The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Manifesting The Calamities

  ‘THERE is something in the first grey streaks stretching along the eastern horizon and throwing an indistinct light upon the face of the deep, which combines with the boundlessness and unknown depth of the sea around you, and gives one a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy foreboding, which nothing else in nature can give.’

  Richard Henry Dana, the American writer, describes a novice seaman’s first bleak dawn aboard a sailing ship. It is probably a good physical description of the Baltimore captives’ first morning at sea as they began their long journey to slavery; but, more importantly, it would also be a fairly accurate depiction of their emotional state.

  Coincidentally, ‘loneliness, profound sense of loss, abandonment and despair’ is the phrase used in the modern US Navy training document ‘Captivity: The Extreme Circumstance’ to describe the feelings commonly experienced by hostages soon after their capture.

  For captives like Joane Broadbrook, the initial dreamlike detachment would wear off in a few days to be replaced by hopelessness and a bleak, aching despondency.

  ‘Hostage is a crucifying aloneness,’ observed Brian Keenan, the Irish teacher who was held as a hostage in Beirut for over four years in the 1980s. ‘It is a silent, screaming slide into the bowels of ultimate despair.’

  Even the most devoutly religious can suffer a major crisis of faith.

  The Rev. Devereux Spratt, a twenty-one-year-old Anglican clergyman based in Ireland, had only recently been ordained when corsairs captured him off the Cork coast in 1641:

  ‘[B]efore we were out of sight of land,’ he wrote, ‘we were all taken by an Algiers pirate, who put the men in chains and stocks.

  ‘This thing was so grievous that I began to question Providence and accused God of injustice in his dealings with me, until the Lord made it appear otherwise by his ensuing mercies.’

  Filipo Pananti, the Italian poet, was equally engulfed by despair. ‘Pent up in this filthy Algerian ship,’ he wrote, ‘every object combined to make us weary of life.’

  In their mental and spiritual anguish, hostages tend to search for spurious explanations for their bad fortune. A typical reaction is to imagine fate is punishing them for some previous wrongdoing.

  Fanny Loviot, the Frenchwoman captured by pirates, said her feelings of desolation were so intense that they made her fear for her own sanity:

  ‘Being so wretched, what more had I to fear? What were death to one whose sufferings had already touched the bounds of human endurance? … I questioned my past life; I searched all the corners of my memory; I asked myself what I had done to merit this great trial.’

  However, in most cases, denial and despair will eventually give way to pragmatism. The US Marine Corps’ Guide For Surviving Terrorism explains the process: ‘As time passes, most hostages gradually accept their situation, and find hope in the thought that their fate is not fixed. They begin to view their situation as temporary, and they believe they will be rescued soon. This gradual shift from denial to hope for rescue reflects a growing acceptance of the situation.’

  On this first grey dawn on June 21, most of the Baltimore captives would not yet have reached this liberating stage. To use Keenan’s phrase, they would still have been sliding into the bowels of despair.

  Once again, let’s get a brief insight into their emotions through the words of others who suffered similar fates. For instance, the feelings of the newly-widowed Mrs Timothy Curlew would probably have been summed up by the words of the seventeenth-century Massachusetts captive Mary Rowlandson:

  ‘[M]y thoughts ran upon my losses and sad bereaved condition. All was gone, my husband gone … my children gone, my relations and friends gone, our house and home … all was gone except my life …’

  For the Meregey children, robbed of their parents, the uncertainty would have been even worse. Like Mary Jemison, a fifteen-year-old girl from Northern Ireland who was captured in a raid in Pennsylvania in 1758, they would have felt a sense of dread that kept them from sleep. ‘The night was spent in gloomy forebodings,’ Mary wrote. ‘What the result of our captivity would be, it was out of our power to determine, or even imagine.’

  Or like Minnie Carrigan, who was captured at the age of seven, they might have slept fitfully, only to be plunged into despair on awakening. ‘I could not think where we were, but all at once the horrible scene of the day before came back to me,’ Minnie recalled. ‘… If the earth would have opened then and swallowed me I would have been thankful.’

