All of which was perfectly fair. But when it came to the Whelps, the justices stretched the bounds of credibility. They did their best to put the blame for the raid squarely on Francis Hooke—“we observed the Fifth Whelp oftentimes to lie idly and unprofitably in harbor while [your] subjects lay open to spoil at sea”—and announced disingenuously that only three weeks before the raid they had given Sir Thomas Button £200 to victual both ships, so how could Hooke pretend that want of victuals prevented him from leaving Kinsale in pursuit of Murad? Deliberately or not, they quite missed the point.
The year 1632 saw a flood of fear. The Algerians were bound to come back. Whitehall ordered more ships to be sent to Munster, in the expectation that “the Turkish pirates who surprised some of his Majesty’s subjects at Baltimore last summer will attempt the like again this next summer with greater forces and in divers places.”25 A Captain Robert Innes urged the Irish authorities to ask the king for three or four Mediterranean-style galleys “for preventing all piracies by sea and sudden depredations and landings of Turks and renegadoes.” Fast, maneuverable, and versatile, they could be crewed by shaven-headed criminals who might be grateful to act as galley slaves for a fixed term in return for their liberty. Beacons were set up along the coast that year, and the president of Munster was authorized to arm the locals. “But please take every care that arms are not put into the hands of disloyal people.”26
In Baltimore, the survivors put the pieces of their lives back together. A company of soldiers was stationed in the Fort of Jewels, and the mayor and burgesses offered to pay for the building of a blockhouse if the king would provide the ordnance for it. The burned-out houses in the cove were rebuilt—some of them, at least—but people drifted away, and the town never recovered. “It is now a poor decayed fishing town,” wrote one nineteenth-century historian, “with not one tolerable house in it. Here are the ruins of an ancient castle of the O’Driscolls, [and] a few poor cabins.”27 A Dutch renegade’s accidental encounters with a Devon sailor and a Dungarvan fisherman had changed this corner of Ireland forever.
In the winter of 1631-32, William Gunter, who had lost his wife and seven sons in the Baltimore raid, traveled to Dublin and then to London to plead for help from the government. The Lord Justices agreed he was “a special object of pity and compassion.” But no one acted, and Gunter never saw his family again. Like the rest of the captives, they simply vanished into Barbary.
A year later, and Murad Raïs is answering the muezzin’s call from the Djemaa el-Kebir, as he always did, making his intention to pray and adopting the qiyam, both hands raised. How many of the Baltimore captives, strangers in a strange land, knelt as he did on their mats in a dusty North African city? How many of the Gunter boys chose to forget how they had once sat in the little church on the strand 1,200 miles away and asked God to deliver them in the time of their tribulation, and now testified with Murad that there is no God but God and Mohammed is his messenger?
And who dares to blame them if they did?
NINE
Woeful Slavery: William Rainborow’s 1637 Expedition to Morocco
Sometimes, a slave escaped.
Francis Knight was an English merchant who was captured by Algerian corsairs in December 1631, six months after Murad’s raid on Baltimore. He was twenty-three years old and destined to spend the next five and a half years with a succession of masters in Algiers, “that city fatal to all Christians.”1
In the summer of 1637 he was sold—for the fourth time in less than six years—to an Italian renegade, Ali Bitshnin, as a galley slave. Ali was a powerful figure in Algiers: “one of the greatest slave-merchants that Barbary ever produced,” said John Morgan in his eighteenth-century Complete History of Algiers.2 He was also an ambitious corsair admiral, and in May 1638, Knight found himself embarked as an oarsman in a combined expedition of sixteen Algerian and Tunisian galleys which set out for Italy, with his master as commander.
