The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  The Barbary men didn’t have a chance. Before long the decks were littered with their dead and wounded. Morat lost one of his three ships and barely managed to escape with the other two. They became separated in atrocious weather conditions. One fled for safety into the Maas River and the other retreated to Amsterdam port.

  It was the dead of winter and bitterly cold, but not nearly as cold as the welcome they received from the Dutch authorities. The former Jan Jansen was seeking help from the very nation he’d betrayed. Armed soldiers, unmoved by the cries of the wounded and dying, patrolled the quays to ensure no-one left the ship.

  The memory of that dreadful winter still haunted Morat Rais. All around him, his men were dying, and he was not permitted even to dispose of their bodies. Instead, he had to hack holes in the ice of the river and push the corpses through. Of the three proud ships Morat had taken to Europe, only one managed to limp home to Africa.

  In capturing this French ship, Morat may have used an alternative tactic. It was common for corsairs to close in on their victims by hailing them and entering into ‘friendly discourse’.

  In 1681 an Englishman named Francis Brooks was sailing past Tangier when a passing ship hailed and asked their port of origin. ‘We said from Marseilles. We enquired the same of her, who answered, from Algiers. So he bid our master hoist out his boat.’

  This was a typical pirate ploy: rather than risk boarding a ship, the pirates would instruct the ship’s officers to row across to them.

  Brooks’s master refused point blank, and the corsairs attacked. ‘[T]hey entered aboard us all at once, firing their pistols, and cut and wounded us with their cutlasses.’

  The English slave Joseph Pitts has left a vivid account of a typical attack in the 1600s. Pitts, from Exeter, was only fourteen when Dutch renegade corsairs targeted his ship.

  His captain calculated that the faster pirate vessel would overtake them within two hours, so he simply hauled up sail and waited.

  As the corsairs drew near, Pitts was terrified to see a band of ‘monstrous, ravening creatures’ come into view.

  Pitts recalled: ‘The very first words they spoke and the first things they did, was beating us with ropes, saying, “Into the boat, you English dogs!”’

  A young Flemish soldier named Emanuel d’Aranda was on board an English ship in 1640 when three suspect vessels closed in. When one of the corsair sailors stood up on deck and dramatically unfolded the green crescent of Algiers, d’Aranda knew his days as a free man were numbered.

  ‘A company of ten or twelve Turkish soldiers, eager to pillage and plunder, stormed on board under the command of a captain, who was the first to set foot on our ship,’ recalled d’Aranda. ‘He was English by birth, but a renegade, and asked me – since I stood on the deck at the time – what nationality I was, and whether I was a merchant.

  ‘I replied, I am a Dunkirker and a soldier by profession. Upon which he replied in Flemish: “Patience, brother, it is the fortune of war; today for you, and tomorrow for me.”’

  A Tuscan poet, Filippo Pananti, memorably described the panic that swept through his vessel when it encountered Algerine corsairs near Sardinia.

  ‘All was terror and dismay,’ he recalled later. ‘It seemed to petrify every person … some were for destroying themselves on board; others proposed jumping into the sea.’

  This initial panic was followed by a doom-laden fatalism. ‘A deep and mournful silence’ descended as sailors and passengers stood listlessly around the deck awaiting their fate. In despair, the master actually began steering towards the Algerines.

  Pananti was later to learn that this behaviour had convinced the superstitious corsairs that they were destined to be slaves. ‘Seeing [us] approach rather than get away, they thought us enchanted … dragged along by the dark spirit of our inevitable ruin’.

  Several agonising hours passed. ‘On the barbarians getting near us, we could easily distinguish their horrid yells; and innumerable turbans soon appeared along their decks. It was now that the last ray of hope abandoned the least terrified amongst us.’

  The corsairs closed in:

  ‘The shouts of the barbarians are heard close to us. They appear on deck in swarms, with haggard looks, and naked scimitars, prepared for boarding.’

  ‘No pauro! No pauro!’ shouted the corsair troops. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  Waving their yatagans menacingly, they ferried half their prisoners across to the pirate flagship, where a human passageway opened up between the cheering ranks of captors.

