The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  Perhaps the most colourful of such escapes was that of Ida McDonell, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the British consul in Algiers, during an English blockade of the city. Ida disguised herself as a midshipman and slipped out to the English fleet one step ahead of the lustful Dey, who (you may recall) had earmarked her for his personal harem.

  Dey Ali Khoja had thrown the consul into jail and was keeping his family as hostages. However, naval officers manage to disguise the mother and daughter and sneak them out to the ships one by one. During the final run the consul’s baby was sedated by a surgeon and hidden in a basket of fruit. But just as the harbour sentry inspected the bundle, the baby began crying and the escapers were hauled before the Dey. In an uncharacteristic display of compassion, the ruler let the child go.

  Another option for escape was to try to hijack a local vessel. The Algerines were well aware of this risk and made sure their craft had their rudders removed while in port.

  However, mass breakouts of this type did happen. Seventy captives obtained their freedom by hijacking a galley that was being prepared for action. They nearly didn’t make it:

  ‘[A]t dead of night they got down through the sewer into the port: but the dogs, which are there very numerous, ran barking at them; some they killed with clubs and stones. At this noise, those who were on guard, as well ashore as in the ships, bawled out with all their might: ‘Christians! Christians!”

  The escapers stormed the boat and overthrew the guard, only to find the vessel tangled by the ropes of other craft nearby. With the guards in hot pursuit, they jumped into the shallow water, lifted the boat on their shoulders, and carried it clear of the cables into the open sea. All seventy managed to reach safety in Majorca.

  While escape by sea was regarded as dangerous, escape by the landward route was almost suicidal. Walls of up to 40 ft high protected the triangular city, and blind desert warriors, renowned for their sharp hearing, helped to guard its five massive gates at night. Even if they avoided the Algerine patrols and the ferocious Berber tribesmen, they would often succumb to hunger, thirst or disease.

  Occasionally someone would make it, trekking across the desert by night and subsisting on roots and snails. But most failed dismally, and were dragged back to Algiers filthy and stinking (they’d often escaped by hiding in the toilet drains) to face the dire consequences.

  Joseph Pitts witnessed one recaptured fugitive suffer a horrendous punishment. The man’s feet were tied by rope to a mule and he was dragged for hours along the stony streets before being burned at the Bab-el-Oued.

  Others would be sentenced to extended beatings to the feet, buttocks and stomach. The sight of these bruised and battered survivors hauling their punitively heavy shackles to work would be enough to make even the most courageous captive think twice before trying to escape.

  Despite all the odds, despite the horrendous penalties, there were those who never gave up. Among those heroes, one man stands out as an example of irrepressible courage. A Spaniard named Miguel, he made four daring escape attempts during his five years of captivity in Algiers and never once implicated his co-conspirators.

  Although he was only in his late twenties, he was already a celebrated war hero by the time corsairs swooped on his galley ship El Sol near the coast of Catalonia in 1575.

  The following year he made his first bid for freedom. He was heading towards Oran with a band of fugitive slaves when their local guide left them in the lurch. The bedraggled group was forced to limp back to Algiers.

  Next year, Miguel worked out a better plan. He would find a secure hiding place and lie low for several months until the hue and cry died down, then make a rendezvous on the coast with a boat captained by his brother. The plan worked well; Miguel and his co-conspirators hid in a grotto cave for five months until they were betrayed by a renegado.

  A year later, Miguel was caught in a third escape plan and sentenced to a fatal two thousand strokes of the bastinado. The beating was never administered.

  In his final escape attempt, Miguel plotted to take command of a galley and flee with sixty other slaves to Spain. Again, he was thwarted by a traitor and was about to be shipped off in irons to Constantinople when two friars appeared with his ransom money, half of which had been donated by his compatriots in Algiers.

