The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  Later in the 1660s, a Cork woman, Mrs Eleanor Walsh, applied for an official pass that would permit her to go to Amsterdam with ransom money for her husband John.

  ‘Last November, when her husband was going to England from Ireland, he was surprised by a Turk man-of-war and carried into Turkey,’ reads the petition. ‘She has sold all she has to pay his ransom.’

  Most people were reduced to pleading for donations from local dignitaries. In the case of the Baltimore captives, the obvious person to approach was the Earl of Cork. Richard Boyle was spectacularly rich and could have afforded to buy back all 107 of these hostages at £38 a head without giving it a second thought. For instance, the £10,000 he lavished on a dowry for his daughter Lettice could have bought these captives their freedom twice over. And the £20 he carelessly expended on one day on a quilt and a useless ‘medicinal stone’ was more than enough to redeem Ellen Hawkins from the owner who had paid £18 for her in the Bedistan marketplace.

  We know that the Earl received petitions from the Baltimore slaves and their relatives. Sadly, all of them seem to have gone missing over the centuries. But we can get a glimpse into their desperate state of mind through similar letters sent to him from Barbary.

  Just nine years before Baltimore, Boyle had received a letter of entreaty from Gerald FitzGerald, a Cork man who had been held as a slave in Morocco for five years.

  Gerald himself put his case before the Earl in a heartbreaking plea for mercy:

  ‘All my trust is in you, only under God, to have pity upon my poor estate of distress and misery … as for my ransom, it will come near hand £200, little more or less.’

  He said he and his fellow slaves were enduring so many hardships ‘that to reckon them all were infinite, and to taste one of them, intolerable.’

  The process of paying a ransom was sophisticated and complex. It had to be – a relative sailing directly into Algiers with a trunk full of money would simply be relieved of his cash and enslaved himself.

  Instead, an intricate network of trusts and sureties was developed via freeports such as Leghorn. This was the route followed by the anonymous Baltimore woman – let’s call her Mary – who Frizell says managed to free herself from Algiers within the first thirty-three months.

  Mary’s husband or family would have gathered her ransom from private funds, or – more likely – taken out a loan. Their banker at home would send a promissory note to a banker in Leghorn. The Leghorn financier would contact his opposite number in Algiers, who would accept a draft for the money and pay the slave’s owner. Naturally, everyone took a substantial cut along the way.

  Everything could go wrong in this process, and frequently did. Banks could crash, bankers could die, crooked financiers could do a runner. Sometimes bankers in Barbary simply stalled for time hoping that the slave would vanish or die in the interim.

  In Mary’s case, however, the timing suggests that negotiations through Job Frogmartino’s bank had begun quite soon after her arrival in Algiers. If that were the case, her time in Barbary would have been spent in a comfortable safe house.

  The most intriguing question is: who was ‘Mary’? She obviously came from a family of means, unlike most of the fishing folk from The Cove.

  It is tempting to speculate that she may have been the wife of the wealthy William Gunter, but Frizell does not divulge.

  Whatever her true identity, her troubles would not be over when the money finally came through to Algiers. There were levies to be paid and palms to be greased. There would have been a 3.5 per cent port duty, after which gifts to the same amount had to be bestowed upon the Pasha and the corsair leader Ali Bichnin.

  After that, Mary would have been taken to the belediye or city hall, where the Cadi would give her the most coveted document in Barbary – the ‘free card’, a document that carefully noted her name, country, height, hair colour and distinguishing marks.

  Curiously, although this document recognised the bearer’s right to avoid slave work, it did not permit her actually to leave the city. To do so, the former slave had to pay a further 10 per cent levy for the ‘freedom of the gates’.

  After the voyage to Italy, Mary had to be kept in quarantine in Leghorn before she was finally allowed home.

  But at the end of it all, she probably shared the feelings of the Italian captive Filipo Pananti. When the poet was at last called aside from the other slaves and told ‘Ti star franco’ – you are free – he described it as ‘the sweetest voice that can possibly vibrate through the heart of man’.

