though he'd only been in the country a

few months, he apparently felt so strongly about the cause of the Civil War, about the freeing the Southern slaves, he immediately went down to an army recruiting station to enlist. But he was turned away because the Union army at that time was for whites only. And that's something that must have been a real shock to Nicholas Said. He had seen black soldiers in the armies of England and France. He had seen thoroughly integrated troops in the Ottoman army, and he likely knew how important Abram Ganabal had been in the Russian army, the Russian army's number three in command. So for a country to be fighting a war over black

slavery like the United States, while banning blacks from the army must have seemed crazy to him. For a while, he tried pitching in as a civilian worker, laboring in military kitchens, but he eventually decided his best contribution would be to help teach black children at a so-called colored school in Detroit. The adventure continues, but in fact, changes in the Union Army would mean that he would get a chance to emulate his father and fight on the front line. Exactly. For the first couple years of the war, there was increasing pressure from abolitionists on Abraham Lincoln to allow African Americans into the army. And then, as the battlefield losses mounted with thousands of white soldiers getting killed, Lincoln decided to allow states to recruit black militia regiments.

At first, the only northern state that did that was Massachusetts, which was a very progressive state and home to a lot of the country's leading abolitionists. You know, the governor was a huge abolitionist. Thousands of Blacks signed up, not only from Massachusetts, but from other states throughout the North, including Michigan, where Nicholas Said was living. In June 1863, Said left Detroit. He hopped on a train. He rode 800 miles to Boston to join the 55th Massachusetts Regiment, which was the nation's second regiment made up almost exclusively of

black African-American freedmen. Partly because of his linguistic skills and partly because of his life experiences, he was promoted to a sergeant within weeks of his arrival. Now, is that the unit featured famously in the film Glory? Yeah, Glory is a great movie, you know, Denzel Washington and everything. Glory was about the 54th Massachusetts, which was a sister regiment to the 55th. Initially, Massachusetts organized them, and then the spillover went into the 55th. Even though they were separate regiments, the movie Glory shows many of the challenges that Nicholas Said and his fellow soldiers in the 55th place, which came not only from a Confederate enemy,

but from the Union Army itself, right? You know, the Union Army refused to pay them the same as white soldiers. It refused to give them equal treatment. It refused to promote them to anything above the level of sergeant, which is what Nicholas Said got promoted to. He got promoted to nearly the top. which is what Nicholas Said got promoted to. He got promoted to nearly the top,

but then all the lieutenants and captains and majors and colonels above him were all white. Glory depicts the 54th suicide attack. It ends with a suicide attack on Fort Wagner, which was a Confederate stronghold near Charleston, North Carolina, where hundreds of black soldiers were killed as they tried to storm the fort. Now, the reason I say it was a suicide attack is because they knew what would happen. They were following the same tactics as a similar attack that happened just a week before, with even more disastrous results. But even though the commander of the 54th knew that he and his men were probably going to die, and he did die leading the attack, he volunteered to lead it because he

wanted to make an effort to show what black soldiers could achieve. And their attack on Fort Wagner, even though it was unsuccessful, it was actually more successful than the attack by white soldiers had been a week before. Now, Nicholas Saeed and the men of the 55th arrived in South Carolina just days after that attack on Fort Wagner. And together with the 54th, they helped in the project that eventually defeated the fort. Thousands of black and white soldiers dug trenches through the sand on this island to get closer to the fort rather than to just attack it on some crazy frontal assault. As these trenches approached the fort, the Confederates knew what was about to happen, so they gave up. And at midnight one night, they just evacuated the fort and were left by the rear entrance, and the Union Army took it over.

Now, over the next couple of years, Nicholas Saeed, as a sergeant, took part in other battles in South Carolina and Florida. Beyond the battles, they also helped build fortifications. They put up signal towers, other facilities. You know, it wasn't all battle, but it was all serving the purpose of the Union Army. And the 55th did become one of the first regiments to occupy the defeated city of Charleston, which is where this war had begun. Now, what do we know about his war service? What do we know about his life?

