The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  Such boy converts brought great honour to their new masters, and the Pasha would often include them among his personal selection. The Icelandic pastor Ólafur Eigilsson was heartbroken when the Pasha picked out his own eleven-year-old son. He was never to see the boy again:

  ‘My son said sadly: “Father, they can do as they wish with my body, but my soul belongs to the Lord.”’

  Some, like young Joseph Pitts, would have been passed on from one master to another. The English boy was sold three times: firstly to a sadistic patron who systematically beat him ‘until the blood hath run down on the ground’ in a bid to force him to turn to Islam.

  Pitts finally yielded and agreed to convert. He was dressed in finery, put on a horse and paraded around the city to scenes of great joy.

  Eventually the youngster was sold on as a servant to a household where the owner’s wife attempted to seduce him. ‘Many temptations did she lay in my way, though not by word of mouth, but by signals,’ he recalled, ‘but I made myself ignorant of her meaning.’

  His third patron was an elderly bachelor who treated him kindly. ‘My work with him was to look after his house, dress his meat and wash his clothes,’ Pitts recalled.

  Pitts said he wanted for nothing and became so close to his patron that he felt as though he were his natural son. After a year, the patron invited him on a pilgrimage to Mecca and afterwards granted him his liberty.

  As a free man, Pitts faced a choice ‘to go from him or to live with him. I chose the latter … [for] he loved me as I had been his own child.’

  Pitts joined the Janissaries at a salary of £20 a year and served throughout the Mediterranean before seizing a chance to escape. After fifteen years in Algiers he was by no means sure that he wanted to return home. His patron had told him he would leave him a substantial legacy and Pitts believed the promise was sincere. ‘He was like a father to me.’

  A Cornish boy, Thomas Pellow, had a similar experience when he was captured by corsairs at the age of ten. After enduring savage beatings he converted to Islam and grew up to become a celebrated general in Morocco.

  There is a verbal snapshot of him, aged twenty-two, in the journal of an English diplomat: ‘Today were visited in Mequinez by one Pilleau [Pellow], a young fellow of good family in Cornwall but now turned Moor … [He] spoke the Arabic language as well as the Moors.’

  Thomas survived in Barbary for nearly a quarter-century before escaping and returning to Cornwall in 1738.

  In Algiers, there were other, less savoury, reasons why young European boys were in demand. Paedophilia was widespread. The leaders of the ruling Divan were reputed to be pederasts, and when the English captive T.S. arrived in Algiers he noted that the Pasha singled out a German boy for his personal choice because ‘… they burn with the unnatural fire which consumed Sodom and Gomorrah.’

  Pitts reported that the city contained a notorious ring of paedophiles who used self-mutilation as a form of identification. ‘I assure you,’ he wrote, ‘that I have seen several who have had their arms full of great cuts, as so many tokens of their love or, rather worse, their bestial lust.’

  Happily, there is no evidence that any of the Baltimore boys fell into such hands.

  And what about the female children? For a start, we have to remember that childhood did not last very long, either in North Africa or in Europe. In both societies, girls were often considered marriageable at twelve or thirteen. (At around this time, the Earl of Cork offered his thirteen-year-old daughter as a bride to his bitter rival Wentworth in a bid to heal the rift between them.) In Algiers, girls of that age were also thought ready for training as concubines.

  There is at least one documented case of a girl of twelve who was saved from the harem only when a Christian captive promised to marry her.

  The youngest girls faced a variety of fates. They could be put to work as maidservants or purchased and raised by investors.

  A winsome child could sell for over £100, twice the price of a beautiful woman, and the cream of the crop were selected as page girls at court.

  An English aristocrat, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, met a group of them at a Sultana’s court in 1718:

  ‘Her slaves were to the number of thirty, besides ten little ones, the eldest not above seven years old,’ she wrote. ‘These were the most beautiful girls I ever saw, all richly dressed; and I observed that the Sultana took a great deal of pleasure in these lovely children.’

  Let’s look at two case histories that illustrate the extreme ends of the spectrum of child slave experience in Algiers.

  The first deals with the two little daughters of an Englishwoman named only as Mrs Jones. Captured at sea in 1747, the family was conveyed to the Algiers slave market, where Mrs Jones and her two youngest girls – one aged eight, the other an infant – were sold into domestic service. A clergyman described the older child shivering in a ragged coat as she carried heavy buckets of water.

  One day a local man grabbed the infant girl and threatened to kill her if Mrs Jones did not have sex with him. When she refused, he cut off the girl’s hand and threw it at her mother, who retaliated by knocking him out with a heavy stone and then despatching him with his own sword.

  Our second case history could not have been more different: a captive girl who made a fairytale transition from the rags of slavery to the splendour of the imperial palace.

  Naksh-i-idil (her Islamic name) was born in France, although her family may have been American. They were captured at sea by Barbary corsairs and sold on the Algiers market.

  Naksh-i-idil’s parents died when she was only two. She was a child of exceptional beauty, and she caught the eye of a canny slave trader who bought her as a long-term financial investment.

