About

Why these stories matter

Losgeld Press is a small independent publisher. We bring seventeenth-century Dutch accounts of voyages and captivity to readers of English, and later to readers of modern Dutch.

Voices from the edge of the map

In the seventeenth century, people from the Low Countries travelled and traded across the world’s seas, and some of them did not come home when they meant to. Captured at sea, sold, set to work, they waited — sometimes for years — while letters, money and favours moved slowly between strangers. Some of those who returned wrote down what they had seen.

These narratives are first-hand testimony from a world of corsairs, galleys, markets and ransom negotiations. They show the Mediterranean and the Atlantic not as a backdrop but as a place where Christians and Muslims, captives and masters, renegades and merchants lived side by side and bargained over human lives. They are also simply very good stories, told by people who wanted to be believed.

How we work

These books were written for readers of the seventeenth century, in a Dutch that few can read today. For more than three hundred years they have waited on library shelves.

Losgeld Press is the work of a single editor with a professional background in maritime affairs and a lifelong passion for history, literature and the Dutch language of the Golden Age. The translations are made with the help of AI, within a strict framework of rules set by the editor and applied throughout the book. The editor checks every page against the original Dutch edition, for historical and nautical accuracy as well, and edits it with creative and stylistic freedom until it reads as clear modern English, with nothing added and nothing softened.

From the original. We translate from the original Dutch editions, never from later or second-hand versions.
Faithful in fact. No invented details, no embellished events, no corrected numbers. What the author says, we say.
Faithful in spirit. The author’s voice stays audible: the formal rhetoric, the moral reflection, the practical eye for ships and weapons.
Natural in English. Modern literary English that reads easily, without false archaism and without turning history into a modern novel.
Honest about the past. Uncomfortable attitudes and episodes are neither removed nor modernised. Brief notes explain; they do not judge or embellish.

The name

Losgeld is Dutch for ransom. For the men and women in these books it was the one word that mattered: the sum that would buy them back.

Image credits

Bastiaen Stopendael, De Stadt Algiers / La Ville d’Alger (the Dutch fleet before Algiers, 1662), etching, 1685–1687. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-81.903. Public domain.
Jan Luyken, Mannier hoe de gevange Kristen slaven tot Algiers verkoft worden, engraving, 1684. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.