The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  And so they watched Edmund Cason’s rescue ship retreat into the blue distance, knowing that they had permanently severed the umbilical cord to their former lives and their former identities. There would be no second chance, no going back on their choice.

  Then, no doubt, they returned to their homes in Algiers, embraced their lovers and kissed their children, and accepted the new destiny they had chosen.

  We’ve discussed many possible reasons for this decision, but they can all be summed up in the words of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, an Englishwoman who visited the Turkish Empire about seventy years later. She confessed – heretically for the age – that she felt drawn towards the Islamic culture and enjoyed the unhurried lifestyle of Constantinople in which leisure time was agreeably passed ‘in music, gardens, wine and delicate eating’.

  ‘I am almost of the opinion,’ she concluded wistfully, ‘that they have a right notion of life.’

  Perhaps the Baltimore captives simply agreed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The Legacy Of Baltimore

  OF COURSE, the men, women and children of Baltimore did not disappear. Their legacy remains among the children of Algiers, among whom there must be some of the descendants of the 107 captives who were torn from their beds on the night of June 20, 1631. It is comforting to think that, in some newly-married Algerian bride of today, there are traces of the genes of Mrs Tim Curlew or some other bride from Roaring Water Bay; and that when some proud Islamic father holds his newborn baby up against the same stars that witnessed the Sack of Baltimore, his child’s veins are coursing with the blood of northern fathers like John Ryder whose children were ripped away from them in the Badistan slave market.

  There’s a facetious story to illustrate this. The eminent historian John de Courcy Ireland, an authority on the Baltimore raid, was strolling through Algiers with a group of local academics when they noticed a child with striking red hair.

  ‘That’s because your ancestors came to Algiers,’ one of them joked.

  ‘No,’ countered the Irish historian. ‘That’s because your ancestors came to Baltimore.’

  The Baltimore captives weren’t the only ones who left a blood legacy. Their captor, the rapacious arch-pirate Morat Rais, may also have left a remarkable genetic inheritance.

  First a brief word about the fate of Morat himself. The former Jan Jansen appears to have continued to prosper in his predatory trade, moving back and forth between Sallee and Algiers. In the autumn of 1631, only a hundred days after the raid, he crops up again in the correspondence of the English envoy John Harrison. With almost incredible brass neck, Morat complains to London that two English pirates, Maddick and Wye, had taken a ship of Sallee and sold its crew as slaves. Morat the master slave-trader refers to Sallee’s peace treaty with London and fumes that the English behaved ‘treacherously’. This was coming from the man who had personally conducted the greatest ever slave raid on English territory, only a few weeks beforehand. Yet the tone of Harrison’s letter is conciliatory and it is possible he did not realise that his friend ‘Captain John’ was one and the same person as the ‘Matthew Rice’ who the English blamed for the raid on Baltimore.

  Four years later, in 1635, Morat crops up again in less self-righteous mood – his time in the memoirs of the priest Father Pierre Dan. Morat appears to have moved temporarily back to Algiers with his North African wife, and, although he must have been in his mid-sixties, he seems to have embarked on yet another corsair mission.

  While his wife was awaiting his return, she received devastating news. Father Dan actually witnessed the drama:

  ‘I saw more than a hundred women hurrying helter-skelter through the streets to commiserate with the wife of that renegado and corsair [Morat] … they tried to outdo each other in demonstrations of sorrow and woe, shedding tears that were either real or forced, since that is their custom.’

  The pirate mastermind had been captured by his most dreaded enemies – the Christian corsairs of Malta.

  Yet the wily Morat managed to extract himself from this situation – presumably by paying an enormous ransom – and by 1638 the records show Morat back in Morocco and enjoying the high life. He had set up home at a castle in El-Oualidiya, a pleasant seaside resort thirty miles north of Sallee. Typically for Morat, he had managed to persuade someone else to pay for his retirement home:

  ‘This haven, he during his residence there took special notice of,’ said one English dispatch, ‘and, understanding it a place probably advantageous to the [Moroccan] King, persuaded him to fortify it.’

