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Title: Pirate Utopias Author: Hakim Bey Date: Jan 9, 2003 Language: en Topics: pirates, piracy, proto-anarchism, individualist anarchism Source: https://hermetic.com/bey/pirate-utopias/index
Some years ago a tall tower stood at the extreme end of Cape Marabata;
the Christians called Torre Blanquilla (White Tower) and it was known to
the Mohammedans as El-Minar. All day long the tower looked out on the
sea; at night it was lulled to sleep by the murmur of the wind on the
water. It was an ancient tower whose walls were covered with gnarled
vines; scorpions hid between her stones, and evil jinn gathered nearby
at nightfall. The gypsies, who knew about all things, said the tower was
built by the Portuguese who came here to fight against the Mohammedans.
The mountaineers of Andjera are better informed; they say the tower was
built by Lass el-Behar the pirate in order to hide his treasures within
its walls.
Lass el-Behar came from Rabat. He was a skillful navigator; and skilled
at an even more difficult art- that of commanding men. The Spaniards and
Italians knew his name only too well. El-Behar's frigate was slender and
light as a swallow; the oars of a hundred Christian galley slaves made
it skim swiftly over the waves. The ship was greatly feared because of
the boldness of her sailors and her many cannons, each different from
the other, which the pirate had captured from Christian vessels of
various nationalities.
Lass el-Behar was young, handsome and brave. Many a captive Christian
woman fell deeply in love with him as did the daughters of rich and
powerful Mohammedans. But he rejected the love of Christians and
mohammedans alike, for his ship meant more to him then the beauty of
women. He loved his ship, the companionship of his valiant warriors, and
the glorious battles which were later to be celebrated in songs &
poetry. Above all, it was the sea he loved; He loved her with so deep a
passion that he could not live away from her, and he spoke to her as men
speak to their sweethearts. His warriors would say that at the hour of
prayer he would turn his eyes away from the direction of Mecca in order
to gaze at the sea.
On the day of Aid el-Kbir (sheep sacrifice), Lass el-Behar, who was in
the village of El-Minar with his companions-in-arms, declined to go to
Tangier to hear the sermon of the cadi and to pray in the company of the
devout.
“Go if you must” he said to his men. “As for me I shall rest here.”
He shut himself up in his tower; from there he could contemplate the sea
and the ships as they moved slowly on the horizon. The charqui, more
breeze than wind, made the water dance under the warm summer light. “The
best sermon of the cadi,” thought el-Behar “could never equal the beauty
of this scene? What prayer, be it ever so perfect, could equal the sweet
murmur of rippling waters? What on earth is as powerful as the sea,
which stretches from one shore of the world to the other? Oh would that
the waves were a woman so that I might marry her, and the ocean a mosque
in which I might pray.”
As these thoughts were running through his mind a storm gathered in the
west; it swept over the plains and the mountains, and roared about the
tower. The sea gulls cried out in fright and flew away; flocks of sheep
ran frantically to their enclosures. The tempest lasted a day and a
night.
When the wind quieted down and the sea ceased to bellow like a thousand
oxen, Lass el-Behar descended from his tower. On the narrow band of sand
which lay between the rocks and the water he saw a woman lying stretched
out, white and cold. He approached closer.
“She must be a christian,” He said to himself, “for her hair is the
color of new gold.”
He lifted her up and took her in his arms.
“Perhaps she is still alive.”
The woman opened her eyes; they were green eyes, green as the algae that
grows in the cracks of rocks. She was a bahria, a jinniyeh (female
genie) of the sea. Her beauty was magic and el-Behar fell madly in love
with her. He neglected his warriors; he forgot about his swift galley,
his glory, even his prayers to Allah.
“I love you more than anything else on earth,” he said to her, “more
than my life and my salvation”
During the equinox the furious sea again hammered at the tower and
threatened the village nearby. Her waters mingled with those of the
Charf River and even reached the garden of Tanger el-Balia.
“The ocean is going to smash our tower,” said the pirate to his beloved,
“let us flee to the mountains.”
“Why fear the ocean?” asked the bahria with a smile. “Don't you love her
above all things? Aren't you constantly praising her force and her
power? Don't you turn your head away from the direction of Mecca in
order to gaze out to sea? I am a daughter of the sea. I came here to
reward you for the love you bear her. Now the sea calls me back.
Farewell, Lass el-behar, you shall never see me again.”
“Don't leave me,” implored the pirate “don't leave me, I beg of you.
Without you I shall never know happiness.”
“Happiness,” answered the bahria, “belongs only to those who fear Allah
and honor him. I must leave you. I dare not disobey the voice that calls
me, but you may follow me if you wish.”
The jinniyeh wandered off with the tide and Lass el-Behar followed her
into the murky depths of the sea. Nor was he ever seen again. He sleeps
under the waves between Tarik Mountain (Gibraltar) and Cape Tres-Forcas.
He will not waken until that day when men will be judged for their
actions and the earth will be a shadow of a shadow which will finally
disappear.
For Allah is the Almighty One.
“Christians are made Turks and Turks are the sons of devils.”
-Newwes from Sea of WARD THE PIRATE (1609)
From about the late 1500's to the 18th century, many thousands of
European men-and women-converted to Islam. Most of them lived and worked
in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and the Rabat-Sale area of Morocco-the
so-called Barbary Coast States. Most of the women became Moslems when
they married Moslem men. This much is easy enough to understand,
although it would be fascinating if we could trace the lives of some of
them in search of some 17th century Isabelle Eberhardt.[1] But what
about the men? What caused them to convert?
Christian Europeans had a special term for these men: Renegadoes,
“renegades”: apostates, turncoats, traitors. Christians had some reason
for these sentiments, since Christian Europe was still at war with
Islam. The Crusades had never really ended. The last Moorish kingdom in
Spain, Grenada, was added to the Reconquista only in 1492, and the last
Moorish uprising in Spain took place in 1610. The Ottoman Empire,
vigorous, brilliant, and armed to the teeth (just like its contemporary
Elizabethan/Jacobean England), pressed its offensive against Europe on
two fronts, by land toward Vienna, and by sea westward through the
Mediterranean.
In the vernacular languages of Europe, “Turk” meant any Muslim,
including the Moors of North Africa. The Renegadoes were said to have
“Turn'd Turke” (the title of a play, “A Christian Turn'd Turke” by
Robert Daborne, performed in London in 1612). [Ewen, 1939: 3; Lloyd,
1981: 48. According to Lloyd, the playwright's name was Robert
Osbourne.] The Lusty Turk and the Wicked Soldier populated popular
literature-and “mussulmano!” is still a deadly insult in Venice. One
might understand a tiny bit of this European ignorance and prejudice by
thinking of the American media during the recent Gulf War with Iraq.
Europe's response to Islam since the l9th century has become far more
complex, because l9th century Europe actually conquered and colonized
much of Dar al-lslam. But in the 17th century there existed no such
point of interpenetration of cultures, however onesided. For the most
part, Europe hated and misunderstood Islam. As for Islam, the word
jihad, Holy War, sums up its attitude toward Christendom. Tolerance and
understanding were almost non-existent on both sides of the cultural
divide.
The Renegadoes therefore seemed like creatures of hellish mystery to
most Europeans. Not only had they “betrayed Our Lord,” they had gone
even farther and joined the jihad itself. Almost to a man, the
Renegadoes were employed as “Barbary Corsairs”. They attacked and looted
European ships and ravished Christian captives back to Barbary, to be
ransomed or sold as slaves. Of course Christian “Corsairs”. including
the Knights of Malta, were doing exactly the same thing to the ships and
crews of Moslem vessels. But very few of the Moslem captives “turned
Christian”. The flow of renegades went largely one way.
Europeans assumed that the apostates were human scum, and believed that
their motives for conversion were the lowest imaginable: greed,
resentment, revenge. Many of them were already “pirates” when they
converted-obviously they simply wanted an excuse for more piracy. Of
course, some of them were captured and offered a choice of conversion or
slavery. But like cowards, they chose apostasy and crime.[2] Renegadoes
were slain on sight in all European countries and burnt to death in
Spain (at least in theory), even if they wanted to re-convert. In this
sense Islam was seen as a kind of moral plague, rather than simply an
enemy ideology.
Within Islamdom the attitude toward conversion can be described as more
open. The Spanish forced Jews and Moslems to convert, but then expelled
them anyway. Islam however still retained an image of itself as a new
religion seeking to expand by all possible means, and especially by
conversion. “New Muslims” are still considered blessed and even “lucky”,
especially on the frontiers of Islam. These differing attitudes toward
the act of conversion help to explain how more Christians turn'd Turke
than vice versa-but the question “why?” remains unanswered.[3] Perhaps
we can begin by assuming that neither the Christian nor the “Turkish”
interpretation of the Renegadoes can satisfy our curiosity. We may
doubt, on the one hand, that these men were all simply demonic, and, on
the other, that they were all angels of the jihad. We can assume that
our answers-if any prove possible will seem far more complex than either
of these 17th century theories.
Curiously enough, it appears that few modern historians have really
tried to understand the Renegadoes. Among European historians the effect
of the “demon theory” still lingers, although it has been rationalized
and elaborated and even inverted into a plausible-sounding hypothesis.
