The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  Succinctly put, but true. There was a hierarchy of slave roles.

  With the exception of the galley oarsmen, the unluckiest slaves of all were the State labourers, who were treated as beasts of burden. ‘I am made daily to grind a mill as a horse,’ one English captive wrote pathetically.

  Mr T.S., the English captive, began his slave life as a palace cook, but was later put to work in the fields, ‘with an ill favoured Turk, leading me by a chain, as a horse or a bullock, through the streets.’

  Hundreds were employed on State farms. There are reports of men pulling ploughs like horses, with metal bits in their teeth. Captain John Smith, who was later to colonise Virginia, was at one stage enslaved by the Turks and put to work threshing corn. It was, he said, ‘the worst of cruelty’ and he was ‘treated like a dog’.

  Some were put to work at the quarries, where huge rocks weighing 40 tons were blasted out of the cliff. The slaves – working continuously under the lash – had to drag them on sleds for two miles to the harbour where they were loaded on to barges and used to bolster the Mole.

  Others laboured on construction works, where they had to carry baskets of earth across high catwalks. As they tried to balance on these planks, sadistic overseers would poke and strike them with sticks.

  ‘Figure to yourself above 1,000 poor wretches,’ wrote one slave, ‘many of them half naked without hat or shoes, at work in the heat of the sun all day till four and sometimes till five or six o’clock on a summer day, carrying earth in a basket to the top of a high building, exposed to the heat and often blistered with the sun, chafed and scalded with the weight of their load, the perspiration flowing from them …’

  These cases represented the blunt and crude end of slavery in Algiers. However, perhaps John Ryder was among the luckier ones. The more enlightened private owners treated their slaves reasonably and encouraged them with a form of incentive deal. The owner or patron (pronounced patroon) would advance a loan to the slave to set up as a craft worker or trader. Ryder would have been able to keep a small amount of earnings – up to a third – which he could use to repay his loan and, eventually, start saving towards his own ransom.

  Slaves like these were allowed to sleep in open prisons or even in their patron’s home. There are reports of owners treating slaves as they would treat their own children. Warm personal relationships were often forged between master and servant.

  Richard Joyce, an Irishman captured by Algerine corsairs while on his way to the Caribbean in 1675, was a case in point. His patron was a goldsmith who taught him how to fashion the intricate, symbolic jewellery then fashionable in North Africa. Joyce proved a willing and dextrous pupil and remained with his master for fourteen years.

  When at last his ransom was arranged, the goldsmith was heartbroken. He offered Joyce a full partnership and his only daughter in marriage. But the Irishman reluctantly refused and returned to his native Galway to set up his own craft workshop and become a wealthy man.

  That much is fact. Legend gives the story another twist, which might well be true. It’s said that when Joyce left, he took with him a design for jewellery depicting a heart and a protective pair of hands. The result has become familiar to us all as the Claddagh ring.

  John Ryder would have rapidly discovered there was good money to be made in bustling, prosperous Algiers by any slave who could spot a business opportunity.

  According to d’Aranda, a captive who could borrow enough money to buy a pipe of wine (110 gallons) at $16 in September could retail it later at a profit of $40 or $50. ‘The Spaniards who could keep taverns lived like princes among the slaves, and in a short time got as much as paid the ransom,’ he wrote.

  Or take the case of William Okeley, an English slave who would have been a familiar figure to John and the rest of the Baltimore captives. Enslaved in 1638, Okeley was told to choose any trade that would earn two dollars a month for his master.

  He set up shop selling wine and tobacco, then began sewing canvas clothes for seamen. Okeley was sold on to a kind elderly patron who treated him as his own son and whom he was extremely reluctant to leave. By the time he made his spectacular dash for freedom (more of which later) he had secretly amassed a considerable amount of money. The scrupulous Okeley honoured his commitments to his patron and ‘paid him his demands duly’ but secretly began hiding his own cash in preparation for his moonlight flit. ‘I had a trunk [with] a false bottom, into which I put all the silver and gold I had, and into the body of the trunk, what it would hold.’

