Pirates of Barbary

by Adrian Tinniswood

  The borderline between volunteers and “perforced-men” was often blurred, and the records of the Admiralty Court are full of stories of men who claimed to have been abducted by pirates against their will, or captured at sea and forced to serve aboard pirate ships. A Richard Hayman swore he had only gone aboard Tibault Saxbridge’s ship as it rode at anchor in Cawsand Bay in Devon to see a friend, “but despite his entreaties Saxbridge would not then set him on land again.” Simon Ashdon’s ship had sprung a leak; he had joined Richard Bishop’s company in Tunis because it was the only way he could get back to England. John Baker explained to the court that he had had a dangerous fall from a cliff at Baltimore and “was forced to go aboard Saxbridge’s ship to have the help of his surgeon”; then Saxbridge set sail, taking him to sea against his will. Mainwaring later explained to King James how such things worked:Having fetched up and commanded a ship, some of the merchants-men would come to me, or to some of my captains and officers, to tell me they were desirous to serve me, but they durst not seem willing, 1est they should lose their wages, which they had contracted for with their merchants; as also that if by any occasion they should come home to their country, or be taken by any other princes, it would be a benefit to them, and no hurt to me, to have them esteemed perforced-men. In which respect I being desirous to have men serve me willingly and cheerfully, would give them a note under my hand to that purpose, and send men aboard to seem to take them away perforce. . . . The inconvenience and mischief whereof is this: that such men knowing themselves to be privileged are more violent, head-strong, and mutinous, than any of the old crew, either to commit any outrage upon their own countrymen, or exercise cruelty upon other, as also the most unwilling men to be reduced home, till they have struck up a hand [i.e., obtained their share of the prizes], and then they apprehend the first occasion they can to get ashore in any [of ] your Majesty’s dominions, where concealing their wealth they offer themselves to the next officers or justices, complaining of the injury they have received in being so long detained by force, and so they are commonly not molested but relieved.25

  Unable to return to Ma’amura because of Don Luis Fajardo de Córdoba’s occupation of the city, Mainwaring, like Peter Eston, moved his base of operations to Villefranche. Information about his movements over the next couple of years is sketchy. He spent five months at Tunis, recalling later that Yusuf Dey was “a very just man of his word,” whose firm but fair rule had produced a notably stable and safe society.26 And he was said to have engaged with a squadron of four Spanish men-of-war off the coast of Portugal on Midsummer Day 1615 and to have got the better of them; soon afterward, by his own account, Spain offered him a pension of 20,000 ducats a year if he would serve in their navy.

  By then, however, he seems to have resolved to take the king’s pardon, and he arrived off the Donegal coast at the beginning of November to begin negotiations. They were uneventful but protracted, and it wasn’t until June 9, 1616, that “Captain Mainwaring, the sea captain, was pardoned under the great seal of England.”27

  Mainwaring’s importance for the history of piracy has less to do with his exploits, real or imagined, than with his writings. His Discourse of the Beginnings, Practices, and Suppression of Pirates, which was begun shortly after his pardon and presented to James I in 1618 “as some oblation for my offences,” is an elegant forty-eight-page manuscript, strewn with learned Latin phrases and illuminated in gold. It earned a knighthood for the born-again Mainwaring, who described himself in the dedicatory preface as “your Majesty’s new creature.” Also known as the Treatise of Piracy, it was transcribed and circulated (at least nine copies still survive) and became a standard text for those in government trying to understand the threat posed to the economy by the pirates “who now so much infest the seas.”28

