The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

The Baltimore slaves were arriving in Algiers at a time when the glory days of the oar-driven corsair galleys were drawing to an end. As European sailing ships gained popularity, the number of galley slaves dropped from four thousand at the turn of the century to around nine hundred in 1675. Yet at this stage, in the early to mid-1600s, these traditional warships were still favoured for their lightness, speed, manoeuvrability, and the raised beak-like forecastles that could slot over an enemy’s deck, allowing the corsairs to jump directly on board. In the 1640s, a tally of English and Irish captives in Algiers recorded that a hundred of the slaves – roughly one in seven – were serving with the Turkish galley fleet.

  A skilled Baltimore oarsman like, for instance, Tom Paine would have been highly valued as a galley slave. His first day on board his hell-ship would have been very much like that of Thomas Sanders, an English slave from Devonshire:

  ‘We were forcibly and most violently shaven, head and beard,’ Sanders recalled. ‘We were chained three and three to an oar, and we rowed naked above the girdle, and the boatswain of the galley walked abaft the mast, and his mate afore the mast, and each of them a whip in their hands, and when their devilish choler rose they would strike the Christians for no cause.’

  Living conditions were atrocious. ‘[O]ur lodging was to lie on the bare boards, with a very simple cape to cover us.’

  John Fox of Sussex, whose ship was captured at sea in the same era, was doomed to spend fourteen years as a galley slave. ‘They were no sooner in [the galleys], but their garments were pulled over their ears, and torn from their backs, and they set to the oars,’ writes his contemporary biographer, ‘… I think there is no man will judge their fare good, or their bodies unladen of stripes, and not pestered with too much heat, and also with too much cold …’

  The French diplomat d’Arvieux said that ‘for these wretches, life was a species of hell’.

  And the eighteenth-century writer Joseph Morgan wrote movingly that any heart capable of the least drop of compassion would be shocked ‘to behold ranks and files of half-naked, half-starved, half-tanned meagre wretches chained to a plank whence they remove not for months together (commonly half a year), urged on, even beyond human strength with cruel and repeated blows on their bare flesh … and this for whole days and nights successively, which often happens in a furious chase …’

  During such gruelling sessions, Tom Paine would have had to subsist on lumps of bread, which were soaked in wine and pushed into his gasping mouth to prevent him collapsing with hunger. And throughout it all, two slavedrivers would pace the benches, prodding and lashing him with leather whips.

  Jean Marteille de Bergerac, a galley slave in 1701, described the process in a way that leaves even the reader exhausted: ‘Think of six men chained to a bench, naked as when they were born, one foot on the stretcher, the other on the bench in front, holding an immensely heavy oar, bending forwards to the stern with arms at full reach to clear the backs of the rowers in front, who bend likewise; and then, having got forward, shoving up the oar’s end to let the blade catch the water, then throwing their bodies back on the groaning bench.’

  This activity could continue for ten or even twenty hours without a break ‘and then the captain shouts the order to redouble the lash … If a slave falls exhausted upon his oar (which often chances) he is flogged until he is taken for dead, and then pitched unceremoniously into the sea.’

  For a slave like Tom Paine, the only opportunity to escape would come in the heat of battle. But the slavedrivers took exhaustive precautions against mutiny. ‘[W]e were not suffered to have neither needle, bodkin, knife, or any other instrument about us … upon pain of one hundred bastinadoes,’ wrote Sanders. ‘We were then also cruelly manacled, in such sort that we could not put our hands the length of one foot asunder the one from the other.’

  Yet for those who had the courage, anything was possible. In 1620, an Englishman named Owen FitzPen was enslaved in Algiers and sentenced to galley oar.

  ‘He projected several plots for his liberty,’ says a plaque in his honour, ‘and on 27th June, 1627, with ten other Christian captives, Dutch and French (persuaded by his counsel and courage) he began a cruel fight with sixty-five Turks in their own ship which lasted three hours in which five of his company were slain.’

  Despite the overwhelming odds, FitzPen took the ship, sold it for £6,000, and returned to England a wealthy man.

