The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  But Mary’s survival instinct was too strong. ‘I had often before this said [that] I should choose rather to be killed by them than taken alive,’ she wrote, ‘but when it came to the trial my mind changed.’

  The mind can play strange tricks in the first few moments of an attack, as evidenced by the experiences of Fanny Loviot, a Frenchwoman captured at sea by pirates in 1852.

  ‘It must have been midnight,’ Loviot recalled, ‘or perhaps a little later, when I awoke, believing myself to be the victim of a horrible nightmare. I seemed to hear a chorus of frightful cries [and] found my cabin filled with a strange red light … the savage yells grew every instant louder … I could not speak – I had no voice, and the words died away on my lips.’

  This dreamlike, or nightmarish, sensation is a classic symptom. The unthinkable has happened: if we dwell on it, it will affect our chances of survival. So we detach ourselves from reality. We watch events unfold from a distance. We are not involved. It is all a dream.

  ‘Denial is a primitive and very common defence mechanism,’ says the Marine Corps Guide. ‘To survive an incident that the mind cannot handle, it reacts as though the incident is not happening. Hostages commonly respond: “This can’t be happening to me!” or “This must be a bad dream!” Denial is one stage of coping with an impossible turn of events.’

  This phenomenon, known to troops as ‘capture shock’ can last between two days and several weeks.

  Emanuel d’Aranda, the Flemish writer captured by Algerine corsairs just nine years after Baltimore, describes the feeling perfectly: ‘I felt as though I were in a dream in which those around me were strange phantoms inducing fear, wonder and curiosity.’

  Fifty of the Baltimore captives were children, ranging from teenagers to babies. How did they react to the trauma? Again, we can get some insight from parallel experiences. Minnie Carrigan, a child of German immigrants to Minnesota, was just seven years old when she was abducted in a hostage raid in 1862.

  ‘While my mother was being murdered I stood about ten feet away from her, paralysed with fear and horror, unable to move,’ she wrote later.

  ‘Suddenly I regained my self-control and, believing that I would be the next victim, I started up and ran wildly in an indefinite direction.’

  Minnie’s narrative gives us one of the most vivid depictions of the surreal, dreamlike world into which hostages retreat. Amid the chaos and death, the only thing the newly-orphaned little girl could think about was picking flowers.

  ‘The birds were singing in the trees above them and the sun shone just as bright as ever. There was not a cloud in the sky. I have often wondered how there could be so much suffering on earth on such a perfect August day.’

  On that balmy midsummer night Joane Broadbrook, John Ryder, Bessie Flood and the other captives were no doubt experiencing the same sense of unreality as they were herded like cattle past the burning rubble of their former homes towards the quayside.

  Anna the maidservant frantically looked around for her master, Dermot Meregey – but they had been separated in the chaos, leaving her with the youngsters. Only a few hours ago, Anna had been a carefree young woman looking forward to the midsummer festivities. But fate had other plans, and now she was headed for Africa as the de facto foster mother of two little children.

  As the captives stepped into the stinking fishing boats, it probably would not have occurred to any of them that they might never set foot on European soil again.

  By the time the raid on The Cove was over, the corsairs had ‘carried with them, young and old, out of their beds, to the number of 100 persons’. A hundred slaves were worth perhaps £2,500 on the slave market – that is, over £230,000 in today’s terms. It was a respectable haul, but Morat wanted more. He fixed his sights on the main village of Baltimore.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Wretched Captivity

  Many towns, villages and farms [are] sacked; and infinite numbers of souls – men, women, children and infants at the breast – dragged away into a wretched captivity … They retreat leisurely, with eyes full of laughter and content, to their vessels.

  —Fray Diego de Haedo, Spanish missionary to Algiers.

  MORAT was spooked by the eerie silence from the main village above. There had been no response whatever from the castle fortress. And this silence remains a mystery, even today. How could the townspeople have slept through the noise and the screams and the crackling flames?

