The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  And upon this business that you sent here one of your gentlemen, named Edmund Cason, who took the names of all the Englishmen, except them that were turned Turks and put their names down in his register book …

  In Alger, the 15 of October 1646 &c.

  This registration process was not as easy as it sounded. Cason requested that ‘every owner of an English captive might come with his slave before me, and a scrivener [scribe] of this place, to declare his slave’s name, and what he had cost him the first penny, the which was regifted by us both; and further took the place he was of, and his age, and what ship he was taken in, and how many years past.’

  Joane Broadbrook’s patron was there, querulously demanding his 150 dollars back, and Ellen Hawkins’s master turned up to present his bill for just under 90 dollars.

  However, the honeymoon glow of the peace treaty was already starting to fade. It wasn’t long before Cason discovered that, in Barbary, things were never simple or straightforward.

  For a start, he suspected that he was being conned by the slave owners. ‘I was informed that divers Turks and Moors caused us to set down much more than their slaves cost, the which I did advise the Basha. He swore by the head of his Master, the Great Turk, I should pay not an asper more than they cost in the market, and the first sale when they were brought on shore.’

  Secondly, he had to negotiate his way through a tangle of levies, duties and outright bribes.

  It was standard practice in Algiers for negotiators to be asked to pay 10 per cent to the State on top of the official ransom price. In this case, the Pasha generously offered to give Cason a bulk discount. For him, it would be a mere six per cent. Cason no doubt gulped at the prospect of paying another £600 on top of the £10,000 fee, but he had no option but to accept.

  This was just the beginning of the rip-off. ‘Then also we agreed for his duties for exportation of the slaves, 20 pesos per man to the Basha, and to the officers, half duties; all of which comes to 31 dollars per slave, without agreement they would have cost about 50 dollars a man for charges.’

  When his register had been completed, Cason found that there was a total of more than 650 English slaves in Algiers, with another hundred serving on the Turkish fleet at Crete.

  Many more had converted to Islam, he reported, ‘through beating and hard usage’.

  There were also the children who were being raised in local households, although Cason generously conceded that they were well treated and kept ‘very gallant.’

  The envoy reported that many of the older boys who had changed religion had been spirited away to Alexandria and other ports to the east.

  There was a sense of acceptance that none of the slaves in these three latter categories could be recovered.

  Cason had the unenviable task of explaining the economics of the slave trade to Parliament:

  ‘The greatest part of the inhabitants had rather keep their slaves than permit them to be freed,’ he complained. ‘They come to much more per head than I expected … Here be many women and children which cost £50 per head, first penny, [whose investors] might sell them for an hundred.’

  Then there was the hierarchy of trades. ‘[M]asters of ships and carpenters, caulkers, coopers and sailmakers, surgeons and others … are here highly esteemed; so that they had come unto £32 per man, first penny, and they have rated them one with another, and the port charges is 61s.6d per head, so they will be about £38 per head put a ship board.’

  Cason tried to simplify things by negotiating a standard individual price that would take all these variations into account, but the slave owners were having none of it. ‘[T]hey would not consent … alleging that they were bought at several prices, and it would make trouble among them; the king hath promised I shall not be wronged.’

  Cason knew that he did not have enough money to redeem all the English slaves – only 250 or so. As winter drew in, he sent a heartfelt plea to London urging action before winter.

  ‘[Though] you suffer some inconvenience at home, it will give a great reputation to the better purpose of the peace … I beseech your Honours not to think that this redemption may be part one year and part another: and I desire your people may go home in summer, for I do assure you, their clothes are thin.’

  Cason’s pitiful lineup contained hundreds of captives from all over the British Isles … from Youghal in Ireland, from Hull in England, and from Edinburgh in Scotland. But from Baltimore, there were only two.

  With the Charles waiting to take away the first contingent, Cason faced the heartbreaking decision of selecting who should go, and who should remain.

  His orders had been to select according to class status, but Cason was either unable or unwilling to obey. ‘I thought to have taken away the better sort of people first, and the rest afterwards, the which I understood to be the command given to me,’ he wrote, ‘but it pleases God to order that I must take away those I could have for cloth, and leave the rest ’til afterwards … I think two good ships and a pinnace will be fit to fetch away the rest of the slaves.’

  London responded generously to the request, and an official document recorded later that ‘264 persons, men, women and children, are redeemed and sent home.’

  The report warmly praised Cason for his role in the mission. The treaty had been ‘long and difficult’, it added, but the money had been well utilised.

  Meanwhile, two more ships were preparing to sail for Algiers to bring home the remainder of the English slaves … all of them, that is, who actually wanted to come home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Homeward Bound

  WHEN Joane Broadbrook and Ellen Hawkins of Baltimore finally walked on board their homebound vessel, they were the sole representatives of the village that had been devastated by the raid of 1631.