  For slaves like Tom Paine, there was only one small glimmer of hope. Tradition dictated that the slaves were entitled to a share of any prize taken. This was given to their owners, who for religious reasons would often return a small amount to the oarsmen. In rare cases, a captive on a successful voyage could raise enough cash to escape the hell-ship by paying for another slave to take his place.

  Incredibly, some slaves lasted for decades at the oar, so it is probable that these fully-trained, hardy ‘lifers’ were excused the harshest treatment. This seems the only way to account for John Fox’s fourteen-year stint at the oar, or the thirty years chalked up by some slaves on the Maltese galleys. Historian Peter Earle cites one astonishing case in 1682 in which a slave aged over eighty petitioned for release after a full half-century at the oar.

  There were break periods during which (according to one 1628 account) the oarsmen were chained together but ‘free to walk about the ship.’

  And Emmanuel d’Aranda, the young Flemish galley slave, hints that life might even have had its lighter moments.

  One of D’Aranda’s colleagues on Ali Bichnin’s galley was an Italian named Fontimama, a fast-talking but likeable conman. Sent ashore to get fresh water, Fontimama was approached by two local men who offered to buy any smuggled scraps of iron.

  Fontimama told them he had just the thing for them … and proceeded to sell them the ship’s anchor for five patacoons.

  And so the short-tempered slavemaster Ali Bichnin, who’d been enjoying a doze in his cabin, woke up to hear his guards arguing with several locals who were convinced they had the right to remove the galley’s anchor.

  The locals explained their purchase to Bichnin, who confronted the Italian conman.

  ‘Fontimama replied that he thought the galley would go better being discharged of that weight,’ writes d’Aranda. ‘All the galley could not forbear laughing at that answer … and Fontimama kept his five patacoons.’

  If the sweltering summers at the galley oars did not succeed in killing a man, the winters often did. At the end of the short sailing season, Tom and the other slaves would be put to general work for six or eight months. However, galley life had left many of them so pain-racked they were incapable of other tasks. These unfortunates were often flung into filthy prisons where ‘through reason of their ill-usage and worse fare, [they were] miserably starved’.

  John Fox, the Sussex slave, was lucky. He was an accomplished barber, a skill that involved surgery as well as haircutting. He was allowed to wander freely during the day with an iron on his leg.

  D’Aranda spent one winter in an underground jail in Tetuan in Morocco. The standard slave prison here was a converted grain cellar with a barred hatch in the ceiling. It was intolerably hot, and any rain would flood the pit within hours.

  Tensions exploded when the already-overcrowded cell was allocated two extra prisoners – Spanish deserters who’d ‘turned Turk’.

  ‘We lay on the floor as close as could be one to another,’ says d’Aranda, ‘because the room was narrow and nobody would have these two rascals lying near them, and there being no house of office in the prison, every two or three had a pot as they have in Spain, and these two wretches were necessitated to enfe themselves. They were extremely put to it, for to do anything on the floor was not permitted, because it was our bed and nobody would lend them a pot.

  ‘One day, their master cast them a little bread at the grate without anything else … nay, they were forced to beg the water they took off the other slaves.’

  The English galley slave Thomas Sanders reported t
hat he spent the off-season on a construction site: ‘[W]e were put to all manner of slavery … I was put to hew stones, and others to carry stones, and some to draw the cart with earth, and some to make mortar.’

  John Fox spent fourteen years sweating at the oars in summer and working as a barber in Alexandria in winter, before deciding that he’d had enough. It was time to break free.

  Taking full advantage of his licence to move around the city, Fox managed to obtain a number of metal files and access to a galley. At 8 pm on New Year’s Day, all the prisoners filed off their irons and swarmed through the jail searching for weapons and looting the treasury.

  The prisoners fought their way through ‘a hot skirmish’ to the roof, where they had to battle for control of the escape ladders. Many of the looters died because they were too heavily weighted with gold to run quickly.

  The noise of the battle raised the alarm all over the city, but by this time the ship was ready:

  ‘Now is this galley afloat, and out of the shelter of the road,’ Fox’s biographer writes. ‘Now have the two castles full power upon the galley … The cannons let fly from both sides, and the galley is even in the midst and between them both … [but] they sail away, being not once touched by the glance of a shot.’

