Lord Dartmouth was the last to leave, springing the final mine himself before being rowed out in his barge to the Grafton, as thousands of Moors rode down from the hills toward the ruined town. He delayed sailing for home for several days, to negotiate the release of Lieutenant Wilson, the commander of Henrietta Fort who had been captured by Umar’s soldiers four years earlier. “I thought it not for your Majesty’s honor to leave a commissioned officer behind that had behaved himself so very well in your service,” he told Charles II. “And I believe [he] will do again upon a little encouragement, though at present his misfortunes and long captivity seem too much to have dejected him.”24
FIFTEEN
The King’s Agent: Life in Late-Seventeenth-Century Tripoli
His Majesty was this day pleased to honor me with his Commission under his Sign Manual and Privy Signet delivered me by the Right Honorable Henry Coventry Principal Secretary of State; thereby constituting me his agent and consul general in the city and kingdom of Tripoli in Barbary.”1
Thomas Baker’s journal “of whatsoever occurrences shall happen or be noteworthy” is a uniquely detailed English perspective on everyday life in a pirate city-state. But when he first put pen to paper on May 2, 1677, the career prospects of English consuls on the Barbary Coast were not happy. They were bullied, held hostage, and even killed by their hosts; they were constantly pestered by desperate captives who expected them to stand surety for ransoms. Throughout the Ottoman Empire they were escorted by Janissaries whenever they ventured out, since Muslims could respond to the sight of a Frank by punching him or spitting on him as he passed by. The district where a consul lived, often in closed collegiate communities, or khans, with other Franks, was contemptuously referred to by Turks as the “pig quarter.”
And the reward for putting up with all this was to be ignored or forgotten by one’s own government. “I do verily believe,” complained James Frizzell in his last despairing dispatch from Algiers in 1637, “that never any of his majesty’s ministers hath been so neglected as I am.”2
Yet men like Thomas Baker were eager to serve, for all sorts of reasons: honor, the potential for advancement, the opportunity to make money on the side, the chance to make a life in an exotic and alien world. Baker’s qualifications for the post were sound. He had close contacts with prominent Levant merchants and London financiers. As a young man he had worked as a factor in Algiers, and he had lived in Tunis in the late 1660s and early 1670s, where he made good friends, both Christian and Muslim. And his brother Francis was in Tunis now, acting as unpaid English consul.
Unlike his brother, Thomas was not prepared to work without pay. The Tripoli appointment came with a salary of £200 a year, and within days he had persuaded the government to increase it to £300 and to give him his first six months’ pay in advance. He put his affairs in order and arranged to take receipt of an expensive present of damask and brocade from the king to the dey of Tripoli. One evening in July he was brought by the secretary of state, Sir Henry Coventry, into the Privy Garden at the Palace of Whitehall, where he knelt and kissed the hands of Charles II and the Duke of York.
Ten days later he was aboard the Plymouth at Spithead and preparing to set sail for Barbary. He would not see the English coast again for another eight years.
Baker was not destined to see the shores of Tripoli anytime soon, either. The new consul traveled with Sir John Narbrough’s Mediterranean fleet, and although Narbrough was charged with personally delivering him to the dey, he considered the task to be a low priority in comparison with the fleet’s primary objective, which was to tackle a resurgence of Algerian attacks against English shipping. The voyage to Tripoli normally took no more than two or three months, but as summer turned to autumn, then winter, an impatient Thomas Baker sat helplessly aboard the Plymouth while Narbrough careered around the Mediterranean, chasing pirates, parleying with the authorities at Algiers, convoying Levant Company merchants to and fro from Zante and Cephalonia to the Straits, and calling in at Tangier and Cadiz and Málaga and Livorno and Alicante and Minorca—everywhere, it seemed, but Tripoli.
