by Des Ekin
Prostitutes came to the area from all over the British Isles. The ex-pirate Henry Mainwaring, reported that there was ‘a good store of English, Scottish and Irish wenches’ who were strong attractors for ‘the common sort’.
A document of 1607 tells how the crew of one pirate captain, Richard Robinson, offloaded a huge cargo of exotic spices in Baltimore, and then blew all the money ‘in a most riotous manner’. Another report complained that English money was rarely seen in the region – the only acceptable currencies were pieces of eight and Barbary ducats!
A Spanish ship rumoured to have £6,000 worth of gold was captured by pirates and beached at Baltimore. When the Spanish complained, Lord Danvers hotly denied that the coast he controlled had become ‘like the Barbary, common and free for all pirates’.
The authorities were particularly infuriated by the ease with which the pirates were able to stock up on food, drink and spares. Baltimore, located near a crucial sea junction, had become the seafaring equivalent of a motorway service station.
But did the locals do this voluntarily? Or were they acting under duress? At least one official document claims the Baltimore villagers had held out against the overwhelming force of pirates for as long as possible before capitulating.
But other officials complained of local suppliers being motivated by gain, ‘taking excessively of [the pirates] for such victuals as they sell them.’
According to Mainwaring, the corsairs would storm ashore and ‘steal’ cattle with much shouting and gunfire, but would quietly compensate the farmers later.
Sir Thomas Crooke, who founded the English settlement at Baltimore, was himself accused of victualling the pirates and entertaining them. On one occasion, his back yard became a temporary abattoir where two hundred cattle were slaughtered for sale to the pirates.
Yet it would be wrong to suggest that the entire population of Baltimore was in league with the pirates. There were recorded cases in which raiding parties of corsairs burned down houses and forced farmers to hand over goods at gunpoint. In fact, it was exactly such a case that landed Sir Thomas Crooke in serious trouble. He had demanded and received compensation from the pirates after they’d burned down a local homestead. This ambiguous exchange of cash resulted in a charge of collaboration against Crooke, who was later ‘freed of all imputation’.
Some modern commentators have judged the people of Baltimore harshly for giving in to the pirates’ demands. But we should bear three points in mind. The first is that there was no clear dividing line between piracy and honest maritime trade as there is today. The second point is that they were living in a corrupt age: some of the highest authorities were up to their neck in piratical trade. And thirdly, they could call upon no-one – not even the King’s Navy – to protect them.
An episode in 1608 illustrates the practicalities of the situation. A Navy captain named Williams tried to capture a pirate ship in Baltimore but was overwhelmed. According to the official account, his crew ‘made merry with the pirates and received gifts from them.’
As one sympathetic official explained: ‘They were in no position to do otherwise.’
The Privy Council did not agree. ‘If it is true that … he received from them 19-20 chests of sugar and four chests of coral, it is a sign of too much familiarity.’
This, then, was the daunting scenario that Thomas Button had faced when he became admiral of the fleet in Ireland seventeen years beforehand. But it seems he was up to the task: he tackled the crisis with energy and gusto. He captured a Captain Fleming, who was ‘hanged in chains at Youghal.’ He defeated a pirate called Captain Austins after an eleven-hour battle in Oysterhaven. And on one frustrating occasion at Lough Foyle, he’d come within an ace of capturing Captain Walsingham, one of Morat’s corsair colleagues.
Button was assisted by the Dutch Navy, whose ships sailed into the creeks and inlets of Ireland to root out their tormentors. By the mid 1620s, the tide had turned against the outlaws. Baltimore had settled down and was making big money from commercial fishing. One by one, the pirate ‘princes’ moved on to fresh territories in the New World, preparing the trail for their notorious successors – the buccaneers of America. It was the end of one era in piracy … and the beginning of another.
Now, in 1631, Button could begin to relax. The carpings of some provincial navy captain would not have bothered him too much. He could never have dreamed that the victualling of The Fifth Whelp would become a crucial factor in the corsairs’ greatest ever success against the English: the Sack of Baltimore.
