Pirates of Barbary

by Adrian Tinniswood

  He came back. By a stroke of good fortune (for him, though not for the boys) the man fell into the belly of the sail, and he grabbed hold of a rope and began to haul himself back up to the deck.

  But his good fortune was about to run out. Seeing what was happening, Cooke dashed to the mainmast, wrenched the wooden handle off the pump that stood there, and threw it across to Ling, yelling at him over the roar of the wind to clout the pirate with it before he could climb over the gunwale. Ling smashed the pump handle down on the man’s head and he fell back into the sea and vanished.

  There were still twelve pirates to contend with. Five or six were forward, busy trimming the foresail, while the rest were gathered aft. It was pitch-dark, and the noise of the wind “whizzing and hizzing in the shrouds and cordage” had drowned out the captain’s cries.16 Cooke remembered there were weapons unsecured in the master’s cabin, and, pushing past some Turks in the darkness, he burst in, grabbed two cutlasses, and handed one to Ling. The two youths laid into their captors, stabbing two of them to death and slashing so savagely at a third that he leapt overboard to escape them.

  That left nine bewildered and surprised Turks, who were chased round the ship by these two cutlass-wielding boys, all the time slashing and cutting at them, until they ran belowdecks and Cooke secured the hatch.

  Robert Tuckey was at the helm all this time. (There was no wheel. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, larger sailing ships were steered with a whipstaff, a vertical wooden rod that was attached to the tiller.) Now, as Tuckey struggled to keep the Jacob steady, the whipstaff fell loose in his hand. In desperation, the pirates below had broken the link with the tiller, and the ship “lay tumbling and rolling unguided in the raging and boisterous billows of the sea.”17

  The pirates must have hoped that their action would at least prompt the boys to negotiate. They reckoned without John Cooke and William Ling, whose reaction to Tuckey’s announcement that he no longer had the helm was to load a pair of muskets, go belowdecks, and threaten to shoot their erstwhile captors dead. Within minutes the Turks had reconnected the whipstaff and delivered control of the vessel back to Tuckey.

  The Jacob survived the storm, and the next day the boys set a course for Spain. By keeping the nine pirates belowdecks and calling up two or three at a time to undertake “necessary and laborious employments,” they eventually reached St. Lucas, where they sold the pirates for galley slaves and, presumably, took on fresh crew before sailing the Jacob home to Bristol and fame.

  On their return to England their exploits were celebrated in print; and as with the Dolphin, the anonymous author took the opportunity to emphasize that the boys were from humble backgrounds:Had John Cooke been some colonel, captain, or commander, or Williame Ling, some navigating lord, or David Jones some gentleman of land and riches, or had Robert Tuckey been one of fortune’s minions, to have had more money than wit, or more wealth than valour, oh what a triumphing had here been then.18

  But these “four rich caskets of home-spun valour and courage” were just ordinary people performing acts of extraordinary bravery. Their actions made Bristol famous and Britain glorious.

  A year later, on December 26, 1622, the Jacob was again attacked by pirates near the Straits. This time she put up a fight and was sunk, with the loss of all hands except two, who were rescued by the Turks and sold as slaves in Algiers. There is no record of what happened to the four boys.

  In the middle of November 1621, two small English merchantmen, the Nicholas and the George Bonaventure, were in the Straits, within sight of Gibraltar, when they were intercepted and boarded by a squadron of three pirate ships. This was only a couple of weeks after the Jacob was first attacked, and the same pirates may have been responsible in both cases. They already had two prizes and a quantity of English prisoners, so they had been on the cruise in the Straits for some time; and their tactics were similar. They put a prize crew of thirteen into the Nicholas and left four English crewmen on board to help them while keeping the rest belowdecks on one of the pirate vessels.

  The master of the Nicholas was John Rawlins, an experienced West Country mariner with a disabled hand who had been sailing out of Plymouth for twenty-three years without incident. Before he saw his home again he was to become involved in one of the most audacious acts of mutiny in the history of Barbary Coast piracy.

