The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  This may seem like an extraordinary about-turn, until you remember that Fineen owed Coppinger £1,693. If Baltimore belonged to Fineen, and Fineen was unable to repay the money, then Baltimore now belonged to Coppinger.

  After examining the dusty tomes, the court ruled in Coppinger’s favour. It seems the settlers only heard about this afterwards; they weren’t even invited to reply.

  Armed with his court order, Coppinger reacted with speed and severity. He moved into the castle and ordered the settlers off his land.

  At that stage, two things happened in parallel.

  The settlers lodged an appeal against the court order, arguing that they’d invested too much in the property to be thrown out at the side of the road.

  Meanwhile, Coppinger and Fineen O’Driscoll became locked in a familiar legal argument over the nature of the £1,693 loan. Sir Walter contended that Fineen had actually sold his estate to him for £1,693. Fineen maintained it was a mortgage. Four arbitrators were appointed to resolve the dispute. They found that each was sincere in his interpretation.

  Fineen was ordered to repay a mere £1,300 out of the £1,693 in full settlement of the debt. The arbitrators made this concession ‘knowing the great and decrepit age of Sir Fineen, together with his present disability and want of means’.

  And so, on April 14, 1629, both parties signed a legal agreement (a ‘deed of defeasance’) setting aside Coppinger’s claim to Fineen’s estate, on condition that this £1,300 was paid. This was by no means a defeat for Coppinger, because both parties knew he would never get the money. Within a year, Sir Fineen had died in poverty and the arguments were set to begin all over again.

  Meanwhile, the settlers were continuing their appeal against eviction. They took their plea before the Lords Justices, one of who was Richard Boyle. The eighteenth-century historian Charles Smith summed up the settlers’ case in 1750:

  ‘They proved that they had made a civil plantation of English Protestants there; that His Majesty had incorporated them; that Sir Thomas Crooke had showed them a patent, whereby the town was granted to him and his heirs, and that he had promised to estate them and their heirs, in consideration of which they had expended £2,000 in buildings and other improvements; but that Sir Walter Coppinger had got possession of the castle of Baltimore …’

  The argument centred on how much the settlers had invested. The Lords decided to get an independent valuation from a panel of auditors: Sir William Hull of Leamcon; Sir Henry Becher, the planter mentioned earlier in this chapter; and a Mr Barham. In the meantime:

  ‘Sir Walter was dismissed upon his promise to reinstate the English, at such rents … as the Council Board should think proper.’

  The panel estimated the settlers’ investment at around £1,640.

  What happened next was quite bizarre. One of the ‘independent’ auditors, Sir Henry Becher, liked the figures he saw. Without consulting anyone, he cut a private deal leasing the town directly from Coppinger.

  Incensed by this action, the Lords ordered Coppinger and Becher to appear before them to explain.

  Coppinger refused and was flung into a cell in Dublin Castle for contempt.

  Boyle told Becher (who happened to be a friend) that he had two choices. He could either return the lease to Coppinger, who would then be obliged to reinstate the tenants; or he could keep the lease and estate the tenants himself.

  Becher refused point blank to give up the lucrative fishery operation.

  The case went back to court. This time tempers were running even hotter and, says Smith, ‘many voices were given for Becher’s being committed to the Castle’.

  Boyle leaped to the rescue, suggesting that ‘since the season for fishing was come, they might all be licensed home, where they might amicably make up matters among themselves.’

  Neither of these two courtroom battles seemed to have a definite outcome, and the bickering would have continued for years if the Algerine corsairs had not arrived.

  Daniel Donovan, the nineteenth-century historian, summed up the whole affair in a parody verse. The three Latin words mean mine, yours and theirs:

  ‘The colonists kicked up a deuce of a clatter

  And quarrelled and fought over meum and tuum,

  The Algerines came and decided the matter,

  By kindly converting it all into suum.’

  There had been only one solid, undeniable result of all this legal wrangling. It rises above all the petty rivalries and disputes and, from our point of view, it is pivotal:

  Walter Coppinger’s ownership of Baltimore was no longer in doubt. It had been copperfastened by the Chancery order and upheld by the Lords Justices. The only thing that stood in his way was the settlers.