At least the consul wasn’t bored. Narbrough’s fleet, which at its greatest strength numbered a colossal thirty-five vessels, was engaged in frequent if often inconclusive naval warfare with the Algerians, who took more than sixty English ships in the year 1677 alone. In return, Narbrough captured five corsairs and destroyed seven more in the course of an expedition which lasted for nearly two years. Baker saw action several times, including a pitched battle off the coast of Spain, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. The fight involved seven English ships and the 142-gun Golden Rose of Algier, commanded by a German renegade named Hassan Raïs: more than sixty English sailors were killed or wounded, and 200 Turks died in the fight.
Baker’s journal shows that casualties weren’t confined to combat. The Plymouth, Narbrough’s flagship, was only a few days out when in saluting a homeward-bound frigate one of her guns went off prematurely “and shot off Richard Robinson’s hand at the wrist whilst he was ramming the wad home.”3 Drunken seamen suffered alcohol-induced fevers and fatal falls; an officer fell sick and died, from taking too much ice in his wine, according to Baker. One poor sailor was caught with his breeches down when the seven a.m. watch gun was fired; contrary to normal practice, it was loaded and the shot killed him “as he was easing himself ” over the side.4
By January 1679 Baker had been aboard one or another of Narbrough’s warships for nineteen months with only brief spells ashore at Cadiz, Cartagena, and a few other ports of call, and the admiral still showed not the slightest inclination to take him to Tripoli. In desperation he asked to be put on board the Diamond, which was convoying merchantmen to Alexandria and could call in at Tripoli without too much difficulty. And finally, at eight in the evening of April 5, 1679, nearly two years after he received his commission from Charles II, the new consul arrived at his destination.
As the Diamond negotiated the narrow channel into the harbor the next morning, Baker stood on deck and looked out on the city which was to be his home for the next six years. The ship moved slowly past shore batteries and gardens, past the forbidding walls of the vast Assaray Al-Hamra citadel and the shipyards that lay in its shadow, past the mosques with their slender minarets reaching for heaven—the Dragut Mosque, named for the sixteenth-century corsair who built it; the mosque of Sid Salem, whose minaret was well known to European mariners as “a mark to bear into the port”;5 the mosque of Al-Naqah, said to date back to the earliest days of Islam; and the mosque that Uthman Pasha commissioned in the 1650s, part of a domed complex which included his mausoleum and a madrasa. At the opposite end of the shore to the citadel stood the Mandrake, a fortress which guarded the northwest approaches. Baker could glimpse, rising gently up the hill behind the high battlemented walls of the city, a sea of densely packed streets and alleys extending half a mile back toward the plains and the scrubby desert beyond.
Tripoli has a distinguished history. Founded in the seventh century B.C. by the Phoenicians, Oea, as it was known, was absorbed into the Roman province of Africa around the second century B.C., along with the colonies of Leptis Magna to the east and Sabratha to the west. By the third century A.D., the coastal strip containing Tripoli, Leptis, and Sabratha was known as the Regio Tripolitana, the “region of the three cities.”
Although Tripoli had its fair share of invasions and regime changes over the ensuing 1,400 years or so—at different times it belonged to Egypt, to Sicily, to Tunis, to Spain, and even to the Knights of St. John, before becoming an Ottoman province in 1551—there was still scattered evidence of its Roman past when Baker arrived to take up his post. The most substantial was (and still is) the magnificent Arch of Marcus Aurelius which marked the junction of the main north-south and east-west cross-roads of the Roman city; but generations of Tripolitans recycled classical remains, and mosques, public buildings, and private homes often boasted columns and capitals many centuries older than themselves.
/> Thomas Baker hadn’t come to Tripoli to look at the vestiges of antiquity. He was there, as the king’s commission put it, “to aid and protect as well all our said merchants and other our subjects trading, or that shall trade or have any commerce, or that do or shall reside at Tripoli.”6 And that meant ensuring that the Tripolitan corsairs kept to their side of the treaty agreed with Narbrough in 1676 and did not rob or otherwise molest English shipping. They could rob the Dutch; they could molest the French; they could do what they liked with Greek barks and Genoese pinks and Maltese galleys. But English ships must be allowed, in the words of the treaty, to “freely pass the seas, and traffique where they please, without any search, hindrance or molestation.”7
Tripoli regarded itself as being at war with France and Holland; so, technically, its fleet did not commit acts of piracy, but acted legally in attacking the merchant shipping of an enemy nation, just as Elizabethan privateers had operated against the Spanish, brandishing their exculpatory letters of marque.
