Pirates of Barbary
Page 25
They held off from making an all-out assault, and some recent British historians have suggested that the Moors were deliberately waiting until Sheres had finished the mole, so that they could move in and take over a fully functioning ocean harbor. In fact the real bone of contention for successive Moroccan rulers was not the state of the mole but the growing system of forts begun by Teviot. While they undoubtedly had designs on Tangier itself, they were determined that the English must not be allowed to expand their territory beyond the old limits set by the Portuguese. And with these forts, the English were doing just that.
On Thursday, March 25, 1680, the Irish governor of Tangier, the Earl of Inchiquin, dispatched seventy-five soldiers to relieve Charles Fort. The Moroccan qaid, or chieftain, Umar ben Haddu, was camped with an army of 7,000 men less than a mile from the town, and his troops were digging a network of trenches and cross-trenches which was coming closer and closer to the forts that defended the English lines. This was something new. Sniper fire, ambushes, and the occasional full-frontal cavalry charge were the tactics the Moors usually employed, not engineers and siegeworks. Now they were beginning a mine, an offensive tunnel, about 200 yards from Charles Fort, and cutting deep trenches between Kendal Fort and Pond Fort, and close to Henrietta Fort. Although they were only half a musket-shot from Charles Fort, they made no attempt to fire on it; and “our small firing did not much disturb them,” wrote a soldier in the Charles Fort garrison, “by reason of their being always under ground.”24
Four days later, on March 29, the Moors cut through the lines of communication between the fort and the town, and that night the English soldiers could see hundreds of them working feverishly by moonlight to mark out new positions. In the morning the commanders of Charles Fort, Captain St. John and Captain Trelawny, erected a cavalier, a raised gun platform, on the walls of one of their batteries, and from the vantage point it provided, thirty feet above the ground, eight or nine snipers overlooked and fired down into the Moorish trenches.
It made no difference. Day by day the siegeworks snaked around and through and beneath the English defenses. Umar ben Haddu had brought in specialists from Algiers and the Levant, men who had learned their trade during the siege of the Venetian stronghold of Heraklion on Crete, which had fallen to the Ottomans in September 1669 after a campaign lasting twenty-eight months. With their help, the Moors were no longer the unmethodical neighbors they had been to the Portuguese but were “grown to a great degree of knowledge in the business of war.”25
At eight o’clock on the night of April 11, a force of between 500 and 600 Moors suddenly rushed at Henrietta Fort. They pitched long timbers up against a section of wall, covered the planks with boards and branches, and brought in their pioneers to work on a mine under cover of the makeshift shelter. For more than seven hours the English commander, a lieutenant of foot named John Wilson, directed his men from the ramparts as they hurled hand grenades down on their attackers in the darkness and shot at them with small arms.
Just before dawn the Moors retreated without having managed to breach the wall, and Wilson, still not daring to open the gates of the fort, let down five men on ropes to clear away the timber siegeworks and burn them. They also decapitated two of the corpses left behind by Umar’s army and raised the heads on poles “in the sight of the Moorish camp, which all of that nation hold for the greatest indignity that can be put upon them, because according to their Mahometan superstition, they hold that when they die, their bodies immediately are translated into paradise; but if they are dismembered they can in no wise enter.”26 There were no more flower-strewn biers, no more expressions of mutual respect.
Torrential rains that week flooded Umar’s trenches, but he maintained his grip on the siege. All of the outlying English forts were now cut off; day and night their troops were subjected to the sound of drums and pipes coming from the Moorish camp, and whenever they tried to communicate with the town by speaking trumpet, “the Moors fell a-hallowing and shouting all along their lines.”27
At the end of April two renegades, a Frenchman and an Englishman, appeared before Charles Fort carrying a white flag. They brought the news that it had been undermined, and that Umar would give the order to light the gunpowder if Captains St. John and Trelawny didn’t surrender. The officers had one hour to decide.