  We have a snapshot of him in his new home a couple of years later, in 1640. A new Dutch consul arrived, bringing with him Morat’s adult daughter Lysbeth, one of the children he’d left behind in Haarlem.

  Their reunion at Morat’s castle left everyone moved with emotion. When Lysbeth arrived, Morat ‘was seated in great pomp on a carpet, with silk cushions, the servants all round him.’ Both burst into tears and they spent some time engrossed in conversation. Yet Morat remained formally aloof and ‘took his leave in the manner of royalty’.

  Morat seemed keen for his daughter to settle down in Morocco, for she stayed with him for eight months at his country residence. However, she did not take to life in North Africa and decided to return home. Perhaps, as in many family reunions, the dream seemed much more attractive than the reality.

  And so Morat settled back into his comfortable retirement, at times, no doubt, gazing wistfully over the horizon of the vast ocean he had once roamed at will with his corsairs.

  We don’t know how Morat died. One source maintained that ‘his end was very bad’, but left no further details. A bad end was always a possibility in the stormy politics of Morocco. But some modern historians believe it was simply an invention, a conventional moral ending to serve as a warning to others.

  What we do know is that Morat’s two sons were no more content with life in Barbary than their half-sister Lysbeth. Anthony Jansen, born in 1607, and his brother Abraham Jansen both emigrated to America. In the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (later New York City) their surname was so common that they adopted the suffix Van Salee (‘from Sallee’) and under this name they founded several important family dynasties. According to a Frontline TV documentary aired by the Public Service Broadcasting Network in the USA, Anthony and Abraham became ‘the ancestors of the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Humphrey Bogart’.

  Little is known of Anthony’s and Abraham’s mother except that she was a concubine of Morat’s. Tradition says she was Moroccan. Against this, it has been pointed out that Anthony Jansen was born more than a decade before Morat settled in Morocco; however, this evidence in itself does not prove or disprove anything. It seems that the two sons were dark skinned, since they were classed in contemporary documents as ‘mulatto farbig’ (swarthy mixed race) or by the catch-all term ‘Turk’.

  The documentary named actor Humphrey Bogart and the music icon John Hammond as Van Salee descendants. Hammond, whose mother was a Vanderbilt, is famous as the producer who first recognised the talents of Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan; perhaps he had inherited Morat’s nose for commercial success. As for Bogart, it seems fitting that he was always most at home in the movie role of a sea captain operating on the fringes of the law.

  Anthony and Abraham were interesting characters in their own right.

  According to the PBS documentary, Abraham had a love child with an unknown black woman and one of their descendants – John Van Salee De Grasse, born in 1825 – became the first black man in the USA to be formally educated as a medical doctor.

  Anthony Jansen Van Salee warrants a special place in New York history as the first man to settle in Brooklyn; it is also probable that the original name of Coney Island (‘Turk’s Island’) referred to him.

  When the Van Salees arrived in Manhattan Island in 1630 – a mere four years after Peter Minuit famously bought the island for trinkets worth $24 – they found a semi-deserted rural se
ttlement with no hint of its future pivotal role. Anthony was able to obtain large tracts of land in the lower island. He had a fine anchorage where, it was said, questionable ships would come and go in the dead of night. Since Anthony seemed to have no shortage of money, there is an intriguing theory that he was actually acting as a front man for his father Morat, who was gradually shifting the family fortune to the New World.

  Whatever the reason, Anthony became financially secure. Socially, he had more of a problem fitting in to the strait-laced New Amsterdam society with his free-spirited Dutch wife Grietje, a former barmaid whom he’d married during the voyage out. Anthony was only twenty-three, but Grietje, at twenty-eight, was already a widow and a source of some scandal in the Netherlands.

