It was all for nothing. The English boats made their way back to the fleet and the Bab al-Gazira, the great gate that connected the harbor to the town, burst open. Citizens, slaves, corsairs, and soldiers streamed out along the mole and began to extinguish the flames. Almost immediately, clouds covered the moon and a sudden shower of rain made its own contribution toward undoing the work of Hughes and his fellow incendiaries. When dawn came Mansell reckoned only two pirate ships had been rendered unserviceable.
That day eleven pirates slipped into harbor past the English patrols, and although the admiral bided his time and waited for a favorable wind so he could send in the fireships again, he had missed his chance. Two Genoese captives who swam for their freedom a week after the attack told him that “the pirates had boomed up the mole with masts and rafts, set a double guard upon their ships, planted more ordnance upon the mole and the walls, and manned out twenty boats to guard the boom.”34 They had also dispatched galleys east and west along the coast to warn off other pirates.
So Mansell retired to Alicante to refit his ships, to plan another assault, and to await orders, supplies, and reinforcements. The Spanish repeated their accusations of his being in league with the pirates. The supplies didn’t come. Nor did the reinforcements. The orders did, but they were not what Mansell wanted: Lord Admiral Buckingham, anxious about rising tensions in the Narrow Seas following the end of the Twelve Years’ Truce between Spain and the United Provinces, told him to send home Hawkins and Button with the Vanguard, the Rainbow, the Constant Reformation, and the Antelope, and to carry on the fight against the pirates with what he had left.
He did as he was told, although the Lion was in such a poor state that she could not be kept at sea “without eminent peril of perishing,” so he swapped with Hawkins and kept the Vanguard for himself.35 He also dismissed four of the merchantmen after their captains convinced him they were no longer fit for service. The Venetian ambassador, with his customary grasp of events, reported to the doge that “the twenty ships under Mansfilt [sic] have fought, defeated and captured some pirate ships and inflicted much damage upon the port of Algiers.”36
Mansell could be forgiven for feeling a little dispirited. But for all his many faults, he wasn’t one to give up easily. He sailed round to Cadiz to refit and spent the month of July planning another attack on the harbor at Algiers, this time using galleys which he hoped to borrow from Spain. He intended to use the galleys—eleven would be good, but he reckoned he could make do with six—to blockade the harbor and to tow his remaining ships in close to shore, where their heavy guns could provide cover for his boats as they dismantled the boom. In spite of some misgivings, the Spanish agreed to provide him with “a great supply of fireworks, galleys, and other vessels,”37 and the galleys had actually been dispatched to Majorca to await his arrival when he received fresh orders from home. He was being recalled to England, to patrol the Narrow Seas.
In October 1621, a year after they left England with such high expectations, the remains of Mansell’s battered expeditionary force sailed into the shelter of the Downs, the anchorage off the coast of Kent which was the traditional gathering point for the fleet. In a final twist to the long comedy of errors, the government had changed its mind and decided to keep him in the Mediterranean, but he left for home before the orders countermanding his recall arrived. The adventure proved too much for his vice-admiral, the elderly Sir Richard Hawkins, who collapsed and died in front of the Privy Council—of vexation at not having his expenses for the Algiers voyage paid, according to one contemporary.38 Sir Thomas Button went back to chasing pirates round the Irish Sea. Mansell was left alone to bear the brunt of the criticism in Westminster.