To prove they weren’t bluffing, the renegades brought a safe-conduct for two English engineers to inspect the works. So they did, but the English remained defiant, telling Umar that they “would stand it out to the last.”28 Between three and four o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, April 29, the Moors sprung the mine; there was a low rumble deep in the ground, and then a huge plume of sand and dust erupted into the air—forty yards short of the fort. Impatient to break the deadlock, Umar’s pioneers had got their measurements wrong.
Nothing daunted, they set to work again, while Umar sent for more ordnance. On Saturday, May 8, the defenders saw a group of Moors hauling “carriages of great guns” up to a hill overlooking Henrietta. They were actually only fairly light cannon, a two-pounder and a six-pounder, but within twenty-four hours they had opened a breach in one of the fort’s walls. Using their speaking trumpet and shouting in Irish in the hope that no one in the Moorish camp would be able to understand them, the officers of Charles Fort got a message to Governor Inchiquin to say that Henrietta was about to fall to Umar and that the garrison of about 175 men was threatening mutiny. They couldn’t hold out much longer—could they have permission to evacuate the fort?
Sir Palmes Fairborne, the deputy governor and commander-in-chief of the military at Tangier, was a professional soldier who had just returned from Europe. He and Inchiquin immediately convened a council of war in the Upper Castle. They decided that Henrietta Fort was lost (as indeed it was—Lieutenant Wilson surrendered that very night), and that the men in the other outlying forts must be brought into the town. A ship should stand by the next morning to take on board the thirteen-man garrison from Giles Fort, which lay on the coast close to the quarries at Whitby, and at the same time the men from Charles Fort must run for it across the 600 yards of open ground that lay between them and the relative safety of the town walls. To cover their retreat, 500 men would sally out from the town toward Moorish lines in five groups: the main body, a right and left wing, a reserve, and a “forlorn hope,” which was the name given to the first wave of soldiers in an assault, the men who bore the brunt of the enemy’s fire and enabled the main body to gain ground while the enemy was reloading. (Apt though it sounds, the phrase is an Anglicization of the equally apt Dutch verloren hoop, which means “lost troop.”)
The men in Charles Fort spent the night spiking and wedging their heavy guns, so that Umar couldn’t use them. At dawn the Moors blew up Henrietta with a mine, and the attempt to rescue the garrison of Giles turned into a farce when all but one of the soldiers surrendered to the enemy, apparently because they couldn’t pluck up the courage to swim out to the ship waiting to take them off.
Meanwhile, the men of Charles Fort broke all the small arms they couldn’t carry, and threw all their powder and hand grenades into a counter-mine they had been digging to intercept Umar’s mine. They spoiled their provisions and did their best to render their surplus ammunition useless to the enemy. Then they waited.
The two captains had agreed between them that St. John would lead the retreat while Trelawny, who had his little son with him, would bring up the rear. At seven o’clock they lit a fuse to the train of powder which was to detonate the counter-mine. By the time they opened the gates of the fort only one inch was left. As they ran, two things happened in quick succession. The forlorn hope, which was led by a Scotsman named George Hume, emerged from the town and advanced relentlessly toward the enemy trenches which crisscrossed the no-man’s-land between Tangier and Charles Fort, followed by the main body, then the reserve and the two wings. And Umar’s soldiers poured out of their camp and into those trenches, determined to take both the fort and its garrison.
Now there was only one trench left between them and the safety of the town. But it was the Great Trench, the hardest obstacle of all, fourteen feet deep and half flooded with rainwater. Hundreds of armed sailors lined the ramparts of the town wall, firing volley after volley at the Moors, urging their comrades on. Hume’s men were hurling grenades at the enemy as fast as they could.
The soldiers of Charles Fort were in the Great Trench, splashing through the mud and filth, when Umar’s men caught up with them. St. John was one of the first out. He took a musket ball in his side as he ran for the gate, but he managed to stagger inside. Trelawny wasn’t so lucky. He was killed in the trench as he tried to pass his child over the parapet to safety. The boy was taken alive, along with fourteen others.
Thirty-nine soldiers made it back to safety. The rest died. The next day, Umar invited the English to come out and retrieve the dead under a flag of truce. They had all been decapitated.