  This must have worried the admiral: it could mean he was being led into a trap. Corsair lore was full of such stories: of raids on sleepy villages cut short when cavalry troops thundered over hilltops; of quiet woodlands hiding columns of soldiers who would spring out to cut off the pirates’ retreat.

  Wary of the danger, Morat divided his troops into three contingents. An attack squad of 140 Janissaries would accompany him to the main town, while sixty marksmen would line the hillside overlooking the road to safeguard their retreat. The remainder were left at The Cove to guard the hostages.

  The road to the main village was a narrow, winding track fringed by dense woodland. Morat picked John Hackett, the Waterford skipper, to guide him on this dangerous journey: a curious choice, since Edward Fawlett had earlier proved his intimate familiarity with the town. Perhaps it was important that Fawlett should not be recognised. Hackett, on the other hand, seemed to relish the task. Many witnesses were later to identify him leading the raiders, his head held high. He was to pay dearly for his moment of glory.

  The Janissaries burst out into the open ground at Baltimore and fanned out around the houses. Within minutes, they had the castle and village under their control.

  But this time it was a different story. According to the official report:

  ‘[T]hey assaulted the said town, where they in like manner surprised ten English inhabitants … breaking open forty houses and rifling of thirty-seven.’

  They would have proceeded further, says the document, if William Harris had not wakened and sounded the alarm:

  ‘[W]ith divers shots in defence of himself, [Harris] wakened the rest of his neighbours who, beating the drum in the upper part of town, caused [Morat] with the rest of his company presently to retreat.’

  Morat, already unnerved by the silence, must have interpreted the gunfire and the martial drumbeat as confirmation of his worst fears. He ordered his troops to back off.

  The greatest Islamist invasion of the British-Irish Isles was over.

  What would have happened if William Harris had not frightened off the corsairs? What greater horrors might have been inflicted upon the villagers if the raid had continued unhindered?

  We don’t need to speculate. We know.

  We know because, only four years earlier in 1627, Morat Rais had led five ships in a raid on remote Heimaey Island in Iceland. On that occasion there had been no interruption. Morat had shown no moral scruples … and absolutely no mercy. He had given his crew carte blanche to kill and maim; to rape helpless women and girls; to dismember infants; to desecrate a church, and cold-bloodedly slaughter a priest at prayer.

  Morat’s expedition had sailed all the way from Morocco to the lands of the midnight sun. They split up and launched individual attacks around Iceland before a trio of vessels set their sights on the Westmann Islands.

  On Monday, July 16, three hundred of Morat’s troops stormed ashore at Raeningjatangay in the volcanic island of Heimaey. The corsairs had already snatched 110 people from Grindavik on the mainland, so the islanders were prepared for the onslaught. A fort called Skans had been built to guard the sea approach to the main town. But instead, Morat landed at an almost-inaccessible cove to the south and marched across.

  At first their behaviour paralleled the story of the Baltimore raid: the three hundred corsair troops rampaged through the main town, burning and looting everything in sight.

  But left uninterrupted, Morat’s men settled down to a long, unhurried orgy of rape, mutilation and murder which seems to have been motivated by noth
ing more than sadistic sport.

  The invaders split into three assault units. Shouting and waving red flags, they ran amok around the entire island. A few pathetic runaways tried to escape along the cliffs: the musketeers picked them off as though they were shooting birds. Around a hundred islanders shivered in a hidden cave in the western shore. The invaders hunted them out and dragged them back.

  One account tells of the corsairs cutting people in half and callously snapping the necks of infants.

  ‘Anyone unable to keep up with their pace … was cut down, and in their madness for blood these villains then chopped and hacked the bodies into small pieces with the greatest of enjoyment and lust for blood,’ wrote one eyewitness, Klaus Eyjulfsson.

  Flames leaped high over the island church. The corsairs slaughtered one of the priests, Jon Thorsteinsson, as he knelt in prayer. The other, Ólafur Eigilsson, was hurled to the ground and beaten.

