Robert Adams (sailor)

Robert Adams (born c. 1790) was an American sailor who was enslaved in North Africa for three years, from 1810 to 1814. During this time he claimed to have visited Timbuktu, which may have made him the first Westerner to reach the city, though this part of his narrative is dubious. Upon his liberation and return to Europe, Adams' story was published in two heavily edited and divergent accounts, most notably The Narrative of Robert Adams in 1816.

Regardless of its discrepancies, Adams' accounts of his experience in Africa provide many valuable historical details about the region prior to European colonization.

Very little accurate biographical information about the man known as Robert Adams is available. It is known that he was an American of mixed black and white ancestry. While he used the name "Robert Adams" in Europe, he had earlier used the name "Benjamin Rose" both when he had shipped out from New York in 1810 and when he was rescued from slavery. It is not known which if either of these names was his real one, though at the time it was not uncommon for sailors, especially "distressed seamen", to change their names. He claimed to have been born around 1790 in Hudson, New York to a white sailmaker father and a mixed-race mother. However, there is no record of a man under either of his known aliases, or fitting his general description, in Hudson during this period.

Nothing else is known of his early life until 1810 when, under the name Benjamin Rose, he signed onto the ship Charles as a merchant seaman. As he recounts in his Narrative, the ship sailed from New York City in June 1810. After a stop in Gibraltar to discharge cargo, the ship continued its course down the west coast of Africa. The captain was unfamiliar with the territory, and the ship struck a reef just offshore Cape Blanco, in Western Sahara. The entire crew was able to reach the shore, but soon after were surrounded by a large group of Moors, who stripped them naked and imprisoned them.

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