  We can only guess their feelings as they stood on the deck watching the white triangular shape of Algiers recede into the distance. Joane was no doubt looking forward to being reunited with her husband Stephen – but what had happened to the two children who’d been abducted with her in 1631? What happened to her baby? Were they among the children who, according to Cason, were being raised ‘very gallant’ in local households? Had they been moved to the east, along with so many others? Had they died? All we know is that they do not appear on Cason’s list.

  As the children had probably grown up in Algiers, it is possible that they had chosen to stay there. Some other slave histories tell of heartbreaking farewell scenes by the dockside as a parent would sail home and a child would remain behind.

  And what about Ellen Hawkins? Was she overwhelmingly delighted to leave Algiers? Or in some small corner of her heart, did she harbour a sneaking doubt about the wisdom of the choice she’d made?

  We’ll never know. Just as we’ll never know the answer to the biggest question of all.

  What happened to the other men, women and children – more than a hundred of them – who were seized from their beds by Morat Rais’s corsairs on the night of June 20, 1631?

  What happened to Bessie Flood and her son? John Ryder and his wife? Mrs Tim Curlew? Anna the maid? Corent Croffine, Mrs Croffine and their daughter Miss Croffine? What happened to the seven Gunter boys or the six members of Stephen Pierse’s family? The entire Payne family, the entire Watts family? Mr and Mrs Evans with their cook, boy and maid? Did they all just fade away?

  We know the fate of only one of them: ‘Mary’, the unnamed woman who was ransomed via Leghorn just a few years after the raid.

  As for the rest, they appear to have vanished from history as mysteriously as the lost tribes in the deserts.

  It is unlikely that they all died in the course of fifteen years. Algiers was, at that particular time, one of the world’s healthiest places to live, and the majority of the Baltimore captives were young people – in fact, fifty of them were children and young boys. Most of the adults were young married couples. The average post-infancy life expectancy in the 1600s was around sixty.

  Admittedly
, some might have died ‘of pure want’ as d’Aranda put it, and others may have succumbed to the lash. Still others may have been spirited away from Algiers.

  But others stayed in the city and tried to make the best of their new lives. We know from Frizell’s records that many of the Baltimore captives embraced Islam, presumably with the intention of settling down permanently in Algiers.

  There seems a consensus among historians who have studied the 1631 raid that quite a number of the Baltimore captives remained behind voluntarily. John de Courcy Ireland, one of the authorities on the subject, has commented that ‘few of [them] showed much enthusiasm about returning’.

  Henry Barnby, in his meticulously researched article The Sack of Baltimore, talks of ‘half a hundred northern women passively and sensibly adapting to a new life in a new environment’ in Algiers.

  Why did this happen? I would suggest two likely explanations – one psychological and the other purely practical.

  I’ve already referred to the phenomenon known as Stockholm Syndrome, an unconscious response to the trauma of captivity. Without realising it, the victim begins to identify with the captor. This requires positive feelings between captive and captor. The captive must also develop negative feelings towards the authorities at home.

  Certain factors make the syndrome more likely to develop. These include duration of captivity, the degree of dependence upon the captor, the extent of abuse, the amount of communication, and the physical distance between captive and home. If we check off this list, we can see that it is almost tailor-made for the Baltimore captives.

  Duration: They were in captivity for fifteen years. One contemporary envoy, Sir Thomas Shirley, warned that the more time Englishmen spent in an Islamic country, the more they were likely to adopt the local manners and customs.

  Dependence: Their Algerine masters had total power over them, from food allocation and discipline right down to their basic right to live or die.

  Extent of abuse: While there were accounts of savage beatings, it seems that most private slaves in domestic employ were reasonably well treated.

  Communication: Domestic slaves were treated like family members and there are numerous accounts of lengthy dialogues and strong relationships between masters and slaves.

  Distance between the captor and any assisting authorities: The Baltimore captives were many miles from their homeland and, as we have seen from Frizell’s correspondence, there was little positive feedback from home.

  This final factor seems likely to have been one of the most powerful driving forces for the syndrome. We don’t know whether the Baltimore slaves felt anger towards the authorities who had abandoned them to their fate for fifteen long years, but it would have been no surprise if they had felt betrayed and abandoned. A greedy and corrupt Navy had failed to do its duty to protect them; it had failed to pursue Morat’s ship; and the Government’s apparent indifference to their plight had prompted William Gunter to go to extraordinary lengths to plead his case. All the signs of abandonment were there. For a decade and a half, they were offered no hope. If some of the captives had given up in angry despair, it would have been perfectly understandable.

  The slave James Cathcart voiced this emotion in an uncharacteristic outburst directed towards his countrymen at home: ‘No notice whatever [has been] taken of us for years … Thou art the people that now leave us neglected, buried in oblivion in the dungeons of Algiers, suffering the most ignominious captivity, when [a] paltry sum … would have redeemed us years ago.’

  One common symptom of Stockholm Syndrome is that the captive appears to adopt a different personality, a ‘pseudo-identity’ which becomes harder and harder to discard with time.