  He had tried the legal route. He had tried harassment and intimidation. None of these tactics had worked. So long as those irksome English planters remained in his village, waving their receipts for the money they’d invested, Coppinger would be prevented from gaining total control of Baltimore and its lucrative fishing industry.

  He had signed a lease in 1610, which he’d believed would end the settlers’ involvement in Baltimore after twenty-one years. But now this agreement was worthless. The court had decided that the settlers had invested too much sweat and money to be evicted, even after the lease expired in 1631.

  Coppinger could not live alongside these odious Sassenachs. What he wanted was a racially pure Baltimore cleansed of English settlers and populated by Irish.

  Perhaps, at some stage in 1629 or 1630, Coppinger thought long and hard and suddenly realised that the solution was staring him in the face.

  No settlers – no problem.

  There is no concrete evidence that Coppinger had any role in organising the Algerine raid of 1631. But it conveniently removed the only obstacle to his total control of Baltimore. Coppinger was the only man in Ireland who materially benefited from the raid. A mere eight months after the Algerines removed the settlers, the Earl of Cork reported: ‘It appears that Sir Walter Coppinger claims it [Baltimore].’

  However, it did him little good. In the 1630s the vast pilchard shoals, which had visited Baltimore regularly every year, suddenly stopped coming. A few years later, in 1636, he leased out the castle and village.

  Yes, Coppinger had the motive. He also had the means – he was a fabulously wealthy man and he could well afford to pay big money for a grudge to be settled. As someone who regular hired musclemen, he also seems to have had plenty of contacts in the criminal underworld – which in this era included the pirate world.

  But was he capable of organising such an atrocity?

  Looking at the near-psychopathic personality of the man, the answer is clear: it wouldn’t have cost him a moment’s sleep. Morally and ethically, the raid on Baltimore was no different to anything he’d done before – the only difference was in scale.

  In Spain, the O’Driscoll émigrés happened to share his ambitions. Sir Fineen had died in poverty in 1630, one year before the raid. In normal times, it would have been either Fineen’s son Conor, or his son Conor Óg, who would then have stepped forward to receive the symbolic rod of power and the village that came with it.

  The exiles would have heard about Coppinger’s war of attrition against the settlers and approved wholeheartedly. It would have been no surprise if they had discovered a common motive and dreamed up a grand conspiracy – a time bomb set to explode just after the old man’s death had freed them to seek revenge.

  This is not a new theory. Historian W. J. Kingston, author of The Story Of West Carbery, has speculated that the O’Driscoll exiles organised the raid from Spain as revenge against the English: ‘Probably the raiders were told glowing tales of the wealth of the place, and, this not materialising, they took persons instead of gold in the hope of obtaining fat ransoms for them, which they do not seem to have got.’

  In his chapter on Baltimore in Pirate Utopias, author Peter Lamborn Wilson agrees that the motive was loot: ‘Perhaps he [Coppinger] painted it a richer p
rize than it proved in fact …’

  Alternatively, perhaps Morat Rais was just paid to do the job. The corsair admiral would not have been too proud to accept a fat purse as payment for a contract raid – particularly since he was also striking a blow for the jihad at the same time.

  Remember, too, that Morat had every reason to hate the English at this time. He had offered to renounce his Islamic faith and serve King Charles, but this offer had been thrown back in his face.

  None of the Barbary corsairs would have had any love for Baltimore, a village that had first entertained the pirates and then frozen them out. Corsair historian Edward Lucie-Smith has described the pirates’ turning upon Baltimore as ‘tit for tat’ – and that may be how Morat Rais saw it, too.

  If we accept the official explanation of the Baltimore raid, none of Morat’s actions make any sense.