No one could claim the mission had been a success—not even the Venetian ambassador, who reverted to saying that the English crews were so ill-paid and ill-disciplined that they had deserted en masse to the Turks. Mansell’s enemies seized the opportunity to condemn his failure of leadership. Sir John Coke, who had lost his place as deputy treasurer to the navy when Mansell took over back in 1604, and who as one of the Commissioners for the Navy had been involved in the 1618 attempt to bring him to book for corruption, described the fleet’s early efforts as “nothing but shooting and ostentation” and criticized the admiral for not spending more time at sea. Sir William Monson, still smarting from being passed over as commander of the expedition, agreed:Such was the misgovernment of those ships, and the negligence and vainglorious humors of some to feast and banquet in harbor when their duty was to clear and scour the seas, that they rather carried themselves like amorous courtiers than resolute soldiers, by which means they lost the opportunity which offered itself to do hurt upon those hellish pirates.39
Monson also blamed Mansell for stirring up the pirates and thus actually making matters worse, a charge repeated by later historians. Josiah Burchett, author of the first general naval history of England, commented in 1720 that “in return for the civility of [Mansell’s] visit, his back was scarce turned, but those corsairs picked up near forty good ships belonging to the subjects of his master, and infested the Spanish coasts with greater fury than ever.”40
There was something in this. By the winter of 1621, MPs were complaining that the decay in trade was much greater than it had been in the summer “by reason of pirates.”41 In November two Portuguese carracks, big three-masted ships of the kind which dominated long-distance trade in the early seventeenth century, had almost reached home on their way from Goa on the west coast of India when they were attacked by seventeen Turks; one managed to get into harbor at Lisbon, but the other was sunk with the loss of all hands and cargo valued at nearly three million ducats. The following spring, merchants in the Exchange at London estimated recent English losses at £40,000. There were reports of savage behavior, too. An English merchantman which resisted three Turks in the Straits was blown out of the water; its master and seventeen crew clung to the wreckage for hours, but the pirates refused to pull them out of the water, and they all drowned. A group of women whose husbands were held captive in Algiers went down on their knees and wept in front of the Prince of Wales; they apparently obtained “fair words”—a remarkable enough achievement for the shy and stammering Charles.
It took a more than usually virulent outbreak of plague along the Barbary Coast in the summer of 1622 to rein in the activities of the pirates. John Ward was among the casualties in Tunis, while merchantmen calling at Algiers reported that pirate ships lay abandoned for want of crew, and that bodies were being thrown into the sea because there were so many dead. “God grant it be true!” exclaimed the Venetian governor of Corfu.42
Sir Robert Mansell was robust in his response to his critics, blaming the failure of his mission on poor communications, inadequate supplies, and bad weather—a fair assessment. He survived the whispering campaign against him, clinging to his vice-admiralty of England and his glassmaking patent, and even entered Parliament, so that he could secure an exemption for his precious patent from the Act of Monopolies.
One of his last appearances at Westminster—and in history—came in May 1641, when part of a ceiling in the Commons chamber gave way with a sudden crack, causing nervous MPs to assume they were under attack. There was an undignified stampede out of the chamber and into the adjoining Westminster Hall, where terrifed members ran straight into Mansell, who drew his sword and commanded them to “stand and fight like true Englishmen.” They didn’t. If they had turned to glance backward as they scrambled out into Palace Yard, they would have seen the old sailor, irascible and magnificent, advancing alone into the Commons chamber with his sword in his hand.
EIGHT
Fishers of Men: The Sack of Baltimore
The men didn’t like passing through the Straits. It made them nervous.
Murad watched as one of the Janissaries tossed the little bundle of candles over the side, an offering to the long-dead holy man who still promised them protection from the safety of his shoreline tomb.
Once
he would have laughed. Now, without thinking, he murmured to himself the ancient form of words, at once a profession of faith and a prayer. There is no other God than God, and Mohammed is his messenger.
The candles vanished in the rolling sea.
Fifteen hundred miles away, on the coast of County Cork, the people of Baltimore were preparing for the first sighting of the glittering, rippling, silver-bright shoals of fish which meant security for the entire community for another year.
It was June 1631, and Baltimore had come a long way since Captain John Jennings and his friends played hide-and-seek with the king’s ships around the inlets and islands of Roaringwater Bay. Pirates still appeared from time to time, but the presence at Kinsale of the Fifth Whelp, a fast, well-armed new pinnace under the command of Captain Francis Hooke, made this particular corner of Ireland less attractive to them than it had been in the past.