  He entrusted the valuable trunk to his chaplain, Rev Devereux Spratt, who somehow managed to bring it home intact. Okeley was able to return from slavery as a rich man.

  Other slaves prospered to the point where they did not wish to return home at all.

  The French diplomat d’Arvieux wrote of one French slave who lived in a private apartment complete with library, study and fifteen servants of his own. Although he remained technically enslaved, this man found life so agreeable that he would never have dreamed of squandering his riches on his own ransom.

  Similarly, an English envoy named John Braithwaite was astonished when he arrived in Morocco to find an Irish slave who kept his own household of European slaves and threw elaborate parties. Mr Carr (his first name is unknown) treated Braithwaite to ‘a very elegant dinner’ and fine wine, to the pleasant background music of an ensemble of northern slaves. A convert to Islam, Carr became became drunkenly homesick during the meal and told Braithwaite that he was ‘as much a Christian as ever’ – a phrase eerily reminiscent of Morat Rais’s protestation to Harrison that he was ‘ever a Christian at heart’.

  Alternatively, John Ryder may have been able to secure an administrative job and rise up the civil service career ladder. This was what happened to another Irish born slave, James Leander Cathcart.

  Cathcart seems to have been one of those unsinkable characters who can adapt to any environment. We’ve already encountered him on his slave ship just after his capture – he was the one who managed to persuade his captors to give him tobacco and fruit. In Algiers, he was even better at working the system. While remaining a slave, he rose to the pinnacle of power and riches.

  Cathcart was born in Mountmurragh in Co. Westmeath, but emigrated to America and served in the Revolutionary War before being captured by corsairs near Portugal in 1785.

  The secret of his success was a combination of Irish charm, efficiency … and bribery. Cathcart understood that everything in Algiers ran on baksheesh and skilfully used this to his advantage.

  He made friends easily and won over nearly everyone he encountered, up to and including the ruler. While other slaves would react to their new masters with grovelling submission or with seething resentment, Cathcart did neither. He would argue for his rights robustly but politely, and with a touch of dry humour.

  At first he was put in charge of a group of American slaves whose job was to maintain the grounds at the royal palace. The garden included a small zoo of pet lions, and Cathcart’s enthusiasm to feed them was never regarded as suspicious, even though the lions became increasingly slimmer and the Americans grew healthier on a diet of red meat.

  His run of good luck ended when he was transferred to a grim state bagnio and put to hard labour. Undeterred, he used his meagre funds as a bribe to secure a move to a better prison, where his language skills earned him a job as a harbour administrator. From there he rose rapidly up the civil service ladder and ended up back at the palace as Chief Christian Secretary – the highest job that any unconverted slave could get.

  Meanwhile, Cathcart had borrowed money to invest in a captured cargo of wine. The move paid off so handsomely that he was able to purchase several taverns. Eventually he became rich enough to buy his own ship.

  The ruler of Algiers, who was involved in talks with America at the time, needed a go-between and instructed Cathcart to sail home to discuss treaty terms. Cathcart – who was, remember, still a slave – sailed off to the land of the free, but dutif
ully returned to Barbary to conclude a peace deal that earned liberty for his countrymen as well as himself. Thomas Jefferson was later to describe him as ‘the honestest and ablest consul we have with the Barbary powers’.

  Further down the hierarchy of prestige there were good jobs and bad jobs. One of the most coveted positions – and it took a hefty bribe to earn it – was that of servant at the Janissary barracks. But for the ultimate cushy job, it would be hard to beat the task allotted to a young French guitarist who was instructed to provide music in the female baths. The women ‘quite naked, took their bath in front of him,’ one writer reported enviously.

  Since male slaves were regarded almost as domestic animals, they were often given free run of the household – with all the temptations that this entailed.