  The second option was to earn your own ransom. We’ve already seen how men like Cathcart and Joyce were able to raise the cash through their own hard work. However, the international brokerage network offered other possibilities, some of them quite ingenious.

  For instance, a slave could arrange to sell his house back at home, or borrow against a future inheritance. Most astonishingly of all, there were cases in which slaves were actually released from Barbary and sent home to England – on assisted passages! – so they could raise their own ransom cash. Of course, a dreadful revenge would be taken on whoever had stood security for them in Algiers if they did not return with the money.

  Another possibility was a direct transfer – a swap of a Christian slave in Barbary for an Islamic prisoner in Christendom. However, this practice was discouraged with a high exchange rate in which three or four Muslim slaves were necessary to free a single Christian captive.

  This is how Emanuel d’Aranda and his three Flemish comrades eventually regained their liberty. Their families, unable to find the money to pay their ransom, instead offered to repatriate seven Islamic prisoners in Europe. Ali Bichnin reluctantly agreed, but insisted on a sweetener of nearly 3,000 Spanish dollars.

  The third main option – often the only option – for slaves seeking their freedom was to be ransomed through an act of charity. The most active agent was the Catholic Church, which had established two orders of friars to work for the redemption of slaves in Barbary. The first was the Trinitarians – the Order Of The Holy Trinity And Redemption Of Slaves – followed by the Mercedarians, or Order Of Our Lady Of Mercy. As the number of slaves grew, the Dominicans and Franciscans joined in. The scale of their operations was enormous. The Trinitarians (Father Dan’s order) are estimated to have ransomed as many as 140,000 slaves throughout their history. The Irish Trinitarians alone, with a base at the Black Abbey in Adare, ransomed 6,300 captives and lost forty of their number as martyrs.

  The Mercedarians were originally a military order, a tradition that prompted them to wear a white Crusader-style habit with a wide leather belt and chain to symbolise the sword they once carried. They are credited with rescuing up to 70,000 slaves.

  The Redemptionists – to give these Orders their umbrella title – would raise money through donations, religious levies and legacies. On arrival in Algiers, they would declare their ransom fund to the authorities and pay enormous levies and bribes before selecting the longest serving slaves for ransom. Clad in symbolic white cloaks, the freed men were marched with religious solemnity to the harbour.

  The Redemptionists have been criticised by modern historians for wildly exaggerating conditions in Barbary in order to raise funds. But amid all the revisionism, we should not lose sight of the basic brutality of slavery, and the heroism of these men, at least nine hundred of whom died in the course of their work.

  For the Protestant slaves from Ireland and England, charity was far less organised: usually a matter of church gate collections and parish fundraisers. Seven years before the Baltimore raid, in 1624, there had been a nationwide charity collection, but it had rapidly degenerated into a farce. The Navy had snatched most of the money to repay its debts.

  In 1628 the philanthropist, Sir Kenelm Digby, spent £1,650 of his own money to ransom slaves from Algiers, and in 1631 King Charles I authorised a nationwide charity collection in aid of slaves in Morocco.

  Documents from the era reveal something of the scale of the problem
. There seems nothing remarkable about the charity donations that were routinely dispensed to slaves; they simply crop up in the records, hidden among the more mundane cases of orphans and needy widows. And yet what tales of heartbreak must lie behind these dry ledger entries?

  These are just some examples:

  Fifteen shillings given for a minister, prisoner at Sallee.

  Sixpence alms given to a poor Algiers slave.

  One shilling alms given to John Williams that had been taken by Algerines.

  One shilling alms given to Robert Stout and John Boules with a pass from Algiers.

  Two shillings alms given to Henry Sheridan and John Price, two poor Algerine slaves.

  One shilling alms given to four poor Algerine slaves with a pass from Leghorn.

  One shilling alms given to Peter Steward and John Steward that had been slaves three years in Barbary.