  The morning sun rose on a transformed Baltimore, a devastated shell of burned-out homes and shattered dreams. Wisps of smoke still drifted from the ashes of the houses. The boats lay idle and the fish palace was deserted, its silver treasures left to rot and add to the stench of the smouldering timber.

  Most survivors of the raid had long since fled. Only the bravest and the most grief-stricken wandered around amid the rubble, looking for mementoes of their loved ones.

  The bloodstained bodies of Timothy Curlew and John Davis were lifted from the ground and laid out for burial.

  The two elderly folk, old Mr Osburne and Alice Heard, were found wandering around The Cove in a distressed state. Only then did a true picture emerge of Hackett’s and Fawlett’s crucial roles in the attack. Grim-faced officials ordered that the two traitors be hunted down and interrogated.

  All along the coast, panic spread like a plague. No-one knew whether this was just an isolated incident or the prelude to a full-scale invasion. The seaports emptied and the inland roads were thick with fleeing refugees.

  Joane Broadbrook awoke to find herself in a floating, heaving prison of wood. Home for the female captives and their children was a cramped area of the ’tween decks level, segregated from the crew’s sleeping quarters only by temporary curtains made of sailcloth. Much of this space was taken up by the ship’s structure and its spares. Amid this jumble of debris, more than seven dozen bodies would have to find room to lie down as best they could.

  The chaotic scene would have been even worse than that described by the seaman Richard Henry Dana:

  ‘The steerage in which I lived was filled with coils of rigging, spare sails, old junk and ship stores, which had not been stowed away … The sea, too, had risen, the vessel was rolling heavily, and everything was pitched about in grand confusion.’

  Cleanliness and hygiene were not high priorities on board any ship in that era. The semi-darkness, the constant damp, the myriad of unreachable nooks and crannies, all combined to provide an ideal environment for rats, cockroaches and fleas. Everyone, crew and captives alike, crawled with lice.

  Joane’s experience would probably have paralleled that of Fanny Loviot, who was also held prisoner below deck on a pirate vessel: ‘The insects which infested our dungeon tormented me incessantly, and my feet were blistered all over from their bites. The rats, also, which at first had fled before the sound of our voices, were now grown but too friendly, and ran over us in broad daylight, as we were lying on the floor.’

  Filipo Pananti, the Tuscan captive, found conditions so horrific that he daily expected an outbreak of plague. He was disgusted at ‘this filthy Algerian ship’ and added: ‘This motley crew were all either affected with some corroding humour or swarming with vermin.’

  Meanwhile, in Castlehaven, James Salmon was moving heaven and earth to help his neighbours in Baltimore. First he tried to persuade Pawlett to set sail. But the merchant captain quite sensibly refused the invitation to a one-way ticket for the Algiers slave market. The official report says that even Salmon’s weighty – and perhaps threatening – influence ‘could not prevail’.

  Now there was only one route left. Salmon dashed off a letter to Captain Hooke of The Fifth Whelp in Kinsale, urging him to give chase.

  Salmon was a man of the world – he knew all about naval corruption. Convinced that Hooke could not be relied upon, he instructed his messenger not to linger in Kinsale, but to continu
e to faraway Mallow to plead directly with Munster President Sir William St Leger, who happened to be an implacable enemy of the Earl of Cork.

  Back in Baltimore, Sir Samuel Crooke was writing to the Mayor at the naval base of Kinsale ‘manifesting the calamities … and praying him to hasten the Captain of the King’s Ship [Hooke] to their rescue.’

  All hopes now rested with the Navy, but it was in such disarray that it could hardly help itself.

  As Morat’s ships ploughed southeastward through increasingly heavy seas, Anna the maid would be doing her best to comfort her two young charges. Seasickness would have been a major problem, particularly among the younger children. As the seas rolled, the squalor resulting from uncontrolled nausea among dozens of children in a confined space would have been horrendous.

