The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  But soon afterwards, things started to fall apart. The war between England and Spain had ended, and there was a mounting constitutional crisis at home. An alliance with Sallee was no longer a priority. Whatever promises had been made, whatever commitments given to Morat on that heady day in Sallee … they were all vanishing before Harrison’s eyes, like the desert mirages he would have encountered on his trek across Morocco.

  Harrison, by now a man obsessed, began paying for his own trips to Sallee. He suffered the final ignominy when he had to take legal action in a bid to get his basic salary.

  And what of Morat Rais? There’s no record of his reaction to all this. But he had probably realised long ago that he was being betrayed – not directly by his friend John Harrison, but by the double-dealing diplomats in London.

  Instead of settling in England, Morat sailed back to his old corsair stomping ground in Algiers. He returned as a force at the peak of his power – a man burning with fury and bristling for action.

  It’s not hard to guess his state of mind. He had been taken for a fool. Worse, he had even offered to renounce his Islamic faith.

  Morat Rais had seldom needed an excuse to attack any Christian nation. But he could choose his targets, and it’s safe to assume that he had no love whatever for the English.

  He would come to English territory, as he’d promised. But it would be on his terms, not on theirs.

  For less than one year later, Morat would exact a terrible revenge on the King of England by leading the forces of the jihad in the greatest Islamist invasion of the royal realm: the Sack Of Baltimore.

  Baltimore lies to the extreme south of Ireland – almost as far south as it’s possible to go on the mainland. In this part of the country, dry land seems to dissolve into ocean in a slow fade-out: ragged peninsulas gradually turn into islands, outcrops and, finally, lines of jagged, semi-submerged rocks. The random scatterings of land that lie off the ancient barony of Carbery are romantically known as ‘Carbery’s hundred isles’. At Baltimore, the mainland doesn’t end in a full stop, but in a three-dot ellipsis, like an unfinished sentence: Sherkin Island, the island of Cape Clear, and the Fastnet Rock.

  The area lies right in the path of one of Europe’s most notoriously unpredictable storm zones. If the warm winds carried up by the Gulf Stream collide head-on with an icy blast from the Arctic, the results can be spectacular. But if a storm howls in diagonally from the southeast, the sea reacts in sheer fury – and it becomes all too clear how Roaring Water Bay got its name.

  ‘With hoarse rebuff the swelling seas rebound,’ Jonathan Swift wrote in Carbery Rocks. ‘Not louder sound could shake the guilty world.’

  When a storm is roaring like the mighty judgment of God, desperate men will sell their souls for a sheltered port. And Baltimore enjoys the most blessed spot of all. It sits at the mouth of the Ilen River with its back protected by hills. In front of it, Sherkin Island forms an ideal breakwater. From the mainland, a peninsula curves gently outward to embrace a natural sea-haven.

  When the Elizabethan general George Carew came here, he found an almost perfect harbour:

  ‘… a pool about half a league over, where infinite numbers of ships may ride, having small tides, deep water and a good place to careen ships.’

  In such a remote area, smuggling has always created a major headache for the authorities. In would come fine wines and brandies, silks and spices, tobacco and salt. Out would go wool, linen, leather goods … and the occasional fugitive fleeing the hangman’s noose.

  It was a profitable business, and no-one took more advantage of this trade than the Great O’Driscoll clan. They were a powerful mafia, one of three major sea-roving families who operated a racket of piracy, smuggling and extortion around the Irish coastline. The name still dominates the district: the joke is that you can’t throw a stone without hitting an O’Driscoll, and in view of their fierce temperament it wouldn’t be the wisest thing to do.

  At the height of their power, the O’Driscolls ruled a territory stretching all the way from Kinsale to Kenmare. The Norman invaders squeezed them out of their ancient lands and into a much smaller territory around Baltimore. Here they threw up a ring of strong coastal fortresses –The Fort Of Ships on Sherkin, The Fort Of Gold on Cape Clear, and The Fort Of Jewels in Baltimore.