  Running this gauntlet could be a painful experience, since it was tradition for each pirate crewman to pinch and pull at every captive in turn, thus claiming a stake in his value.

  When this ordeal was over, the prisoners were searched for valuables. Some were literally shaken down: held upside down and shaken until everything fell out.

  (One French aristocrat achieved fame by swallowing twenty heavy gold coins to conceal them from the corsairs. He got them back later.)

  Next, the corsairs would demand their prisoners’ clothes and shoes. Some were re-issued with threadbare garments that crawled with lice. Others, like John Foss, were left in their underwear.

  At that stage, Morat Rais would have ordered the new slaves to be brought to his quarters for inspection.

  ‘As we entered the cabin we saw the commander of the pirates, sitting on a mat on the cabin floor,’ Foss recalled.

  ‘[He] asked us many questions concerning the vessel, and cargo, and the places of our nativity …

  ‘He then informed us that … we were his prisoners and must immediately experience the most abject slavery on our arrival in Algiers.’

  The rais told them to get to work on deck. ‘We told him we had no clothes,’ Foss wrote. ‘[H]e answered in very abusive words that … he would teach us to work naked, and ordered us immediately to our duty.’

  The corsair captain who enslaved Filippo Pananti treated his prisoners with slightly more decorum. ‘We were interrogated in brief and haughty terms,’ he wrote, ‘but neither insult nor rudeness was offered.’

  With elaborate politeness, the Rais asked them for their money and valuables and stored them separately in a small box.

  ‘This is for you, and this is for you,’ the Rais promised solemnly.

  However, the cynical poet was not taken in. ‘This is for you, this is for you … but perhaps in his heart: All this is for me!’

  Meanwhile, the corsairs were pillaging the captured vessel. ‘[They] broke open all the trunks and chests,’ Foss recalled, ‘…and plundered all our bedding, clothing, books, charts, quadrants and every movable article.’

  The haul was piled on deck for an instant auction. ‘All is brought to the mainmast and sold,’ states an official English report of 1675, ‘and the money is kept and joined to the rest.’

  Having stripped their prize vessel, the pirates had to decide whether she was worth keeping. In this case, the answer was no.

  And so Morat Rais pulled the plug on his captured vessel and continued his voyage, leaving the steel grey Atlantic waters to close over the French ship as though she had never existed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Desperate Men, Shameless Women

  Kinsale, County Cork, June 1631

  As Morat Rais sailed ever closer to his target, only one force stood in his way: the English Navy. But in June 1631, the two naval officers responsible for protecting the villagers of Baltimore were in no position to help anyone. They were already at war … with each other.

  As the commander of the naval gunship The Fifth Whelp, Captain Francis Hooke was supposed to patrol the coast for pirates. However, throughout that fateful spring he was locked in bitter contention with the Admiral of the King’s Ships in Ireland, Sir Thomas Button.

  Hooke was stewing with frustration. Ever since his arrival at Kinsale in April, he had been living from hand to mouth. Warrants for supplies arrived sporadically, if at all. The proud captain had been reduced to wheedling
for goods on credit and was now in a classic debt trap. New supply-notes went to pay off old debts – and the crew remained hungry.

  They were a sorry bunch even at the best of times. Hooke glanced contemptuously at his motley crew of drunks and cutthroats. Even the ship’s master was intoxicated so regularly that he was ‘a disgrace to the ship’. The sixty crewmen had not been paid for eight months and were in no mood to fight anyone except themselves and their army counterparts on shore. The drummer, Richard Tanner, and fourteen of his cronies had killed an army lieutenant during a vicious brawl at Ballyhack. But although convicted of murder, they had been allowed to remain on duty. ‘We cannot diminish the crew by so much,’ was the pragmatic explanation of the Lords Justices.

  Life in the Navy had never been easy. Many of the men had been been press-ganged into service and their pay was miserably low – half as much as a merchant sailor’s. One eyewitness reported that a Naval patrol on the Irish coast consisted of a hundred men who looked like ‘ragged beggars’ and shared fewer than forty shirts.