With flags, standards, and streamers blowing in the breeze, the fleet grouped at La Goulette and sailed up into the Tyrrhenian Sea, past volcanic Stromboli (where several of the inhabitants were so frightened at the sight of the Turks that they ran straight into the “affrighting fires perpetually burning”3), and along the Calabrian coast, before doubling back through the Straits of Messina and into the Adriatic. They wrought havoc as they went, kidnapping hundreds of terrified citizens—including a bishop and fifteen nuns “whom they prostituted to their lust”4—and destroying isolated farmsteads, small villages, and big towns. Encountering no resistance at all, they burned fishing boats, slaughtered horses and cattle, and laid waste to fields of corn. “Thus was Italy the eye of Christendom infested by these rovers,” said Knight ruefully.5
In October a Venetian fleet caught up with Ali Bitshnin’s galleys off the coast of Albania, and the corsairs were forced to seek refuge in the heavily fortified Ottoman garrison of Valona (modern-day Vlora), Ali persuading the governor of the castle to defend his men “from the violence of the Nazerene misbelievers,” even though his own raid had very definitely not been sanctioned by the Sublime Porte. Fearing at one stage that the Venetians might storm ashore and capture their slaves, Ali and his captains placed them in one of the castle’s towers, more than a thousand men, women, and children, “all lying 10 and 10 in chains, [in] a place as dark as pitch, and a foot thick in dust.”6 Ali eventually escaped inland, taking with him the Algerians, the Tunisians, and all the captives who could still walk. Among those left behind because they were too sick to travel was Francis Knight.
“God that had preserved us in so many inevitable dangers,” recalled Knight in the account he wrote of his captivity, “did also restore some of us to more than an ordinary strength of body. . . . No sooner were we able to stand upon our legs, but we are studious how to bring to pass our liberty.”7 On Saturday, October 22, 1638, their Turk jailer went to a neighboring town for the day, and while he was away the prisoners managed to unchain themselves “and the locks again so put in as to be taken out with our fingers.” Soon after midnight, Knight and twelve others—a cosmopolitan bunch which consisted of three more Englishmen, a Welsh-man, a Jersey man, two Frenchmen, a Spaniard, a Majorcan, a Neopolitan, a Greek, and a Maltese boy—slipped out of their chains while the jailer was sleeping. “What became of our keeper I cannot tell,” Knight said a little uneasily. “My consorts told me they had not done him any violence.”8
The fugitives took bread and water, and a rope that they used to scale the walls of the castle. Then they walked along the shore for a couple of miles in the darkness until they came on two little boats pulled up on the beach. They stove in the planks of one, and took the other out to sea, rowing for two nights and a day until they finally reached Venetian-held Corfu, about eighty miles south of Valona. Greek Orthodox monks sheltered them, and eventually they were brought before the governor of the island, who gave them passes to board a galley bound for Venice. From there, Knight found passage on a Bristol merchant ship, the Charles, arriving in England in 1639, and the following year he published the story of his seven years’ captivity, in the hope that it would rally support for “my poor country-men, groaning under the merciless yoke of Turkish thralldom.”9
An opportunistic escape from captivity like Knight’s was unusual, but not unique. The master-slave relationship on the Barbary Coast was not at all clear, and those victims of piracy who were determined to find their way home sometimes exploited this ambiguity. In 1634 or 1635, for example, an English sailor named John Dunton was captured off Land’s End in the Little David, which was bound for Virginia with fifty-seven men, women, and children aboard. They were all taken to Salé and sold, including Dunton and his young son. Soon afterward Dunton’s Algerian master invested in a slaving expedition setting out from Salé for the south coast of England, and he sent Dunton as pilot, keeping the little boy behind in Algiers. The captain of the vessel was a Frieslander, John Rickles, who was also a slave; so was the gunner, Jacob Cornelius, and two other Dutch
crewmen. The rest were Moors.
As they approached England, Dunton and the Dutchmen agreed they would try to bring the ship into port. They captured an English fishing boat with nine crew “with intention to make a party against the Moors,” and when they reached the Isle of Wight, Rickles called on the Europeans “to stand up for their lives and liberties, whereupon they drove the Moors into the hold.”10 They hoisted a white flag, hung the Salé colors over the stern into the water, and sailed into port to give themselves up.
The ambiguities didn’t end there. There was some question as to their real motives in taking the fishing boat, one of whose crewmen had leaped overboard and drowned; at their trial in Winchester at the end of October 1636, the Dutchmen were consistently referred to as renegadoes rather than slaves and admonished by the judge to repent their apostasy. At one point Captain Rickles collapsed in a faint at the bar, “which was occasioned, as he himself stated, and as was conceived by the standers-by, seeing the sweat run down his face ere he fell, by the consideration of the foulness of his sin being laid open to him.”11 Pirates who were apprehended by the authorities, or who simply had had enough of the life and come home, often claimed they had been enslaved and forced into a life of piracy by their owners; unless anyone was found to bear witness against them, it was hard to prove they were lying.