  In its early days, Baltimore (’town of the big house’) was more commonly known as Dún na Séad, the Fortress Of Jewels. The reason for this beautiful name has been lost in history. Perhaps it was a romantic description of its setting. Or maybe it was meant literally – there are many tales of buried treasure in these parts. Either way, there is a local superstition that the very name of Dún na Séad was responsible for Baltimore’s spectacular run of bad luck.

  A local writer, J. E. O’Mahony, referred to this myth in 1887: ‘The superstitious,’ he wrote, ‘think that this seductive appellation led to the desperate onslaught that inflicted upon it such dire and prolonged misery.’

  Their secure base at Baltimore left the O’Driscolls untouchable for centuries until the merchants of Waterford, outraged over a particularly heartless act of trickery that had robbed them of a cargo of fine wine, struck back with a scorched-earth offensive that razed their two main castles to the ground.

  Over the next few decades – this was the mid-1500s – an uneasy peace developed between the two towns, although the ancient grudge continued to fester. The fortresses were rebuilt and new ships were constructed. Like some crusty old salt recovering from a bloody tavern brawl, Baltimore was back on its feet and back in business.

  The O’Driscolls elected a new clan leader, a shrewd and intelligent individual who they believed would protect them against future incursions and possibly lead them back to their former glory. In the event, his notorious double dealing was to divide his people and leave Baltimore weak and vulnerable to the pirate invasion. His name was Fineen O’Driscoll … or, as history would come to know him, Fineen the Rover.

  If the O’Driscolls were among the wildest of Irish sea rovers, Fineen was the most celebrated freebooter of all. He would pass into popular myth as the hero of a swashbuckling ballad that begins with a toast (sláinte) to his memory:

  Then, sláinte to Fineen the Rover

  Fineen O’Driscoll the free

  Tall as the mast of his galleys

  And wild as the might of the sea.

  And, indeed, he would have made a striking figure as he stood on a hillside overlooking Roaring Water Bay, his long hair blowing across his face in the fresh Atlantic breeze as he accepted the symbolic white rod, which ‘for time out of mind’ had marked the transfer of power to the new chieftain. He would have been wearing the traditional apparel of his race: loose brogues of untanned leather, woollen trews, a saffron-coloured leine, or shirt, and over it all, billowing in the wind, the distinctive Celtic brat, or cloak, fastened across his breast with an antique clasp of bronze or gold.

  In this ceremony, Fineen solemnly pledged to protect his people and to renounce the leadership when asked to do so. Under the tanistry laws that shaped Gaelic society, the land and castles were not owned by any one man – the chieftain would merely hold them in trust on behalf of his people.

  On that day in 1573, the O’Driscolls had every reason to feast and make merry to honour their new leader. No-one could have foretold that, within the next few decades, their entire world would fall apart, the structure of Gaelic society would be reduced to rubble, and Fineen would become the last Great O’Driscoll chieftain to hold sway over Baltimore.

  A new threat was facing the clan. English land-grabbers were moving into the southwest of Ireland and taking over huge tracts of territory, either at gunpoint or with the aid of dodgy legal deeds.

  Fineen was a shrewd diplomat and a master of the art of realpolitik. He looked at what was happening around him and concluded that collaboration was the only way to survive. Power, English style, was better than no power at all.

  As soon as he became chieftain, he asked the
English to let him surrender his Gaelic title and have it re-granted to him as a conventional knighthood.

  Soon he was on his way to London for a personal audience with the Queen. Elizabeth had always had a predilection for wild privateers and adventurers, and we can easily imagine this tall, weather-beaten sea rover charming the Royal Court with his swashbuckling tales of battle and stolen treasure. He seems to have won a lasting place in the Queen’s affections. By the time he returned home, he was Sir Fineen O’Driscoll, a knight of the realm and an English landowner like all the rest.

  As for the members of his clan … suddenly, they had no rights at all.