  ‘Guarda per ti, et non andar mirar mugeros de los Moros; nous autros pillar multo phantasia de questo conto,’ new slaves were sternly warned in Sabir. ‘Be careful, and do not go to look at the wives of the Moors. We are very particular on that matter.’

  A Christian slave caught with a Muslim wife could expect no mercy from the Algerine authorities. And the risk wasn’t all one-sided. Wives caught in adultery would be flung alive into the sea in a weighted sack – often by their own vengeful husbands.

  However, relationships were not always discouraged. There were genuine romances between unmarried male slaves – men like Edward Cherry or John Amble – and the eligible daughters or nieces of their masters.

  To Europeans, the Algerine women were as exotic and beautiful as the pale-faced northern women appeared to the North Africans. In public, they wore white cloaks, tied tight at the knee over voluminous trousers. A white headdress covered their hair and their face was concealed, except for the eyes, by a white veil. Europeans compared the floating vision to ships gracefully under sail, or even to Greek goddesses.

  Those privileged to see them in private raved about their ‘clean and healthy appearance’ and their clear skin and flashing eyes. Yet this beauty did not always come directly from nature. They were skilled in cosmetics and took enormous trouble to create the wide-eyed, startled-doe look that was so fashionable in Algiers.

  On special occasions they would dress in their finery and wear the sarma, a richly worked metal crown, culminating in a peak from which gold and silver coloured ribbons descended almost to the ground. Baltimore bachelors like Edward Cherry, accustomed to the unadorned fish factory workers of their own village, could not have been blamed if they fell head over heels for such exotic visions.

  In an era of arranged marriages, owners would often earmark a talented slave as a potential husband for a daughter or niece. A common scenario involved a slave who had learned a trade and was now capable of supporting a family. If he agreed to convert to Islam, he would be given his freedom on his wedding day. Another scenario centred on wealthy young widows – there were plenty in warlike Algiers – who could offer instant wealth and prosperity to an eligible man.

  According to D’Arvieux, patrons would give their slaves ‘promises, exhortations and everything that was seductive’ in a bid to win them over.

  And so we see the vast and bewildering variety of lifestyles that could have been open to the male slaves from Baltimore in 1631 – from bathroom balladeer to human mule, from cosseted family babysitter to royal lionkeeper. The fates of the male captives from Roaring Water Bay – ordinary men like John Ryder, Corent Croffine, Edward Cherry and John Amble – could have gone in any of a thousand different directions, but their lives in slavery would at least never have been dull and predictable.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Beyond The Gate Of Felicity: The Harem Women

  [T]o bring forth children to die untimely deaths; and to end their days by prisons, or the bowstring, or to live miserable lives separated from mankind and immured within walls, or entombed whilst they breathed, and not to tremble with horror

  — the role of a palace concubine, according to Paul Rycault in 1634.

  THERE is no mystery about the fate of Joane Broadbrook, Bessie Flood and the other three dozen Baltimore women who ended up in Algiers – their future had been decided the moment they were herded aboard the corsair boat. They were all destined for the harems: the younger and more attractive women as concubines, the older ones as domestic servants. Some would have ended up in the Pasha’s own harem, some at the homes of local merchants, and some would have been sent all the way to the Sultan in Constantinople.

  The women who were despatched to the imperial harem in the decade beginning 1631 were both lucky and unlucky in their timing. They were fortunate in that they arrived right in the middle of a period known as ‘The Reign Of Women’ in which the royal palace, and sometimes even the vast empire itself, was effectively ruled by females. However, they were also unfortunate. For most of its existence, the imperial harem was a comparatively sedate place. It was sheer bad luck that anyone sent from Baltimore would have experienced the reigns of the two craziest and most debauched sultans in the empire’s seven hundred-year history. The first was a twisted drunk. The second was a lunatic whose grotesquely inventive sexual orgies shocked even the harem veterans who thought they had seen it all.