That afternoon he sent back their heads.
THIRTEEN
Breaches of Faith: Making Peace with Barbary
There was a moment at the end of the 1640s when England seemed to have achieved a peace of sorts with the two most troublesome Barbary states. The treaty Edmund Cason had negotiated with Algiers in 1646 was holding, due in part, at least, to his continued presence there; and Thomas Browne, an agent appointed by Parliament, was treating with the authorities at Tunis for the release of English captives and the confirmation of an agreement between England and Tunis not to molest each other’s shipping.
Tunis had gone through some major upheavals since the death of Yusuf Dey in 1637. His successor as dey, a capable Genoese renegade named Usta Murad, encouraged and regulated piracy, played off the interests of Tunisians against those of the Turkish Janissary corps, and constructed a new and heavily fortified harbor for corsairs on the northeast coast of Tunisia at Porto Farina (present-day Ghar al Milh). But Usta Murad Dey died in 1640; the next two deys, Ahmad Khuja (1640-47) and Mohammed Laz (1647-53), had to contend with a particularly astute and powerful bey, Hammuda.
Under Uthman Dey, at the beginning of the century, the bey of Tunis had been a finance officer responsible for collecting taxes; and since the nomadic tribesmen of the interior were reluctant to hand over their taxes, the process often involved an element of compulsion. Hammuda’s father, Murad Bey, a Corsican who had been captured by pirates as a child and converted to Islam, was thus able to gather together a private army separate and distinct from the Janissary corps, which formed the basis of his political power as bey; and Hammuda, who inherited the beylicate in 1631 as a sixteen-year-old after Murad persuaded the Ottoman emperor to appoint him pasha of Tunis, continued the rise to power begun by his father. He built himself a palace at the Bardo a few miles outside the city, where he would be safe from the hostile Janissaries, and consolidated his influential connections with both rural Tunisia and with Tunis itself. One of his wives, for example, was the daughter of a tribal chieftain, while another was the daughter of an important Provençal renegade. His good opinion was essential when it came to electing the dey, and in 1658 he followed his father’s example by buying the office of pasha from the emperor.
Power in mid-seventeenth-century Tunis was delicately balanced among the dey, who had been the de facto ruler for fifty years; the bey with his own private army; and the agha, the powerful head of the Janissary corps. All of them were happy to invoke the authority of the sultan in Istanbul when it suited; all of them were equally happy to ignore him when it didn’t. The Tunisian corsairs remained an important economic force in the community—the state still received ten percent of their prizes, the Janissaries still accompanied them on raids, everyone who could afford to still invested in their ventures—but they were expected to conform to government policy and to prey only on those nations with whom Tunis had not concluded a treaty.
By and large they towed the line, even when it involved a loss of income all round. So when in April 1651 an English ship, the Goodwill, whose captain had contracted to carry thirty-two important Tunisian citizens from Tunis to Smyrna, was intercepted by Maltese galleys, and when that captain, a man named Stephen Mitchell, handed over those thirty-two Tunisian citizens without a struggle, the dey, the bey, and the agha were understandably aggrieved. When word reached them that the captives had been put into the galleys of the Knights of Malta as slaves, their disappointment with their English friends was acute. And when they heard that Captain Mitchell had not only handed over their comrades without a fight, but might actually have sold them to the Knights, they were very cross indeed.
So were the townsfolk. There was a riot as a 500-strong mob stormed through the streets, looking for Englishmen and crying, “Stone the dogs who have sold our fathers, brothers, kindred and friends!”1 Members of the English community were taken into custody for their own protection, and English property in Tunis was confiscated until the captives were returned safely.