Less concerned with definitions than with the threat to English shipping, over that first summer of 1679 Thomas Baker set down “an exact list” of the fleet that lay in the little harbor beneath the city walls. Tripoli boasted thirteen vessels, with a fourteenth on the stocks. (This man-of-war had been under construction for five years, and the shipyard was so short of timber and other materials that it would be another five years before it was launched.) The vessels ranged upward in size from a little galley carrying one gun and 150 men to the flagship of the Captain of the Sea (admiral), its stern painted with a white half-moon, which was armed with forty-two guns and had a complement of 350. Six of the ships—the galley and the five biggest—were built in Tripoli; the rest were presumably converted prizes, since they originated in Provence (three), Genoa (two), Venice (one), and Malta (one).
Baker also noted the name and origin of each raïs. The corsairs of Tripoli were as cosmopolitan as their fleet. Seven were “Turks,” including the Captain of the Sea, Ali Minikshali, and his rear admiral, Karavilli, although this is not to imply that they were native Tripolitans. Ali was Greek and Karavilli came from Anatolia. Four others were Greek renegades, including Ali’s vice-admiral, Mustafa; one was a Moor; and one, Ryswan Raïs, was a French renegade. Ryswan commanded the memorably named Venetian prize Souls in Purgatory. Baker noted that its stern was painted with “purgatory”; sadly, there are no other details, although recycled Christian iconography clearly wasn’t a problem for the Muslims of Tripoli, since the Genoan prize, which was commanded by a Greek renegade, regularly went out in search of Christians with a gilded figure of Mary Magdalene on its stern.
When every ship was carrying its full complement, more than 3,000 Janissaries and sailors might go out on the cruise. This seems impressive, but the fleet was considerably smaller than that of Tunis, which numbered twenty vessels, and it was dwarfed by Algiers’s thirty-eight men-of-war, seven brigantines, and three galleys.
It was also much less successful. Over that first summer of 1679, Baker watched Ali Raïs’s ships go out “a Christian-stealing” again and again, only to come back empty-handed.8 Their range was limited: food was so expensive and they were so poor that they could only afford victuals for three or four weeks at a time. (“Corn is always dear, because their fields are sand,” was Samuel Purchas’s verdict on Tripoli back in 1614.9) At least six men-of-war were forced to turn to more respectable occupations. Three of them, “having been long out in corso and meeting with no purchase,” put in at Alexandria and took on legitimate cargoes of rice and beans.10 Two more went to the Dardanelles in search of timber to finish the warship in the yards; and the sixth was sent to Crete for supplies of corn.
In Baker’s first six months in Tripoli the fleet took only two prizes, even though it was out for most of the spring and summer. One, the inappropriately named Madonna of the Good Voyage, was taken off Zante on its way to Istanbul with a cargo of brazilwood and sugar, her French crew escaping in a longboat. The other, also a Frenchman, was actually on her way into harbor at Tripoli when she was captured. It wasn’t considered sporting to take a vessel in this way—the convention was that if a merchant managed to get within gunshot of the batteries, she should be allowed to come in unmolested. It shows how desperate the Tripolitans were for prizes that the dey overlooked this nicety, impounded the bark, and made slaves of her fourteen crewmen.
Baker meticulously recorded the unimpressive comings and goings of the Tripoli fleet: he counted them out, and he counted them back—“without any prize.”11 In the middle of August 1679 half the fleet came back not only without prizes, but also without their admiral. Ali Minikshali had gone ashore with all his money and possessions at Heraklion on Crete and announced he was staying there.