As a result, Baltimore’s black economy—the trading in stolen goods, the whores, the cattle, and casks of ale left in isolated coves—had declined dramatically. The Protestant colony planted here at the beginning of the century had put down roots and all but ousted the native Catholic population, and a “town of English people, larger and more civilly and religiously ordered than any town in this province,” as the Lord Bishop of Cork had called it, was knuckling down to earning a more or less honest living.1
It prospered. That summer about two hundred people were living in neat rows of houses beside the O’Driscolls’ ancient Fort of Jewels, which overlooked the harbor. A second group of over a hundred lived a few hundred yards below, close to a little cove. There were stalls, alehouses, work-shops, brewers and bakers, a Friday market, a pretty stone-built church. The mayor, elected each year by twelve burgesses, presided over a weekly court; farmers and village people from all over West Cork came to the big three-day fairs which were held in June and October.
Baltimore wasn’t entirely reformed. Its merchants still bought the occasional chest of sugar without inquiring too closely into its provenance. But these days the place owed its wealth not to pirates but to a cousin of the herring, the humble pilchard.
Every summer, boys stood watch along the cliffs for the telltale shimmer on the waves which meant the arrival of the first shoals. As soon as one was sighted, the cry went up and men scrambled to put out to sea, eager for the teeming silver which meant security and prosperity for the entire community. They worked in teams: perhaps a dozen or more in the main vessel, the seine-boat, and half a dozen in a smaller follower. The fishers were guided by “huers,” who would track the shoal’s movement from their vantage points on high ground; at a given signal a seine up to 400 yards long was dropped to form a vertical curtain. The crews of the seine-boat and the follower then rowed as hard as they could, one going clockwise and the other counterclockwise, to draw the net round the shoal. When they met, they heaved up weighted draw-ropes on the bottom of the net to trap the writhing mass of pilchards in a kind of purse. Then, using oval baskets, they emptied the fish into their boats and either set off in search of another shoal or turned for home.
It was a hard, frantic business, and the catch was just the start. The pilchards were unloaded in the cove and taken to storehouses called “palaces” (from the old Anglo-Norman palis, meaning an enclosure), where they were arranged in layers, with salt between each layer. There they stayed for up to three weeks. Then the salt was shaken off and the fish were rinsed in fresh water before being taken to pressing-houses, where they were tightly packed into casks and pressed with heavy weights. “The pilchards are squeezed down,” explained an eighteenth-century commentator on the County Cork pilchard industry, “[and] the barrels are again filled up and so again till they can hold no more. Under the casks are convenient receptacles to hold the oil, blood and water; the oil is got by scumming off the top. The fish being thus pressed, the barrels are headed and sent to market.”2 A single catch might bring in 600 barrels of pilchards.
Baltimore revolved around the pilchard industry. It sustained not only the fishermen, but coopers and carpenters and ropemakers, shipwrights and merchants and factors. Most of the women worked in the palaces and pressing-houses. Pilchard oil filled the lamps which lit their homes, and was used in preparing the leather they wore. Their great fear was that one day the notoriously unpredictable shoals wouldn’t come.
Murad still marveled at the way the Janissaries would sit so still and silent, for hours on end. The motion of the ship meant little to them. The commands he gave his crew, as he sat cross-legged on his mat, they ignored. They had not come on this voyage to climb rigging or haul in the sails.
Sometimes they talked to each other, or smoked, or gambled. Sometimes they cleaned their muskets and oiled their scimitars. Mostly they just sat, in their tall red caps and long sashed robes and iron-heeled slippers, and looked out at the sea passing by.
A Barbary Coast raïs, a corsair captain.
In Dublin, a rumor reached the Earl of Cork that Algerian pirates were planning to attack Munster. His informant believed their targets would be two recently built forts: Haulbowline, which commanded the mouth of Cork harbor, and Castlepark, put up in 1604 on a peninsula overlooking Kinsale. Unlikely though this seemed, the earl took the intelligence seriously enough to pass it on to London. Cork and Kinsale were both ripe “for Turks to lay eggs in,” he told Viscount Dorchester, the king’s secretary of state, not setting much store by Captain Hooke and his Whelp.