  Along with the rest of the captives, Rawlins was brought into Algiers, valued, and put up for sale in the qasbah. “Although we had heavy hearts, and looked with sad countenances,” he later recalled, “yet many came to behold us, sometimes taking us by the hand, sometime turning us round about, sometimes feeling our brawns [i.e., muscles], and naked arms, and so beholding our prices written in our breasts, they bargained for us accordingly.” 19 Because of his disability Rawlins was the last to be sold. He was bought for 150 doubles (about £7.50) by the pirate who had taken him, a renegade named Villa Raïs.

  The fact that a pirate had to buy his own prisoner is a reminder of how formalized the slave trade was on the Barbary Coast: just like the captain of a Levant Company merchantman, Villa Raïs worked in partnership with financial backers who sponsored his expedition in return for a share of the profits.

  What happened next to Rawlins also sheds light on the logistics of piracy and the economics of slavery. After being put to work repairing Villa Raïs’s ship over the winter, he was sold to an English renegade, John Goodale. Goodale’s captain, Ramadan Raïs—a candlemaker’s son from Southwark, who until his conversion to Islam had been Henry Chandler—had just bought a ship, the Exchange of Bristol, from some Turks who had captured her earlier that year. He and Goodale intended to take her out hunting as soon as possible, and since neither man was a particularly experienced mariner they were in need of a good pilot. Villa Raïs demanded 300 doubles for Rawlins—twice the price he had paid for him only a few weeks previously—and after some haggling, Goodale and two more Turks formed a consortium to buy him, putting up 100 doubles each.

  The Exchange set sail from Algiers, streamers and banners flying, on January 7, 1622. She was armed with “12 good cast pieces, and all manner of munition and provision,”20 and a polyglot crew consisting of sixty-five Muslims, a number of whom were European renegades; one French slave; nine English slaves (including Rawlins and two of his men from the Nicholas); and four free Dutchmen.

  From the start, Rawlins refused to accept his fate, ranting against “these cruel Mahometan dogs” and their treatment of him so violently that the other slaves begged him to be quiet or it would be the worse for all of them. He responded with a question:The worse? What can be worse? Death is the determiner of all misery, and torture can last but a while. But to be continually a dying, and suffer all indignity and reproach, and in the end to have no welcome but into the house of slaughter or bondage, is unsufferable, and more than flesh and bloud can endure. And therefore by that salvation which Christ hath brought, I will either attempt my deliverance at one time, or another, or perish in the enterprise.21

  As the Exchange cruised toward the Spanish coast and the Straits, Rawlins devised a desperate plan to take over the ship and sail it back to England. If enough of the crew could be persuaded to help, he was convinced it would be possible to jam shut or bind up all the cabin doors, gratings, and portholes when Chandler and his confederates were belowdecks. This would buy the mutineers enough time to storm the gunroom. Once in control of the ordnance, they would be in a position either to blow the pirates into the air “or kill them as they adventured to come down, one by one, if they should by any chance open their cabins.”22 With some effort, he managed to convince his fellow slaves that his plan was their only hope of freedom. Then he took a couple of English renegades into his confidence, and the four Dutch Christians, who in turn persuaded two Dutch renegades to join with them. The signal for the mutiny to begin was a cry of “For God and King James and St. George for England!”

  This still left the rebels facing odds of more than three to one. But as th
e days went by and the Exchange headed toward the Atlantic in search of prey, the pirates unwittingly conspired to reduce them. In the middle of January they chased a little three-masted polacre aground on the Spanish coast; when the crew ran off, Captain Chandler (a.k.a. Ramadan Raïs) refloated her and put a prize crew of nine Turks and one slave aboard to sail her back to Algiers.

  Then on February 6, off Cape Finisterre, the pirates captured a bark on its way home to Torbay with a cargo of Portuguese salt; Chandler brought seven of the English crew aboard the Exchange and replaced them with ten Turks (three of whom, however, were renegades who were in on Rawlins’s plan). The Torbay men agreed to join the mutiny, and that meant there were twenty-one rebels pitting themselves against a pirate force of forty-five.