  One shilling alms given to a poor Turkey slave that had his tongue cut out.

  One shilling alms given to Markis Thow Jenaki Nicula, who had been fourteen years a slave in Algiers and lately made his escape from thence.

  Option number four was to be redeemed by government treaty. Peace treaties would often include an amnesty for slaves of a particular nationality, but these pacts rarely lasted for long. The interesting question was why they were considered necessary at all. If all the Christian nations had combined forces, they could easily have defeated the Barbary menace forever. It seems that each nation cynically sought to gain a commercial edge by achieving immunity for its own shipping while the corsairs continued to attack its rivals.

  The problem of ransoming slaves through treaty was exactly the same dilemma that faces modern states dealing with terrorism. Paying money to ransom the Baltimore hostages would simply encourage further raids. Besides, Barbary piracy – like modern terrorism – was international. A nation could forge a treaty with one Barbary state, only to be plagued by the same corsairs who’d moved along the coast to another base.

  The families of English and Irish slaves tried every form of protest they could devise a bid to persuade their government to change its ‘no negotiation’ stance. In the 1620s, it was said that the road to the House of Commons was so packed with the weeping wives of Barbary slaves that the MPs could hardly make their way through.

  At one stage, three hundred Algiers captives sent a pitiable petition to the King, making ‘supplication to rigid death’ for their redemption. They were ‘groaning under a woeful and intolerable captivity’ and begged to be ransomed since most of them were still ‘in the May of their lives’.

  Supplications just as sad as this were being received regularly in the 1630s, but they fell for the most part on deaf ears.

  Two years after the Baltimore raid, a monumental decision was taken about the future of English slaves in Algiers – although it’s not clear whether the slaves themselves were aware of it.

  A document dated 1633 reveals that King Charles, responding to complaints from merchants in the West Country, commissioned an expert panel to report on the crisis. The experts began by restating the scale of the problem and by recognising ‘the great dishonour and loss already suffered’ by England. Their verdict:

  ‘[It is] both impossible and improvident to think of redeeming the captives by collection, retribution [i.e., compensation] or at all by ransom, for that would encourage the pirates …’

  Even if such action were taken, they estimated that ‘50m li [£50,000] would not redeem those already taken at the price mentioned by James Frizell’.

  The experts ‘declare[d] their judgment that there was no way but one (and it most necessary): to suppress them by force.’

  It wasn’t going to happen. No nation would manage to suppress the corsairs, by force or otherwise, for another two centuries.

  And so the miserable captives from Roaring Water Bay would continue to send petitions pleading for the State to ransom them, but they were simply shouting into the wind. The decision had already been taken at the highest level.

  The Baltimore slaves were on their own.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Apostasy Now

  Divers of the English slaves have turned Turks, through beating and hard usage —Edmund Cason, the English envoy sent to Algiers to free the Baltimore captives.

  THE phrase ‘to turn Turk’ has entered the English language as an all-purpose phrase to describe an act of defection or treachery. But in the 1600s it had a quite literal meaning: to embrace Islam and become a citizen of the Turkish Ottoman empire.

  When consul James Frizell reported in 1634 that forty of the original Baltimore captives had either died or ‘turned Turk per force’ he meant that the converts had been forced to change their religion through violence.

  This may have been the case: we have no evidence one way or the other. But it was always more convenient to believe that all ‘renegadoes’ had been forced into conversion through torture than to admit the truth that the reasons for apostasy were many and often complex.

  During fund-raising drives in Europe, congregations were shown pictures of scenes ostensibly set in Barbary but more inspired by Dante’s Inferno. Captives are strung up by the heels while tormentors with demonic faces beat or burn them into submission.

  Yet the Spanish monk Diego de Haëdo listed several possible reasons for conversion, including fear of slave life; experiencing temporary freedom; and a taste for the ‘vices of the flesh’.