CHAPTER NINE
The Turning Of Edward Fawlett
St George’s Channel, 17 June 1631
BY the time Morat Rais reached English waters, he had taken and sunk a second French ship and had boosted his crew with twenty-nine captive sailors – seventeen French, nine Portuguese and three others. Off Land’s End, he encountered the first of two men who were fated to assist him in the destruction of Baltimore.
It was just a routine voyage for Edward Fawlett, master of a 60-ton merchantman from Dartmouth in Devon. He was crossing St George’s Channel, a waterway that swarmed with similar merchant ships. Hundreds of vessels trekked wearily back and forth between England and Ireland, carrying unromantic cargoes and shivering, seasick passengers.
He probably didn’t pay much attention to the corsair craft as she hove into view. Morat’s round ship, so novel and exotic to African eyes, was almost boringly commonplace here. She merged perfectly into the background.
The moment the corsairs swooped on Fawlett’s ship, the lives of the ten Devonmen were turned upside down. They were no longer free men, with their homes just a short distance away and their wives or families waiting to greet them on their return. They had become hostages of the Ottoman Empire and they were doomed to a life of slavery in Africa.
What seems so incredible about Fawlett’s experience, and that of so many others, was that the Barbary corsairs were able to operate with such impunity in these waters. All this took place a mere sixty miles from Cornwall, and sixty miles in the other direction from the well-guarded Waterford coast. Fawlett’s men could probably still see the hills of their homeland on the horizon.
A fascinating document from the 1620s shows just how active the Barbary corsairs were in the channel at that time – and it also depicts vividly the sort of traumatic experience that Fawlett and his men would have endured at the hands of the pirates.
This document is the nearest thing we have to a Barbary ship’s log in northern waters, although it was actually a transcript of an affidavit from a captured seaman.
On May 8, 1623, Hugh Baker, a sailor from Co. Cork, was seized by an infamous Barbary corsair named John Nutt at the very mouth of his home harbour of Youghal. During his week’s confinement aboard Nutt’s ship, Baker witnessed a series of corsair attacks on English ships.
Nutt was an Englishman – he still kept a wife and three children in Apsham – but for the past three years he’d operated as a corsair, regularly sailing from Barbary to terrorise English shipping.
After capturing Baker, Nutt attacked a bark owned by Captain Morgan Phillipps from Padstow. Phillipps, who was on his way to Dungarvan in Waterford, tried to make a run for it. The corsairs gave chase. Three cannon shots rang out from the corsair ship before Phillips was forced to yield, right at the entrance to Dungarvan port. He had almost made it to freedom.
The ensuing description gives a good idea of the sort of scenes that would have taken place aboard Edward Fawlett’s boat when it was seized by Morat Rais.
First the pirates pillaged Phillipps’s bark and seized £50. Not content with that, they searched the captain and found another 26 shillings in his pocket.
‘And they took Phillipps’s boat, and a barrel of wine, and a fat ox, and killed him presently, some 40 or 50 yards of fine canvas, five or six rugs, and some linen and woollen Irish cloth, and two suits of clothes, with a gown and cloak which Phillipps swore, weeping then, that they were worth £20.’
‘12th of this month, [Nutt] took a Loner of Cornwall and took from him a hogshead and barrel of beer and some wood.
‘13th, a bark of Apsham … took beer and butter.
‘15th, took a bark of Foye near the Land’s End and bound for Kinsale, with fifty passengers on her, or thereabouts, whereof Captain Tucker was one, and from him the pirate took forty pieces and rifled all the passengers, and took from them plate, rings, jewels and money, as much as came to £300 or £400.’
So, in the course of about one working week, a single Barbary corsair in a 160-ton ship had seized five vessels, around a hundred English subjects, and cash and goods to the value of approximately £500 – that is, over £60,000 in today’s money.
