Blake was back at Tunis on March 18, when he found Mustafa Laz Dey less inclined to negotiate than before. Accusing the Tunisians of obstinacy, insolence, and willfulness—by which he presumably meant they still wanted their citizens back—he reported to England that such “barbarous provocations did so far work upon our spirits, that we judged it necessary for the honor of the fleet, our nation, and religion, seeing they would not deal with us as friends, to make them feel us as enemies.”8 Having now resolved on commencing hostilities, his plan was to fire the pirate fleet, which still lay in harbor at Porto Farina. After withdrawing his ships to Trapani in Sicily—a deliberate ruse to lull his enemy into a false sense of security—he returned to Porto Farina on the afternoon of April 3.
At sunrise the next morning the English fleet entered the harbor. The biggest men-of-war, including Blake’s sixty-gun flagship, the George, anchored within musket range of the Tunisian fortifications and opened fire, “the Lord being pleased to favor us with a gentle gale off the sea, which cast all the smoke upon them.” Out of these rolling clouds emerged the English boats of execution filled with armed men and incendiaries, and at the sight of them the pirate crews, who had been returning fire with small arms, lost their nerve and swam for the shore. All nine vessels were boarded and set alight.
By mid-morning the operation was over and the English sailors were back aboard their ships. Twenty-five had been killed and about forty hurt, mostly by small-arms fire from the shore. The fleet continued to play its guns on the burning ships to deter any attempts to extinguish the flames. That night the English lay at anchor outside the harbor and watched them light up the sky “like so many bonfires.”
Leaving aside the question of who held the moral high ground, Blake’s burning of the Tunisian fleet at Porto Farina was a remarkable action. “Planned with care and executed with precision,” said the twentieth-century naval historian J. R. Powell, it was the first time ever that “the guns of a fleet had overpowered shore batteries.”9 “A piece of service as hath not been paralleled in these parts of the world,” wrote young John We ale. 10 “We have great cause to bless God for His mighty deliverance in the sight of the heathen,” was the verdict of another officer.11
At home, the English hailed the burning of Porto Farina as a terrible demonstration of the nation’s naval might. A bit of contemporary verse gives a flavor of the triumphalist (and racist) sentiments that Blake’s victory provoked:The poor Mahometans do trembling fly,
From their strong holds to mountains that were nigh
Whence like so many fiends of blackest hue,
(With scaring horrid faces) they might view,
In those sulfureous fiery streams below,
A new Gehenna, to their greater woe.12
England was also convinced that the friendly reception Blake received when he put in for supplies at Algiers six days after the Porto Farina attack was entirely due to the shock and awe his action had caused throughout Barbary. This wasn’t quite fair. The Algerians, increasingly adept at playing one European power off against another, had already decided that it was in their interests to maintain the peace with England—for the time being. When Blake’s fleet first entered the Straits, in November 1654, for example, four Algerines had made a great play of handing over some English captives whom they had just rescued from a Salé pirate.
Blake himself was more circumspect about his victory, and with good reason. The action was a tactical triumph, but it didn’t really achieve very much besides, of course, preventing nine Tunisian ships from causing any more mischief. Although he returned to Tunis and asked Mustafa Laz Dey to reconsider his refusal to hand over English goods and captives from the Princess (he could no longer hand over the Princess itself, as Blake had just burned it), the dey stuck to his obstinacy, insolence, and willfulness. Moreover, he chose this moment to remind the admiral that Tunis was under the protection of the Ottoman emperor.
This was no hollow threat. Blake took it seriously enough to dispatch letters warning Sir Thomas Bendysh, the English ambassador at Istanbul, to expect reprisals against English merchants in the city. Bendysh went straight to the Grand Vizier as soon as he received the news, “and very well pacified him concerning the burning of the ships at Tunis,”13 so the consequences Blake feared didn’t materialize. But it wasn’t until after April 1657, when the ransom of the thirty-two captives held at Malta was finally settled (by the English), that a lasting peace between England and Tunis became a real possibility.