  In his poem The Sack Of Baltimore, Thomas Davis speculated about the fate of the women captives. In his version, a young man from Bandon – a ‘gallant’ – is due to marry a woman named O’Driscoll. But she is abducted to Algiers, where the governing Dey selects her for his serai, or harem:

  The maid that Bandon gallant sought is chosen for the Dey,

  She’s safe – he’s dead – she stabbed him in the midst of his Serai;

  And, when to die a death of fire, that noble maid they bore,

  She only smiled – O’Driscoll’s child – she thought of Baltimore.

  His heroine’s fate would have been particularly grisly. In this method of execution, victims were tied to a post and surrounded by a ring of bonfires whose heat would roast them slowly to death. O’Driscoll’s child would hardly have met her death smiling.

  However, this story was pure fiction, since no Algerine governor was ever stabbed by a harem slave. Critics have also pointed out that there were no O’Driscolls in the list of Baltimore captives; but, then again, very few of the women were actually named. It is quite possible that one of the servants was a local O’Driscoll girl and that Davis could have based his work on oral tradition. Whatever the truth, the central theme of his verse is authentic. When Davis suggests that the nubile young women from Baltimore were selected as sexual playthings by rich and powerful men, he is absolutely right.

  The rulers of Algiers were notorious for their rapaciousness, and not only towards their slaves and captives. Even diplomats’ wives and daughters were targeted.

  ‘Mr McDonell’s daughter, pretty and young, for my harem,’ a later Dey of Algiers wrote about the English consul’s daughter. ‘The Spanish consul’s daughter, who is ugly, to serve the favourite; I shall have the English consul’s head cut off and that of the Spanish consul also … if they dare to complain.’

  In the late 1600s, an Irish woman named only as Mrs Shaw was enslaved in Morocco, where the notorious emperor Muley Ismael selected her as a bedmate. Years later, Mrs Shaw confessed to an English envoy that the emperor ‘having an inclination to sleep with her, forced her to turn Moor’. The nights they spent together must have left the emperor especially satisfied, because he made her his fourth wife.

  However, Muley soon tired of his new bride and sold her to a Spaniard. By the time she met the English envoy, the former empress was wandering the streets half-naked and destitute, with a new baby in her arms.

  In 1685, writer Francis Brooks reported that the same emperor chose an English slave for his bedchamber: ‘[He] had her washed and clothed her in their fashion of apparel and lay with her; having his desire fulfilled, he inhumanly, in great haste, forced her away out of his presence’.

  Regional governors like the Pasha of Algiers were always expected to replenish the Sultan�
��s harem with their most beautiful and exotic women. Failure to do so was more than a diplomatic faux-pas: it would have been career suicide. Pale-skinned women of English West Country extraction were the cream of the crop, the supermodels of the Barbary world. It would have been unthinkable for Pasha Hussein to have received a large consignment of such women in 1631 without donating at least some of them – the best of them – to his imperial master.

  So although this is not specifically recorded, we can speculate with reasonable confidence that perhaps a half-dozen of the female captives from Baltimore would have ended up in the Imperial Harem.

  Which of them received the summons? Bessie Peeter’s daughter? The Evans’s young female servant? Anna, the Meregeys’ maid? History doesn’t tell us.

  Let’s follow a typical female slave from Baltimore on that long journey to the imperial palace in Constantinople. (A useful exercise in any event, because the setup in the Sultan’s harem was simply a larger-scale version of the Pasha’s own harem and much the same rules would have applied to both.)

  After the long sea journey across the Mediterranean, the young slave – let’s suppose it was Anna – would have found herself in the mighty Ottoman capital on the banks of the Bosphorus. She would have been conveyed in a curtained carriage to the vast city-palace known as the Topkapi Serai. Peering through the veils at her new home, she would have been overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the seaside palace. Three miles in circumference and covering over 170 acres, Topkapi was home to more than 4,000 people ranging from warriors to pen-pushers and from sexless eunuchs to the world’s most beautiful and voluptuous concubines.