  Conor O’Driscoll, Fineen’s eldest son and heir, was furious. It was 1601 and the entire country was ablaze with rebellion. Not just some minor skirmish in a hayfield, but a genuine war of independence that had a realistic chance of success. The Gaelic general Hugh O’Neill had risen in revolt in an attempt to oust the English once and for all. He’d met the enemy on the battlefield and had actually defeated them. Now they were marching southwards to Cork to link up with an invasion force from Spain.

  It was the moment every rebel had dreamed of, the moment when they could almost taste the sweetness of victory. Baltimore’s fortified harbour was crucial to the invasion – it had been described as ‘the King of Spain’s bridge into England’.

  And yet … his own father was refusing to join the rising. While many of the other chieftains were sharpening their swords in anticipation of battle, the old man was remaining stubbornly loyal to the Crown.

  Conor couldn’t understand it. He’d always hated the English and everything they stood for. Throughout his life he had been forced to endure the anger and taunts of his fellow clansmen when Fineen had entered into agreements with the Sassenach invaders.

  He must have shuddered with humiliation when he recalled how his father had begged the Queen to let him hand over the ancient rights of his clan:

  ‘Fineen O’Driscoll. The suit to surrender all his possessions to the Queen and to hold them by such tenure as shall seem good to her …’

  Now Conor was an active insurgent and one of the key figures in the southern revolt – even the great English general Sir George Carew singled him out for mention as ‘a malicious rebel’.

  In September 1601, four thousand Spanish troops under Don Juan del Aguila sailed into Cork and despatched a division to take Baltimore castle.

  We have no details of the shouted arguments that echoed through the rafters of the Great Hall of the O’Driscolls on those tense autumn nights. All we know is that, in the end, the old man was ‘overruled by his son’. At the eleventh hour, after decades of support for English rule, Sir Fineen chose to change sides and offer support to the Spanish invasion.

  It was the wrong call. The invasion proved a fiasco. The ensuing battle was an ignominious rout. The Spanish sailed home and, after holding out for as long as he could, Conor O’Driscoll escaped to Spain to plead for further help. Back home, it took all of Fineen’s diplomatic skills to bribe and inveigle his way back into the Queen’s good books.

  Fineen escaped with a Royal Pardon, but the entire business had left him penniless. And when a syndicate of English colonists offered to take out a long lease on Baltimore harbour in order to create a fish processing works, he nearly broke their arms in his haste to sign the deed

  Fineen the Rover had died. Word spread around the coastline of Roaring Water Bay like the whisperings of the sea-grass in the windswept estuary where he had spent his last lonely days. There was a legend that Lough Hyne was haunted by restless spirits whose whispers could be heard in the ceaseless rustle of the grass and trees. If so, there would only have been one sibilant message on that fateful day in 1630: ‘The O’Driscoll is dead. The O’Driscoll is dead.’

  Fineen had been a giant of a man whose extraordinary career had spanned nearly six decades and had marked the passing of an era. He had been, in turns, a sea rover, a Gaelic warlord, an English knight, and a reluctant rebel. He had taken up arms against Queen Elizabeth … and then charmed the Virgin Queen into letting him keep his head when all around him were losing theirs.

  As his life faded away in his ancient island fortress of Cloghan, everyone knew the great age of the Gaelic lords had faded with him.

  There had been a seismic power shift, and things would never be the same again.

  When the news reached moneylender Sir Walter Coppinger, he did not think of it as the passing of the era of the Gael or the dawning of a new age for the English colonists. He saw it as a business opportunity.

  Coppinger was a brilliant but unscrupulous lawyer, and he wanted the town of Baltimore. He wanted it so badly that for the past three decades he had tried every means at his disposal, legal and illegal, to get his hands on the deeds.

  Like some patient spider, he had spun a dense legal web around Baltimore – an agreement here, a mortgage there, a rental from someone else – until the right of title to the town had become tied down by a complex network of threads, nearly all of them leading back to Coppinger.