  Everyone’s clothes rapidly became mouldy, and remained that way. Wooden ships were always unpleasantly damp, even in dry weather. In common with Richard Dana, Joane would have found that:

  ‘Our clothes were all wet through, and the only change was from wet to more wet … everything was wet and uncomfortable, black and dirty, heaving and pitching.’

  This was very much a man’s world, with no provision made for female needs. Sailors simply urinated over the side of the ship or used ‘seats of easement’ with large holes poised over the waves. The female captives would have been required to make do with communal buckets, creating a nauseous filth and stench.

  And this was to be their home for the next forty days.

  Next morning, Sir William Hull of Leamcon dashed off a letter to the Earl of Cork, Richard Boyle. ‘The [Algerine] ships were plying on and off near Mizen Head’ Hull wrote, inaccurately. ‘They have been there for eight or nine days, but were not known to be Turks.’

  The boss of the lucrative Leamcon fishing business made no mention of the captured women and children but pointed out testily: ‘They took two excellent pilots with them from Baltimore.’

  Although he was one of the richest men in the area, Hull proved niggardly with help. ‘I would lend two sakers [cannon] and shot to Baltimore and Crookhaven, but there is a complete lack of powder,’ he grumbled. ‘I hope we may have more from the King’s store.’

  The following day, Wednesday, June 22, Munster president St Leger wrote to Boyle urging him to send the naval ship in hot pursuit, but pointing out the practical difficulty that The Fifth Whelp could not set sail without supplies. St Leger requested ‘that the King’s ship may forthwith be provisioned to go to fight them’.

  By Thursday, The Fifth Whelp was still stuck in Kinsale, and Captain Hooke was desperately defending his position to the impatient authorities.

  ‘We are still victualling here from day to day,’ he pointed out, adding hopefully: ‘About the last of the month, we shall have three weeks’ victuals and be able to go to sea. We had not been paid for ten months. We cannot go to meet the Turks (who took ten men at least from Kinsale) until we are victualled. I wish I could victual my own ship.’

  The official account of the raid sums up the final scenes in what, by now, had degenerated into a fiasco:

  ‘[T]he Lord President … presently sent out his commands to the Sovereign of Kinsale and Captain Hooke, to set forth with the king’s ship, and to hasten her to the service, who came accordingly within four days.’ [my italics].

  Morat had sailed on Monday; Hooke did not even leave port until around Friday. What happened next came as no surprise to anyone:

  ‘But the Turks, having not continued in the harbour longer than they could bring in their anchors and hoist sail, were gotten out of view, and the King’s ship followed after them but could never get sight of them.’

  The last hopes had faded. Nothing, now, could save the Baltimore captives. Nothing stood between them and the slave markets of Barbary.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A Bed Of Thorns

  The Baltimore women may have suffered horrendous deprivations on board ship – but for their menfolk, conditions were even worse.

  John Ryder, Tom Paine and the rest of the male captives would have been thrown into stinking, dripping lockers where they were fettered in chains or wooden stocks.

  James Leander Cathcart, born in Co. Westmeath in Ireland, was captured by the corsair Yusuf Rais in 1785. He wrote: ‘It is impossible to describe the horror of our situation … forty-two men shut up in a dark room in the hold of a Barbary cruiser…filthy in extreme, destitute of every nourishment and nearly suffocated …’

  John Foss, enslaved by Algerine corsairs in 1793, recalled how he was confined in the sail room: ‘We were obliged to creep in on our hands and knees and stow ourselves upon the sails …

  ‘[L]ice, bugs and fleas [were there] in such quantity that it seemed we were completely covered.’

  And the poet Filippo Pananti described how he and his fellow captives were ‘packed like herrings’ in the anchor chain locker:

  ‘[It] had infinitely more the appearance of a sepulchre than a place destined for living beings. There it was necessary to extend our wearied limbs over blocks, cables and other ship’s tackling, which made ours a bed of thorns indeed!

  ‘In this suffocating state, the bitterest reflections presented themselves in our sleepless imaginations.’

  On his first morning, Pananti was taken for a ‘promenade’ on deck, where the crew gathered to stare at the captives.