  This is from the perspective of a Catholic friar, but at least it admits that apostasy could be voluntary.

  Other eyewitnesses confirm this. In 1622, a man named John Rawlins wrote that many Christians ‘very voluntarily’ became Muslims. And George Sandys, an Englishman, said that the Barbary authorities ‘compel no man’ to convert.

  Sadly, however, there are verified cases of conversion through force. The child slave Thomas Pellow was savagely beaten. And the English captive Joseph Pitts had a sadistic patron who attempted to convert him by slow, measured beatings, interrupted only by smoking breaks.

  ‘He declared that, in short, if I would not turn, he would beat me to death,’ Pitts wrote. ‘I roared out to feel the pain of his cruel strokes, but the more I cried, the more furiously he laid on, and to stop the noise of my crying, would stamp with his foot on my mouth.’

  Women were not excused such treatment. D’Aranda’s expert seamstress – the one who was chosen as handmaiden to the Pasha’s wife – was given ‘300 blows of the cudgel’ for refusing to convert.

  However, even Pitts was fair enough to concede that this treatment was not the norm. ‘In Algiers, I confess, it is not common,’ he wrote, ‘though I myself suffered enough from them, God knows.’

  Sometimes trickery was used instead. During a friendly debate on religion, James Cathcart was asked if he knew the Muslim affirmation of faith. When he quoted it, the Algerines instantly declared him a convert. It took a hefty bribe to extract himself from this tight spot.

  Yet the missionaries who loved to emphasise the violence and subterfuge couldn’t hide the fact that thousands of Christian freemen were becoming Muslims of their own volition.

  Throughout the early 1600s, as the opportunities for piracy dried up in Europe, there was a steady southward flow of migrants – mostly seamen and shipworkers – who became Muslims purely to advance their careers in the equal-opportunities atmosphere of Barbary, where they found an early version of the American Dream.

  These conversions were not all cynical and self-serving. There were many genuine believers, including the Italian renegado Ali Bichnin, who in 1622 built a mosque so beautiful that it still stands as a source of wonder today.

  The first recorded English-speaking convert was named as John Nelson in 1583. Among the hundreds who followed were some high-profile names, including an English consul, Benjamin Bishop.

  For a typical slave, conversion was rarely a sudden impulse, and more of a gradual process. At first the ‘pull’ of home was far more forceful than the ‘pull
’ of life in Algiers, but the former would grow steadily weaker and the latter would grow steadily stronger as new relationships were forged.

  In Europe, there were two common myths. The first was that slaves who converted acquired automatic freedom. This was not the case: they enjoyed some extra privileges, but they remained slaves.

  The second myth was that most owners of adult slaves wanted their slaves to change religion. In fact, the opposite was true, since any prospect of ransom cash would instantly evaporate.

  ‘I have known some Turks who, when they have perceived their slaves inclinable to turn, have forthwith sold them,’ Pitts wrote. ‘They are more in love with money than with the welfare of their slaves.’

  D’Aranda tells the story of a Pasha who was considerably annoyed when a thirteen-year-old boy he’d bought for three hundred ducats decided to convert to Islam.

  He says the boy had been ‘debauched by a Portuguese renegado for the sum of 40 ducats’ and adds:

  ‘The Portuguese renegado who had debauched the lad brought the boy before the Pasha, saying: ‘This Christian desires to renounce his religion.’ The Pasha was not well pleased because he had proferred his 300 ducats …’

  But the ruler had little choice but to accept the situation.

  Owners faced strong social pressure to grant freedom to a converted slave. As Pitts put it: ‘It is looked upon as an infamous thing … to deny them their liberty and to refuse to send them out handsomely into the world.’

  There was little patience with Christians who converted simply to avoid the consequences of a crime. Thomas Sanders, the English captive, tells of a Frenchman who was sentenced to death and turned Turk in a bid to save his own life.

  ‘Then said they unto him: “Now thou shalt die in the faith of a Turk” and so he did …’