The reasoning goes something like this: How did the great European
powers fail to eradicate the Barbary corsairs for three schole
centuries? It goes without saying that Islamic military and naval
technology was inferior to European. Moslems, as everyone knows, make
bad sailors. How to explain this apparent conundrum? Obviously-the
Renegadoes. They, as Europeans, introduced European technology to the
Moslems, and fought for them as well. It appears therefore that Barbary
piracy was “une affaire des etrangers”, without the Renegadoes it could
never have happened [Coindreau, 1948]. They were traitors of the worst
sort-but brilliant in their crude and thuggish way. Piracy is
despicable-but, after all, a bit romantic!
As for Islamic historians, they naturally resent any suggestions of
Islamic inferiority. The l9th and early 20th century local histories of
Rabat-Sale, for example, make it quite clear that the Moors, Berbers and
Arabs of the country contributed, in the long run, far more to the
history of the “holy war at sea” than did a few thousand converts. As
for the converts themselves, their descendants still live in Rabat-Sale
they became Morrocans, whatever their origins. The history of the
corsairs is not “an affair of foreigners”, but part of the history of
the Maghreb, the Far West of Islam, and of the emerging Moroccan nation
[Hesperis, 1971].
None of these “explanations” of the Renegadoes gets us any closer to
their possible motives for embracing Islam along with the life of the
Barbary corsairs. Brilliant traitors or assimilated heroes-neither
stereotype possesses any real depth. Both contain elements of truth. The
pirates did introduce certain technical and strategic novelties to
Barbary, as we shall see. And they did participate in Islam in more
complex ways than simply as hired thugs-or “experts”-as we shall also
see. But we still have no inkling of the “why?” of the whole phenomenon.
We should note at once that although some of the Renegadoes were
literate in numerous languages, none were literati. We have no firsthand
accounts, no texts by Renegadoes. Their social origins did not dispose
them to selfanalytical writing; that luxury was still a monopoly of the
aristocracy and emerging middle class. The pen of history is in the hand
of the enemies of the Renegadoes; they themselves are silent.
Thus we may never be able to uncover their motives Perhaps we can do no
more than suggest a number of complex and even contradictory impressions
and speculations. But we can still do better than the neocolonialist
Euro-historians, or the Moroccan nationalists, who both see the
Renegadoes only in relation to their own ideological preconceptions. We
can try to appreciate the Renegadoes for themselves, as individuals (if
possible) and as a group, with their own interests and agendas, their
own values, their own selfimage. We can attempt to see (as clearly as
the evidence allows) from inviSe the phenomenon, rather than depend on
the light of outside interpretations.
To focus attention on a specific history (or “microhistory”, as C.
Ginzberg put it) might help us to refine our perceptions of the
Renegadoes more easily than if we attempted a global view of the entire
phenomenon.[4] The methodology used here consists of reading
historical/ethnographical texts in the light of “the History of
Religions”. I prefer to call this framework histories of religion
however, for two reasons: First, to avoid the imputation that I adhere
to the school of Eliade, which has almost monopolized the label “History
of Religions” for itself. I use some of the categories developed by
Eliade, also by Henry Corbin, but find them less useful in dealing with
concepts such as “resistance” or “insurrectionary desire”. Which leads
to the second reason for preferring the term histories of religion any
academic discipline which calls itself The History of anything
whatsoever must be suspected a priori of erecting a false totality based
on dubious absolutes which will serve only to mask and reinforce the
ideologies of elites. Therefore the third chief methodological
ingredient of this essay derives from a Nietzschean history of ideas,
images, emotions, aesthetic signs, etc., as developed by G. Bachelard,
W. Benjamin, G. Bataille, M. Foucault, etc.-an historical discipline
which begins by questioning and criticizing the absoluteness of History
as anything other than an idea with a history of its own. And finally,
the chief methodological tool here is really piratology, which-as
everyone knows-is exclusively the province of enthusiastic amateurs.
So we'll center our study around one community in one brief period
(about 50 years): Rabat-Sale, in the first half of the 17th century. Of
all the Barbary states, Sale was the only one in which the corsairs
achieved independence. Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli were all
protectorates of the Sublime Porte, but Sale-for a few decades-was
governed by a “divan” or Council of Corsair Captains. It was a true
“pirate utopia”, and thus we can hope to find the Renegado in his most
evolved form, his most sophisticated political and spiritual state of
development, here in the “Republic of Bou Regreg”, the “Moorish” or
“Corsair Republic of Sale”.
First however, we can also try something which none of the historians
(as far as I know) has yet done for the Renegadoes. We can ask if Europe
really was monolithically opposed to Islam. We can ask if Islam
possessed a positive shadow, so to speak, which might have hidden itself
within European culture, and might have influenced the Renegadoes even
before their escape to Barbary. We might give them the benefit of the
doubt, and not simply assume that their motives for conversion were all
base and empty of real significance. We might wonder if Islam itself
(and not just the hope of pirate gold) could have attracted them to
North Africa -or, if not “Islam itself”, then some image or rumor or
myth or misconception of Islam. In what way, then, might a 17th century
working-class mariner have acquired an interest in or even an attraction
toward Islam?
[The Mediterranean, showing the main Barbary Bases]
At the time of the Crusades the idea of an “esoteric Islam” began to
sift back to Europe along with all the spices and silks-and books-the
holy warriors of Christ managed to “liberate” from the Holy Land. Did
the Ismaili “Assassins” pass along some secret knowledge to the
Templars? And is this why the Templars were proscribed, tortured,
executed, extirpated with such seemingly insane hatred? Were alchemy and
neoplatonism passed along through Moorish Spain to the rest of Europe,
especially Italy and France? Did St. Francis and Roger Bacon and other
mystical missionaries to the Saracens bring back with them some elements
of Islamic gnosis, hermetic science, and Sufism?
In any case, whether these contacts really occurred or not, by the
beginning of the 17th century some European intellectuals believed they
had occurred, and that some real transmission of secret wisdom had in
fact been carried out. (The reality or irreality of such contacts is a
subject for research; here we are concerned only with a history of
images, of beliefs and ideas, which profoundly influence human society
whether or not they are based in “historical reality”.) The late
Renaissance Hermeticists began to demonstrate a touch of Islamophilia.
Around 1610 (the date of the last Moorish or “Morisco” revolt in Spain),
some German occultists released a series of documents outlining the
history of a secret order, the Rosicrucians. According to their account,
the 14thcentury founder of the Order, the probably-mythical Christian
Rosenkreutz, had traveled widely in the Islamic world (Damascus, Arabia,
a mythical city called Damcar, and the Moroccan city of Fez) and
received there a complete course in Hermetic wisdom. His tomb, which had
supposedly been recently re-discovered, contained enough coded
illumination to make possible the revival of the Order. The Rosicrucian
documents created a great stir among learned and pious Christians who
had grown quite disgusted with the wars and quarrels of Catholicism and
Protestantism, and yearned for a universal religion based on knowledge
rather than faith. Islamic (and Jewish) science and wisdom were now
eagerly desired for their contributions to this final Hermetic
revelation. Publicly the Rosicrucians taught “tolerance even for Jews
and Turks”; secretly they might have admitted that no one religion
possessed the monopoly of truth. They remained Christians, but not
“sectarians”. Islam, for them, appears as simply another sect, in
possession of some of the truth (including even certain truths about
Jesus), but no more and no less limited than Catholicism or even
Lutheranism. Thus, while the Rosicrucians did not convert to Islam, they
exhibited far less hatred and intolerance for it than most Christians
and even went so far as to praise it for its esoteric and occult
traditions.
In a broader context, Islam might have had a sort of vague appeal for
some Europeans who were simply anti-religious or at least anti-clerical
(along the lines, for instance, of the Elizabethan “School of Night”,
and Marlowe's quip that “Moses was a juggler”). A general impression of
Islam's freedom from any authoritative priesthood or even dogma had
percolated into European culture, or would soon do so. A long line of
European intellectual Islamophiles began to appear. Rosicrucianism
influenced Freemasonry which influenced the Enlightenment which
influenced Nietzsche. Some of these tendencies and individuals actually
knew something about Islam, but for the most part it was simply a matter
of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Priests hate Islam; I hate
priests; therefore I like Islam. Even in the 1880's Nietzsche's view of
Islam was still rather two-dimensional-he seemed to see it as a sodality
of aristocratic warrior monks-but his image of Islam was the culmination
of a tradition of free-thinkers who viewed it primarily as a kind of
anti-Christianity
Hermeticism in turn influenced certain less intellectual tendencies
within Protestantism. Many of the extremists who were to carry out the
English Revolution in the 1640's had been influenced by Jacob Boehme and
other Hermetic- leaning Christian mystics. Even the working-class
Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters had some acquaintance with Hermetic
ideas and ideals-such as the esoteric interpretation of Scripture;
universal tolerance; “pantheistic monism”; direct contact with the
divine, without the intermediation of priest or Church; a tendency to
antinomianism; a belief in the sacred quality of material Nature; an
inclination to view “God” as “Universal Reason” (or mind); faith in the
power of the imagination to change reality; social egalitarianism; the
millennium or “World Turn'd Upside Down”; etc.
No evidence suggests that any Ranter ever took an interest in Islam.