Ali’s decision to jump ship was related to his part in a failed attempt that summer to oust the dey, an Anatolian Turk named Aq Mohammed al-Haddad. The stability which Uthman Pasha had imposed on Tripoli in the 1650s and 1660s was a distant memory in 1679, as was amply demonstrated by the fact that Aq Mohammed was the eighth dey to rule since Uthman’s death in 1672. Two deys had ruled for less than a fortnight, and one for a matter of hours.
Each change of government was accompanied by an inordinate amount of strangling, although the luckier outgoing officials were deposited alive on Djerba, the fabled island of the lotus-eaters described in Homer’s Odyssey . (However attractive it might have been to Odysseus’s men, it held little appeal for the Tripolitan exiles: according to John Ogilby’s Africa, the land was barren and there were “no cities, nor any thing else, but some huts, scattered here and there far from one another.”12)
Aq Mohammed’s hold on power was already shaky. A plot by kulughis to depose him while most of the Janissary corps were out on the cruise with the fleet was forestalled in June, and the dey had eight of the ringleaders dismembered alive. (“The silly, but wicked animal,” declared Baker.13) In July, one of Aq Mohammed’s exiled predecessors landed at Zuwarah, to the west of Tripoli, joined forces with a group of disaffected Arabs, and disappeared into the mountains of Gharyan, seventy miles south of Tripoli. The dey sent his bey, or commander of land forces, Hasan Abaza, to find out exactly what was going on, and to make certain that the powerful governor of Gharyan, Murad, was loyal to him.
He wasn’t. Nor was Hasan, who came back to Tripoli with Murad as his deputy, called a full meeting of the diwan, and denounced Aq Mohammed. The dey was taken away in chains to face some rather rigorous questions as to the whereabouts of 394 pounds of gold which was missing from the treasury, and, with a suitable show of modesty, Hasan reluctantly agreed to take his place as ruler. The next afternoon, Aq Mohammed was shipped off to Djerba, “a Christian and a negro being his whole retinue and dollars five hundred his subsistence.”14 And the afternoon after that, the new admiral, vice-admiral, and rear admiral prepared to set out on the cruise. It was business as usual.
Baker’s reaction to the coup was a very human irritation—he’d wasted Charles II’s expensive present of damask and brocade on the wrong dey. But he loathed Aq Mohammed and liked Hasan Abaza, so he shrugged his shoulders, ensured that the new regime ratify the old articles of peace with England before the fleet sailed (which it did), and settled into life in Tripoli.
Contacts with fellow countrymen were few. There was no sizable English merchant community resident at Tripoli; nothing like what could be found farther east, at Aleppo in Syria and Smyrna on the Aegean coast of Turkey. Thomas Goodwyn, a friend who had accompanied Baker from Livorno in April, only stayed until September, preferring to try his luck in Tunis instead. Henry Caple, a ship’s master liberated by Narbrough in 1676 who had acted as consul from then until Baker’s arrival, left in a bad temper aboard the Diamond, having tried and failed to persuade the diwan that Baker must pay him 1,500 dollars (around £350) before being allowed to take up his post.
It wasn’t until nearly a year later that the consul realized the full extent of Caple’s duplicity, when it emerged that in the chaos of
the handover, while the captains of the Diamond and the Pearl were taking their leave and the consulate was crowded with visitors come to pay their respects, the outgoing consul had bribed his secretary to slip a forged deed under Baker’s nose in a sheaf of papers. Baker had signed it with the rest, not realizing that it made over to Caple a sum of 4,302 dollars (about £1,000) which did not belong to him.
Baker doesn’t say how he discovered the deception, but when he did, the secretary, a fifty-nine-year-old Venetian slave named Andrea Nassimbene, was hauled before the dey and formally accused. The man confessed straightaway and was sentenced—rather to Baker’s horror—to have his right hand chopped off. The Venetian had another trick up his sleeve, however (if that’s not a hopelessly inappropriate expression in the circumstances). The moment sentence was pronounced he said to the dey that he wanted to convert to Islam.
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