  Once the ships were far out to sea, John Ryder and the other skilled mariners from Roaring Water Bay would have been freed to work on deck, provided they stayed well away from the helm. On a sailing ship, even the worst weather was preferable to the squalor beneath them, as Richard Dana testified:

  ‘[T]he confusion of everything below, and that inexpressible sickening smell caused by the shaking up of the bilge-water in the hold, made the steerage but an indifferent refuge from the cold, wet decks.’

  At least they had freedom to move around. And as they swung heavy tools and spars within a few feet of their captors, John and the other Baltimore men must inevitably have toyed with the thought of mutiny … and escape.

  Escape from a corsair ship was difficult, but not impossible. Eight years earlier, a Hugh Baker from Youghal had escaped from corsair John Nutt’s ship while on his way to a life of slavery in Barbary.

  Nutt’s crew had grown rich on their plunders and, according to Baker, ‘play[ed] continually for Barbary gold’. Baker and another captive waited for their opportunity and:

  ‘… perceiving the pirate and his company to be drunk, cut the sea-boat which was fastened to the man-of-war … and so came in her to Kinsale.’

  In 1621, a Captain John Rawlins was seized near Penzance by a corsair captain whose entire crew comprised of renegadoes. Rawlins managed to re-convert them all and sail home as master of his captor’s vessel.

  In 1663 an English Quaker captain named Thomas Lurting staged a similar reversal of fortune by instructing his captured men to obey all orders so enthusiastically that his Algerine captors became careless. During a rainstorm, the corsairs all took shelter in the cabins. Lurting’s men simply locked them in and took command. Magnanimously, he released the corsair crew near Algiers and they ‘parted in great love’. The corsairs even tried to persuade him to come ashore for supper. Lurting declined – he was virtuous, but he wasn’t stupid.

  Not all shipboard escapes had such happy endings. The fourteen-year-old slave Joseph Pitts was kept shackled in a grim locker where he and his shipmates became ‘almost weary of our lives’.

  Hope came when someone smuggled in a pincer to loosen their chains. They managed to obtain two swords and planned a full-scale mutiny. However, the corsairs rumbled the plot and selected one man at random for punishment. Pitts describes what happened:

  ‘[He] was forthwith laid down on the deck … one man sitting on his legs and another at his head, and in this posture, the captain, with a great rope, gave him about 100 blows on his buttocks.’

  For their part, the Baltimore men were constantly supervised by tw
o hundred crack troops and had little chance of escape. Their only sensible option was to hang on grimly … and concentrate on staying alive.

  For the Baltimore womenfolk like Joane and Anna, there was another terror involved in captivity … and this fear was often justified.

  European renegado corsairs were notorious for raping and violating women prisoners. There had been an infamous case in Ireland in May 1623, when Barbary corsair John Nutt captured a bark outside Dungarvan. The twelve to fourteen women on board were all raped by the crew. Mrs Jones, the wife of a Cork saddler, received Nutt’s special attention. According to the same Hugh Baker’s deposition:

  ‘Captain Nutt took [Mrs Jones] for himself into his cabin, and there had her a week before [my] departure from him, and there he left her.’

  (Sometimes the corsairs took on more than they could handle when they assaulted women. The fearsome Irish pirate queen Gráinne O’Malley was once attacked by Algerine pirates as she lay breastfeeding her child in her cabin. She flew up on deck in a rage and appeared in the thick of the fray, wild-haired and screaming. Having routed the invaders, she returned with grim satisfaction to nursing her baby.)

  However, there is no evidence that any of the Baltimore women were molested during the voyage. This may seem at odds with the corsairs’ behaviour in Iceland, but there could be a simple explanation: once on board ship, the women were officially State property and the two hundred Janissaries were duty bound to protect them.

  Westerners were often surprised to find such discipline. James Cathcart’s group of captives included one woman who was given the freedom of the ship and excused the usual shackles. ‘[She] seemed perfectly reconciled to her situation and endeavoured to reconcile everyone to theirs,’ he wrote. ‘[I] began to thank God that our situation was no worse.’