However, there exists some reason to believe in connections between
Ranterism and piracy. A “Ranter's Bay” in Madagascar sheltered a pirate
utopia later in the 17th century, and a number of Ranters were exiled to
the Caribbean during the “Golden Age of Piracy” there. Certain aspects
of Islamic thought might well appeal to extremist Protestants- such as
anti-trinitarianism, the human but magical nature of Jesus, scriptural
hermeneutic, “spiritual democracy”, even the concept of Holy War. The
Ranters (or other similar sects), who specialized in daring and
outrageous spiritual paradox and antinomian extremism, might have had
some influence on the kind of marginalized and rebellious men who were
destined to end up in Algiers or Sale. [Besides the standard works by
Hill (1978) and Cohn (1970), see Friedman (1987); Morton (1970); Smith
(1983). For Ranter-Pirate connections see Hill (1985: 161-187).]
A ranter or proto-Ranter, who liked to “blaspheme gloriously” and preach
in taverns while drinking and smoking, with a whore perched on his knee,
might also have been attracted by the European image of Islam's
sensuality. In effect Islam is a more pro-sexual religion than
Christianity, and to some extent views pleasure as divine beneficence.
The Koranic heavens of houris, cupbearers, gardens, and fountains of
wine, have always been notorious among Christians dissatisfied with
their own tradition's emphasis on chastity, virginity, and
self-mortification. On the popular level the stereotype of the “Lusty
Turk” preserved a caricature of this holy sensuality of Islam. The
Orient began to be viewed (usually covertly) as a place where forbidden
desires might be realized.
Finally, Islam was the Enemy of European Christian civilization. As M.
Rediker (1987) has pointed out, by the 17th century the maritime world
already revealed certain aspects of the Industrial Age which loomed so
closely on the future's horizon. Ships were in some ways like floating
factories, and maritime workers constituted a kind of proto-proletariat.
Labor conditions in the merchant marines of Europe presented an abysmal
picture of emerging capitalism at its worst-and conditions in European
navies were even more horrendous. The sailor had every reason to
consider himself the lowest and most rejected figure of all European
economy and government-powerless, underpaid, brutalized, tortured, lost
to scurvy and storms at sea, the virtual slave of wealthy merchants and
ship-owners, and of penny-pinching kings and greedy princes. C. Hill and
Rediker, basing themselves on earlier work by J. Lemisch, have both
pointed out that in such a context, piracy must be studied as a form of
social resistance. The pirate, who (in the words of one of Defoe's
interviewees) “warred against all the world”, was first and foremost the
enemy of his own civilization. And once again, “the enemy of my enemy”
just might prove to be my friend. I hate Europe. Europe hates Islam.
Therefore…might I perhaps like Islam? What might a literate but not
specially learned English reader know about Islam in, say, 1637? In that
year an ambassador from the Moorish Corsair Republic of Sale visited
London, and some professional journalist churned out a pamphlet on this
marvel. He says,
For their religion, they are strict observers of the law of Mahomet;
they say Christ was a great Prophet, borne to bee a Saviour of the world
(but not incarnate), that hee was the Breath of God, that hee was borne
of a Virgin, and that the Jewes should have beleev'd in him, but would
not; and therefore, because they went about to murder and crucifie him,
he left them, and ascended from them into Heaven, and that then they put
another man to death instead of him, whom they tormented and cruelly
crucified. Therefore these Mahometans doe hold and esteeme the Jewes as
the worst of men, and very slaves to all nations of the world.
The one and onely booke of their religion is called their Alcaron,
devised by their false prophet Mahomet who was of their nation, a Larbee
Arab. They may not use any other booke for devotion, nor, on paine of
losse of life, no part of it doe they dare to examine or question; but
if any be diffident, or any point or sentence be intricate and hard to
be understood by any of them, then it is lawful to aske the meaning of
the talby which is a poore weake-learned priest. They are all
circumciz'd, and they use a kind of baptisme, but not in their churches,
but at home in their houses.
Their Lent is much about the time as it is with us, which they doe hold
but 30 dayes; but they neither eate nor drinke all the time on any of
those dayes betwixt the dawning and the twilight, but when once the
starres doe shew themselves, then, for their day fast, they feed fast
all night. That priest or talby that cannot read over the booke of the
Alcaron (or Mahomets Law) all over on their Good Friday at night is held
unworthy of his place and function. They say their prayers six times
every day and night, and they doe wash themselves all over very often.
They have no bells to toll them to church, but he that is the clarke or
sexton hath a deepe base great voyce, and goes to the top of the
steeple, and there roares out a warning for the people to come to their
devotions. No man doth enter their churches with his shoes on. Their
talbies or priests each one of them are allowed a wife or wives if they
will. The lay-men may have captive women, but they must not Iye with
them in the night-time, for that belongs to the wives by turne, and, if
any wife be beguiled of her turne, she may complaine for satisfaction to
the magistrate. He that hath foure wives must be a rich man; a poore man
is allowed as many, but his meanes are too short to keepe them;
therefore one or two must serve his turne. The bride and bridegroome doe
not see each other before the wedding-night that they are going to bed,
where, if he finde her a maid, all is well; if otherwise, hee may turne
her away and give her no part of the portion she brought him.
Their churchmen are not covetous or lovers of money or riches, for which
cause they doe dayly in every towne and citty sit every day to heare and
decide causes, which must be prooved by such witnesses as are not
detected or knowne to be defamed for being drunkards, adulterers,
prophaners, scandaliz'd persons, (for if they be knowne to be such,
their testimony will not be taken). Likewise if the defendant can prove
that the witnesse, which hath beene against him, hath not said his
prayers six times duely in 24 houres, he or they shall utterly be
disabled to beare witnesse, or give testimony in any cause whatsoever;
but upon just and honest proofes the most tedious suite is ended in a
weeke or eight daies at the most.
They are just in their words and promises; for the which cause there is
small use of bills, bonds, or obligations amongst them (which is the
cause that there is scarce one rich scrivener either in Morocco, Fesse
or Sus), for the breach of promise is held an unrecoverable disgrace
amongst them. He that is taken with false weights or measures doth lose
all his ware in his house to the use of the poore, and is a defamed
person, and cruelly whipt. Their execution for life and death is that
commonly the person adjudged to die hath his throat cut by the
executioner.
Altogether an interesting mix of fact and fancy, and on the whole quite
positive [Sources Inédites: 381-384]. We shall return to all these
speculative themes and try to focus them more clearly in the specific
context of the Corsair Republic of Sale. But before we can carry out
such an operation we need to know more about the historical context of
the Republic, and its chief economic resource-piracy. Specifically, we
need to know more about the history of the whole Barbary Coast, and the
Ottoman Protectorates of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli.
[“Torment of the Slaves”, from History de Barbarie (1637)]
“The Algerians are a company of rogues, and I am their captain.”
The Dey of Algiers to a European Consul[5]
Tunis, Tripoli, and especially Algiers, have been studied much more
thoroughly than Salé; the interested reader will easily find an
extensive bibliography-so it will not repay our time to devote too much
detailed attention here to the Mediterranean coast states. Almost any
book on pirate history will tell something about Algiers, and there are
many works devoted exclusively to its history. Salé, which was smaller
and more distant from the gaze of Europe, interests us not only because
it's less well-known, but also because of its political independence.
Even so, Salé was part of a “big picture” which we need to know at least
in outline. The Encyclopedia Britannica (1953 edition), which doesn't
even mention Sale in its entry on “Barbary Pirates”, gives us this:
The power of the piratical coast population of northern Africa arose in
the 16th century, attained its greatest height in the 17th, declined
gradually throughout the 18th, and was extinguished only in the 19th
century. From 1659 onwards the coast cities of Algeria and Tunisia,
though nominally forming parts of the Turkish empire, were in fact
anarchical military republics which chose their own rulers and lived by
plunder. The maritime side of this long-lived brigandage was conducted
by captains, or reises, who formed a class or even a corporation.
Cruisers were fitted out by capitalists and commanded by the reises. The
treasury of the pasha or his successors who bore the title of Agha or
Dey or Bey, received 10% of the value of the prizes …. Until the 17th
century the pirates used galleys, but Simon Danser, a Flemish renegade,
taught them the advantages of using sailing ships. In the first half of
the 17th century more than 20,000 captives were said to be imprisoned in
Algiers alone. The rich were allowed to redeem themselves, but the poor
were condemned to slavery. Their masters would not in many cases allow
them to secure freedom by professing Mohammadanism. In the early part of
the l9th century, Tripolitania, owing to its piratical practices, was
several times involved in war with the United States. After the general
pacification of 1815, the British made two vain attempts to suppress
Algerian piracy, which was ended only by the French conquest of Algiers
in 1830.
Note that Islam is called “Mohammadanism”. Note that these piratical
“Mohammadans” refused “in many cases” to permit conversion; the logical
conclusion is that in some cases they did permit it-but the author
prefers to avoid this conclusion, and to speak only in negative terms
about mere “Mohammadans” and pirates.
Two interesting political terms are used here- “anarchical” and
“capitalists”-which may not be quite appropriate. “Capitalist” sounds
too 18-19th century to describe the merchants and ship-owning captains
who fueled the economy of the corsair states. Moreover, I presume the
author is not thinking of anarchism when he uses the term “anarchical”
but is simply brandishing this word to indicate violent disorder.