  The Discourse’s five chapters displayed an impressive combination of intelligent thought, inside knowledge, and sound common sense. Mainwaring began by describing how so many of the king’s subjects turned to piracy and how they managed to keep themselves supplied. Far too many shipowners neglected to mount a watch while they were in harbor, he said, and they left their sails aboard, making it easy for a dozen discontented sailors to steal a small bark. Once in possession of a vessel of their own, they could recruit more crewmen at almost any small fishing village, “by reason that the common sort of seamen are so generally necessitous and discontented.”29 With a strong crew they could overpower one of the coastal vessels which plied their trade off the French coast. With that they could run down and take any small, lightly armed ship. “And so by little and little [they] reinforce themselves, to be able to encounter with a good ship.”30 (This was just the career path that John Ward had taken a decade earlier.) And once they had amassed a little capital in the form of stolen goods or hard cash, Ireland was a popular stopping-off point for supplies and munitions. Irish country people wouldn’t openly sell to the captain of a pirate ship for fear of the consequences, but they would let him know where he might find anything he needed. He was expected to “steal” the goods with a show of force, and then leave goods or money worth considerably more than the items’ market value in a mutually agreed spot.

  With a touching lack of irony, Mainwaring chided the king for his policy of offering pardons, which meant that now every English pirate was confident of being able to come in and negotiate terms as and when it suited them. And the ordinary sort of pirate didn’t worry much about the consequences of being taken and brought to trial, since “none but the captain, master, and it may be some few of the principal of the company shall be put to death.”31 The rest might be condemned to “a little lazy imprisonment,” but it wouldn’t be any worse than conditions aboard ship. Rather than hanging entire crews, however, he proposed putting them to work as galley slaves, or dredging silted-up harbors, or repairing the coastal forts which were, he pointed out disapprovingly, “miserably ruined and decayed.”32

  These reflections took up the first two chapters of the Discourse. In the third, the reformado offered a short account of how pirates typically went about catching their prey. A little before dawn, he wrote, a ship would take in all its sails so that it lay still in the water. As the sun came up, the watch could make out what else was in sight and the pirate ship would set sail to intercept its chosen victim. To anyone watching from the other vessel, she hadn’t altered course to chase them; it would seem as though she was just another merchantman bound on the same course as themselves. She would allay suspicion by showing the appropriate colors: if she was a Flemish flyboat, for example, she flew a Flemish flag. “In chase,” said Mainwaring, “they seldom use any ordnance, but desire as soon as they can, to come a board and board [i.e., alongside], by which course he shall more dishearten the merchant and spare his own men.”33

  Rather disappointingly, he didn’t have much more to say about tactics, apart from a couple of intriguing asides. If a pirate wanted to lull a pursuer into a false sense of security, she heaved out all the sail she could make and hung out drags to slow her down, so that the other ship would think she was running scared and make haste to overhaul her. (Sir Francis Drake used the same trick against the Spanish in the Pacific.) And when pirates sailed as a fleet, all vessels kept their tops manned constantly and used a system of “signs”—flags? a precursor of semaphore?—to communicate with each other.

  Eighteen of the Discourse’s forty-eight pages are taken up with a remarkable gazetteer. From Flores in the Azores, where pirates “may water, wood, and ballast, and the inhabitants will not offer to molest them,” to Tripoli, where they “shall be entertained and refreshed, and ride in command [i.e., protected by a fort]; but these are dangerous people,” Mainwaring gave terse but telling descriptions of harbors and havens where pirates could trade or shelter or resupply in safety. He confined himself to “the most important and the most used,” and he didn’t include individual bays and coves in Ireland, since pirates could find “all the commodities and conveniences that all other places do affor
d them” at virtually any remote coastal settlement in the country. “They have also good store of English, Scottish and Irish wenches,” he added. “And these are strong attractors.”34

  Even so, he managed to produce a list of over forty places where pirates could expect to find sanctuary of sorts and where, therefore, the king’s ships could expect to find pirates if they cared to look. Some were remote islands out in the Atlantic, or quiet coves on the shores of Spain or Portugal, where it was possible to rest for a day or two, take in water, and perform running repairs to a ship. On the Desertas Islands, south-east of Madeira, for example, pirates can “water and perchance get some beeves [oxen]”; the tiny Lobos Island in the Canaries offered “goats but nothing else.”35

  But at somewhere like Santa Cruz on the Atlantic coast (modern-day Agadir, in Morocco), pirates could resupply and ride safe at anchor in the shadow of the fort, “so that there they stay long and use much.”36 Tetouan, just inside the Straits, was a good place to dispose of stolen goods and to buy powder and munitions, which were brought in for trade by English and Flemish merchants. “The people are very just and trusty.”37