  John Fox eventually returned as a hero to his hometown of Woodbridge. He had managed to spirit 266 galley slaves away from a Turkish prison and bring all but eight of them safely across the Mediterranean to freedom.

  This, then, was the life that Tom Paine could have expected as a galley slave in Algiers. But it was not the only job in Barbary – far from it.

  Let’s return to the aftermath of the slave market in July, 1631, and see what sort of fates would have awaited John Ryder and the other men from Baltimore.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ‘Dog Of A Christian, To Work!’

  AFTER the ordeal of their auction had ended, John Ryder, Corent Croffine and the other male prisoners from Baltimore would have been led on yet another humiliating circuit of the town. Afterwards, they were taken to what Pananti described as ‘a large dark looking building’. As they passed through its grim gateway, the guards would sardonically deliver the traditional welcome – words reminiscent of Dante’s famous warning ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’. They would call out:

  ‘Whoever is brought into this house becomes a slave.’

  The slaves were now in the belly of the bagnio – the network of urban prisons that would be their home from this day forth.

  As the name suggests, the original bagnios were bathhouses, but they had developed into a gulag of giant purpose-built prisons. The largest state jail – the Grand Bagnio – held up to two thousand slaves of nearly two dozen nationalities.

  Let’s see the bagnio from the point of view of a typical slave like John Ryder as he walks through the awesome main gate and into the prison yard for the first time …

  Ryder enters a spacious courtyard, which at first resembles a Mediterranean village square. It’s surrounded by shops and tavernas run and staffed by slaves. Outside the bars are wooden tables where free men – European mariners, renegadoes, wastrels of all nationalities – sit in the shade drinking flagons of wine and smoking their pipes. Some of the drunker ones are singing and others are huddled together, whispering and plotting. There are public cookhouses, serving out western-style meals to the renegades – even pork sausages are available. The smell of frying food makes Ryder’s stomach groan, for he hasn’t eaten a decent meal for weeks.

  Catholic chaplains in their solemn and elaborate gowns wander past the tables to their quarters at the rear of the shops.

  And of course, everywhere there are the slaves themselves, who, in Pananti’s words, ‘wander like pallid spectres’, wrapped up in their melancholy fate.

  The jail itself lies beyond the central square, opposite the main gate. It is a three-part structure with two cell blocks to either side and, in the centre, a building that serves as chapel.

  The guards herd Ryder towards the barbershop and storeroom where he is shaved of his hair and beard – a humiliation in itself – and issued with blanket and clothes.

  A baggy, skirt-like garment, drawn in to form holes for each knee, serves as trousers. A floppy, wide-necked shirt is worn under a waist-length sleeveless jacket. For footwear he gets the ubiquitous pointed Turkish slippers, scuffed and thin-soled, and if he is lucky, a red skullcap to protect his head.

  ‘No sooner is anyone declared a slave,’ writes Pananti, ‘than he is instantly stripped of his clothes and covered with a species of sackcloth; he is also generally left without shoes or stockings, and often obliged to work bareheaded in the scorching rays of an African sun.’

  This gear (already well-worn) is expected to last until the annual reissue of garments in mid-winter. ‘I do assure you,’ one envoy later wrote of the Baltimore captives, ‘their clothes are thin.’

  Ryder’s right leg is painfully fitted with a metal ring almost as heavy as a modern bag of sugar. During the day the slaves will also be required to drag a length of chain, its weight progressively lightening with good behaviour.

  A contemporary illustration shows a captive with a chain as thick as a man’s wrist affixed to his leg-ring; this fetter is so long that he has to carry it looped over his left arm.

  Ryder is hustled to his quarters. These are described by the French diplomat d’Arvieux as ‘terrifying jails where the poor souls are piled on top of each other rather than housed’. His hammock is slung somewhere in a stack between ceiling and floor, with other men sleeping above and below him, and a communal ladder to provide access.

