Some of the earliest memoirs of captivity known in the English speaking world were written by white Europeans and later Americans captured and sometimes enslaved in North Africa, by local Muslims, usually Barbary pirates. These were part of a broad category of "captivity narratives". Beginning in the 17th century, these included accounts by colonists and later American settlers in North America and the United States who were captured and held by Native Americans. Several well-known captivity narratives were published before the American Revolution, and they often followed forms established with the narratives of captivity in North Africa. North African accounts did not continue to compile after the Napoleonic Era, accounts from North Americans, captured by western tribes migrating west continued until the end of the 19th-century.