  Pirates based at Tunis tended to hunt off Sardinia or the southern coast of Sicily, or farther east among the Greek islands. In the spring, those who operated out of Algiers or the Moroccan ports might lurk off the southwest coast of Spain, waiting just outside the Straits “for Indies men outward bound.”38 Others lay off Portugal on the lookout for Baltic merchantmen carrying copper, linen, and victuals on their way to supply the Spanish fleet; they were also well placed to meet with the ships of the annual Spanish Brazil fleet, “which commonly are going and coming all the year long.”39 From May to August “the Spanish and Flemish men of war do more diligently keep the seas than in winter weather,” and to avoid their patrols, pirates moved north to raid the fishing fleets on the Newfoundland Banks, before returning to patrol the Atlantic between the Azores and Portugal at a latitude of 37½° to 38½°, “at which height the Indies men come in.”40

  Of the dozen or so havens on the Barbary Coast, Mainwaring singled out Algiers and Tunis for special mention. In both, he told the king, pirates “may be fitted with all manner of provisions and . . . ride safely from the Christian forces.”41 But he distinguished unwittingly between their brand of structured, state-sanctioned warfare—which would have been called privateering if it had been conducted by a Christian state—and the haphazard, opportunistic way in which the coastal settlements of Morocco dealt with Europeans. Pirates needed to obtain passes from the Tunisian authorities, he said, before trading with Porto Farino, Sousse, or any of the other harbors along that coast; and it wasn’t a good idea to call in at Rhodes or Cyprus without letters of safe-conduct from Tunis or Algiers. At Bona and Bougie (present-day Annaba and Béjaïa), they “may be very well refreshed with victual, water, and bread, and also sell goods well, and these are good roads for pirates, but they dare not trade with any unless they bring with them the letters of Algiers.”42 He also misrepresented—or perhaps misinterpreted—the symbiotic relationship that existed at Algiers between Janissaries and Christian or renegade pirates, characterizing it as a kind of treachery on the part of the perfidious Turk. At Algiers, English pirates were liable to have their ships “betrayed from them and manned out by the Turks, after the proportion of 150 Turks to 20 English.”43

  In the final section of the Discourse, Mainwaring turned his attention to the question of how to suppress piracy. Some of what he had to suggest was sound common sense: instituting regular coastal patrols in the west of Ireland; having unemployed sailors bound over to keep the peace; training up naval officers and commissioning armed merchantmen. But his big idea was less happy. “Your Highness must put on a constant immutable resolution never to grant any pardon, and for those that are or may be taken, to put them all to death, or make slaves of them . . . for questionless, as fear of punishment makes men doubtful to offend, so the hope of being pardoned makes them the apter to err.”44

  The spectacle of Mainwaring trying to pull up the ladder behind him after making his own successful escape is not attractive. More to the point, he was plain wrong. After a patchy start, James I’s policy of pardoning pirates began to yield results, as crews followed Mainwaring’s example and came in. That didn’t mean that piracy per se was on the decrease, though—far from it. By the end of James I’s reign, in 1625, the nomadic community of English pirates who had spent their lives drifting between the west of England, Ireland, Barbary, and the Newfoundland Banks—the Bishops and the Estons and the Mainwarings—were being superseded by more professional sea-rovers based in Algiers or Tunis, men who regularly sailed out beyond the Straits with large companies of Janissaries in search of prizes, goods, and slaves.

