The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  The new Baltimore settlement had been created by a family of intellectual freethinkers whose fierce refusal to conform had made them a thorn in the side of the religious and political Establishment in England for generations.

  Their patriarch, the Rev. Thomas Crooke (1545-1598), had been one of the leaders of a group of Protestant radicals who wanted to swap the rituals and vestments of high-church Anglicanism for the simpler worship of Calvinism. The precursors of today’s Presbyterians, they wanted the Bible made open to everyone, and they wanted the elite hierarchy of bishops replaced by a structure in which ‘every man is his own priest’.

  The Elizabethans had regarded such ideas as subversive – after all, the Queen was the head of the Church, and so any attack on her bishops was an attack on her. Printers of offending documents were tortured and some extremists executed. The movement was forced underground.

  The heartland of the radical movement was Crooke’s birthplace of Northamptonshire. Here, seditious sermons were preached urging ‘the multitude’ to revolt. As a preacher at Gray’s Inns in London, Crooke was an eminent theologian and a potential candidate for Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet secretly he was helping to coordinate the radical network. The full extent of his involvement became known only after his death.

  The clergyman shrewdly installed his eldest son Thomas as a lawyer at Gray’s Inns, putting yet another radical mole at the heart of the London Establishment.

  There was no doubt but that the second generation of Crookes shared their father’s egalitarian views. Crooke’s second son, Samuel, also became a clergyman and had heated, defiant clashes with the Bishops over his refusal to wear the surplice.

  The third son, Helkiah, was a prominent doctor and author of a shockingly frank medical textbook. As the first English physician to map the human anatomy, he outraged his superiors by including the sexual organs. Harassed all his days, Helkiah went on to fight a bitter battle with the authorities in a bid to reform the horrific conditions at the Bedlam lunatic asylum.

  But it was the eldest son, Thomas Crooke junior, who made the greatest impact. Aged only twenty-eight at his father’s death, he used his legacy to help establish a settlement in Ireland where he and his fellow Calvinist sympathisers could be free to worship as they saw fit. Although there was also a strong economic motive – none of the settlers had any objection to making a profit – almost every reference to the new settlement makes it clear that its primary motivation was religious.

  His move was in keeping with the spirit of the age. In the same period, other freethinkers were emigrating to Holland and America to establish Puritan or Pilgrim settlements.

  Crooke was aged only around thirty when he sailed into the Irish port and began negotiations with the impoverished Gaelic chieftain, Sir Fineen O’Driscoll, whose village had been almost deserted ever since it had been caught up in an unsuccessful Spanish invasion. The proposal was simple: fishermen from the English West Country would lease the port and use advanced Cornish processing techniques to turn it into a vital centre of food production.

  The new King, James I, adopted a pragmatic attitude to settlements like Crooke’s. However dangerous their ideas, these pioneers helped reinforce the English presence. Baltimore was granted full recognition with borough status and its own MPs. However, the settlers soon found that if they wanted practical help, they would have to look elsewhere. They were on their own.

  Thomas Crooke’s project got off to a shaky start. He was no saint – far from it – and there were repeated accusations that his settlers were collaborating with the pirates who frequented these remote ports. But a high-level hearing acquitted him of all wrongdoing and encouraged him to continue his work.

  As the years progressed, his settlement succeeded beyond all expectations, encouraged by an Irish Anglican hierarchy that shared his Calvinist outlook. By 1624, Thomas was knighted in recognition of his achievement. But life was getting increasingly tough for the colonists. King James’s successor, Charles I, was a solid high-church man who had no time for notions of equality. Meanwhile, back in Baltimore, the settlers were being harassed by Irish dissidents and challenged in court by a hostile local lawyer, Walter Coppinger, whose aim was to expel the English and take control of the port himself.

  Caught between belligerent Irish resistance in Baltimore and chilly indifference to their plight in London, the settlers were facing the greatest-ever challenge to their survival when their inspirational leader Sir Thomas Crooke died in 1630 at the age of fifty-six.