When Morat’s men attacked Fawlett, they behaved in much the same way – rifling the merchantman for valuables, seizing the ten captives and then dismantling the ship for spare parts. According to the official account:
‘They took therewith her masts, cordage and other necessaries …’
And when the entire ship had been stripped, they sent it, bubbling and belching, to the bottom of the sea.
After that, they turned their attention to Edward Fawlett. He had something that the corsairs prized more than spares, more than the finest cargos, even more than gold. He had knowledge.
Soon afterwards, Captain Edward Fawlett went over to the dark side.
For some reason, the Dartmouth captain decided to switch allegiances and to support the Barbary slavers. He was not half-hearted about it. From this point on, Edward Fawlett would be an active – even proactive – participant. He had detailed knowledge of the ports of southern Ireland, and he did not hesitate to volunteer all this information to Morat. It is fair to say that the raid in Baltimore could not have succeeded without him.
Local knowledge was vital to a Barbary corsair. In almost every raid, the pirates used a guide or pilot from the area to ensure that they did not do something stupid like lose direction or run aground on a hidden sandbank. Sometimes these guides were brought with them from Algiers, but they preferred to use locals whose memory was fresh and whose information was up to date.
So why did Fawlett choose to co-operate with his country’s enemies? One obvious possibility is that he was coerced.
Many of the Barbary corsairs routinely used torture on their victims. When they sacked a ship, they could never be completely certain that they had found everything. There might be a purse of ducats secreted in the hold; there might be rich passengers posing as seamen. They needed this situation clarified, and quickly.
They would usually begin with one of the ship’s officers and then follow up with one of the crewmen or passengers. Even if the first victim held out, the grisly demonstration would be enough to make the second person blurt out everything he knew.
There was no great ceremony about it, and no need for specialist equipment: the corsairs simply used everyday seafaring objects. A length of wood could be used as a bastinado, or punishment baton, to beat the soles of the feet. A slow-burning match from the gunners could be inserted between the fingers. Basic caulking materials such as oakum and pitch tar could be applied to human skin and set alight.
One of the favourite techniques, possibly because it was fastest and most dramatic, involved a length of thin cord. Every seaman worth his salt had mastered the basic skill of whipping cord around a mast and twisting it to extreme tightness. When the same process was applied to a human head, the results would be quite literally eyepopping.
So was Fawlett tortured into revealing his secrets? It’s possible, but unlikely. If he’d held out on Morat Rais, even for a short while, he would have been doomed to a life of slavery in Algiers, alongside all the others. Instead, Fawlett was destined to be released after the raid on Baltimore. It’s more likely that he guaranteed his freedom by cutting a deal. Or perhaps the entire encounter was a pre-arranged rendezvous and Fawlett had been an accomplice from the very start. Who knows?
What we know for certain is that, after talking to Fawlett, Morat Rais left Land’s End and set a direct course for Cork. He seems to have been in quite a hurry to get there: he made the considerable distance within thirty-six hours or so. By the morning of June 19 – just fourteen hours before the start of the raid – he had reached the prominent Cork landmark of the Old Head of Kinsale.
It was ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, and only fifty miles lay between Morat Rais and Baltimore.
Still blissfully unaware of the impending danger, the churchgoers of Baltimore spilled out of the cold church and into the bright June sunshine, determined to enjoy their treasured day off.
However, this leisure time was not guaranteed: even the strict ban on Sabbath work could be conveniently forgotten if the pilchards were running. (At St Ives in Cornwall the pilchard fishermen would run straight out of Sunday service to the harbour in a mad dash when the fish were shoaling.)
John Ryder, Joane and Stephen Broadbrook, Bessie Flood and her son would have dallied, exchanging gossip with other villagers before making their way back to The Cove. Then – and it was still only late morning – the villagers sat down with relatives to enjoy a long and satisfying dinner.
At the Broadbrook home, Stephen and Joane and the children would sit on stools around a bare table, eating from platters made of wood or pewter and (youngsters included) drinking ale.
At John Ryder’s house, it would be the same story. Perhaps they had invited guests: each of them would have brought along his own dinner knife, a sort of universal broad dagger used for cutting and slicing the meat, which was transferred to the mouth with fingers. Forks were almost never used.