Even then the Tunisian government would only give up the seventy-two English men and women it held when Admiral John Stoakes, who arrived off Tunis with six warships in 1658, agreed to pay out 11,250 dollars (about £2,700) for their release. This cleared the way for formal articles of peace, which were agreed to on February 8, 1658. They included a clause stipulating that “if any English ships shall receive on board any goods or passengers belonging to the kingdom of Tunis, they shall be bound to defend both them and their goods . . . and not deliver them to the enemy.”14
Maintaining good relations with the Ottoman Empire was important, as the Lewis affair demonstrates. In the summer of 1657 word reached London that Captain William Ell of the Lewis had turned up at Livorno with a cargo of rice, sugars, and other provisions, which he was trying to sell. The problem was that these goods were the property of Sultan Mehmed IV, and Ell had contracted with the pasha of Egypt to take them from Alexandria to Istanbul.
This had the makings of a major diplomatic incident, as Sir Thomas Bendysh pointed out to Oliver Cromwell. All his carefully laid plans for furthering English interests in the Levant were in danger, he ranted, “of being blasted by the unexpected and foul treachery and falseness of one (sorry I am, I must name an Englishman) William Ell, master of the Lewis.”15 In London the Levant Company, which employed Ell, shared Bendysh’s outrage. Trade was already poor because of the depredations of Turkish and Spanish pirates, and officials were in the middle of some delicate negotiations for the recovery of a company ship, the Resolution, which had recently been taken by men-of-war from Tripoli. Ell’s actions jeopardized everything, said the company, “to the great shame and scandal of the English, and disparagement of our ships, beside the evil consequences it may have on our trade.”16
Captain Ell’s version of events was delivered to Secretary of State John Thurloe at the beginning of September 1657, and it suggests the matter was more complicated than either Bendysh or the Levant Company appreciated. Ell claimed that after he contracted to carry the Grand Seignieur’s goods in January, he was kept hanging about at Alexandria for more than three months without any allowance for the delay. When he was finally given permission to set sail, armed Turks went with him and commanded him to put in at Rhodes, where he encountered a battle fleet of forty-four galleys and fifteen ships from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli which were preparing to attack Venetian territory in the Aegean. The Lewis was held there for a further two months, during which time the Tripolitans amused themselves by threatening that the moment Ell had unloaded his cargo, they were going to take over his ship and carry off two boys who were part of the crew “to satisfy their inhuman, unnatural lust.”17 Thoroughly rattled, Ell was ordered to accompany the fleet into the Aegean, unload at one of the Turkish-held islands, and refit the Lewis for service against Venice. He was all too aware that the Venetians hanged any Christians they found supporting the Turks, and while the Tripolitans—the same pirates who had captured the Resolution of London—continued their threats against him, the captain-general of the fleet showed no inclination to protect them against “this desperate destructive resolution of the Barbarian corsairs.”18 So on July 6, while the fleet anchored for the night off Samos, Ell seized his chance and made a run for it. The Lewis arrived at Livorno twenty days later.
It’s impossible to know how much of this was true. But it cut no ice with the English government, or with Sir Thomas Bendysh, or with the English agent in Livorno. An aggrieved Ell complained that the Grand Duke of Tus
cany was threatening to return him and his ship to the Turks because his behavior was prejudicial to European interests in Turkey. He offered to hand over the balance due to the Grand Seignieur as soon as the goods were sold. In desperation he reminded Cromwell that he and most of his men had fought for their country against the Dutch in the last war. By way of reply, Oliver Cromwell personally wrote to the Grand Duke, asking him to impound the Lewis and its cargo and to arrest the captain and crew. The disputed goods were sent to Istanbul—at Captain Ell’s expense. The Turks refused to accept them, saying they were spoiled and claimed further that they were only worth 16,000 dollars (£3,840), while the original consignment was valued at well over four times that amount.