Algiers was subject to the Ottomars Empire, and thus could not have
attained an anarchist form of organization in any strict sense of the
word. As for the charge of “violent disorder”, some scholars have asked
how Algiers could have survived for centuries as a “corsair state”
without some kind of internal continuity and stability. Earlier
Eurocentric historians and sensationalist writers on piracy give us an
impression of Algiers as a kind of ravening horde in a state of
perpetual arousal; while more recent and less chauvinistic scholars like
William Spencer (1976) tend to emphasize the stability of Algiers and to
seek for possible explanations for its successful duration. The
quasi-moralistic horror embedded in a term like “anarchical”, as applied
to North Africa, tends to obscure the secret fact that historians are
frequently in the business of providing retrospective justifications for
the imperialism and colonialism-the truly hideous rapacity-of 18-19th
century Europe. If Algiers can be shown as a sinkhole of all decent
human values, then we are permitted to go on believing in the
“civilizing mission” of Europe's subsequent African and other colonial
adventures. Hence the need for a massive revising of history as written
by European (and Euro-American) pseudo-rationalist apologists for piracy
practiced by White Christian Nation States, as opposed to piracy
practiced by mere Moorish “anarchicalists”.[6]
In truth the government of Algiers seems to have been neither anarchical
nor anarchist-but rather, in a strange and unexpected way-democratic.
Unlike the European nations, gradually succumbing to the Absolutism of
the Kings, Algiers exhibited signs of a more “horizontal” and
egalitarian structure. In theory, of course, it was at all times
subordinate to Turkish imperial policy and direction, but in practice
the city-state was run by various “chambers” of Janissary soldiers and
corsair notables, who made their own policy-and sometimes sent the
Sultan's representatives scurrying back to Istanbul with a blunt refusal
to carry out the will of the Sublime Porte.
To a certain extent the protectorates or “Regencies” of Algiers, Tunis,
and Tripoli really were “affairs of foreigners”, and perhaps might even
be called quasi-colonies. In Algiers the Ocak or ruling body of
Janissaries was made up-by law-not by natives of the regions (Moors,
Arabs, Berbers) but rather by “Turks”. But of course, as a further
complication, the Janissary corps were originally not native Anatolians
or even born Moslems, but slaves of the Sultan, recruited as children
under the Ottoman “boy tax” which operated in such outlying areas of the
imperium as Christian Albania; they were trained, converted to Islam,
and at first were used as the Ottoman equivalent of the Praetorian
Guard. The Barbarosa brothers, who founded the Regency of Algiers, were
Albanians or perhaps Greek Islanders by birth. They however received
permission to begin recruiting native Anatolians into the Algerian
branch of the corps, and eventually even European Renegadoes were
admitted. The Ocak, like the knights of Saint John of Malta, comprised a
military order in a holy war, and an occupying army, and a government,
all in one. It seems that not one of the Ocak was ever born in North
Africa-and in fact if a Janissary married a native woman and had
children, these children were refused membership in the Ocak (a
situation which led to several unsuccessful rebellions by such
“half-breeds”). Native Algerians could and did rise to eminence and
power- as corsairs-but never as military administrators. Hamida Reis,
the last great l9th-century Algerian captain (Ar. ra'is), was a pure
Kayble Berber. But in Algiers he was something of an exception. In any
case, the “democracy” of the Ocak excluded native Algerians- and yet it
also tended toward greater and greater independence from Turkey. If it
was a “colony” of sorts, it was nevertheless only loosely connected to
the homeland, unlike the later “departments” of the French. And the
“Turks” always remained closer to the natives than any l9th century
European colonists by virtue of a shared religion. However much the
Moors and Berbers may have hated the Turks, they joined forces with them
when Spanish or French fleets loomed over the horizon.
We want to compare the government of Algiers with that of Sale, which
was perhaps in part modeled on it. But the comparison of Algiers and
Sale will have only a limited usefulness for us precisely because of the
former's Ottoman ties. Over the centuries Algiers absorbed a great deal
of Turkish culture. The Janissaries were largely devoted to the Bektashi
Sufi Order, a rather heterodox confraternity which sometimes used wine
ritually, and exhibited many Turkic-shamanic features [Birge, 1937]. The
famous Janissary marching music was originally a Sufi invention. Pere
Dan, a priest who came to Algiers in the 1630's to ransom captives and
stayed on to produce an important history of the Regency, describes the
investiture of Abd al-Hassan Ali in 1634 upon his arrival from
Constantinople as the new triennial pasha:
The city sent out two well-equipped galleys to do him honor. The officer
corps of the Divan assembled in the number of five hundred to receive
him at the port, where as he disembarked from his galley he was received
with a salute of some fifteen hundred guns from the city forts and the
corsair ships some forty of which came out under sail. There then
marched the Agha of the Janissaries accompanied by two drummers (Cavus),
followed by the Principal Secretary with the 24 Ayabashis who are the
chief Counselors of State. There followed two by two the Bulukbashis
with their huge plumed turbans, then the ranks of the Odabashis; there
marched after them six Turkish oboists with Moors among them some
playing flutes and other cymbals, the whole ensemble a very strange
noise which aroused in us more fear than pleasure. Last came the new
Pasha, enveloped as a mark of peace in a vast white robe. He rode a fine
Barbary steed richly harnessed with a silver bridle studded with gems,
spurs and stirrups, reins of silk all laden with turquoises and an
embroidered saddle-cloth elaborately worked. In this order the
procession entered the city and the Pasha was taken to the residence
designated for him.
[Spencer, 1976]
It's interesting that Pere Dan mentions the terror roused in “our”
European hearts by the music. The Janissaries appear to have been the
very first in history to use military marching music, and when their
bands appeared blaring and booming before the gates of Vienna, it's said
that Christian soldiers threw down their weapons and fled at the mere
sound. It would be interesting to know if the Ocak ever shipped a band
aboard a corsair vessel (the Algerian Janissaries accompanied the
pirates as men-at-arms, used only when a prize ship was boarded and
subdued by force). The European pirates who operated in the Caribbean
and Indian oceans in the 17-18th century are reputed to have been very
fond of music, and to have hired on full-time professionals when they
could afford to, but apparently the music was for their own pleasure
rather than a form of psychological warfare![7]
In Salé the Sufi and military Turkish music would have been unknown, but
Andalusian music-a complex of Persian, Arab, Moorish, Iberian, and other
influences, developed over centuries in Islamic Spain and now suddenly
exiled to North Africa-must have been imported to Salé by various waves
of Moors and Moriscos from Spain; new Berber and African influences
would have been added to the mix giving birth to classical North
Moroccan music more-or-less as it's played today and still called
Andalusi.
Salé, by contrast with the other Barbary states, remained free of
Ottoman control or even much influence. A close relation between
Algerine and Saletine corsairs (discussed below) probably led to dome
Turkish cultural influence in Salé. For instance, Salé celebrated a
special holiday with the old Turkish custom of a candlelight procession.
But Salé was at all times either a Moroccan possession or a free
MoorishCorsair state, and no “foreigners” ever seized power there in the
name of an alien government.
Structurally, the most notable feature of the Algerian Ocak was its
system of “democracy by seniority.” In theory and for the most part even
in practice-a recruit rose up through the ranks at the rate of one every
three years. If he survived long enough, he'd serve as
commander-in-chief or “Agha of Too Moons”… for two months. He would then
retire into the Divan or Ocak chamber of government with a vote on all
important issues and appointments. All this had nothing to do with
“merit”, but was simply a matter of time served. The lowliest Albanian
slave-boy or peasant lad from the Anatolian outback, and the outcast
converted European captive sailor, could equally hope one day to
participate in government-simply by staying alive and serving the
“Corsair republic”, which was the real power-structure within the
Ottoman protectorate. As Pere Dan put it: “The state has only the name
of a kingdom since, in effect, they have made it into a republic.” No
wonder the Ocak never seemed to have trouble recruiting new members.
Where else in the world was such “upward mobility” possible?