  By the time she was fourteen she was a beautiful and cultured young lady. She caught the eye of the city governor who wanted exceptional females to send as his regular tribute to the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid I.

  Abdulhamid, who was known as ‘pious and benevolent’, took her as his wife and she gave birth to a potential heir.

  As their son Mahmud II began a reign that would last twenty-one years, Naksh-i-idil automatically assumed the pre-eminent role of Empress Queen Mother.

  When she eventually died of a fever, Naksh-i-idil was given a magnificent funeral and laid to rest in an opulent mausoleum. The Sultan draped his own scarf across the coffin.

  For two decades, Naksh-i-idil had been the most powerful woman in the Empire – a remarkable accomplishment for the former slave girl who had once stood shivering in the Algiers slave market.

  The Baltimore children may not have fared nearly so well, but the experiences of youngsters like Naksh-i-idil, Pellow and Pitts show it was possible for a child captive in Barbary not only to survive and to live well, but even to rise to the highest positions in this strange and hostile land.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Cursed With Iscariot

  Baltimore, six months after the raid

  BACK home, the investigations were continuing into the Baltimore fiasco. It was the end of the year before the inquiry was complete, and on New Year’s Day, Hooke received a withering rebuke from the Lords Justices.

  The Earl of Cork began by referring to the ‘disaster’ at Baltimore and then addressed Hooke’s role in the fiasco.

  ‘We think that if you had done your duty in plying to and fro, it might have been avoided,’ he said.

  The captain reeled under this onslaught. He had already explained about his lack of supplies.

  ‘It is folly to say that you were not victualled,’ Boyle continued relentlessly. ‘When you came over from England, you had a good supply, and you have since got £100 from us.’

  Hooke seethed silently.

  ‘You will at once set out and patrol the sea,’ Boyle commanded him. ‘And if you do not behave properly, we shall inform the Lords in England.’

  The ruling must have left Hooke incensed. It was a classic bureaucratic fudge and it left no-one satisfied: least
of all the King.

  King Charles was still waiting for an explanation and he did not intend to wait for much longer. The letter he sent to Boyle and Loftus was chillingly polite.

  January 19, 1632, Whitehall.

  Lord Dorchester to Lords Justices. The King is surprised at having had no report from [you] with regard to the Turkish piratical raid at Baltimore. I hope that you will make such report soon.

  Just over three weeks later, a report from Boyle and Loftus was on the desk of the Privy Council in London.

  February 11 1632, Dublin Castle.

  We have inquired into the question of negligence of the captain at the time of the recent piratical raid on Baltimore. Captain Hooke complains that he could not act for want of provisions, but on 28 May 1631 we gave a warrant of £200 to Sir Thomas Button towards victualling both ships.

  On the 4th of June he told us that he had taken orders for victualling both ships, so that, on the 20th, when the raid took place, The Fifth Whelp, which was lying at Kinsale, should have been able to act.

  It must be remembered that the attack was delivered suddenly, that the invaders stayed only a few hours [and] that the harbours in that part are many and yet so far apart that it is impossible to tell either where an attack may be delivered or how it may be forestalled.

  We have urged vigilance on the captains, and sent you over instructions to Captain Hooke. On victualling ships we have spent £3,649.3s.6d. We still think Captain Hooke dilatory and at fault … Sir Thomas Button should be ordered to come here at once.

  The dispute over who was to blame for Baltimore did a slow fade-out from history. Hooke, who had friends in high places, seems to have escaped with an admonition.

  His ship, The Fifth Whelp, wasn’t so lucky. Six years later, the curse of the ill-starred fleet struck once more when she sprang a leak near The Brill and sank to the bottom of the ocean.

  The case against Sir Thomas Button was pursued until his death. There seems no doubt that the Welshman had been deeply corrupt throughout his entire career. His skimming of supplies to The Fifth Whelp came as no surprise to his superiors: Button had been doing the same thing since the early 1600s, when he was keeping his ships undermanned and undersupplied and pocketing the extra money. This was a common scam among naval commanders, but, as one biographer points out, Button had ‘acquired a reputation for being especially greedy’. He’d also been taking backhanders from the pirates he was supposed to be suppressing.

  Just three months before the Baltimore attack his career was engulfed in scandal when it emerged that he’d stolen part of a cargo intercepted on a corsair ship.

  After the raid, his reputation was in tatters. He lost the right to victual his ships, he was deeply in debt and, at the age of fifty-six, his health was failing. By November, his admiralty superiors in London would not even talk to him.

  Two years later, Button was formally charged with negligence in failing to forestall the Baltimore attack. He was still preparing his defence when he died in April 1634.

  As for Richard Boyle, it was not in his interests to dig too deeply into the Baltimore debacle. He was living on borrowed time and he had many enemies – including Munster president William St Leger – who were keen to expose his own financial irregularities. Perhaps he did not want to open any unpleasant cans of worms with an investigation that was too thorough and detailed for comfort.

  Yet the authorities desperately needed a scapegoat for Baltimore. And they found one – in the person of John Hackett.