Did he write? How have you been able to put this together? Nicholas Sight actually wrote two memoirs, and that's the basis of this book. He wrote two memoirs, one for a magazine and one was a full-length autobiography. He was encouraged to write the magazine version by his Civil War commander, who was just in love with these stories that he would tell by the campfires. The men would gather around and listen to stories about Africa and the Middle East and Europe, all these places that they could only imagine. So his commander said, hey, write this thing down. This is something that we should have a record of. And then after the war, the commander

sold it to the Atlantic Magazine, which is a very popular magazine at the time. A few years later, he wrote his autobiography, but he did leave out one major section. He did not write anything about his service in the Civil War. There's a simple reason for that. After the war was over, Saeed remained in the South. He stayed in the South to teach English to the freed slaves. He helped establish schools throughout the South. He went on a lecture tour that aimed at showing black and white audiences the things that could be accomplished by Africans. He was very committed to helping African Americans, helping the freed slaves achieve a better life than they had had under slavery. But since he was staying in the South, he didn't want to necessarily attention to the fact that he had been in the Army of the North

and that he had spent much of the Civil War shooting at Southerners. So when people asked him when he first arrived in the United States, you know, reporters would come up during his lecture tour, when did you, how long have you been here? At first he said that he arrived 1865, the year the war ended, and then he changed it to 1866 and then 1867, which is what his autobiography says. Although he really arrived in 1860, right, when the war was just beginning. Now, that is the only place where his autobiography seems off base, but it seems perfectly understandable, considering that this was a time when the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups were roaming around the South, and you wouldn't want to say anything that might anger them. So he was, I think, being

very careful in putting a distance between himself and the Civil War. On the other hand, what that meant was that when I was writing in the Civil War section of my book, I didn't have any of his own words to work with. So I had to rely on military documents and the diaries and letters of people who knew him. And I was able to batch together that information from there. So he really is, I mean, hard to believe, but he's only really kind of 30 at the end of the Civil War. And he then lives kind of 15 more years, I suppose, a quieter, more settled life as a family man in the southern states. He really wasn't a family man.

His writings give us brief glimpses of love affairs in Austria and England. And he apparently got married twice, although one seems to have been an unofficial marriage that ended not long after it began. It was in the final days of his being in the army. There was a newly freed slave who was very happy to have been released from slavery. And so they had a brief love affair that he described as a marriage, but probably wasn't officially that way. as a marriage, but probably wasn't officially that way. Anyway, his only known child was a daughter that he apparently didn't even know that he had. He had an affair with this woman when he was on his lecture tour. And by the time she found out that she was pregnant, he was hundreds of miles away and never to return. She was in Georgia. He was in Alabama. There really wasn't a good way of getting

in contact. It's not like he had a permanent address. Back at that time, when he went to a bank in Florida once to open up an account, he was asked to write down his current address. And the only thing he could think to write down was traveler. My address is traveler. At around that time, he told a news reporter that he never spent enough time in one place to have a family. And that apparently is true. He did eventually get married in Alabama, officially married, but that marriage does not seem to have lasted very long before they went their separate ways. But he never left the States after the war, we don't think. As far as we know, he never left the country, but he traveled extensively through the South. He visited the Carolinas and Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee.

On the other hand, one thing that's interesting about Saeed is that in a number of newspaper interviews, he insisted he only wanted to stay in the United States long enough to make money to sail back to Africa. Now, there's no indication that he ever did sail back to Africa. I haven't seen any passenger lists or anything like that. Who knows? There is a possibility that happened. Dean, where do you end his days? That is a big question. Some researchers point to a handwritten note in his military records, which they claim indicate he died in Tennessee in 1882. But that note's really ambiguous and

more likely indicates that he was merely living there at the time, which we know from the U.S. Census. He was living in Tennessee in the early 1880s. On the other hand, there was a news reporter in the 1890s who claimed he had been jailed for fraud and that he was doing hard labor in an Alabama prison mine. But there is zero evidence that that's true. No prison records from Alabama or Tennessee, no court records from any of the counties that he ever lived, no arrest reports, nothing.

There's no evidence to indicate that's true. Instead, the article seemed to have been made up by a guy who was often accused of fictionalizing some of his stories. This appears to have been a one-sided vendetta by a news reporter who met Saeed when he was younger, who met Saeed when he was younger, when Saeed was kind of at the height of his fame. And this guy who had a reputation for being a racist, who once got in a knife fight with a guy who objected to him calling him a racially insensitive name. This was a racist guy who apparently wanted to smear the name of Nicholas Saeed. And the fact that Nicholas Saeed never responded to those articles, however, indicates that maybe he was even dead by the time he arrived. Maybe he did die in Tennessee in the 1880s, or maybe he left the country to

continue his travels, maybe even made his way back to Africa. Again, almost impossible this day to know, but I'd like to think the best about him. Maybe, maybe he returned to Central West Africa. We will never know. Dean, this is a great story. Thank you very much. What's it called? What's the book called?

The book is called The Sergeant. The Sergeant. Go out and buy it now everybody thank you very much dean okay well thank you very much you