  When the sun rose the next day, there was no sign of the Torbay bark. (The renegades had decided to persevere with their plan: they secretly set a course for England during the night, and the first the other pirates knew of it was when they came within sight of the Cornish coast and puzzled “that that land was not like Cape Vincent.”23) Chandler was so angry at the loss of his prize that he threatened to turn the Exchange for Algiers, and although he eventually calmed down, Rawlins decided he must act quickly if they weren’t to lose their opportunity. On February 8 he took Chandler down into the hold and showed him a quantity of water that had gathered in the bow. There was nothing unusual in that, but Rawlins convinced the captain that it wasn’t coming to the pump, which was placed amidships, because the Exchange was “too far after the head”—that is, her bow was too low in the water. Chandler’s only course of action, he said, was to drag four of the heavy pieces of ordnance aft—Rawlins’s confederates lashed two of them down on the deck with their barrels pointing at the poop deck—and to order as many men as possible to gather on the poop. The weight of men and ordnance would bring the stern down, so that Rawlins and the other slaves could pump out the water from the hold.

  Chandler followed Rawlins’s advice, and all day the slaves manned the pumps, while twenty or so pirates lounged around on the poop deck. The routine was repeated the next day, February 9, and again half the pirate crew was ordered to gather on the poop, in order to bring up the bow.

  At two o’clock that afternoon one of the rebels fired off one of the guns. The report, which splintered the binnacle housing and threw the pirates into confusion, was the signal for the rebels to storm the gunroom and grab all the muskets they could find. Chandler, who had been writing in his cabin, dashed out on deck waving his cutlass, only to come face-to-face with Rawlins, at which he threw down his cutlass and begged for mercy.

  The other pirates were made of sterner stuff. They set to work to tear up the planking of the deck with anything they could find—hammers, hatchets, knives, cutlasses, boathooks, and oars, even the stones and bricks from the cookhouse chimney. Their object was not only to get at the slaves, most of whom were belowdecks, but also to break through to the helm and thus take control of the Exchange. But these pirates were too late. The rebels subjected them to volley after volley of musket fire from cover, killing some and injuring more, until at last the Turks called for a truce and asked to negotiate with Rawlins. With an armed guard he went up to talk with them “and understood them by their kneeling, that they cried for mercy, and to have their lives saved, and they would come down, which he bade them do.”24

  But he wasn’t interested in mercy. He was too angry, too exhilarated at the uprising’s success, and—perhaps—too well aware that he and his men were still outnumbered and that thirty-odd prisoners would pose a threat to the ship’s security. So he did something which to twenty-first-century sensibilities seems terrible. As the beaten pirates clambered down belowdecks, one by one, they were disarmed, bound—and then killed with their own cutlasses. The screams of the dying soon alerted their comrades above to the awful truth of what was happening, and a few jumped overboard in a futile attempt to escape. For the rest, Rawlins’s men moved through the ship, cutting down anyone who resisted and putting those who didn’t in manacles before tipping them into the sea to drown.

  Captain Chandler begged Rawlins for his life, reminding him that if it wasn’t for him the pilot would still be working in Algiers as Villa Raïs’s slave. Rawlins lectured him as he knelt on deck, berating him with “the fearfulness of his apostasy from Christianity, the unjustifiable course of piracy, the extreme cruelty of the Turks in general, the fearful proceedings of Algiers against us in particularly, the horrible abuses of the Moors to Christians, and the execrable blasphemies they use both against God and men.”25

  But he did spare Chandler’s life, along with those of his master, John Goodale, the renegade who had helped the mutineers, and four Turks “who were willing to be reconciled to their true Saviour.”26 When the killing was done and the ship had been cleared of corpses, Rawlins assembled his men together and led them in a prayer of thanksgiving. The Exchange arrived to a hero’s welcome at Plymouth four days later, on February 13, 1622.