Rickles, Dunton, and the other Europeans were all acquitted of piracy, while the Moors were convicted and sentenced to death. Two of them offered to convert to Christianity if it would save their lives; others hinted that their comrades back home in Salé would willingly exchange them for Christian slaves. The Europeans asked that none of the Moors should be allowed to go free, in case word of what had happened got back to Barbary and their countrymen suffered as a result. Dunton, though, pleaded with the court to be given one of the Moors so that he could exchange him for his ten-year-old son in Algiers. He also produced petitions from local fishermen who had had their own children and friends taken, to the same purpose. They were all refused.
Exchange was an accepted way of liberating victims of piracy, as it was any captive or prisoner of war. In the same year that Dunton and the others seized their chance to escape, Charles I received an anonymous letter proposing that idle and lascivious women should be exchanged with the Turks for their male captives, “so that one harlot might redeem half a dozen captives that are made slaves to fulful the lustful desires of the heathen Turks.”12 (The notion that Turks used men to gratify their sexual desires merely because they couldn’t find suitable women suggests the writer was woefully ignorant of human sexuality. Or that he was a sailor.) Tit-for-tat expeditions to capture sailors, fishermen, or coastal villagers who could in turn be exchanged for sailors, fishermen, and coastal villagers captured by the other side played a big part in perpetuating the cycle of Christian-Muslim violence all round the Mediterranean basin throughout the seventeenth century.
In general, citizens of Catholic Europe who had the misfortune to be taken by pirates had more chance of getting home than their Protestant counterparts, because there was more contact between Barbary and the Catholic nations which bordered the Mediterranean, and also because ever since the Crusades, when the need arose to rescue Christians taken prisoner by the Saracens, the Catholic Church had operated two religious orders whose raison d’être was the redemption of captives held in the Islamic world. The clerical Order of Trinitarians, founded in France in about 1193, and the lay Order of Mercedarians, which was founded in Barcelona twenty-five years later, worked extensively along the Barbary Coast, the former tending to send its monks to Tunis and Algiers, and the latter concentrating on Salé, Tetouan, and the other Moroccan strongholds.
Redemptist friars negotiate to ransom European slaves.
Mercedarian friars gathered goods, livestock, Muslim prisoners, and money to ransom Christian slaves. They collected from door to door, delivering sermons in churches and marketplaces, always emphasizing the cruel treatment meted out to Christians by Moors and Turks, and the terrible possibility that captives might lose their souls by converting to Islam. When enough money had been collected to mount an expedition, and all the necessary safe-conduct permissions had been obtained, those friars who had been chosen as redeemers set out, carrying a banner painted with an image of Christ’s descent into limbo. If the expedition was successful, redeemers and redeemed made a triumphal entry into their city in a grand procession with the redemption banner at its head, followed by the redeemed, all wearing the white Mercedarian scapular, accompanied by the local clergy, and with the redeemers bringing up the rear.
The monks and friars who worked with the redemptist orders were dedicated men who cheerfully put their own lives at risk to save others. Unless it was absolutely impossible, they always traveled to Barbary themselves, rather than sending proxies, and if they found captives who were in danger of converting to Islam and there was not enough money to redeem them, they sometimes stayed behind as hostages in their place. But they weren’t all that concerned about the saving of Protestant souls, and British victims of piracy had, by and large, to look to less formalized methods for their redemption.
Ransom was one such method, and licensed collections were regularly taken in British churches to buy the freedom of slaves. In 1643, for example, a group of women successfully petitioned Parliament for collections to be held over a two-month period in churches in London, Westminster, and the surrounding suburbs to raise money to ransom their husbands, who “were taken by Turkish pirates, carried to Algier, and there now remain in miserable captivity, having great fines imposed upon them.”13 But poor private citizens were at the mercy of a government bureaucracy which moved very slowly and took its cut at every conceivable opportunity. Collectors took a percentage; officials at the Admiralty, which was supposed to organize the payment of the ransoms, took a percentage; consuls and merchants and the middlemen who brokered the handover took a percentage. And what money was left was often diverted toward securing the freedom of the more influential captives, leaving common sailors nothing but dreams of ever seeing their wives and families again.