  Miguel returned to Spain where he tried to resume his previous career as a writer. But his style was regarded as passé, and it wasn’t until after his death that Miguel de Cervantes became famous for a novel that he had ‘hatched in a prison’ in Algiers – the book we now know as Don Quixote.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Bagnio Days, Bagnio Nights

  For most of the Baltimore slaves, Algiers was a giant prison and all life centred on the bagnios. Much has been written about these unique Barbary gulags. Depending on your point of view, they were either hellholes or ‘universities for life’; either noisy, smelly dives, or the only place in town you could order a decent pork sausage.

  Because these massive jails played a dual role in Algiers. By night they kept the captives stacked up in their honeycombed beds like so many worker bees. At dawn the slaves buzzed off on their allotted tasks and the bagnio changed character to become a social centre – a recreational village of taverns, barbershops and kebab houses. Here, according to Emanuel d’Aranda, the best conversation was to be enjoyed as renegade sailors gathered around the bar to drink and swap seagoing yarns. D’Aranda had experienced the bagnio as a slave; once freed, he chose to return there as a customer.

  However pleasant the place seemed to a free man, it was a different story for the slaves when darkness fell and the jail reverted to its true role.

  James Cathcart recorded the dramatic moment of transition:

  ‘The Guardian called out in a most tremendous tone … “We are closing the gate!” when immediately emerged from the taverns a motley crew of Turks, Moors, Arabs and even some Jews, all intoxicated, some half naked, having sold or pawned their clothes to the Christian tavern keepers for liquor, others singing or shouting, some with drawn swords swearing they would kill the first person that offended them … [T]he gates of the prison were then shut for the night.’

  In this chapter will try to recreate the life and colour of the bagnio through the eyes of two witnesses – the French ambassador D’Arvieux, and the wide-eyed, open-eared Flemish slave D’Aranda, who let nothing escape his notice.

  Let’s begin by allowing D’Arvieux to guide us into a typical bagnio:

  ‘The main bagnios are built uniformly, with little difference between them,’ he says. ‘As you enter, you find yourself in a large square or rectangular courtyard with stalls all around – these are used by the slaves to keep their taverns. The rear of these stores is separated into several small rooms, mostly occupied by the priests of different nations for the care of the slaves.

  ‘They are rented by the Guardian Bachi, or the concierge of the bagnio. You’re perfectly safe inside this place, and you have complete freedom to come and go as you please. The main gate opens at dawn and closes very late at night.

  ‘The courtyard has plenty of tables, and they’re always filled with soldiers, seamen and other idle and shiftless types who go there to drink wine, sing, smoke or make deals …’

  The taverns are run by slaves who pay protection money to the Guardian Bachi: ‘He earns a considerable revenue from allowing the slaves to keep shops where they sell alcohol, food, tobacco and suchlike.’

  The only comfort for slaves lay in their religion, which the authorities permitted to be practised openly in the bagnio. ‘There’s a chapel and a room which is home to the priest, who says Mass before they are led to work at daybreak,’ explains D’Arvieux.

  It is almost certain that many of John Ryder’s fellow slaves from Baltimore would have ended up in the possession of Ali Bichnin, the sardonic and cynical corsair admiral. Immensely rich, the Italian renegado had hundreds of slaves which he kept in his own private bagnio – a vast complex with stout walls s
mothered in climbing vines. When d’Aranda was there in the early 1640s, it contained more than 550 Christian captives who spoke twenty-two different languages.

  Bichnin once demonstrated the extent of his slave empire by holding a banquet at his country home a considerable distance from Algiers. The food was plated up in the city centre and passed out, hand to hand, by an unbroken human chain comprised solely of his slaves.

  Bichnin’s attitude to his charges was Darwinian. He refused to feed them, reckoning that the fittest would survive, and the others weren’t worth keeping anyway. The captives had to moonlight or scavenge in their time off, either on Fridays or in the few hours between quitting time and sunset lockup.

  D’Aranda marvelled at how the slaves rose to this challenge. Cottage industries grew up and flourished.