  First he had allied himself with disaffected elements of the O’Driscoll clan. Then he’d moved in on the clan chieftain. Fineen, who’d been destitute at that stage, had mortgaged part of the town to Coppinger in return for money he knew he’d never be able to repay. In doing so, the ageing Fineen had ignored the rights of the English fisherfolk who’d settled there on long-term rental.

  Coppinger was a proud Cork City Catholic who had been fined for recusancy (that is, for refusing to attend Protestant services). He had no love for the English Protestant settlers and wanted to oust them from the district by fair means or foul.

  He’d organised a localised guerrilla war of intimidation and violence against them. But under the charismatic leadership of Thomas Crooke, the newcomers had proved tougher and more resilient than he could ever have imagined. Coppinger responded by tightening his legal web. He began to claim outright ownership of Baltimore and ordered the settlers to leave.

  In 1629, a court had given a mixed ruling on the dispute. Yes, Coppinger had a strong legal case. But no, he could not simply evict the English fisherfolk – they’d put too much work into building their homes and improving the village over the years.

  A quarter century of scheming had all been in vain. Baltimore was Coppinger’s for the taking – but it was useless to him so long as it was occupied by the settlers.

  But if they could somehow be made to disappear, the Fort Of The Jewels would be his.

  Under the blistering heat of the Spanish sun, the exiled rebels of the O’Driscoll family heard of the old man’s death with mixed emotions of grief and release. Grief for the loss of a patriarch; release from the repugnant promises and dirty deals with which the old man had sold out his clan to the English.

  Fineen’s son Conor had proved a hero of the 1601 rebellion – one of the last to admit defeat after the rising was soundly defeated at Kinsale. As the Spanish turned tail and fled in humiliation, Conor had continued to hold out against the English at Kilcoe Castle, just a few miles away. He never surrendered: he kept up the fight until he was finally forced to abandon all hope and flee.

  Kilcoe Castle (centuries later to become the home of actor Jeremy Irons) held out until 1603, when it was the last fortress to fall.

  As the English armies swept through the area wreaking vengeance with fire and sword, Conor became one of their most wanted fugitives. They were so incensed when he slipped through their fingers that they reported a rumour – perhaps started by Conor himself – that the ‘malicious rebel’ had gone down with a Spanish ship that was sunk by the Navy in 1602.

  But they were wrong. On 7 July that year, the Green Pimpernel had managed to slip safely out of Ireland through the Kerry port of Ardea, together with his wife and their nine-year-old son, Conor Óg – Sir Fineen’s grandson and the second in line to succeed him as chieftain of a territory that had been lost forever.

  Conor O’Driscoll became a captain in the Spanish a
rmy, but he had never totally given up his personal war against the English. Throughout the first quarter of the century, Fineen’s heir was constantly hatching plans for new invasions and battle campaigns that would oust the Saxon invaders, revive the old Gaelic order, and allow him to accept the ancient white rod as lord of the Great O’Driscolls. In 1617, for instance, fifteen years after his exile, he is recorded as still ‘engaged in plots’ against the hated Sassenach.

  He was not alone. General Hugh O’Neill, the leader of the last great Gaelic rebellion, was in exile in Rome, and right up until his death in 1616, he’d continued to devise plots that would allow him to return to Ireland at the head of an overwhelming invasion force.

  It was not to be. By 1630, it would have become obvious to the O’Driscoll exiles that the Spanish would never invade Ireland again. If the dissident members of the clan wanted to reclaim their ancient home of Baltimore, they could not count on help from other armies.

  Other conventional armies, that is.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Warrior Monks

  IN the 1600s, a mariner sailing away from the coast of Africa would see the great city of Algiers recede in the distance ‘looking from afar like a big vessel, all under sail’.

  This was a remarkable city in unremarkable surroundings: a triangular iceberg of pure white glittering against the sunblasted North African coastline. Built on the face of a steep hill, protected by giant walls and fronted by a formidable harbour, the city shone dazzling white in the Mediterranean sun. It was a comforting spectacle for friendly ships, but a daunting sight for even the most determined enemy.