The Divan itself used one of the strangest “rules of order” ever devised
by any group anywhere in the world:
The rules covering the meetings of the divan were simple enough. No
member was allowed to carry arms of any kind, and armed guards
maintained order. No member was allowed to use his fists for any
offensive action on pain of death, but he was allowed to express his
feelings with his feet, either by stomping or by kicking. One French
consul was nearly killed when he was “footed” in the divan. All speech
was in Turkish; dragomen translated into Berber or Arabic and the
European languages when necessary. The “word” was taken in order of
seniority or importance, although the most usual practice seems to have
been for the speaker to orchestrate a chorus of shouting by the
assembly. These sessions were incredibly disorderly as a result of this
procedure. Foreigners who attended were often convinced that they were
dealing with wild, violent, irrational men; the evidence seems to point
to the fact that the leaders used this procedure to emphasize their
programs and to shout down any objections. To an Englishman, however,
such procedures seemed irrational; for instance, Francis Knight, who, in
the second quarter of the 17th century spent several years in Algiers as
a slave, was apparently able to witness meetings of the divan. His
account of procedures is worth repeating:
“They stand in ranks, passing the word by chouse or pursuivant, jetting
each other with their arms or elbows, raising their voices as if in
choler or as a pot boileth with the addition of fire…. They have a wise
prevention of a greater mischief, for [they] are commanded upon deepest
pains not to drink wine or any strong liquor before coming…or to carry a
knife thither…. It is such a government like which there is nowhere else
in the world…”
[Wolfe, 1979: 78]
In the course of its long run for the money, Algiers witnessed every
sort of skullduggery, riot, rebellion, corruption, political murder, and
disorder known to the human condition-and yet somehow survived and
thrived. Some have gone so far as to define its form of government as
l'democracy by assassination“. But was it any more corrupt or violent
than any other state in the 17th (or any other) century? Was it so much
more chaotic than, say, the European monarchies, so wild that it could
boast of a freedom obtained-at least for the successful few-and
obtainable only through chaos? Or do the accounts (by European visitors,
remember) over-stress the negative and present us with a wicked
caricature of Algiers? My suspicion is that the daily life of the City
was no more or less violent over the long haul of history than the daily
life of many another human group. But Algiers was different because its
very economy depended on violence outside its borders-the acts of the
corsairs. And it was more democratic than the European or Islamic
monarchies. Are these two features somehow connected I prefer to leave
it a question.
The corsair equivalent of the Divan was the Taiffe reisi,or Council of
Captains. Unfortunately we know a good deal less about it than about the
Divan, because the corsairs had no Ottoman bureaucrats and hocas
(learned scribes) to serve them as record-keepers. The Taiffe has been
compared to a medieval guild, but this is misleading to the extent that
the Corsairs' proto-labor-union was also a de facto ruling (or at least
consultative) body within the Regency. The Divan and the Taiffe may
sometimes have competed or clashed in power struggles, but we may be
sure that neither body would lightly risk alienating the other. The
Corsairs depended on the Ocak for political protection, funding, and a
supply of men-at-arms. The Divan depended on the Taiffe for its economic
life-blood, the very prosperity of the Regency, which lived, in large
part on pirate booty and ransom fees. Apparently the Divan of Salé was
based on the structure of the taiffe of Algiers (rather than on the
structure of the Divan of the Ocak), so it's a pity we know so little
about Taiffe organization. Unlike the Ocak, seniority would obviously
not work as a modus operandi. The reis was a captain either through
sheer merit (or “luck” as most pirates would call it), or because he
owned a ship or two. Of course, again, a lowly pirate cabin boy (like
Hamida Reis) could hope to become Admiral of the Fleet some day,
whatever his class or race origins-a far different situation than in,
say, the British Navy! And we know that the Taiffe voted democratically
on issues and to select its leaders. Altogether it may well be that the
16-17th century Algerian Divan-and-Taiffe form of “bicameralism” can be
seen as a precursor to the republican governments of America and France,
which came into being only centuries later; as for the genuine Republic
of Salé, it preceded even the protectorate/Commonwealth structure of
revolutionary England (1640's and 50's). A strange thought: Does
European democracy actually owe a direct debt to the 'Corsairs? No one
would ever have admitted it openly, of course, since the Barbary
corsairs were heathen-but as Rediker points out, sailors were the 17th
century's proletariat, and we might imagine whispers circulating from
ship to ship (England sent a fleet to Salé in 1637!) about the enviable
freedoms of the 'worsairs and Renegadoes.[8]
We must skip over the fascinating unfolding of political structures in
the subsequent history of Algiers, simply because it cannot offer us
much help in understanding our chief interest, Salé. As for what we
might call the specific ethnography or socio-history of Algerian piracy,
we will certainly return to it for comparative material when discussing,
say, the erotic mores or economic arrangements of the Corsairs of Bou
Regreg in Morocco. But one more Algerian theme must detain us before we
depart for the Far West- the Renegadoes.
A huge proportion-some say the majority of Algerian captains and crews
were indeed “foreigners” of some sort or another. Andalusian Moors and
Moriscos from Spain introduced new techniques in armor and cannon, and
many of them proved experienced mariners as well. A medley of
“Levantines” from the Eastern Mediterranean-including Greeks, Egyptians,
Syrians, islanders, and the usual riffraff and scum of every port-served
the jihad in Algiers. Albanians and other Balkan/Ottoman mountaineers
and brigands floated in along with the Turkish contingent. And of course
there were Renegadoes from every country of Europe (especially the
Mediterranean littoral), whether volunteers or converted captives:
Between 1621 and 1627 there were said to be twenty thousand Christian
captives in the corsair capital, including “Portuguese, Flemish, Scots,
English, Danes, Irish, Hungarians, Slavs, Spanish, French, Italians;
also Syrians, Egyptians, Japanese, Chinese, South Americans,
Ethiopians,” which attests to the polyglot ethnicity of seafaring in
those days. The records kept by Redemptionists on apostasy are equally
revealing, although painful to the apostolic ego. Between 1609 and 1619,
Gramaye observed, renegades who willingly abjured their faith for the
comforts of Islam included “857 Germans, 138 Hamburgmen, 300 English,
130 Dutch and Flemings, 160 Danes and Easterlings, 250 Poles, Hungarians
and Muscovites.”
[Spencer, 1976: 127]
Once a whole army of Spaniards embraced Islam to avoid captivity, and
were apparently completely absorbed- and even a few Black Africans,
brought north in slave caravans, who purchased their own freedom and
joined the great corsair gold-rush. Jews, both native and foreign
(including Marranos and Convertados from Spain, and other Sephardic
groups), served all the Barbary states as merchants and financiers, and
frequently obtained great power in the councils of government. European
merchants, consuls, and redemptionist friars and priests provided a
small shocked audience for this exotic rainbow coalition of rogueS, and
luckily some of them wrote up their impressions and memoirs. The pirates
themselves have left us not a word.
The hero and beau ideal of the Corsairs was Khaireddin (Khizr)
Barbarossa (Redbeard), the greatest scion of a family of sea-rovers
(probably Albanian in origin but resident on Lesbos), who first arrived
in the Western Mediterranean as an agent of the declining Mameluke power
of Egypt. From Tunis, he and his brothers joined with Moors from Granada
to raid Spanish coasts. They raised their own freelance fleet and sold
their services to various North African regimes; when possible they
would assassinate the local ruler and take over the town (Bougie, 1512,
Jijelli, 1514, Algiers, 1515); the island of Djerba for a time served as
their headquarters. Around 1518, hard pressed by Spain, Khaireddin
appealed for aid to the Ottoman Sultan Selim I (the “Grim”), and was
appointed vice-regent or beylerbey of Algiers. He finally managed to
expel the Spaniards from their island fortress in the bay of Algiers in
1529, and took Tunis in 1534.[9] The emperor appointed him admiral of
the entire Turkish fleet. The Ottomans had a treaty with France at the
time, and Barbarossa appeared off the coast of Provence as an ally. But
so powerful was he that he prohibited the ringing of church bells (an
offensive sound in Islamic tradition) while his fleet was anchored in
port. He died in bed in his palace at Constantinople, and was succeeded
as beylerbey of Algiers by his son Hassan Barbarossa. A true pirate
epic, rags to riches: the Renegadoes' dream. [Spencer, 1976: 18]
In the next generation the Renegado hero was Morat Reis, another
Albanian, who made a name for himself by capturing a Sicilian duke and
plundering a papal galley.
His most daring adventure, however, was to take a squadron of four
galiots through the Straits to Salé, where he was joined by three pirate
captains, and then on to the Canaries. The corsairs sacked Lanzarote,
captured the wife and daughter of the governor and hundreds of people of
lesser importance. After a cruise around the islands and several further
landings for more booty and prisoners, they hoisted a flag for parley
and allowed the ransom of their more important captives. The rest were
carried back to Algiers or Salé as slaves. The Spanish, forewarned of
the corsairs' return, tried to intercept them at the Straits, but Morat
Reis successfully evaded Don Martin de Padilla's armada in a storm and
brought his little flotilla into Algiers. It was a daring raid made more
daring since the galiot was not really a suitable vessel for the
Atlantic. Christians liked to believe that God punished Morat Reis by
causing his son to die just before his return, but the story, told in
the testimony about the raid made before the Inquisition, may not be
completely correct. [Wolfe, 1979: 146-7]
Morat Reis seems to have inaugurated the special “Salé connection” in
Algiers, which led to a unique scheme for the mutual benefit of both
cities. When Algiers signed a peace treaty with some European nation-a
frequent occurrence in the complex web of diplomatic back-stabbing
around the Mediterranean basin-then Algiers agreed not to raid the
shipping of that country-say, England. Meanwhile, let's say, Salé is
temporarily at peace with France, and thus French ships are taboo for
the “Sally Rovers”. So…when an Algerian corsair approaches a French
ship, it flies the flag of Salé, and thus arouses no suspicion. Having
seized the French ship, it reverts to Algerian colors and returns to
Algiers (where French prizes are permitted) to sell cargo and captives.
And a ship from Salé can pull the same trick on a ship from England.
Further ramifications can be imagined, especially as Algerian and
Saletine ships could freely use each other's home port facilities for
repairs, sale of booty, and R&R.