  The trial of John Hackett took place at the next sitting of the Cork County Assizes, where he was condemned as an enemy of the state and put to death, all within eight months.

  Hackett never did stand much of a chance. After being returned to shore by Morat Rais, he and the Falmouth captain Edward Fawlett had walked straight into the arms of English interrogators who wasted no time discovering the full story of what happened aboard the corsair ship.

  Richard Boyle was later to sum up the case against him:

  ‘Hackett, the fisherman from Dungarvan, was seized by the Turks and piloted them into Baltimore instead of taking them into some other port where they might have been taken. He has been condemned and executed as an enemy to his country.’

  It’s interesting to note the emphasis. Hackett’s main crime, it seems, was not to pilot the corsairs to Baltimore, but to stop them attacking Kinsale, where the Navy supposedly stood some chance of capturing them.

  Hackett was taken back from Cork city to Baltimore to die. In those days a condemned criminal would often be dragged across country behind a running horse. At every hamlet and every corner, there would be locals waiting with stones and rotten fruit. John Hackett’s last day on earth would not have been a pleasant one.

  The sentence was carried out on a hill overlooking the bay. The nineteenth-century historian Daniel Donovan, drawing on local folk memories, describes the scene:

  ‘[Hackett] was taken prisoner, carried to Baltimore, and hung on a high cliff, facing the sea, and looking down to the very channel through which the miscreant had but a short time before so treacherously and cruelly conducted the galleys of the bloodthirsty and marauding tyrants.’

  Thomas Davis, writing just two centuries after the event, uses the same oral history as the basis for the climax of his poem:

  ’Tis two long years [sic] since sunk the town beneath that bloody band,

  And all around its trampled hearths a larger concourse stand,

  Where, high upon a gallows tree, a yelling wretch is seen –

  ’Tis Hackett of Dungarvan – he who steered the Algerine!

  He fell amid a sullen shout, with scarce a passing prayer,

  For he hath slain the kith and kin of many a hundred there,

  Some muttered of MacMurchadh, who brought the Norman o’er,

  Some cursed him with Iscariot, that day in Baltimore.

  Meanwhile, in Algiers, more slaves kept pouring in from England to join the Baltimore captives. On 1 December 1631, James Frizell wrote home to a Captain Hawkridge referring to the ‘miserable thraldom that the 384 now English captives, with myself, lyeth in’.

  (Note that the number of slaves had risen by nearly 13 per cent since the summer.)

  Frizell complained again that ‘not one penny’ of his salary had been paid to him.

  By the following year, another hundred English slaves had arrived.

  The plight of the Baltimore captives is vividly reflected in a heartbreaking petition sent by English slaves in Algiers a year after the raid:

  ‘[We are] lying in most miserable slavery that, by [our] barbarous usage, [we] are ready to famish for want of bread.’

  Their bulk ransom had been set at £100 apiece … an impossible sum. They humbly beseeched that they be released from ‘this miserable slavery’.

  But like Frizell himself, they were pleading in vain.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Sweetest Voice

  Of 109 persons taken from Baltamore (being 89 women and children and no. 20 men) here remaining now are 70 persons only to be ransomed, 40 being dead and turned Turks, perforce. And not one of them as yet redeemed, but only one woman, by Mr Job Frogmartino from Loagorno through his Jewish Factor – James Frizell, English consul at Algiers,

  February 18, 1634.

  FRIZELL’S letter to his Secretary of State thirty-three months after the Baltimore raid showed just how dire their situation had become. Over the course of less than three years, almost one in three of the original captives had either died or converted to Islam – it’s a sign of the times that Frizell doesn’t even bother to distinguish between the two categories. Of the twenty men and eighty-seven women and children in the original batch (eighty-nine if you accept the consul’s figure) there were only seventy left available to be ransomed.

  The most intriguing part of this document was practically a throwaway line. One woman from the Baltimore contingent had managed to arrange her own ransom via a middleman in the freeport
of Leghorn – modern-day Livorno in Italy. This go-between rejoiced in the exotic name of Job Frogmartino, but at least he had a name. The ransomed captive herself was given no name at all.

  This brief reference to the lucrative and elaborate ransoming network between Algiers and Leghorn needs a bit of explanation.

  In Barbary, there were six main ways out of slavery:

  You could be ransomed by your family or friends;

  You could save up to buy your own way out;

  You could be ransomed through charity;

  You could be released by your government under treaty;

  You could be released by your patron, usually because you’d agreed to convert;

  Or

  You could escape.

  All of those options were open to Baltimore captives like John Ryder and Joane Broadbrook, although some were more realistic than others.

  Let’s take them one by one. Ransom by family or friends was an option reserved for the rich. In 1631, a professional man earning £20 a year would have had to save for ten years or more just to free a relative whose ransom was set at a typical £200 to £250. For a labourer on sixpence a day, the prospect was as unrealistic as flying to the moon.

  However, there were borderline cases of families who put themselves into debt for life to rescue a loved one from Barbary.