  That summer Rawlins published his own account of his adventures (with a little literary help, no doubt). He dedicated it, “an unpolished work of a poor sailor,” to the Lord High Admiral, the Marquess of Buckingham, and, like the authors of the narratives about the Dolphin and the Jacob, he used the story to remind his readers of the courage with which ordinary seamen faced the most appalling hardships. But in his preface he went further, asking Buckingham himself to show greater compassion: For though you have greater persons, and more braving spirits to lie over our heads, and hold inferiors in subjection; yet are we the men that must pull the ropes, weigh up the anchors, toil in the night, endure the storms, sweat at the helm, watch the biticle [binnacle], attend the compass, guard the ordnance, keep the night hours, and be ready for all impositions.27

  Elsewhere, Rawlins’s narrative suggests a hardening of attitudes, not so much in the brutal treatment he and his men meted out to their erstwhile masters (which the seventeenth century considered perfectly acceptable in the aftermath of any violent confrontation) as in the rage and contempt he showed toward Barbary and Islam. According to him, a European could turn Turk for one of two reasons. Either captives convinced themselves that any religion would serve, and renounced their Christian faith in the hope of obtaining wealth and liberty; or they were tortured into submission, beaten until “their tongues betray their hearts to a most fearful wickedness.” He railed against “Mahometan tyranny,” seethed at “their filthiness and impieties,” and ridiculed as superstition and witchcraft the “foolish rites” he witnessed aboard ship.28 The pirates of Algiers weren’t just pirates; they were devils.

  The Other had become the Enemy.

  SEVEN

  Treacherous Intents: The English Send a Fleet Against Algiers

  James I’s resolution in 1617 to “draw our sword against the enemies of God and man” produced no immediate results, but it did at least lead to the creation of a commission of courtiers and merchants, who were charged with the task of putting the king’s rhetoric into practice. They focused from the outset on Algiers, “the nest and receptacle of the pirates,” and the advice they received was that a frontal assault would fail.1

  Sir William Monson, onetime admiral of the Narrow Seas, suggested an international force of up to thirty-six English, Spanish, and Dutch ships, “as most able to perform the service in respect of their strength and swift sailing.”2 They should be prepared for a war of attrition lasting years rather than months, and since all the maritime nations of Europe would benefit, those who couldn’t send ships and men should be asked to contribute to the finances. Spanish cooperation would be especially important: the fleets would need to be revictualed, careened (hauled over on a safe beach so that their hulls could be cleaned of barnacles and other impediments to good speed), and perhaps refitted every four or five months. Access to Spanish naval stations at Majorca, Alicante, Cartagena, and Málaga was essential.

  So was timing. It would be best to blockade the harbor at Algiers while th
e pirates were out on the cruise. None of the other friendly ports they might run for—Tunis, Safi, Agadir—could offer the same shelter as Algiers. But this meant stealth was important. “If they understand of a greater force than their own to be made out against them,” warned Monson, “they will not adventure to put to sea.”3

  Some members of the commission quailed at the diplomatic hurdles involved in organizing an international force. Wouldn’t it be simpler to stick with an exclusively English fleet and to ask the Spanish for the use of their ports? There were two objections to that. For one, Spain would benefit more than other nations from the destruction of the pirates, and popular opinion would not be happy at the idea of English ships and English sailors being sent to fight the Spaniards’ battles at English expense. For another, an international operation meant that the costs of mounting the expedition could be shared.

  Everyone recognized that among the king’s subjects, the merchants and shipowners had the most to gain, so it was only fair that they should contribute the lion’s share of the finances. London was the country’s largest port, and the London companies were asked to stump up £40,000. Outside the capital, the provincial ports would have to raise another £9,000 between them. But from each according to his trading links with the Mediterranean: the Levant Company was required to give £8,000 and the Spanish Company £9,000, while the Muscovy Company was assessed only £1,000.

  The pattern of variation was repeated with the ports outside London. Bristol was asked for £2,500, Plymouth, Exeter, and Dartmouth for £1,000 each. King’s Lynn and Chester, which depended much less on the Mediterranean trade, had to give only £100 apiece, and Carlisle and Berwick weren’t asked for anything at all.