Ali Bicnin (a corruption of his name, Picenino) flourished in Algiers
during the same period (1630's60's) which also saw the establishment of
the Bou Regreg Republic in Morocco, and which seems to have been the
real golden age of the Barbary corsairs.
He was an Italian, some say a Venetian, named Piccinio, who arrived in
Algiers in command of a pirate ship that he had sailed from the
Adriatic; he converted to Islam and quickly rose to prominence in the
taiffe through his daring and bravery. His prizes made him rich, and he
reinvested in new corsair vessels until his own flotilla earned him the
title of admiral of Algiers. He owned two palaces in the city, a villa
in the suburbs, several thousand slaves, jewels, plate, and great wealth
in merchandise. He built a sumptuous public bath and a great mosque in
Algiers as a gift to the city. He had his own bodyguard of footmen as
well as cavalry, recruited mostly from the Koukou tribesmen whose sultan
became his father-in-law. In the 1630's the redemptionist fathers
writing from Algiers looked to him rather than the pasha as the real
ruler of the city. Francis Knight, who was one of his slaves, called him
a great “tyrant” who respected no man, not even the Grand Seigneur.
However, not all his slaves regarded their lot as “exquisitely
miserable” or their master as a tyrant. One story tells of a Mohammedan
fanatic who, wishing to gain paradise by killing a Christian, begged
Bitchnin for the privilege of killing one of his slaves. The corsair
agreed but armed a muscular young man with a sword and then invited his
petitioner to meet him in an orchard; when he fled, Ali Bitchnin laughed
derisively at him. Another slave returned a diamond that he had “found”;
Bitchnin remarked about the folly of not taking advantage of a chance
for freedom!
Ali Bitchnin probably had ambitions to usurp control over the regency.
His alliance with the sultan of Koukou, his bodyguard of hundreds of
soldiers, his personal navy, his relations with the coulougli leaders
all point to political ambitions. He suffered a serious reverse at
Valona, where he lost eight galleys (Knight secured his freedom from him
in that battle; he was a slave on board of one of the ships that was
captured) and two thousand slaves. A few years later, when the sultan
planned an assault on Malta, Ali Bitchnin refused to allow the Algerian
naval forces to go unless the sultan would pay a subsidy in advance. The
Sublime Porte sent a chaouch (messenger or emissary) to Algiers to
secure Ali Bitchnin's head; both the chaouch and the pasha had to flee
to a mosque to escape the wrath of the corsair admiral's followers. At
that point, however, the pasha refused to pay the Janissaries' salary,
and the corps demanded that Ali Bitchnin provide the money. Apparently,
he had not yet prepared his men for a coup. He fled to his
father-in-law's territory, and the Janissaries sacked his city homes as
well as the Jewish quarter. What would happen next? The Sublime Porte
obviously feared that Ali Bitchnin might return to Algiers with a Kabyle
army; it sent him money, pardon, and honors just short of making him the
pasha, but when he returned to Algiers with the sultan's chaouch, he
soon sickened and died. His funeral was celebrated with near royal pomp,
but many suspected that he had been poisoned on the sultan's orders.
[Wolfe, 1979: 1489][10]
Simon Danser, the “Old Dancer” or “Diablo” Reis, was the famous corsair
who (according to legend, at least) first taught the North Africans to
abandon their outmoded Mediterranean rowed galleys with lateen rigs and
take up sailing in “round ships”, i.e. European-style fore-and-aftrigged
vessels (like the caravel, made famous by Columbus). Danser and his
comrade Captain Ward (who will re-appear later) achieved enough fame to
appear as characters in Thomas Dekker's play, If This be not a Good
Play, the Divel is in it (1612) [Ewen, p. 3]. Originally a Dutchman from
Dordrecht,
Danser came to Algiers from Marseilles, where he had established
residence, married, and engaged in the ship-building trade. It is not
clear what caused him to turn renegade and undertake a corsair career,
but within three years of his arrival he had become the taiffe's leading
reis and had acquired the sur name of Deli-Reis, “Captain Devil,” for
his audacious exploits. Using captured prizes as models, Danser taught
his fellow captains the management and navigation of round ships
equipped with high decks, banks of sails, and cannon. He personally
accounted for forty prizes, which were incorporated into the corsair
fleet, and from Danser's time onward the Algerians replenished their
losses equally from captured ships and from their own shipyard.
Danser also led the Algerians farther afield than they had ever
navigated before. They passed through the Strait of Gibraltar,
penetrated the Atlantic, and ranged as far north as Iceland, where a
corsair squadron swept the coast in 1616
Ironically, Danser, who seems to have retained his Christian faith at
least in secret, utilized the capture of a Spanish ship carrying ten
Jesuit priests off Valencia as a means of informing the French Court of
Henri IV secretly of his intention to return to Marseilles, where he had
left his wife and children. The French agreed on condition of the safe
return of the Jesuits, which was done. In 1609 Danser was reunited with
his family and restored to full citizenship by the Marseilles city
council. But, once a corsair always a corsair, whether in the service of
Christian France or Muslim Algiers, and in 1610 Danser presented to the
king and the Marseilles councilors a bold proposal for an expedition
against Algiers which- given his extraordinary inside knowledge of the
city-would probably have overthrown the Regency government.
Unfortunately, the French, distrustful of the loyalty of the former
corsair, refused to entertain his project.“
[Spencer, pp. 125-6]
The Old Dancer, however, was in fact the causus belli of a war between
France and Algiers. It seems that
Danser, grateful for generous treatment by the French government,
presented the Duc de Guise, the governor of the province, with two brass
cannons, which, unfortunately for subsequent events, were on loan to him
from the government of Algiers. Naturally the Algerians, shocked at
Danser's “treason” demanded the return of the two cannons.
The political crisis moved slowly but surely. Guise refused to give up
his cannons, but it was events in France, quite unconnected with Danser,
that delayed action. Henry IV was murdered, the regent Marie de Medici
had troubles to worry about both in the Rhineland and in Paris. Nothing
was done. This was the sort of crisis that the Algerian reis were
waiting for: French Mediterranean commerce was plentiful and rich and
tempting, and with the refusal of the French king to grant redress, it
was an excellent opportunity for the corsairs
[Wolfe, 1979: 181-2]
The cannon were eventually returned to Algiers-perhaps the worst
humiliation ever suffered by France at the hands of its future colony.
We could go on digging up the names of many Algerian-based Renegadoes,
and even the names of some of their ships and prizes, but we wouldn't
learn very much more about their lives, much less their thoughts and
feelings. Needless to say that some of them were Moslems, at best, in
name only, and were despised by the pious for continuing to drink,
curse, and “sing like Christians” even after their conversion. But what
about that sailor from St. Tropez who caused a diplomatic incident
because the French consul tried to prevent his turning Turke? What were
his motives? And what about Ali Bic,nin's mosque and bath house? The
architecture of a cynical hypocrite?-or perhaps the sign of a more
ambiguous emotion, half self-interest, half something else? True
insincerity is-after all-rather rare in the history of the human heart.
Most people tend to justify their choices and acts by some appeal to
ideas and ideals-and first of all, to justify these acts to themselves.
Ideologies are easily internalized when self-interest and self-image
coincide with ideological rhetoric and goals. To assume that the
Renegadoes were all Machiavellian schemers and poseurs would be to give
them too much credit. It's far more psychologically convincing to
imagine that some of them, at least, came to “believe” in what they
professed to believe.
The ambiguity of the Renegadoes was mirrored even in language. The
medley of peoples in Algiers must have produced a polyglot nightmare of
mistranslation. A lingua franca was needed, and indeed came to be known
as Franco, the language of the “Franks” (and by extension of all
European foreigners), or Sabir (from the Spanish “to know”). Arabic,
Spanish, Turkish, Italian, and Provençal were mixed in this typical
seaport argot. If a parallel dialect developed in Salé, it might have
utilized Arabic, Berber, HispanoArabic (Morisco) and Spanish,
Portuguese, French, and English. “New” languages reflect new and unique
large-scale social phenomena; they are not simply means of communication
but also patterns for thinking, vehicles for the inner and outer
experience of the speakers, for their new communitas, and their new (or
newly-adopted) ideology. Franco died out with the corsairs, but its
shadowy existence suggests that the Renegadoes had become-however
tenuously-a “People”, a linguistic community. Given the right historical
circumstances, a lingua franca can become a full-fledged literary
language, like Urdu or Bahasa Malay. Franco never made the grade-but
knowing that it existed must change our view of the Renegadoes. We can
no longer see them as a random scattering of lost apostates. A language
(however crude and jury-rigged) is a culture, or at least the sure sign
of an emerging culture.