There had been several security scares in these waters recently. In July 1630, Lord Esmond, governor of the fort at Waterford, complained to London that “the pirates on the coast are very bad”;3 and the same month Captain Hooke reported he was unable to engage with Spanish warships which had taken two prizes because “the Irish fishermen warn them of our presence.”4 That November, the mayor of Waterford warned the authorities that “Cornelius O’Driscoll, an Irish pirate with his rendezvous in Barbary, is in the neighborhood with a ship of 200 tons and 14 guns.”5 Cornelius was one of the O’Driscolls who had ruled Baltimore before the coming of the English planters, and his appearance, together with the report that Turks were planning a visit to that part of Ireland, prompted the Earl of Cork to revive an idea proposed by Lord Deputy Chichester back in 1608, that Baltimore must be fortified to prevent its use as a safe haven by pirates.
The earl ordered a map to be drawn up and sent to Viscount Dorchester, so that “your lordship may observe how the town and harbor lyeth and how narrow the entry of the harbor mouth is, and how easily and fit it is to be fortified and secured.”6 This map shows 1631 Baltimore in remarkable detail. Thirty-six houses, plumes of smoke rising gently from their chimneys, are grouped around the Fort of Jewels, with a further ten houses standing in two rows within the walls of the fort. The settlement down at the cove is represented by another twenty-six buildings. Most are obviously houses, but three pairs set apart on the shore could be the fish palaces and pressing-houses.
In the bay, two seine-boats and their followers are fishing, and a small fleet of six fishing boats lies in the cove. Two armed ships are anchored in deep water below the cliffs of Sherkin Island, which acts as a breakwater for the harbor, protecting it from the ravages of the Atlantic. A third ship is at anchor behind a little headland at the harbor mouth, just out of sight of the town, and a fourth puts out to sea in full sail, cannon blazing in salute. It isn’t clear what these ships signify, although given that the anonymous cartographer has chosen to portray a snapshot of everyday life at Baltimore, most likely they are patrolling naval vessels and visiting merchantmen. The only sign of defense is a gun emplacement projecting out into the bay from the sixteenth-century Castle of Dunalong on Sherkin Island.7 Heavy ordnance placed here would be capable of playing over the western side of the 500-yard-wide entrance to Baltimore harbor; but since Dunalong was still an O’Driscoll stronghold, the Earl of Cork presumably felt something a little more reliable was called for.
Viscount Dorchester’s response to the Earl’s proposal hasn’
t survived. The map—or a copy of it—found its way into the hands of Thomas Wentworth, who took up his appointment as the Lord Deputy, the king’s representative in Ireland, in July 1633. Perhaps that implies that the idea of fortifying Baltimore was passed back and forth from one government office to another. Wentworth did nothing about it, either.
In any case, by 1633 it was too late for Baltimore.
The two French ships were easy. His men stripped them of ropes, rigging, canvas, and everything else of value. They stripped their crews, too—seventeen Frenchmen, nine Portuguese, and three Spaniards—and shackled them in the hold of the pirate vessel. But the ships themselves were worth nothing. Where Murad was going, they would be a liability. The men stove in their planking with iron bars and watched from the deck as they disappeared beneath the waves.
Murad was a veteran. As Jan Janszoon of Haarlem he had worked with Suleiman Raïs, another Dutch renegade and a onetime member of Simon Danseker’s crew. Around the time of Suleiman’s death, in 1620, Janszoon converted to Islam, took the name Murad, and became a raïs himself, operating first out of Algiers, then from Salé on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, where he rose to become head of the taifat al-raïs. He was back in Algiers by the spring of 1627, when a Danish captive approached him with an offer to pilot an expedition to the Northern Seas if Murad would buy him his freedom.
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