Estimates of the numbers of European slaves in Barbary varied wildly from one observer to another. In 1634 the Trinitarian Pierre Dan reckoned that 32,000 were being held in Tunis and Algiers. Francis Knight, on the other hand, put the number of Christians “groaning under the yoke of Turkish tyranny” in Algiers alone at nearly twice that number.14 Inevitably, such rough estimates are less than reliable. But the threat was real enough, with corsair raiding parties making their presence felt right along the south coast of England. In September 1635 the governor of Pendennis Castle, Sir Nicholas Slanning, reported that six Turkish warships stood off Land’s End, lying in wait for the return of the Newfoundland fishing fleet. “This news terrifies the country,” he said. As well it might—a few days later the mayor of Dartmouth reported that two ships on the way home from Newfoundland had been taken by Turkish pirates less than ten miles off Cornwall’s Lizard Point, thirty miles east of Land’s End. Sixty seamen were carried off “to increase the number of the western captives.”15 A thousand poor women petitioned Charles I to send an ambassador to Salé to plead for the release of their husbands, who were in “woeful slavery, enduring extreme labour, want of sustenance, and grievous torments.”16
By 1636 there was a definite air of panic among the merchants and fishing fleets that operated out of the south-coast ports. Shipowners from Exeter, Dartmouth, Plymouth, Barnstable, Southampton, Poole, Weymouth, and Lyme Regis got together and complained to the king that over the past few years they had lost an alarming eighty-seven vessels to piracy, which, along with their cargoes, were worth £96,700. In addition, 1,160 English seamen were kept “in miserable captivity”; and the burden of caring for the wives and children of those captives was becoming intolerable. The petitioners begged that the Admiralty would issue letters of marque for taking the pirates, as well as mounting regular patrols “of some nimble ships” to protect coastal waters.17
&n
bsp; The raiders were back that summer. Another forty-two seamen were captured off the Lizard, and two fishing boats were taken by a Turkish man-of-war in full view of the fort at Plymouth. In September 1636, with the Newfoundland fleet due home at any time, the same group of merchants petitioned the king again, complaining there were now so many pirates about that “seamen refuse to go [to sea], and fishermen refrain to take fish, whereby customs and imposts are lessened, merchandising is at a stand, petitioners are much impoverished, and many of them utterly undone.”18 Plymouth organized monthly collections to ransom captives, and in October the Cornish divine Charles Fitzgeffry preached three sermons before the mayor of Plymouth, urging compassion toward “our brethren and country-men who are in miserable bondage in Barbary.” Taking as his text Hebrews 13:3 (“Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them”), Fitzgeffry’s impressive rhetoric railed with an alliterative flourish against “miscreant Mahometans” and urged his congregation to ponder the recent “tragical transportation of our brethren from Baltimore into that Babylon, Barbary.”19 Praising the men who had died trying to defend their families, he was in no doubt that they had the happier fate: “Better it is to fall by the hands, than into the hands of those tyrannous Turks, whose saving is worse than slaying.”20
The miscreant Mahometans currently causing such havoc for West Country merchants and shipowners were the Salé rovers of Morocco. In 1613, during the last Spanish expulsion of the Moriscos, a group of Moriscos from Extremadura, in western Spain, found their way to Salé on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, where Mawlay Zidan allowed them to settle in a decrepit old fortress at the mouth of the Bou Regreg River. Taking their name from their home town of Hornacha in Extremadura, the Hornacheros repaired the fort and came to an informal arrangement with Mawlay Zidan whereby they took care of his defenses along that particular stretch of the North Atlantic coast in return for being allowed to make their living as privateers. Within a decade the Morisco settlement at “New Sallee” had attracted several thousand Muslim exiles (and several hundred European renegades and outlaws), and when Mawlay Zidan died, in 1627, the Hornacheros decided they were powerful enough to dispense with the patronage of his ineffectual successor, Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik. Encouraged by a charismatic religious leader named Mohammed al-Ayyashi, who was simultaneously waging a holy war against the Spanish and making a play for control of the northwestern corner of Morocco, they broke away and set up their own small republic, presided over by a Grand Admiral and his council.
Pirates of Barbary Page 17