  Anthony seems to have been an irascible individual who would quarrel and fire off a lawsuit at the drop of a hat. Grietje erred in the opposite extreme, becoming so intimate with the island’s menfolk that she has been described by one historian as ‘Manhattan’s first and most famous prostitute’. In 1639 they were denounced as slanderous and troublesome and asked to leave.

  They established a 200-acre farm called ‘Turk’s Plantation’ on western Long Island and became the first settlers in present-day Brooklyn. Their increasing prosperity mirrored that of the colony, which was renamed New York with English rule in 1674. Anthony and Grietje had four daughters and two sons: they made good marriages and launched several New York family dynasties whose lines continue today. Grietje died at the age of sixty-seven. Anthony remarried in his early sixties and died in 1676. Intriguingly, his legacy included a beautiful copy of the Koran, an indication to some that he had secretly maintained his Islamic faith. The volume survives to this day.

  So much for Morat’s line in New York. But what about the main town in our story – Baltimore?

  The raid had delivered a crushing blow to the once-prosperous port. It seems that most of the survivors, dreading another invasion, moved further inland to establish a new colony at Skibbereen.

  Thus began Baltimore’s long process of decline. In 1745, exactly one hundred years after Cason’s first expedition, historian Charles Smith wrote: ‘Baltimore never recovered itself … it is now a poor, decayed fishing town, with not one tolerable house in it.’

  Another report in the 1700s described it as a ‘poor shrunken village’. One visitor sniffed that it was a miserable collection of huts which had no basis to claim urban status.

  By 1800, not a single resident had means to pay local taxes and Baltimore was declared a rotten borough, unable to justify its own MPs in Parliament.

  By 1837 there was a temporary recovery. The town had a thriving port and its 460 inhabitants had invested in a new schoolhouse. One report said it was ‘increasing rapidly in size and importance.’

  Then came the Great Hunger. As the bodies piled up in mass graves, the famine ships Melvina and Leviathan regularly left Baltimore for New Brunswick with thousands of refugees.

  In the 1860s a German newsman, Paul Julius Reuter, scooped his rivals in Europe by tossing news despatches into the sea in sealed canisters as transatlantic ships passed Fastnet. Retrieved by fishermen, the despatches were rowed to Baltimore and telegraphed to London. Using this means, Reuter was twenty-four hours ahead with the news of Lincoln’s assassination – and for one brief, glorious moment, Baltimore became the nerve centre of news for the entire western world.

  By 1876, it was back in the doldrums. ‘Baltimore never recovered from the shock of the Algerine invasion,’ wrote Dr Dan Donovan. ‘Its energies became paralysed, its wealth and prosperity vanished.’

  Another nineteenth-century historian, J. E. O’Mahony, agreed. ‘Agony upon agony, sorrow upon sorrow ensued,’ he wrote dolefully.

  Fishing and small-scale shipbuilding helped Baltimore to survive until the tourist boom of the modern era, when a new breed of ‘invader’ began to arrive, sailing luxury yachts instead of warships, and carrying gold credit cards instead of pirate bullion. Sadly, their insatiable demand for property in beautiful Roaring Water Bay has forced the indigenous young people out of Baltimore even more effectively than Morat managed to do in 1631.

  The Algerine slave trade left another type of legacy: the opening of Northern Europe to Islamic influences. Returning captives like Ellen Hawkins, Joane Broadbrook and thousands of others must have brought back tales of an equal-opportunity society in which wealth and status was determined by ability rather than by accident of birth. These were dangerous ideas. For instance, Islamist ideals of equality may have indirectly influenced the creators of the American Declaration of Independence.

  Eastern learning shook western science to its foundations. European scholars pored through Islamic writings, gaining new insights into chemistry, mathematics, astronomy and medicine. Again, this was dangerous knowledge. The English academic Dr Henry Stubbe (1632-1676), who openly admitted his debt to Islamic teachings, had his work suppressed and was jailed for heresy.