  Hooke was required to put to sea for several weeks at a time. But as he later explained to the Admiralty:

  ‘Since the fourth of May, [my] crew have only been provisioned for a fortnight when they plied out to sea, but are … forced to come in again for want of supplies. They live from hand to mouth [while] the Turks are committing depredations, sinking French and English ships and taking crews captive.’

  It was a ludicrous situation, made even more frustrating by the fact that no expense had been spared on constructing The Fifth Whelp a mere three years ago. The Duke of Buckingham had invested £7,000 on a fleet of ten sophisticated warships – The Lion’s Whelps – which were designed to equal the pirates in speed and firepower.

  Even in port, The Fifth Whelp would have made an impressive sight: a fast, lightweight three-master with square-rigged sails and a series of 32 foot oars (‘sweeps’) modelled on the oars of a pirate galley. A ship of the sixth rank, she was 75 feet long overall, displaced 186 tons, and could carry a crew of seventy men. Originally designed to carry ten cannons, The Fifth Whelp was now fitted with fourteen, ranging from brass sakers firing 6lb shot to giant culverins firing 18lb. However, the weight of the four additional guns had seriously affected her sailing ability. When the Whelp had taken part in the siege of La Rochelle, even more guns had been added and the ‘lion’ had sailed like a pig. The extra cannon had to be confined, uselessly, in the hold.

  The Whelps were not lucky ships. None would survive for very long. The previous October, The Seventh Whelp had met a sudden and inglorious end when a dim-witted crewman had inspected the gunpowder hold while holding a naked candle. In the resultant explosion, sixty men died.

  And now this debacle.

  Hooke was convinced he was the victim of official corruption, and his anger was to spill out in a series of letters to the Admiralty.

  He told how Button had made a deal with a corrupt meat wholesaler and supplied The Fifth Whelp with rancid meat that stank to high heaven. The starving crewmen ate it anyway and spent days retching with food poisoning.

  ‘[Hooke] complains again of Sir Thomas Button’s corruption,’ said one official report. ‘Sir Thomas spent the money given to him by the Government, and left the butcher and the baker unpaid.’

  Unfortunately for Francis Hooke, the man he was accusing of corruption was a war veteran, an intrepid arctic explorer, and a national hero. Sir Thomas Button, then aged around fifty-six, had enjoyed a long and glorious military career. Born in Glamorgan, he’d joined the Navy in his mid-teens and had served in the epic Siege of Kinsale.

  His bravery was legendary. On one occasion, he had taunted an enemy by rowing a tiny boat back and forward under heavy fire, purely to encourage his men. He had also been commended for courage under fire during an attack on Algiers. (Button had been vice-admiral of the English invasion fleet, and if his mission to capture Algiers had succeeded, there would have been no raid on Baltimore.)

  As an explorer, he had joined Henry Hudson on his quest to find the Northwest Passage. Later, Button had discovered the western shore of Hudson Bay (which for a brief period was named ‘Button Bay’). In 1614 he was made admiral of the fleet in Ireland with instructions to subdue the pirate menace.

  He’d been in the job for seventeen years now, and succeeded so well that it was difficult to conceive the scale of the problem he’d faced at the beginning. During the first two decades of the 1600s these waters had been plagued by pirate commanders – mostly renegade Dutchmen and Englishmen – who had organised themselves into a formidable seaborne empire known as the ‘confederacy of the sea’. They sailed in vast armadas and regarded themselves, not as criminals, but as admirals and even princes. For instance, one of the pirate leaders, a Captain Jennings, appeared in Ireland with a fleet of eleven ships and 1,000 men, and was expecting another ten ships which would almost double his force. Four other captains – Blomley, Thompson, Saxbridge and Bonyton – held the entire south coast of Ireland in terror. At one stage they had ‘robbed a hundred fishing ships, and sent them empty home’.

  Even the President of Munster, Lord Danvers, had been trapped in a pirate blockade of Cork and candidly admitted he was too afraid to venture out to sea. The furious Danvers reported that the pirates ‘would not leave the gates of hell unripped open in the hopes of gain.’

  Algerine corsair admiral Peter Easton was a frequent visitor to the area around Baltimore, as were John Ward from Tunis and his ‘admiral’ Richard Bishop from Sallee.