Subsequent events show how difficult it was to arbitrate when complicated international episodes like this occurred. The Parliamentarian naval commander William Penn (father of the prominent Quaker colonist in America), who happened to be cruising with his squadron in the western Mediterranean in search of the remains of the Royalist fleet commanded by the late king’s nephew, Prince Rupert, remonstrated with the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta. “If by means of such necessity our merchants should be subject to such deep inconveniences,” Penn threatened, “what resentment the State of England may thereupon make, I cannot conclude.” 2 Meanwhile Penn secured the release in Tunis of the most senior of the English merchants, Samuel Boothouse, who was allowed to travel to Sicily to obtain a letter from the Archbishop of Palermo in the name of the Viceroy of Sicily (who, technically, had feudal domain over the Knights) demanding the release of the thirty-two Turks. Boothouse also tried to prosecute Captain Mitchell in the English courts, and Mitchell was held on his return to London, only to be released when no evidence was offered.
The Grand Master, who didn’t take kindly to being squeezed between Penn’s squadron on the one hand and the Viceroy of Sicily on the other, responded to English threats by pointing out that the Knights of Malta were friends to England, but that since the time of the Crusades their role had been to harry the Turk, “the enemies of the name of Jesus Christ.”3 Penn suggested the affair might be solved if Tunis paid a ransom of 3,200 dollars (£770) for the lot. The Knights demanded a lot more than that. They wanted 40,000 dollars (£9,600), and they refused to part with a single slave until the entire sum was handed over.
The Tunisians decided reprisals were in order. Their corsairs captured an English merchant ship, the Princess, and held her crew.
For the next couple of years, England had more pressing foreign affairs than Barbary to consider, in the shape of war with Holland. But when the First Anglo-Dutch War ended in 1654, the Commonwealth was in possession of a massive fleet, 160 strong; and that summer, Cromwell and the Council of State sent twenty-four ships under the command of Admiral Robert Blake into the Mediterranean, for the purpose of reminding other nations, principally the French and the Spanish, that England was a force to be reckoned with. While he was there, Blake’s instructions included the liberation of English captives held by the Tunisians, the restitution of the Princess, and the reestablishment of peaceful relationships with the dey of Tunis.
Blake, an inveterately republican veteran of the English Civil Wars (and not to be confused with the Robert Blake who mediated between the English and the Moors in 1637-38), arrived off Tunis on February 7, 1655. The moment he anchored, “I did forthwith send ashore to the Dey of Tunis a paper of demands for restitution of the ship Princess, with satisfaction for losses, and enlargemen
t of captives.”4 There was a new dey in office: Mustafa Laz Dey was Hammuda Bey’s choice, and since Hammuda had bribed the agha to support him, Tunis was experiencing a rare moment of cooperative government without the usual trilateral infighting.
The Tunisians received Blake politely and expressed a desire to restore peaceful relations with England; but the thirty-two citizens taken from the Goodwill were still being held captive in Malta, and until they were freed the dey refused point-blank, in Blake’s words, “to make a restitution of satisfaction for what was past.”5 It was a stalemate; and the dey showed not the slightest sign of being intimidated by Blake’s war fleet, even though it boasted around 900 guns and more than 4,000 men. “They entrust an English runnagardo with their causing,” commented a suspicious John Weale, a junior officer with Blake’s fleet who kept a journal of the voyage.6
The fleet needed to replenish its supplies of bread and fresh water, so Blake couldn’t afford to stay in Tunis Road indefinitely. Moreover, he was a punctilious officer, and he was anxious that although his instructions authorized him “to seize, surprise, sink, and destroy all ships and vessels belonging to the kingdom of Tunis,” they didn’t specifically extend to actually entering Tunisian ports.7 So he sent letters back to England asking for clarification and sailed for Cagliari Bay in Sardinia to revictual his ships. On the way, the fleet anchored for more than a week at Porto Farina, where they found nine corsairs (including the refitted Princess ) drawn up close to the shore and unrigged. Blood-red colors were flying from the castle which guarded the harbor, as well as from eight of the pirate ships; a silk flag of white and green flew from the corsair admiral’s vessel. There were signs of frantic activity along the shoreline: batteries of guns were being erected, as were a sea of tents. And thousands of horsemen and infantry had gathered, flourishing their scimitars in the sunlight and firing at English boats which attempted reconnaissance closer to the shore. The Tunisians were clearly anticipating an English invasion.