Meanwhile, the better-off townsfolk like William Gunter and Thomas Bennett may have eaten out at the inn or alehouse. A fairly standard menu of the time cost sixpence and consisted of: ‘good bread and drink, beef and mutton, boiled or roasted, or else veal … upon fish day … good bread and drink, salt fish or salmon, ling, egg and butter.’
It was washed down with fine claret at 6d a quart.
After their prolonged meal – it could last three hours – the ubiquitous tobacco pipes were lit and the conversation would almost certainly have touched on the political crisis in London. Two years beforehand, King Charles had adjourned Parliament indefinitely and had been exercising his divine right to rule alone and to tax and imprison his subjects as he saw fit. Nobody knew how long this stalemate could continue.
Yet overall, there was a sense of optimism. A year ago, the long war with Spain had finally ended, and England was once more at peace. Despite the ever-present tension, Ireland, too, had been uncharacteristically free of serious strife. ‘I have known Ireland for forty-three years,’ the Earl of Cork had written just a few months earlier, ‘and never saw it so quiet … contentment is, in fact, general.’
Only a few hours’ sailing-time away, at the Old Head of Kinsale, Morat Rais was swooping on a fourth vessel. This one was only a minnow: a little 12-ton fishing boat from Dungarvan in Waterford. As the giant corsair ship towered over him, skipper John Hackett surrendered along with his five-strong crew, and the boat was ‘manned by Turks and renegadoes’.
The Old Head Of Kinsale, 256 feet high and three miles from land, has always been a major landmark for sailors. It’s no surprise that there was a second Dungarvan boat in the same area – another 12-ton fishing boat skippered by a man named Thomas Carew. This time, Morat didn’t scupper the captured boats. He had other plans for them – and for their skippers, Hackett and Carew.
At this point a mist of doubt descends over the story. Up until now, the key elements of Morat’s voyage have been pretty clear: he had looted and scuppered two French ships; he’d taken a third ship from Fawlett off Land’s End; and he’d captured the tw
o Waterford boats between 10 am and 11 am on Sunday, June 19. That much is irrefutable. But at this stage, the facts become clouded by ambiguity.
For the crucial events that followed, we have only the later evidence of Edward Fawlett and John Hackett, both turncoats who were testifying to save their lives. The official account of the raid gives their version of events in this curiously worded section:
‘Then the said Captain [Morat] demanded Hackett to pilot him into Kinsale. But Hackett answered that the place was too hot for them, for besides the fort, there were there the King’s ships; whereupon they altered their purpose, and Hackett brought them to Baltimore …’
The report makes it clear that ‘these things we received by the confession of Hackett and Fawlett afterwards’.
There are those (this author among them) who find it hard to believe that an admiral of Morat’s experience was ignorant about Kinsale’s status as a well guarded garrison town until he was informed by Hackett. For decades, this port had been one of the main defence points on a coastline that the Barbary corsairs regarded as their second home.
Besides, the wording is ambiguous. Did Hackett proactively suggest that the corsairs target Baltimore? Or did the corsairs decide and then ask Hackett to guide them there? The former notion has always been the popular version, with Hackett being held responsible for Baltimore’s ordeal. But that is not what the official account says; and once again, it’s difficult to believe that a great corsair admiral should effectively take his orders from a humble fisherman.
But let’s get back to facts. The only certainty we have here is that the corsairs headed west towards Baltimore, with Hackett acting as their willing pilot and guide.
Why did John Hackett choose to help the corsairs? He had no shortage of motives. The first and most obvious is that, by going west, he was keeping the corsairs well away from his own hometown to the east. Secondly, there was no love lost between Waterford and Baltimore – they’d had an ancient and bitter grudge dating back to the days when the O’Driscolls plundered passing Waterford ships at will. And thirdly, Baltimore was populated by English Protestants, while Hackett himself was a native Irishman and a Roman Catholic.