  ‘There were some employed themselves in footing stockings and others got their livelihood by some kind of games,’ d’Aranda recalled, ‘but the profession most of us most used was stealing. Every night there was publicly sold what had been stolen the day before …’

  The Algerines imposed a curious double standard. In theory, stealing was a serious offence for which a man could have his hands amputated. In practice, as D’Arvieux reported, ‘they have only a few blows of a stick to fear, for everyone knows that all Christian slaves are professional thieves’.

  There was even a grudging admiration for the best scams and a contempt for moral scruples. We’ve already seen how Bichnin laughed off an attempt by an Italian slave to sell his galley anchor; and on another occasion he sneered at a slave who passed up on a chance for freedom by returning a diamond he had found.

  And so, as dusk fell on Algiers, hundreds of slaves would scurry through the narrow alleyways like plague rats, shoplifting, swiping, eating stolen food on the run and filching anything that wasn’t nailed down. After nightfall those slaves who weren’t confined to the bagnios went burgling.

  Other slaves dreamed up elaborate con tricks. The cleverest conman of all was Fontimama, the irrepressible Italian sparrow who’d tried to sell the anchor. He worked so many rackets that he was able to feed not only himself, but also his friends (including d’Aranda) with delicacies that would ‘set their jawbones a-grinding’.

  One morning in the bagnio, Fontimama dreamed up a brilliant scam that could be used only once. He was so confident that he invited his accomplice to dine with him that night on the proceeds.

  The pair set off towards the street where the moneychangers operated. Fontimama carried with him two Spanish half-dollars – one a genuine coin and the other an obvious counterfeit. He showed the good coin to the first moneychanger and asked him to change it for low-value Algerine aspers. The businessman emptied the aspers in a heap and began counting them out, with Fontimama obligingly helping him.

  After the aspers were pushed across the table, Fontimama offered him the fake half dollar in payment. The banker spotted the switch instantly. But this had simply been a decoy ruse. What the moneychanger hadn’t noticed was that a good proportion of the aspers had stuck to Fontimama’s fingers.

  The racket continued until noon when, as d’Aranda recalls, ‘Fontimama returned to the bagnio with a couple of pullets and money enough to procure three skins full of wine’.

  D’Aranda knew another long-term slave, a French cavalier, who was always immaculately dressed and ate handsomely. In fact, he indulged in a round of endless credit, borrowing money from one French renegado and repaying it with a loan from another. In any ordinary society this scam would soon have collapsed, but Algiers was no ordinary society. ‘[T]he renegadoes being soldiers and being always abroad at wars by sea and land, it happened that some of his creditors died every year and they, having no relations, wives or children, the debt was paid at their deaths,’ d’Aranda explains.

  It was difficult enough for able-bodied slaves to get enough food to survive. But the same harsh rule applied to those who were handicapped by age or disability.

  D’Aranda tells of an eighty-year-old Russian slave who survived on the tips he earned from cleaning the bagnio toilets. Another slave from Hamburg had lost an arm and was left to starve. When someone lent him a half-dollar, he invested the money in the equipment for a game of ninepin bowls, which he hired out to the local children and so ‘lived pretty well’.

  One slave who’d been penalised with a 100 foot chain wrote letters home for his illiterate countrymen without any charge except the occasional drink. This magnanimous offer attracted so many grateful customers that he built up a large amount of tavern credit, which he converted into cash for food.

  Other slaves ‘frequented certain houses where they daily carried water and fetched away the dirt,’ writes d’Aranda.

  Those slaves who were unable to moonlight or scavenge found that the ruthless Ali Bichnin was not bluffing. In d’Aranda’s time, no less than twenty English slaves died ‘of pure want’.

  D’Aranda was not sympathetic. He claimed that all nations made ‘some sort of shift to live’ except the English, who wasted their time quarrelling with each other.

  At the top of Bichnin’s scale of instant evolution were the slaves who’d prospered so well that they could live relatively normal lives. Not for them the dawn assembly and the wretched march to work. Instead, they could bribe the Guardian Basha and devote themselves to the serious business of making money.

