ABSTRACT
Consequently the records of the English merchant community in, e.g., Algiers, apart from incidental references in the surviving North African consular series in the Public Record Office are scanty, although not entirely nonexistent. Equally, laments for the paucity of indigenous archival documents or narrative sources for reconstructing the maritime history of the Maghreb in the early modern period have became almost a commonplace amongst North Africanist historians in recent decades. The total lack of any corresponding registers from the English North African consulates of the period makes it impossible to redress the balance. The presence of document in the Preston Papers is explaining by an accident of war. It is as a material piece of evidence in Croft's apparently fruitless attempt to have his vessel restored to him that document owes its survival in the Preston Papers.