  Morat’s men herded their captives into a harbour warehouse and ordered the most saleable slaves to board the ship. Then the corsairs closed the warehouse doors and torched the building, ignoring the screams of those left inside.

  When Morat sailed away from Heimaey on Thursday, he had 242 islanders on board – almost exactly half the island’s population. His captives included the wife and children of the slain priest Jon Thorsteinsson, and a married woman of exceptional beauty named Gudridur (Gudda) who will feature later in this story.

  The corsairs left behind them thirty-six to forty corpses – that is, one islander in every twelve – and sailed into Algiers with around four hundred slaves from all over Iceland.

  Morat’s raid left a dark stain on Iceland’s history. As late as 1898, a visitor reported that the Heimaey islanders talked of the seventeenth-century atrocities almost daily. Even today, elderly folk still tell how, as children, they were given escape plans to follow should the dreaded corsairs ever reappear.

  Accounts of other corsair raids reveal the same pattern. Following the capture of the town, there would be a triumphalist orgy of burning, looting, raping and religious desecration. The Barbary corsairs were seventeenth-century punk rockers: they liked to scandalise, and they loved the shock value of despoiling churches. They’d tear down crucifixes and trample communion wafers underfoot.

  When pirates led by the English pirate John Gentleman raided Iceland, an annalist recorded: ‘They placed muskets before the priests of the people with laughter and ridicule … the church bells they seized and fastened to the mast of their ship.’

  Dozens of people would escape the first raids, but the corsairs would march deep into the countryside and relentlessly round them up. Haedo, the Spanish cleric, reported that the Algerine corsairs would typically ‘advance into the country ten, twelve or fifteen leagues or more’.

  Once the fugitives had all been captured, the corsairs would often use horrific forms of torture in a bid to force them to reveal hidden cash … whether they knew of any or not.

  This, then, was the horrific scenario that William Harris had prevented with his single musket.

  It was still dark on the early morning of June 20 when Thomas Bennett – one of the founding fathers of the Baltimore colony – opened his door to a breathless, wild-eyed group of fugitives. Stephen Broadbrook and several others had somehow escaped the early raid on The Cove and had dashed through the night to Bennett’s house in the hope of intercepting the pirates before they could leave Roaring Water Bay.

  Bennett considered his options. The naval base at Kinsale was fifty-four miles away. There was only one ray of hope, so ludicrously impractical that it seemed realistic only to desperate men. At Castlehaven, five miles to the east, a sizeable ship lay at anchor. This vessel, commanded by a Mr Pawlett, could set sail immediately and rescue the captives.

  Bennett must have known the idea would never have worked. Even The Fifth Whelp with all its naval officers and guns would have been no match for Morat’s army. What hope would there be for Pawlett’s merchant ship?

  Nevertheless, he lit a candle, sat down at his desk, and wrote a letter in the pre-dawn darkness. He wrote, not directly to Pawlett, but to his influential friend James Salmon, begging him to ‘use his best endeavours to persuade Mr Pawlett … to haste to the rescue of the foresaid captives.’

  Salmon, another founding father of the Baltimore colony now living at Castlehaven, had made a fortune by buying cloth from questionable sources, and had since risen to become a commanding figure in local politics. If anyone could persuade Pawlett to undertake such a suicidal mission, Salmon could.

  As the sun rose to reveal the devastation of his village, Baltimore Mayor Joseph Carter decided his first priority was to alert the neighbouring ports. Unable to find any paper, he ripped out an irregular scrap four-and-a-half inches by eight and scrawled out a rushed warning to William Hull, his counterpart in Leamcon.

  This letter displays all the hallmarks of a man in profound shock. Carter’s profound apology for failing to find the correct stationery is a classic example of a mind trying to cope with the unthinkable by concentrating on the trivial. He handed it to his fastest messenger, one of a breed of native Irish runners whose remarkable ability to run long distances through dense woodland and bog earned them the unique right to wear the traditional glib, a thick forelock of hair that fell over their faces.