  Is this what happened to some of the Baltimore slaves? Did captives like Bessie Flood, Corent Croffine and Stephen Pierce adapt to the stress of their new lives by forging new personalities sympathetic to Islam and Algiers – personalities they were incapable of discarding when Cason’s ship sailed in to their rescue?

  No-one knows, but it is a fact that some long-term hostages will refuse to allow themselves to be rescued and, in extreme cases, will actually join their captors in resisting any attempts to free them.

  The English slave Joseph Pitts confessed that he suffered an agonising internal conflict when he had the chance of freedom. He described this battle between his two personalities in Biblical terms: ‘The devil was very busy with me, tempting me to lay aside all thoughts of escape and to return to Algiers … I was very melancholy.’

  Bearing this in mind, it does not seem beyond possibility that some of the Baltimore people simply turned away from the prospect of rescue. There was no need to make a conscious decision: all that was needed was to do nothing.

  There were also many sound, practical reasons why the Baltimore captives might not have wanted to go home.

  The most obvious reason is that they had entered into new relationships and perhaps had children with local partners. In such circumstances, it would have been extremely difficult to return home.

  There are parallels to illustrate this. The historian Peter Earle refers to a 1604 case of two young women who were enslaved in separate incidents. One was held by Islamic corsairs in Barbary, the other by Christian slavers in Malta. Their fathers organised a direct exchange, but one of the women refused to participate. She had married and settled in her new home and did not want to return.

  But perhaps the best parallel is the eighteenth-century case of Mary Jemison, the Northern Ireland emigrant girl who was abducted in Pennsylvania at the age of fifteen. Adopted by the peaceful Seneca tribe, Mary was so impressed by their culture and lifestyle that she decided to stay with them even when offered the prospect of freedom.

  ‘I was ever considered and treated by them as a real sister, the same as though I had been born of their mother,’ she wrote later. ‘… I had no particular hardships to endure.’

  Mary married twice, had a total of nine children and became a prosperous landowner. But the main reason she refused to return was that ‘I had got a large family of Indian children that I must take with me; and that, if I should be so fortunate as to find my relatives, they would despise them, if not myself, and treat us as enemies, or, at least, with a degree of cold indifference, which I thought I could not endure.’ [My italics].

  Wise Mary Jamison had put a perceptive finger right on the centre of the problem. She could never return to the world she had left behind, because it had changed, and she had changed. If she went back, she would be treated with hostility and suspicion or, at the very least, pitied and patronised. Perhaps the worst treatment of all would be ‘cold indifference’, the silent shunning of anyone who had escaped, however unwillingly, to a different culture. She would always be an outsider.

  The same thoughts must have crossed the minds of the Baltimore women who had been torn away from their husbands in 1631. For captives like Mrs Alex Pumery these unbearable anxieties must have mingled with the guilt that is part of a hostage’s burden. How could they return and face their husbands, their sweethearts, their parents, after fifteen years of sleeping with the enemy – sometimes figuratively, but often literally?

  How could a woman like Bessie Flood explain, in the cold light of a Puritan church, how she had felt sincerely drawn towards the teachings of Islam, or how she had taken to wearing Turkish dress so happily that she would forever feel naked without her veil?

  Some of the cultural rifts were beyond healing. How, for instance, could the pious neighbours back home be expected to understand that a woman remained respectable and marriageable after spending years as a harem concubine? For most people, this prospect would have been impossible to face.

  Even without such complications, life for a returning captive was never easy. In the 1600s, ransomed Barbary captives were referred to as ‘poor slaves’, forced to exist on handouts, and even expected to wear shackles to re-enact their experiences at fundraising events. Some complained that the chains they wore in liberty were, liter
ally, heavier than the ones they’d borne in captivity.

  So we can imagine captives like John Ryder or Bessie Flood glancing at Cason’s ship, and then back towards Algiers, in an agony of indecision. The point hardly needs to be made that life in this ancient Mediterranean town was, in many ways, superior to life in rainy, wind-blasted Baltimore. How many men, now accustomed to solid and comfortable homes in Algiers, recalled their draughty damp-ridden shacks in The Cove and gave an involuntary shiver? How many women, now used to being awakened by the bright African sun chasing the coloured light around their silk-draped bedrooms, felt like returning to a land where the sun was a mere ghost in a leaden grey sky?

  For those women who had laboured in the fish factory or led lives of drudgery as domestic servants, slave life would actually have been an improvement. Here, there was fresh running water; it did not have to be humped from springs in slopping buckets. Here, even the chore of laundry was a reasonably pleasant social activity carried out in a roof garden where clothes would dry rapidly in the warm sun.

  There may also have been some dramatic reversals of fortune since 1631. Mrs Harris’s domestic maid might have married a well-to-do merchant and become much wealthier than her former mistress. The former fisherman Tom Paine might have become a wealthy captain in his own right; Bessie Flood might have built up a lucrative business selling tobacco. Who knows? Anything was possible in this fluid city where the last could rapidly become first. Whatever way the dice had rolled, few of these people would have wanted to return to a bleak life of shovelling salt or scraping fish-scales.