  As a new slave, Ryder receives only a minimal serving of bread on his first evening. Someone whispers to him that this is a starvation diet designed to provoke the desire for a speedy ransom. The usual ‘menu’ in the state bagnio is three loaves of bread a day, served mid-morning, noon and suppertime and occasionally softened by olive oil or vinegar.

  Ryder and his fellow newcomers are placed under the tender care of the controlling Guardian Bacha, a sort of boot-camp sergeant major who will make his life miserable until he can afford to bribe his way to a higher standard of living. In some cases, new prisoners are even left to sleep out in the open until they can ‘buy’ a place in a cell.

  In the unlikely event that Ryder has managed to secrete a few scraps of food or valuables, these will be removed under the pretence of safekeeping. (The English slave Thomas Sanders had brought a jar of oil and a basket of bread: ‘But before I came to the Banio the Turkish boys had taken away almost all my bread, and the keeper said, ‘Deliver me the jar of oil, and when thou comest to the Banio thou shalt have it again’; but I never had it of him any more.’)

  At least there is one consolation. Men who’d been separated during the auctions are reunited in these bleak cells. The grim walls echo to the sound of weeping and commiseration as men like Richard Lorye and William Arnold try desperately to console each other over the loss of their wives and children.

  Sanders tries to convey the gloomy atmosphere: ‘[W]hen I came to the Banio and saw our merchants and all the rest of our company in chains, and we all ready to receive the same reward, what heart is there so hard but would have pitied our cause, hearing or seeing the lamentable greeting there was betwixt us.’

  Sleep is hard to achieve in those dark, airless surroundings, with the weeping of slaves mingling with the raucous din from below. D’Arvieux describes the atmosphere at the bagnios. They are, he says, ‘places of horror, what with the smoke of cooking from all around, the noise, the shouting, the blows and the tumult prevailing everywhere’.

  But the first dreadful night would be short. The sun has barely begun to tinge the eastern horizon when Ryder is shaken out of his sleep and hustled out into the prison yard. It is 3 am, and time to begin his first day at work.

  ‘A trabajo cornutos; can d’infidel a trabajo!’

  ‘Dog of a Christian, to work!’

  The harsh cries of the
Guardian Bacha echo around the walls of the courtyard as Ryder rubs the sleep from his eyes and takes his place among the hundreds of slaves in the courtyard. Above him, stars are only beginning to fade in the pre-dawn light. He is hungry, but there is no time for breakfast – that will come later.

  Feeling the weight of his heavy irons, Ryder trudges in line out of the bagnio and into the sleeping city streets.

  ‘Being ordered to proceed to the scene of our labours, a mournful silence marked our progress, which was attended by guards both in front and rear, armed with whips,’ recalls Pananti.

  Pushing through the narrow streets, the long-term slaves skilfully liberate food from the baskets of deliverymen on their way to market. The alleyways echo to shouts of accusation: ‘Which Christian dog [took that]? Infidel, I will have you beaten to death!’

  The first stop is the huge bakery where other slaves have been sweating all night to supply the city with bread. Here, two rusks of cheap black bread are thrown at the slaves, ‘as if to dogs’. Ryder has scarcely wolfed it down when the pathetic procession moves on down to the Great Hall of the Marine, where the prisoners are formally recorded and allocated their tasks. Some will be sent to sea, others to the farms, still others to the quarries. In many cases this choice will dictate whether they will survive in Algiers, or die gasping from overwork and exhaustion in some hellish quarry pit. This is the moment that decides his future.

  A generation after the raid at Baltimore, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diaries of a drunken afternoon in the Fleece Tavern. The unlikely result of this hazy interlude was one of the best summaries we have of slave life in Algiers:

  ‘Captain Mootham and Mr Dawes (who have been both slaves there) did make me fully acquainted with their condition there: as, how they eat nothing but bread and water. At their redemption, they pay so much for the water they drink at the public fountains, during their being slaves. How they are beat upon the soles of their feet and bellies at the liberty of their patron. How they are all, at night, called into their master’s bagnard; and there they lie. How the poorest men do use their slaves best. How some rogues do live well, if they do invent to bring their masters in so much a week by their industry or theft; and then they are put to no other work at all. And theft there is counted no great crime at all.’