While the English government went to some lengths to avoid upsetting Mehmed IV, its relations with the Barbary Coast states were complicated by the fact that they were less inclined than ever to keep to Istanbul’s rules. Almost the first thing the new English ambassador, the Earl of Winchilsea, did when he presented his credentials to the Grand Vizier on his arrival in Istanbul in January 1661 was to draw attention to renewed complaints about the behavior of Algerian pirates, to which the vizier airily promised redress. They both knew he didn’t mean it.
Like France and Holland—the other two major European nations with trading interests in the Mediterranean—the English knew that, as well as going through the motions with the sultan and the vizier, they would have to come to separate accommodations with the governments of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. The Dutch did their best to make themselves indispensable to the Turks by supplying sails and munitions; the French relied on a shared hatred of Spain to endear themselves to Barbary; the English, after Blake’s action at Porto Farina had boosted their confidence as a force to be reckoned with in the Mediterranean, developed a confrontational policy of cannon diplomacy.
The apparently inconclusive attack on Algiers which the Earl of Sandwich mounted in the summer of 1661, before he moved on to supervise the handover at Tangier, had done more damage to the city than he realized. A month after he withdrew from Algiers he was surprised to hear from a Frenchman who’d just left the place that “when we shot against Algiers we killed them many men and beat down many houses, and that they have made a great heap of our shot in the Palace yard.”19 Back in England, where a restored monarchy wanted its own Porto Farina, the assault was hailed as a major victory: Turkish insolence had been answered by a terrifying display of naval power in which English guns battered down half the town, demolished the citadel, destroyed eighteen enemy ships, and rescued 1,100 Christian slaves.
This was a wild exaggeration. But it confirmed the obvious: that a powerful English presence in the Mediterranean at least had a chance of making Islamic pirates choose to prey on the merchant ships of other nations. Sandwich’s vice-admiral, the rough, tough, career mariner Sir John Lawson, remained on the Barbary Coast for the next four summers, harrying Algerian shipping and generally making his presence felt.
So effective was he that in the autumn of 1662 he managed to conclude three separate treaties within the space of thirty-six days. Hammuda was now pasha at Tunis, having appointed his son Murad as bey, and he confirmed the articles of peace on October 5. There were some very minor changes to the previous treaty, but the articles still included the clause about English ships defending their Tunisian passengers. Hammuda had not forgotten Captain Mitchell’s lack of goodwill toward the Tunisians on the Goodwill. To be fair, neither had Charles II. In a proclamation issued at Whitehall, he commanded the masters of all English ships carrying Turks or their goods “to the utmost of their power, by fighting or otherwise, [to] preserve and defend them against any whatsoever.”20
The rest of the Tunis treaty was commonsensical, if a little biased toward the English. Neither side should seize the other’s ships at sea or in port; both should treat the other’s citizens with respect; any English merchant or passenger captured by Tunisian ships of war was to be released with their “goods free and entire.”21 And the ship of either party “shall have free liberty to enter into any port or river belonging to the dominions of either party.”22 (How often did Tunisian merchants sail up the Thames or enter the port of Bristol?) Encounters between the two nations on the high seas were formalized through a system of passes. Tunisian men-of-war were to be provided with certificates by the English consul at Tunis, and were required to produce them when they met a ship flying English colors. In return, the English vessel had to allow two men—and no more—to come aboard to verify that its crew was indeed predominantly English. It was common practice for Italian merchant ships to sail under English colors because they carried two or three English crew, “to save them from the Turks.”23
On November 10, 1662, a month after concluding terms with Hammuda at Tunis, Lawson confirmed a treaty with Algiers. The details had been thrashed out the previous April, but the pasha, Isma’il, had neglected to inform the taifat al-raïs of the fact, since as a major investor in piracy he was keen to prolong their activities against English shipping for as long as possible. All was now well. No Algerian was to give any English subject “a bad word, or a bad deed, or a bad action.”24 English slaves were to be set free on payment of their first market price. (Charles II asked the Church of England to stump up the cash, and more than 150 captives were redeemed the following January.) No more were to be bought or sold in Algiers or its territories.