  Bishop set up a northern base just across the bay from Baltimore at the rocky and treacherous harbour of Leamcon. At one point the pirate fleet in Leamcon alone consisted of nine ships with 250 guns and four hundred men. Many had wives and children in the district. The local vicar was a pirate collaborator and on Sherkin Island, pirates even served as jurors.

  The corsairs were protected by Sir William Hull, the leader of the Leamcon settlement, who rose to the position of Vice-Admiral of Munster even though he was described by his own superiors as ‘an encourager and countenancer of pirates’.

  Hull was particularly friendly with Claes Campian, a Dutch corsair admiral who regularly pillaged ships returning from the East Indies. At one stage, the goods from one of Campian’s prize ships were sold off at Leamcon. The inventory included pepper; wax; a hundred Barbary hides; camphor; fourteen rolls of tobacco; bed coverings; and ‘three elephant’s teeth’. Another pirate ship was recorded as unloading ‘hides, iron, earthen dishes, black-coloured woods … gilt leather, silk, velvet, tobacco …’ and (once again) the puzzlingly ubiquitous elephant’s teeth.

  At the height of the crisis, in 1611, the English authorities stated bluntly that the pirates who plagued their ships had two main bases: Barbary and the Irish west coast. Barbary was beyond redemption, but ‘there is no reason why the latter, being part of His Majesty’s Kingdom, should not be kept free from such unjustifiable correspondence.’

  All sorts of desperate proposals were considered to deal with the pirate plague. Some extremists wanted all the local ports razed and the islands cleared of their populations.

  On the other extreme, there were plans to buy off the outlaws with estates in America.

  In 1624, one Lord Deputy of Ireland came up with a plan to turn the Algerine corsairs into a semi-official naval unit employed to quell uprisings in Ireland. ‘[B]eing birds of prey that have ever been trained up in rapine, an excellent use will be made of their forces and abilities,’ Sir Henry Cary wrote coldly.

  Cary was convinced it would appeal particularly to ‘the Dutch pirates’ in Barbary, and appears to have actually contacted them with the offer. Although he probably had Claes Campian in mind, Cary may have also offered the amnesty to another leading Dutch corsair – Jan Jansen, alias Morat Rais. It is intriguing to speculate whether this prompted Morat’s subsequent offer to defect.

  And how had Baltimore been affected by all these piratical shenanigans? Profoundly, it turns out.

>   In stark contrast to the Baltimore of 1631 – a hive of legitimate industry – the Baltimore of the early 1600s was a rollicking, raffish pirates’ den. It had always been a centre of local freebooting under the O’Driscolls, but this was different. Southwest Ireland became a magnet for huge numbers of English pirates who’d been pushed out of their homeland when James I announced a crackdown on privateering.

  Since piracy had never been made illegal in Ireland, the footloose freebooters of Devon and Cornwall began to hang around Roaring Water Bay, like Hell’s Angels at a holiday resort. The area became increasingly lawless and disreputable. Between 1603 and the early 1620s, towns like Leamcon and Baltimore were every bit as wild as Port Royal or Tortuga Bay were in their heyday: risky to live in and downright dangerous to visit.

  Criminals, whores, fencers and kidnappers hung around seedy ‘alehouses’ where many an innocent man could fall asleep in the arms of a friendly girl and, somehow, wake up next day on board a pirate ship far from home.

  This was the fate of one Roger Notting, a London poulterer. He came to Baltimore in 1609 to visit a relative, but fell in with some friendly seamen and was invited on board their ship. Plied with liquor, the unfortunate Notting woke up next morning to see, through hangover-ridden eyes, the coast of County Cork receding far into the distance.

  In 1610, King James was warned of the ‘continual relief that pirates have received from time to time in western parts of this Province, in Baltimore, Inisherkin [Sherkin Island] and divers other ports …’

  It was reported to the King that ‘desperate and dishonest men’ had come to the area to work hand in glove with the pirates.

  They’d quickly been joined by ‘shameless and adulterous women’, to the great annoyance of the law-abiding citizens who constantly complained of ‘drunkenness, whoredom and brawls’.