  Contemporaries were convinced of the reason for this. It was because Europeans had betrayed Christendom by teaching the Turks and the Moors how to navigate the oceans in sailing ships. Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame claimed that Ward and Danseker and Bishop and Eston “were the first that taught the Moors to be men of war”;45 and Londoners who went to see A Christian Turn’d Turk gasped as Robert Daborn’s stage-Ward told the stage-Turks that it was him “that hath shown you the way to conquer Europe, [who] did first impart what your forefathers knew not, the seaman’s art.”46 The English sailor Sir William Monson even thought he knew exactly when it happened. In a 1617 report on how to combat the threat from Algerian pirates, he told the Privy Council, “It is not above twelve years since the English taught them the art of navigation in ships.”47

  The traditional Mediterranean galley was faster and more maneuverable than a sailing ship. With a clean bottom and a fresh crew, a heavy war-galley, with twenty-four oars to a side and three men to each oar, could cover 4,700 yards in twenty minutes, a speed of seven nautical miles per hour.48 Its speed and direction didn’t depend on the prevailing wind, or lack thereof, and its shallow draft meant it could come close in to shore, allowing its crew to escape from pursuers or launch amphibious assaults, as the occasion demanded.

  The galley was well suited to the kind of shock tactics in which the Mediterranean corsair excelled. Ordnance was light and mounted on the bow. It might typically consist of a heavy, centrally mounted gun firing a fifty-two-pound shot, flanked by a pair of twelve-pounders and a pair of six-pounders. Small wooden fighting platforms over the guns gave a degree of cover to the gunners and were themselves mounted with breech-loading swivel guns (that is, light guns fixed on swivels to allow them to be turned horizontally in any direction). The slender prow was reinforced with a raised iron beak. In an attack, a pirate galley would close at alarming speed on its prey, presenting a minimal target to its guns and ramming hard on impact into the planking of its hull. The prow stayed fast and acted as a boarding plank; after the Janissaries had fired at point-blank range into the rigging and raked the decks with their swivel guns, they would storm the enemy vessel, which was powerless to free itself from the unrelenting iron spur.

  The Mediterranean galley, a formidable fighting machine.

  But the features that made the galley so formidable were also the reasons for its decline as a fighting ship. A twelve-bank raiding galley—a galley with twelve oars on each side—required a rowing gang of seventy-two (twenty-four oars, with three men to each oar). It would also carry perhaps ten spare oarsmen. This was small compared with a typical heavy war-galley, which was powered by twenty-four banks of oars and a standard rowing gang of 164 slaves. The oarsmen needed food and water, not only as a matter of common humanity but because a healthy rowing gang was an efficient rowing gang; and there was hardly any storage on a galley, around ninety-five percent of the space being taken up by the oarsmen’s benches. It has been calculated that a voyage by a war galley with 144 oarsmen and forty soldiers and officers would require 1,800 gallons of water, limiting its cruising period to ten days at the most before it was forced to take on more water. Even a lighter galley of the kind favored by corsairs needed to take on water at fourteen
-day intervals.49

  Within the Straits, an undefended beach wasn’t too hard to find, and it was easy to put a small foraging party ashore, even on a hostile coast. The wilder northern waters of the Atlantic were a different matter. While the clear, nontidal waters of the Mediterranean allowed a corsair captain to moor relatively close to shore without much difficulty, the shifting tides, contrary winds, and vicious currents of the seas around the coasts of northern Spain, France, England, and the Low Countries required local knowledge and navigational skills beyond the reach of the Mediterranean galley captain.

  The European renegades of the early 1600s may well have played their part in introducing “the seaman’s art” into Barbary, although the Moriscos of Spain who settled in North Africa after their expulsion also contributed their knowledge and experience as, no doubt, did the English and Dutch traders who made a living by supplying munitions and buying stolen goods all the way along the coast from Safi to Tunis. But while contemporaries might debate whether Ward or Danseker was responsible for empowering the Turk, no one was in doubt that Barbary had adopted European sail technology, or that it made the corsairs of Algiers and Tunis more formidable as a result.

  Mariners’ accounts of attacks reflect the change. The Three Half Moons, an English merchant ship captured near the Straits in the 1560s, fell victim to “eight galleys of the Turks.”50 In 1582 the Mary Marten was attacked and sunk by two galleys off Cabo de Gata on the Spanish coast. Forty years later the George Bonaventure and the Nicholas were both overtaken and boarded off Gibraltar by Algerian pirates in five sailing ships (two of which were recently captured merchantmen). From the 1620s onward it was rare indeed to find Barbary Coast pirates using galleys in the western Mediterranean or outside the Straits.