  His son Samuel inherited his father’s problems along with his title. Together with his fellow leaders Thomas Bennett and Joseph Carter, he was still trying to steer the colony through this crisis when the Algerines arrived to make it all suddenly irrelevant.

  We have no detailed record of that last Sunday morning, but from contemporary records we have a fairly accurate idea of what it must have been like.

  Picture the scene. With the preparations over, the families step out of their homes and begin the walk to Tullagh, on the far side of Baltimore town. Everyone is there, for church attendance is not an option in the early 1600s: it is a legal requirement and a moral duty.

  A sort of informal procession is formed: the women in bonnets and dresses, the men in tunics and breeches and stovepipe hats. The Broadbrooks, the Meregeys, the Croffines, Tom Payne and his wife and two children … all the well-known families of The Cove, some chatting sociably, others tight-lipped and serious, but all uniting in this walk to worship.

  They pass the fish palace, which lies eerily calm and quiet on this Sunday morning. On any other day, this fish processing workshop would be a noisy crucible of bustle and industry. Workers like Tim Curlew and Corent Croffine would be chipping at salt blocks with pickaxes while others would be washing the preserving salt from last month’s catch, engulfed in a blizzard of fish-scales that would settle on their clothes like snow.

  This palace (the word means ‘cellar’) is the nerve centre of Baltimore’s economy. Here, fresh pilchards are layered with salt in four-foot piles before being stuffed tightly into huge casks. A false lid, slightly smaller than the barrel mouth, is steadily forced down by a weight until it eventually squeezes out valuable oil for lamps. The salted fish is re-casked and shipped off as far as France, Italy and the New World.

  The churchgoers continue their walk, thankful that today is not a working day. Many of the men would spend six wearisome days a week at the oars of the fishing boats – an exhausting routine of high speed chase in which they would try to outpace the flashing shoals of pilchards. The routine is complex. A highly-skilled supervisor known as a huer would stand on top of a hill, his hawk-like gaze fixed upon the water. Below in the bay, men would sit in rowing boats, patiently awaiting his signal. When the huer spotted a silver frisson of motion beneath the waves, he would use his entire body as a signalling device, throwing out his arms in exaggerated gestures, almost like a conductor directing an orchestra.

  In response, the oars would dip into the water and dozens of arms would strain as they forced their reluctant craft into action. Fishermen like John Ryder and Tom Paine would feel their muscles scream and their backs ache as they fought to encircle the lightning-fast fish while paying out a net of tarred hemp. As the net formed an incomplete circle, helpers would sail into the only exit and splash the water with heavy bats, keeping the pilchards inside until the gap could be sealed.

  At busy times, everyone would help in the processing work – women and children included. It is a filthy task, creating an overwhelming stench that visitors would describe as ‘intolerable’.

  Yet the womenfolk would tolerate it, knowing that their current prosperity is fragile. Those fish shoals, so plentiful today, could suddenly and inexplicably vanish for decades. So they must not complain, even though at times they must secretly yearn to live somewhere else – somewhere not so cold, somewhere not so damp, and somewhere that life does not revolve around cleaning fish.

  From The Cove, they walk
through a narrow gulley towards the main part of town. Passing the quays on her left, Joane Broadbrook encounters the walled castle of Dún na Séad – The Fort Of The Jewels. This is the most imposing building in the area, a squat and not particularly attractive tower house overlooking the bay. Dunashad Castle once rang to the piratical shouts and laughter of the Great O’Driscolls, the clan of sea rovers who once plundered passing ships; today its halls are silent and respectable.

  Around the tower house Joane can see a high double wall, forming a fortified enclosure. Ten houses, their chimneys smoking pleasantly, line the inside of two of the walls. Outside the perimeter, rows of other houses have been built parallel to the castle boundary. There’s a neat line of eight homes near the harbour, and another eight directly above the castle. At the highest point of the village, four substantial homes lie in another parallel row.