  Here we have a top corsair admiral and 280 elite fighting troops setting forth in two serious warships bristling with guns. This is clearly an important mission. But no – instead, they just spend their time faffing vaguely about the English coast, picking on minor merchantmen and stinking little fishing boats. Wandering around without direction, pathologically indecisive, Morat suddenly decides to attack the best-defended port on the entire coast – Kinsale – and then changes his mind on the advice of some humble fisherman who persuades him to sail fifty miles west, to a little village where there are nothing but pilchards.

  Even if we believe that Morat set out with the specific intention of attacking Baltimore, his actions still don’t make sense. Why did he waste his energy with these diversions? Why didn’t he head directly for his main target?

  The explanation could be that he was simply filling in time. Perhaps Morat had agreed not only to attack Baltimore … but to attack it on a specific date.

  If we work on the basis of this theory, suddenly all becomes clear.

  Morat agrees to the contract sometime in 1630 and makes preparations to sail in the spring in 1631.

  In February, the Earl Of Cork’s agents in Algiers get wind of the plan, but mistakenly assume that the targets must be Kinsale or Cork.

  Morat sets sail in the knowledge that he has a date at Baltimore on 20 June 1631 – no earlier, no later. Like all prudent mariners, he leaves enough time to allow for the unexpected. He makes it to Land’s End early, around June 17. He picks up an expert on Baltimore, Edward Fawlett, in what might even have been a pre-arranged meeting. He heads towards the prominent landmark of Kinsale Head, where he arrives by June 19.

  Reaching Roaring Water Bay in good time, the corsairs have to cool their heels for a couple or hours until the day ends. Allowing for mustering troops, preparing the boats and rowing to shore, their ‘invasion’ would have begun almost as soon as the trickling sand in the hourglass showed midnight on the crucial date of June 20, 1631.

  Is that how it happened? It’s sad to think that we may never find definite evidence. If Morat ever kept a journal, it has long since disappeared.

  So of course the reader may be excused for dismissing this entire theory as fanciful speculation.

  Except for one curious fact.

  It is quite an astounding fact.

  In all of the books and articles I have read about the Baltimore raid, no-one seems to have remarked upon it. But it struck me so forcibly that, when I stumbled upon it in a list of ancient deeds, it was all I could do to prevent myself shattering the silence of the National Library with a cry of pure astonishment.

  In the great religious wars of the 1600s, dates and anniversaries were highly potent. We need look no further than Guy Fawkes’s Day (‘Remember, remember, the Fifth of November’) or the later Battle of the Boyne whose anniversary (‘The Glorious Twelfth of July’) is commemorated in Northern Ireland to this day.

  This was also an era in which pirates deliberately chose anniversary dates to avenge ancient grudges. For instance, when the privateer Sir Edward Mansfield launched a raid on the Spanish-held Caribbean island of Santa Catalina in 1666, he timed his attack for May 26 – the precise twenty-fifth anniversary of the date (May 26, 1641) when the Spanish had consolidated their victory over the island’s English inhabitants.

  Similarly, if Walter Coppinger had inflicted the vengeance of the corsairs upon the settlers, he would not have chosen any old date. He would have made it a grand gesture, a permanent reminder to the English of how he had been wronged.

  We’ve seen that the crucial date in this whole business was June 20, 1610: the date that Crooke and O’Driscoll signed an agreement to hand over Baltimore to Coppinger in twenty-one years’ time.

  The same date of June 20, 1610 crops up again and again in all the legal documents that follow. To Walter Coppinger, that date was a symbol – of a deal that had been broken, of good faith that had been betrayed.

  For the O’Driscoll exiles, too, June 20, 1610 would have been a date that lived on in infamy. It was the day the turncoat Sir Fineen had finally and irrevocably sold out the O’Driscoll clan’s ancient heritage, together with his own birthright, to the hated Sassenach.

  A twenty-one year lease. Signed on June 20, 1610.

  If it was a coincidence, it was a truly staggering one.

  Morat Rais’s corsairs arrived to remove the English settlers from Baltimore on June 20, 1631 – twenty-one years, to the very day, from the date that agreement was signed.