  The most profitable businesses were tavern keeping, tobacco selling and the black economy. Fencing stolen or smuggled goods was hugely profitable. Each evening the hot material would be displayed in the prison yard and snapped up at keen prices.

  Tobacco selling was also a big moneyspinner: we’ve seen how William Okeley’s trade earned him a trunkful of cash. Other slaves bought shiploads of tobacco at cheap rates in Spain and resold them in Algiers.

  Tavern keeping was the best business of all, but it involved special problems. The owners were obliged to keep orderly houses, but could not physically restrain drunken locals, since it was a capital offence for any Christian to raise his hand against a ‘Turk’. One slave, Rodrigo, solved this dilemma with an ingenious method.

  ‘[W]hen the drunken Turks drew their knives,’ writes d’Aranda, ‘Rodrigo came armed with a ladder and, getting the Turks’ heads between the rounds, led them all along.’

  A little lower down the hierarchy of success in the bagnios were the skilled workers. A special bagnio, more like an open prison, was used for specialists like gunsmiths and shipworkers.

  Among D’Aranda’s comrades at Bichnin’s bagnio were six enslaved surgeons ‘who got much money, for they were sent for by the citizens’. Unfortunately they were big spenders who rapidly blew their earnings.

  The walls of the Algiers bagnios embraced much human misery … but they also contained a vibrant, exciting international community, with cookhouses where the food was tasty and varied, alehouses where the wine was of the highest quality, and conversation that never grew dull.

  Some locals would come here to enjoy the illicit thrill of eating pork sausages. The American slave John Foss once asked an Algerine customer if he realised what he was eating. ‘Hold your tongue,’ the man replied. ‘If you do not tell me, then I shall not know.’

  For his part, Emmanuel d’Aranda enjoyed the banter in the tavernas even after he regained his freedom. He would join his former comrades in discourse, or simply let the conversation wash over him like waves from the ocean:

  ‘[T]here would always be some relating their adventures at sea: the Dutch, on what passed in the East Indies, Japan or China; the Danes and Hamburgers at the whale fishing in Greenland, what time of the year the sun appears in Iceland, and when their six-months night is at an end; or if such conversation pleased not, I went among the Spaniards who covered the dominions of their Kings as they pleased, or talked of the delicacies of Mexico or the wealth of Peru, or if I went among the French we had news from New France, Canada, Virginy; for most of the slaves were people some way related to the sea.’

  D’
Aranda felt he had learned valuable life lessons in the bagnios. ‘[It] may be seen what mistress necessity is,’ he mused, ‘and that there can be no better university to teach men to shift for their livelihood than one of the bagnios of Algiers.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Habituated To Bondage

  Meanwhile, consul James Frizell had been sinking ever deeper into depression. At his wits’ end, he had penned a direct plea to King Charles.

  To the King’s most excellent Majesty.

  The humble petition of

  James Frizell on behalf of himself and 800 of Your Majesty’s subjects now slaves in Algier.

  Most humbly showing:

  That the unfortunate and miserable prisoners and slaves having been taken and being still detained in a most lamentable condition by reason of breaking of the peace formerly made and confirmed by Sir Thomas Roe, then ambassador at Constantinople, betwixt Your Majesty’s subjects and the Corsari [corsairs] of Algier, have at divers times requested and long hoped for their redemption of their miserable bondage. But same as not redeemed, no fruits of Your Majesty’s intended clemency towards them.

  Frizell’s tetchy letter showed how hopeless the situation had become by 1634, when the Baltimore captives marked their third year in captivity, and the number of English slaves in Algiers had more than doubled. It was plain that the prospect of release was receding, and bleak despair was setting in.

  Frizell had concluded by pleading with the King to appoint commissioners to ‘find out some ways and means for the preservation and deliverance of Your Majesty’s miserably suffering subjects.’