  Another academic who studied the experimental work of Islamic scientists went on to create the West’s first objective, verifiable ‘scientific method’ and became a major influence on the great astronomer Sir Isaac Newton. He was Robert Boyle, the famous chemist … and the son of Richard Boyle, the Great Earl Of Cork.

  For me, the most intriguing twist in our tale began back in the 1630s. It has been suggested that the raid was the main factor that provoked King Charles I to revive the ancient Ship Money tax in 1634. This tax, designed to equip warships, was normally imposed on coastal towns, but Charles extended it to inland communities. Levied in Parliament’s absence, this ‘taxation without representation’ provoked a legal challenge by John Hampden (Oliver Cromwell’s cousin) and became a test case to decide the extent of the King’s power. Hampden lost by a narrow margin – and left a deeply divided nation headed on an almost inevitable course towards civil war.

  Historian W. J. Kingston was convinced that this was one of the ‘important results’ of the Baltimore raid: ‘Charles I, fearing such raids might be repeated … proceeded to levy Ship Money to equip his Navy, which produced such opposition that it eventually led to the Civil War in England, the beheading of Charles himself, and the raising of Cromwell to power as Protector of the English Commonwealth.’

  We could take this further. The establishment of a democracy, however briefly, in England showed that it was possible to do the same thing elsewhere, in America and in France. When he signed the first writ for Ship Money, Charles I effectively signed his own death warrant – and from that turbulent era onward, no autocrat in Europe would be able to sleep comfortably in his bed.

  It would be wrong to overemphasise the role of the Baltimore incident in the great march towards freedom. No doubt this process would have happened anyway.

  And yet …

  And yet, I like to think that there is a sense in which the flames that leapt high over the thatched roofs of Baltimore on the night of 20 June 1631 sent out a bright spark that helped to light the flaming torch of democracy.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The Three Knights

  The fact that they [the corsairs] were given local assistance and that the captives were all English settlers suggests that there was far more involved than a chance slave raid.

  — Dr Liam Irwin, Politics, Religion And Economy: Cork In The 17th Century

  THERE’S always been a suspicion that what happened on June 20, 1631 was a set-up job: a pirate raid engineered to remove the English settlers from Baltimore. Although the phrase did not exist in the 1600s, we would now describe it as the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of an entire town.

  The conspiracy theory has never been proven, and yet it has been astonishingly persistent. To this day, visitors seeking information about Baltimore are given tantalising hints. For example, this is from the tourist website baltimore-ireland.com:

  ‘The allegation is sometimes made that the raid may have been orchestrated by the O’Driscolls, who did not care to see their lands being taken over by English
settlers – you’d never know.’

  Or from another tourist website:

  ‘As the pirates had a pilot from Dungarvan to guide them, and those kidnapped were English settlers, theories abound as to how and why the Sack Of Baltimore was organised.’

  Even the Automobile Association’s guidebook refers to the theory:

  ‘Some believe the raid may have been orchestrated by the fierce O’Driscolls, to frighten off English settlers. If so, it worked: many of them moved upstream where they felt less threatened.’

  None of this proves anything – except that the conspiracy theories passed down through the generations are still very much alive.

  There is no doubt that in the decades leading up to the raid, there was a bitter, no-holds-barred battle for control of Baltimore – a battle that ended only when the corsairs arrived. It was a major power struggle involving a Gaelic chieftain, an English planter and an unscrupulous financier. None of these players was a model of virtue, and the tensions between them erupted into a dirty war of attrition. It was a major cause célèbre at the time: even the King became involved.

  Initially, I was sceptical about the set-up theory. To my mind, the historical record was fascinating enough: why add fanciful conspiracies?

  Besides, how could anyone in Ireland have possibly arranged with pirates from North Africa to sail north and settle a problem?

  But as I delved deeper into my researches, I realised that communication with the Barbary corsairs was not a problem. They had been frequenting Baltimore for so long that they had many contacts and relatives there.