  Appendix

  The Taken

  This is the definitive tally of the enslaved, as compiled by the burghers of Baltimore just a few days after the raid and recorded in The Council Book of Kinsale. Confusingly, each line begins with the head of the household, whether or not that individual was personally captured.

  A list of Baltimore people who were carried away by the Turk, the 20th June 1631.

  William Mould 2 himself and a boy

  Ould Osburne 2 himself and maid

  Alexander Pumery 1 his wife

  John Ryder 4 himself, wife and two children

  Robert Hunt 1 his wife

  Abram Roberts 5 himself, wife and three children

  Corent Croffine 6 himself, wife, daughter and three men

  John Harris 6 his wife, mother, three children and maid

  Dermot Meregey 3 two children and maid

  Richard Meade 5 himself, wife, and three children

  Richard Lorye 7 himself, wife, sister and four children

  Stephen Broddebrooke 3 his wife and two children (she great with child)

  Ould Haunkin 3 himself, his wife and daughter

  Evans & The Cook 5 Evans and his boy, cook, his wife and maid

  Bessie Flodd 2 herself and son

  William Arnold 5 himself, wife and three children

  Michaell Amble 3 himself, wife and son

  Stephen Pierse 6 himself, wife, mother and three children

  William Symons 4 himself, wife and two children

  Christopher Norwey 3 himself, wife and child

  Sampson Rogers 2 himself and son

  Besse Peeter 1 her daughter

  Thomas Payne 4 himself, wife and two children

  Richard Watts 4 himself, wife and two children

  William Gunter 9 his wife, maid and seven sons

  John Amble 1 himself

  Edward Cherrye 1 himself

  Robert Chimor 5 his wife and four children

  Timothy Corlew 1 his wife

  John Slyman 4 himself, wife and two children

  Morris Power 1 his wife

  The sum of all carried away from Baltimore: 107*

  Timothy Curlew, slain

  John Davys, slain

  Ould Osburne, sent ashore

  Alice Heard, sent ashore

  Two of Dungarvan, sent ashore

  One of Dartmouth, sent ashore

  Portingales 9

  Pallicians 3

  Frenchmen 17

  Englishmen of Dartmouth 9

  From boats of Dungarvan 9

  This total 47

  The sum of all captives: 154
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  [*Note: the main list actually totals 109, not 107. The compiler is obviously discounting Mr Osburne and Ms Heard, who were set free.]

  Bibliography And Recommended Reading

  As far as I am aware, no full-length factual book has ever been written about the pirate raid on Baltimore. Few books give it more than a passing mention. I would recommend Donovan, Coppinger, The Council Book of the Corporation of Kinsale and Smith, all books dating from the Victorian era or earlier; and in the modern age, de Courcy Ireland, Kingston, Wilson and Healy.

  The best academic works on the subject are to be found in the Cork Historical and Architectural Society Journal (CHASJ). The most extensive are Raymond Caulfield’s 1892 newspaper article and Henry Barnby’s 1969 treatise. I am particularly indebted to Barnby’s work, a rare blend of academic discipline and easy readability, for giving me an overview of the subject and pointing me towards some of the main sources. Articles by Mark Samuel and Rev J. Coombes also threw light on aspects of the raid.

  The history of Fineen and the O’Driscolls has been well documented in the ‘Genealogy of Corca Laidhe’ (O’Donovan) in Coppinger and Donovan, and more recently by Burke, Coleman, Healy, Kingston and Edward O’Mahony (2000 and 2001).

  The best sources on Morat Rais are the correspondence in Castries; Fr Dan; and Gosse.

  For more on Algiers and the Barbary corsairs, I would highly recommend Earle, Lane-Poole, Gosse, Clissold, Lucie-Smith, Spencer and Fisher; and on English and Irish pirates in general, Senior and Cordingly.

  Other recommended works will be obvious from this bibliography and from my source notes.

  Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by The Four Masters. (1848). Dublin: Hodges & Smith.

  Anonymous (1804) The Captives: An Account of the Sufferings of Twenty Christian Slaves Taken By Algerine Corsairs. London: Cape Macclesfield.