Algiers did manage to extract ten percent custom duty on imports and exports, although this hardly operated in its favor—very soon the Algerian merchants were complaining that English traders didn’t come to their city anymore. All English ships sailing in the Mediterranean were required to carry a pass:The Algier ships of war meeting any merchant-ship belonging to the subjects of the King of Great Britain . . . have liberty to send one single boat, with but two sitters more than the common crew of rowers, and no more to enter on board the said merchant-ship but the two sitters, without the express leave of the commander of the merchant-ship; that upon producing unto them a pass under the hand and seal of the Lord High Admiral of England, the said boat to presently depart, and the merchant-ship to proceed on his voyage. 25
Examples of these passes were handed over to the authorities in the Barbary states for their men-of-war to carry to sea, so they could distinguish them from counterfeits. But even if the master of a vessel couldn’t produce a pass, the Algerians were required to leave it alone as long as the majority of the company was English.
Lawson was a busy and determined man, with a strong and well-armed squadron. Between signing the Tunis treaty on October 5, 1662, and the Algiers treaty on November 10, he also managed to agree “a good and firm peace” with Uthman, the pasha of Tripoli.
Until quite recently, the corsairs of Tripoli hadn’t posed too much of a threat to European trade. For one thing, they weren’t as adventurous as their comrades to the west, never venturing as far as the Straits, let alone into the Atlantic. For another, Tripoli was poorer than either Algiers or Tunis, and the bloody battles for supremacy which frequently shook its hierarchy of dey, bey, diwan, and Istanbul-appointed pasha tended to distract Tripolitans from the business of piracy. Uthman was a Greek renegade who became dey in 1649 on the sudden but not unexpected death of the incumbent, another Greek renegade named Mohammed al-Saqisli. Uthman moved quickly to secure the support of Mehmed IV, who appointed him pasha; at the same time he secured popular approval by the excellent and simple expedient of lowering taxes.
This bought Uthman time, but his hold on power depended on a juggling act involving a bewildering patchwork of different and often overlapping factions: Turkish Janissaries; corsair captains; European renegades; native Tripolitans; sheikhs who ruled the tribes in the deserts beyond the city walls; kulughis, the offspring of Janissaries and local women, who formed a separate, unempowered, and resentful class in Tripoli, as they did in Algiers and Tunis. Every one of these groups had to be placated, neutralized, or actively suppressed.
Uthman’s natural al
lies were the renegades; it was they who had propelled him to power in the first place, and he tried to ensure their continued support by rewarding them with positions of authority. For the same reason, he built up the fleet, turning it into a strong force of some twenty-four ships. Around half of the corsair captains in Tripoli were renegades.
It was the activities of this fleet which attracted the attention of Sir John Lawson’s squadron. During the 1650s, Uthman’s “Tripoli men” preyed on Levant Company ships to such an extent that the company petitioned Cromwell for help, while the port itself gained a reputation all the way along the Barbary Coast as a safe haven for pirates: an Englishman calling there in the spring of 1651 noted without surprise that one evening a Moroccan man-of-war from Salé, 1,400 miles westward, sailed in with a prize. (The same Englishman also encountered renegades from Kent and Devon during his stay and ransomed a captive so he could return to his native Dorset.)
Lawson’s articles of peace and commerce with Uthman Pasha were basically the same as those he concluded with Tunis and Algiers. They announced a new start in relations between the two countries, the first clause of the agreement stating that “after the signing and sealing of these articles, all injuries and damages sustained on either part shall be quite taken away and forgotten.”26 Lawson installed a consul, Samuel Tooker, who, like most English consuls in seventeenth-century Barbary, was destined to have an unhappy time: promised a generous salary of £400 a year from the crown, he had only received £200 after eight years of service, while the two percent “consulage” he was supposed to receive on goods imported and exported in English ships was withheld by Uthman, who declared it was an unwarranted restraint on trade.
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