  June 20, 1631.

  Baltimore, this present Monday morning.

  Right Worshipful Sir,

  This my letter to let you understand that this last night, a little before day, came two Turk men of war of about 300 tons, and another of about 150, with a loose boat to set their men ashore, and they have carried away of our townspeople, men, women and children, one hundred and eleven, and two more are slain; the ships are at present going westward.

  I thought presently to give your Worship intelligence, and have sent a messenger apurpose, and I pray to give him content for his pains, and I am doubtful that they will put in about Leamcon or Crookhaven. I pray give intelligence westward. This with my service remembered,

  I rest, etc,

  Joseph Carter

  (desiring excuse, having no paper.)

  It was broad daylight by the time the last of the miserable Baltimore captives were dragged on board the two pirate vessels. Birds sang lustily in the woodlands, adding to the sense of unreality.

  Safe on board ship, the corsairs made a tally of their human haul. Altogether, 109 captives had been stolen away from Baltimore. Two elderly people, a Mr Osburne and a Mrs Alice Heard, were released almost immediately because they were too infirm to survive the journey.

  This left 107: twenty-three men, thirty-four women (including three ‘daughters’ and five maidservants), and fifty youngsters of whom twelve were classified as ‘sons’ or ‘boys’ and thirty-eight were described as ‘children’. In the terminology of the time, a ‘child’ was female.

  Nearly all the names in the official list of captives are as English as roast beef: Ryder, Hunt, Roberts, Watts, and so on. For this reason it has often been assumed that there were no Irish among them – but this may not necessarily be true. It would be surprising if some locals did not figure among the many nameless maids, cooks and servants. Frustratingly few of the thirty women captives are identified by name – they are simply someone’s ‘wife’ or ‘daughter’.

  The slavers now had a grand total of 154 captives on board: the 107 from Baltimore, plus seventeen men from the French ships; nine Englishmen from Dartmouth; nine Dungarvan men; and a further dozen of other nationalities.

  Morat had one final act to perform. He gratefully released Fawlett and Hackett, together with a second unnamed Dungarvan fisherman, as a reward for their collaboration.

  What happened next was curious. According to the official account, they lingered on at Baltimore until ‘three or four o’clock in the afternoon’.

  This directly contradicts Carter’s letter, dated ‘Monday morning’ and stating unambiguously that ‘the ships are at present going to the westwa
rd’.

  So according to Carter the ships had left by Monday morning. And there is further evidence to back him up. One letter from the Lords Justices states that ‘the invaders stayed only a few hours’. Since Morat arrived at 10 pm on Sunday, a 4 pm departure the next day could hardly be described as ‘only a few hours’.

  Even the official account – the same one that gives the departure time as between 3 and 4 pm – says the invaders did not stay ‘longer than they could bring in their anchors and hoist sail’ before leaving.

  If the 4 pm version is correct, the corsairs may simply have been waiting for a fair wind. Or perhaps they were waiting to establish communication with the relatives of their victims. Barbary corsairs often organised instant ransoms of captives just after a raid. (When the Albanian corsair Murad raided Lanzarote he remained in harbour and began selling the slaves he’d taken only a few hours earlier. The island’s Governor paid up and had his wife and daughter returned to him on the spot.)

  However, in this case there was to be no second chance. The weeping captives would have heard the familiar noise of departure – the sails being loosened, the yards being braced, and finally the ominous turning of the windlass that lifted the anchor and severed their last link with home.

  ‘Those peculiar, long-drawn sounds which denote that the crew are heaving the windlass began,’ wrote one veteran of sailing ships, ‘and in a few moments we were under way. The noise of the water thrown from the bows began to be heard, the vessel leaned over from the damp breeze and rolled with the heavy groundswell, and we had actually begun our long, long journey.’