Before we set sail at last for Salé we should make one more brief cruise
of the Mediterranean in search of Renegadoes. It's incredibly
frustrating not to have a genuine geography of one of these men (or
women). In most cases all that survives of their memory is an anecdote
or two, perhaps an exciting account of a battle at sea, which all reveal
precisely nothing of the renegades' psychology, their thoughts, their
motivations. But every once in a while a little flash of sulphurous
insight lights up the gloom of mere speculation. For instance, the
English Renegado Peter Eston,
who started life as a Somerset farm laborer, commanded a fleet of forty
vessels by 1611. In 1612 he raided the fishing fleet on the Newfoundland
banks, as West Indian-based pirates were to do after him. Here he
trimmed and repaired his vessels, appropriated such provisions and
munitions as he needed, and took 100 men to join his fleet. He caused
havoc wherever he appeared, whether this was in the western
Mediterranean or off the coast of Ireland. Eventually tiring of the
renegade life, he entered the service of the Duke of Savoy, purchased a
Savoyard marquisate, and married a lady of noble birth.[Lucie-Smith,
1978: 83]
At one time, Eston was told that James I of England had offered him a
pardon. “Why should I obey a king's orders,” he asked, “when I am a kind
of king myself?” This quip reminds us of numerous speeches recorded in
Defoe's General History of the Pyrates which hint at the existence of a
pirate “ideology” (if that's not too grand a term), a kind of
proto-individualist-anarchist attitude, however unphilosophical, which
seems to have inspired the more intelligent and class-conscious
buccaneers and corsairs. Defoe relates that a pirate named Captain
Bellamy made this speech to the captain of a merchant vessel he had
taken as a prize. The captain of the merchant vessel had just declined
an invitation to join the pirates:
I am sorry they won't let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do
any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we
must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking
puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which
rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have
not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn
ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who
serve them, for a parcel of hen hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the
scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor
under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the
protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us,
than sneak after these villains for employment?
When the captain replied that his conscience would not let him break the
laws of God and man, the pirate Bellamy continued:
You are a devilish conscience rascal, I am a free prince, and I have as
much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred
sail of ships at sea, and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and this
my conscience tells me: but there is no arguing with such snivelling
puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure.
It's interesting to compare Eston, a “farm laborer” with the heart of a
king, with Henry Mainwaring, the gentleman pirate who did accept an
English pardon and (like Henry Morgan some years later) betrayed his
former low companions. Or consider the only real aristocrat (as far as I
know) to turn Turk, Sir Francis Verney:
A turbulent youth, Verney lost a quarrel with his stepmother about his
inheritance, and in the autumn of 1608 left England in disgust. He
arrived in Algiers and played a part in one of the frequent wars of
succession, then turned corsair. In 1609 he was reported by the English
ambassador in Spain to have taken “three or four Poole ships and one of
Plymouth.” In December 1610 he was said by the Venetian ambassador in
Tunis to have apostatized. At this period he was an associate of John
Ward. But his period of success did not last long. In 1615, according to
Lithgow, he was desperately sick in Messina, after being a prisoner for
two years in the Sicilian galleys. He had been redeemed upon his
reconversion by an English Jesuit. Though he was now free, his fortunes
were broken, and he was forced to enlist as a common soldier in order to
exist. Lithgow discovered him when he was on the point of death, “in the
extremist calamity of extreme miseries” and having lost all desire to
live.[Lucie-Smith, 1978: 84]
Four years later (1615) he died in the Hospital of St. Mary of Pity at
Messina [Senior, 1976: 98]. Truly he “came to a bad end”, as the
old-time chroniclers always said of the pirates-whether it was true or
not.
Another English renegado “gentleman” (from Cornwall) was Ambrose Sayer
[ibid., p. 83]. In 1613 Sayer was captain of an Algerian vessel which
was captured at Sale by an English ship, whose captain decided to send
the corsairs back to London to stand trial. Toby Glanville, one of
Sayer's shipmates, realized the “game was up, made several attempts to
commit suicide and eventually succeeded in throwing himself off the
stern of the ship.” [ibid., p. 97] Presumably, like most sailors, he'd
never learned to swim. Captain Sayer was sent home and convicted of
piracy, but somehow managed to escape-and presumably to retire, since we
hear no more of him.
Probably the corsair about whom we know the most was John Ward. Ward
enjoyed the distinction of “starring” as the villain of that 1612 West
End hit, A Christian Turn'd Turke; Ward also merited at least two
penny-dreadful blackletter pamphlets and two popular ballads-the
supermarket tabloids of the good old days-which may be full of errors
and outright lies, though they paint an interesting picture. [For Ward,
see Ewen, 1939]
Ward was born around 1553, “a poore fisher's brat” in Faversham, Kent.
In the last year of Elizabeth's reign and the first of James, we find
him penniless in Plymouth, apparently with a fairly extensive career in
privateering behind him- fifty years old, “squat, bald, white-haired.”
[Norris, 1990: 63] In 1603 he had the extreme bad luck to be “drummed
into service” in the Navy-i.e., impressed-and forced to serve aboard the
Lion’s Whelp under Captain Thomas Sockwell (who later became a pirate
himself). As many historians have noted, low or non-existent pay,
exhausting drudgery, and violent corporal punishments made up life in
the Navy in those days, which was “one of the worst fates that could
befall any man.”[11] Ward is said to have lamented his salad days in
privateering “when we might sing, drab [i.e., fuck], swear and kill men
as freely as your cakemakers do flies; when the whole sea was our empire
where we robbed at will, and the world was our garden where we walked
for sport.” After just two weeks of naval discipline Ward reasserted
himself and organized thirty other sailors to jump ship, steal a small
bark in Plymouth harbor,[12] and sail out on the Account, free men at
last. Aged 50, Ward embarked on a new and amazing career as a pirate.
Ward now sailed to southern Ireland, probably to Bearehaven or
Baltimore, obscure and remote little ports known for their hospitality
to pirates.[13]
Somewhere in the area he came across the Violet of London in November
1603 and captured her.
When they reached the Scilly Isles the pirates had the good luck to fall
in with a French vessel, but such was the strength of their ship that
they could only hope to capture the Frenchmen by guile. Accordingly, the
majority of the pirates hid below hatches while a few of their comrades
up on deck engaged the other ship in conversation. They continued thus
for several hours until their ruse finally succeeded and they came close
enough to board and overpower their quarry.
[Senior, p. 88]
Ward renamed the ship Little John—which offers us a precious insight
into his ideas and his image of himself: clearly he considered himself a
kind of Robin Hood of the seas. We have some evidence that he gave to
the poor, and he was clearly determined to steal from the rich.[14]
Ward now made one last clandestine visit to Plymouth where he recruited
a crew to man his flagship, and then set out for the South-and the
Orient-never to return.
On his voyage south, Ward took a 100-ton flyboat north of Lisbon and
then entered the Straits. He sailed to Algiers, but received a hostile
reception there because Richard Gifford, an English adventurer in the
service of the Duke of Tuscany, had recently attempted to burn the
galleys in the harbor. He therefore continued to cruise the
Mediterranean, increasing in strength and wealth all the time. In
December 1604 he was in the waters of Zante, where he captured the Santa
Afaria, a Venetian vessel laden with currants and silk, and on Christmas
Day that year he looted a Flemish ship of her cargo of pepper, wax, and
indigo.
Disposing of his loot in various Mediterranean ports, Ward then passed
through the Straits once more to trim and victual his ship. It was while
he was at Salé, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, that he was joined by
twenty-three more Englishmen. These men, who had set sail in the
Blessing with Dutch letters of marque, were in a sorry state, having
been roughly handled by a Spanish warship. When they saw that Ward and
his fellows were “well shipped and full of monie,” they needed little
encouragement to leave their ship and join forces with them. Ward's
numbers were further augmented at Larache, when another English crew
threw in their lot with him. The captain of these men, Michael, soon
returned home to England, but their lieutenant, Anthony Johnson,
remained with Ward and became one of his most trusted men.
By 1605 Ward had succeeded in gathering a formidable force around
himself. His man-of-war, which he had appropriately named the Gift, was
a flyboat of 200 tons or more, mounting thirty-two guns and crewed by
about 100 men. In addition to the Gift, he was accompanied in his
marauding by any prizes which he thought might suit his purpose. His men
; were mainly English, but included a considerable number of Dutchmen.
There was certainly no shortage of able seamen who were anxious to join
his band. Ward's pamphleteer, Andrew Barker, had an even higher estimate
of the pirates' abilities, saying that many of them were “worthy
spirits, whose resolutions, if they had beene aimed to honourable
actions, either at sea or shore…might have beene preferred and commended
for service to the greatest Prince living.”
In 1603, Ward had been a common seaman, living in poverty and serving in
terrible conditions aboard one of the king's ships. At fifty years of
age it must have seemed that his best years were over. Now less than two
years later, he was a rich man, the commander of a fine, strong vessel,
and the respected leader of a large band of desperate men.
Ward's piracies continued throughout the winter of 1605-6. In November
1605 he was in the waters off Cyprus where he robbed a ship from Messina
of silk, velvet and damask to the tune of ÂŁ5,500. At about this time he
also took a French prize laden with spices, drugs, and cotton in the
roadstead at Modone, and followed this in April 1606 by capturing a
Flemish ship off Sardinia, carrying a cargo of textiles. Such captures
can only have served to emphasize the pirates' growing need for a secure
base of operations where they could sell their booty and store their
riches. By 1606 they had found such a haven with the Turks at Tunis. In
August of that year, Ward was reported to be living in the city and to
have helped some English seamen who were temporarily in difficulties.