  On the far side of the castle, a row of nine homes lies at right angles to the others, and a few others are dotted around randomly in sites dictated by the rough terrain.

  Walking through the centre of town, Joane passes the shops and craftsmen’s workshops. A market town like Baltimore would have been well equipped with a wide variety of stores. One contemporary document says that a typical fishing settlement provided employment to ‘bakers, brewers, coopers, ship carpenters, smiths, netmakers, ropemakers, pulleymakers, and many other trades’.

  As a Royal Borough since 1612, Baltimore has the right to make by-laws, try minor cases in a weekly court, and ‘chasten delinquents’. And right in the centre of the castle yard Joane can see the harsh apparatus of justice: the pillory and the whipping post.

  Tullagh is a traditional country church, solidly constructed from stone to withstand the battering of the Atlantic winds. It has a tall central steeple topped by a curious weathervane in the shape of an open-mouthed fish.

  Joane shuffles in with all the others and takes a seat on one of the bare wooden pews. In a special pew near the front of the sparse, unadorned church sits the Sovereign Mayor of Baltimore, Joseph Carter, and the Crooke family, headed by Sir Samuel Crooke. Other prominent citizens take pride of place in church. There is Thomas Bennett, a member of the settler family who helped found Bandon town. There is William Gunter, described as a ‘person of some credit [status]’, with the family he loves – his wife and his seven young sons, their heads all in a row and rising in height like a staircase. The Gunters’ fine attire and shiny shoes are in marked contrast to the coarse clothes and bare feet of the poorer folk at the back. Joane looks around the Church and nods to everyone she knows: Mrs Bessie Flood with her son; Mrs Bessie Peeter with her daughter; elderly Mrs Alice Heard; Mr and Mrs Evans with their son, cook, and maid; the seven-strong family of Richard Lorye; old Mr Haunkin.

  All these people have come into Tullagh Church for the last time, to kneel on the rough wooden floor and pray for deliverance from evil.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hunting For Humans

  Algiers, some six weeks earlier

  THE thunder of cannons echoed and rolled around the ancient walls of Algiers, from the gate of Bab-az-Zoun on the south of the city, all the way to the portal of Bab-el-Oued on the northwest. High on the hilltop, at the apex of the triangle that formed the citadel, the red-mouthed cannons of the Kasbah cracked their sharp salute, and down by the harbour the mighty long-range guns of the main fortress roared a deep-throated response.

  Out in the sparkling turquoise bay of Algiers, Morat’s two ships replied with a salute from their thirty-six guns of iron and bronze: one volley in honour of the Sultan of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, and one in honour of the Islamic patron saint who protected the city from all harm. One shot for Church, and one shot for State; one shot for God, and one shot for Mammon. It was a fitting summary of a mission that would unite big business and holy war in one highly satisfactory package.

  Fired with excitement, crowds spilled out into the narrow streets and down to the waterfront. A corsair was embarking on a major slaving expedition – that in itself was always an occasion for celebration. But since the corsair in this case was the legendary Morat Rais, the entire city would have been determined to give him a particularly noisy and boisterous sendoff.

  The noise was deafening. Citizens scrambled up the time-worn stone steps to the city walls to shout and wave as Morat’s two ships hoisted sail. The cheers rose, quite literally, to the rooftops, where in hundreds of secluded roof-gardens, the city’s cloistered womenfolk gave their traditional cheer – a curious high-pitched, birdlike whooping that would follow Morat’s crew for miles out to sea.

  Algiers in those days was a polyglot city. Its population of around 100,000 was a stew of different peoples, a multicoloured tajin featuring almost every country and culture under the sun. One contemporary observer recorded:

  ‘Portuguese, Flemish, Scots, English, Danes, Irish, Hungarians, Slavs, Spanish, French, Italians; also Syrians, Egyptians, Japanese, Chinese, South Americans, Ethiopians …’

  This mix would have been reflected in the crowds that thronged the dockside on that spring morning. There would have been Biskra water sellers in their colourful costumes, carrying massive copper tanks on their backs. Jewish brokers in their gowns and coloured shoes. Moorish craftsmen in their white burnous cloaks and embroidered caps. Wealthy Turkish merchants, twirling their luxuriant moustachios; jet-black porters from the Sahara, leading wheezing, overburdened donkeys.

  Swaggering Janissary soldiers in their bright red uniforms and baggy pants. And the notorious European expatriates – renegadoes, as they were known – a mish-mash of rogues and outcasts from places as far apart as Seville and Moscow, Iceland and Italy.

  Then there were the slaves. Out on The Mole – the massive breakwater of stones created to protect the vital deep-water dock from the wind and tide – the sweating captives may have paused from their backbreaking labour to sneak a glance at the spectacle before being whipped back to work by their overseers.

  In the cool of the evening, families liked to stroll along this breakwater to enjoy the fresh sea air. They walked its 900 ft semi-circle without particularly caring that every single foot had cost the lives of more than four Christian slaves. Nearly four thousand had died in the construction process alone. And yes, they were still dying, regularly, as they toiled under the baking sun.

  These slaves, dressed in their homemade linen shirts, their right legs shackled with heavy chain, would have seen Morat Rais’s departing ships in an entirely different light. They realised that another generation of captives would soon be coming to the chain gang. But would the newcomers be coming to join them … or replace them?

  We don’t know the precise date Morat Rais set sail for Baltimore. It was probably in early May of 1631 and most likely on a Friday or a Sunday – traditionally considered the luckiest days to begin a mission. Such considerations were important. Before fixing a date, Morat would have spent hours huddled with the local marabout or holy man, sifting through books of auguries to ensure good fortune. And before they set foot on the ship, the crew would have sipped from a special fountain whose waters ensured a prosperous voyage.

  The noisy sendoff from the citizens was part of the same ritual process – but it was also based on practical self-interest. Almost every free person in the city, from the ruling Pasha right down to the lowliest bath attendant, had a personal stake in the success of missions like this. Algiers in the 1630s was a city with very few resources: its main income, by far, came from the sale, ransom and forced labour of human beings. It was a machine that would grind to a halt without its fuel of human sweat and blood.

  A lot of money would be riding on Morat’s expedition. Much of it would have been invested by the State, and much by Morat himself. But the investors would also have included wealthy merchants and syndicates of ordinary citizens. Each of them hoped that Morat would return with a prize ship or two, a rich haul of stolen cargo and hundreds of valuable captives.

  With a bit of luck, these slaves would include
rich people or aristocrats who could be relied upon to fetch a high ransom, and a high proportion of skilled workers who would sell at a premium on the slave market.

  Ideally, Morat’s haul would also include a sizeable batch of women. Not just any women, but the pale-skinned, fair-haired northern women who were highly prized as concubines.

  The corsairs had no qualms about hunting down and capturing human beings. According to a reliable Spanish observer, Fray Diego de Haedo, they thought no more of it ‘than if they went hunting hares or rabbits’.

  Their tactics were simple. ‘They very deliberately, even at noonday, or indeed just when they please, leap ashore and walk on without the least dread, and advance into the country, ten, twelve or fifteen leagues or more … and infinite numbers of souls – men, women, children and infants at the breast – [are] dragged away to a wretched captivity.’

  As Morat’s ships sailed out of the harbour – paying homage to the tomb of the patron saint who reputedly controlled the weather – the ship’s company would pause and call out to heaven for a safe journey.

  ‘We leave you with God. May Allah give us good speed!’

  The walls of the city rocked as thousands of voices, representing dozens of countries and cultures, joined as one in the traditional response:

  ‘May Allah give you a good prize!’

  Two people watched with special interest as Morat’s two ships adjusted their sails and shrouds, their crescent-moon flags fluttering green against the Mediterranean sky.

  One was the Pasha, the nominal governor of the Regency Of Algiers. The other was Ali Bichnin, General of the Galleys and boss of the Taifa Rais, the Guild Of Corsair Captains.