Ward's protector at Tunis was Cara Osman, who, as head of the
Janissaries, had exercised absolute control over the city since 1594. An
agreement was reached between the two men whereby Osman had first
refusal of all goods which the pirates brought back to Tunis. The goods
were then stored in Tunisian warehouses and resold to Christian
merchants at a considerable profit. Everything points to the fact that
Ward and Osman enjoyed a good working relationship and they may have
even become close friends, for the pirate called the Turk “brother”. The
suspicion is, however, that Osman got the best of the bargain. Yet the
pirates were utterly dependent on Osman's friendship, for without it
they would probably have been denied the use of Tunis as a base. Thomas
Mitton, a man who had lived at Tunis for three years and been to sea
with Ward, testified to this when he gave evidence in the admiralty
court:
…the said Carosman is the onelie aider, asister and upholder of the
saide Warde in his piracies and spoiles for that hee the saied Warde
hathe noe other place to victualle in save onelie Tunis, and at Tunis
hee coulde not victualle but by the meanes of Carosman whoe grauntethe
him the saied Warde warrantes to take upp and buy victualles at Tunis
and the Cuntrie theereaboutes. And the reason that moovethe the saied
Carosman soe to doe is beecause when Warde takethe anie prize Carosman
buyethe his goodes of him at his owne price.
Ward's first voyage from his new-found base began in October 1606. Cara
Osman paid one quarter of the costs of victualling the pirate ship,
which was the Gift, Ward's old man-of-war. The crew was entirely
English, except for twelve Turks put aboard by Osman, who paid for their
own keep. Ward did not have to wait long for his first prize. On 1
November, near Corone, he captured the John Baptist, 90 tons, a vessel
belonging to some London merchants which was employed in the local
coasting trade. At this capture the Gift had as consort a fifty-ton
pinnace commanded by Anthony Johnson, and it seems reasonable to assume
that the two ships had set out from Tunis together.
The next prize to fall to the pirates was a far richer vessel, the Rubi,
a Venetian argosy of upwards of 300 tons, which was returning from
Alexandria with a cargo of spices and 3,000 pieces of gold. The Gift,
flying a Dutch flag, sighted the Rubi on 28 January 1607, forty miles
off the coast of the Morea, and Ward and his men, no doubt making full
use of the element of surprise, captured her by boarding “verie
suddeine, desperate and without feare.” Ward followed this success by
taking another Venetian vessel, the Carminati, which was homeward-bound
after a voyage to Nauplion and Athens. Well pleased with the way the
voyage had gone, Ward returned triumphantly to Tunis with his two
Venetian prizes under guard.
As in the early years of the century, it was the Venetians who once
again had to bear the brunt of English depredations. They were, however,
yet to suffer their most sensational loss.
Ward fitted out his ships and put to sea again early in 1607. This time
he was in the Rubi, his Venetian prize which he had converted to a
man-of-war and manned with a crew of 140, mostly English. Once again
Cara Osman had bought a quarter share in the venture by providing the
pirates with guns, powder, match, and shot from the Turkish armoury.
This time, however, there were no Turks on the expedition.
The event that shook the Republic of Venice, and so enriched the
pirates, was the loss of the Reneira e Soderina, a 600-ton argosy. The
great ship was taken as she lay becalmed near Cyprus by two pirate ships
commanded by Ward, each said to be mounting forty guns and carrying at
least 100 armed men. Amongst the fabulous cargo of the Soderina was
indigo, silk, cinnamon and cotton worth at least L100,000 (one wildly
exaggerated English report put her value at “two millions at the
least”). It was not only the size of the financial loss which caused
such a stir on the Rialto. The very manner of the Soderina's capture was
a disgrace to the Republic of St. Mark. From one account of the baule,
it is clear that the crew of the argosy were terrified by the ferocity
of the pirates' attack and offered little or no resistance:
The captain, after deciding on the advice of everybody to fight, divided
up all his crew and passengers, and stationed some on the quarterdeck,
others on the maindeck and poop, and thus they all seemed to be very
gallant soldiers with weapons in their hands. The two ships that came to
attack, even though two or three shots were fired at them, strove
without further ado to lay themselves alongside, and on coming within
range fired off twelve shots, six each, always aiming at the crew and
the sails, without firing once into the water. Their plans, designed to
terrify, succeeded excellently, because two of those who were defending
the quarterdeck were hit by one of their shots, and when they were
wounded, indeed torn to pieces, all the rest fled, leaving all their
weapons lying on the quarterdeck and all of them running to their own
property, even while the two vessels were coming alongside. For all his
efforts, the captain was not only quite unable to force the crew to
return to the quarterdeck, he could not even make them emerge from below
decks or from the forecastle. Indeed, the ship's carpenter and some
others confronted him with weapons in their hands and told him that he
should no longer command the ship.
As if this prize were not enough, Ward proceeded to take another
Venetian vessel before finally returning to his base. On a June day in
1607, he and his men dropped anchor at La Goleta, the port of Tunis,
with booty worth at least 400,000 crowns. Ward did not want to prejudice
his chances of getting a good price by landing the loot, and
made many offers to carry away the shipp and goods to some other porte,
because the said Carosman would not come to his price, and to that ende
the said Warde rode out of command of the castle, and kepte his sayles
at the yards untill they had concluded.
Eventually, Ward and Cara Osman agreed on a price of 70,000
crowns-little more than one-sixth of what the goods were actually worth.
Ward was now at the height of his success. An English seaman who saw him
at Tunis in 1608 has left us a description of the arch-pirate:
Very short with little hair, and that quite white, bald in front;
swarthy face and beard. Speaks little, and almost always swearing. Drunk
from morn till night. Most prodigal and plucky. Sleeps a great deal, and
ot'ten on board when in port. The habits of a thorough “salt”. A fool
and an idiot out of his trade.
[Senior, 1976: 8893]
Whatever his level of intelligence “out of his trade” Ward was now at
the high point of success his the trade. He
gathered round him a formidable group of pirates: Captain Sampson was
appointed to the command of prizes, Richard Bishop of Yarmouth became
Ward's first lieutenant and James Proctor of Southampton and John Smith
of Plymouth his gunners. Though Danser still rivaled him in the western
Mediterranean, Ward ruled the central seas. When asked if he would like
to join the French as Danser had done, he replied, “I favor the French?
I tell you if I should meet my own father at sea I would rob him and
sell him when I had done.” When a seaman called Richard Bromfield
upbraided him for turning Turk and living in such a heathenish country,
Ward merely called him “a Puritan knave and a Puritan rogue.”
Yet at this moment he opened negotiations for a royal pardon. One of his
acquaintances deposed that he was offered L200 “in Barbary Gold” to take
to friends in England in order to impress the Lord Admiral. The Venetian
ambassador said that he was offered 30,000 crowns. But even James I
jibbed at accepting bribes from such a notorious pirate and went so far
as to name Ward specifically in a proclamation of January, 1609, for the
apprehension of pirates. Ward seems to have been much annoyed at the
rejection of his suit: “Tell those flat caps who have been the reason I
was banished that before I have done with them I will make them sue for
my pardon.”
[Lloyd, 1981: 50-51]
As one of Ward's biographers put it, in a ballad called “The Famous Sea
Fight between Captain Ward and the Rainbow,” “Go tell the king of
England, go tell him this from me / If he reign king of all the land, I
will reign king at sea.”
On one occasion in 1607, the well-known diplomat Sir Anthony Sherley
“wrote to Ward at Tunis to dissuade him from his mode of life and sinful
enterprises.” Ward was so incensed he granted freedom to a ship he'd
just captured, on condition that the Captain find Sir Anthony and convey
to him Ward's challenge to a duel. It's hard to reconcile Ward's
reputation for slow-wittedness with such flamboyant gestures.
About Sept. last (1608) Ward, being in the Straits, met Fisher of
Redriffe, bound for England, and gave him ÂŁ100 to carry to his wife.
Others of the company also sent money for wives and friends. Fisher
abused his trust. On their next meeting Ward despoiled Fisher's ship,
and being reviled, had Fisher ducked at the yard arm, and killed. The
other men to avoid the like fate joined the pirates.
Ward having stabbed one West, a master's mate, his men mutinied. In a
great storm in the straits under Saracota, Longeastle and others called
him to prayers, but he refused, saying that “he neither feared God nor
the devil.” [Ewen, 1939: 14. These quotes and anecdotes derive from one
of the pamphlets about Ward, Newwes from the Sea.]
Ward now seems to have decided to remain in Barbary and give up all hope
of a peaceful retirement. He
fitted out the Soderina as his man-of-war and made preparations for his
next voyage. She must have looked a fine ship indeed: 600 tons burden,
mounting forty bronze pieces on the lower deck and twenty on the upper.
He was at sea in her by December 1607, in command of an Anglo-Turkish
crew of 400. However, the Soderina soon proved to be impractical as a
warship. Her excessive armament weighed her down and her planks began to
rot. As soon as Ward captured a prize he took command of her, leaving
his cumbersome warship to her fate. The great vessel sank off Cerigo
early in 1608 with the loss of almost all hands—250 Turks and 150
Englishmen.
Yet this was just the start of a series of disasters that lay in store
for Ward in the winter of 1607–8. First, the prize of which he had taken
command was lost at sea, and then a galleon, which he had captured and
fitted out at Navarino, was wrecked. Worse still, one of his leading
captains, a Fleming named Jan Casten, was off Modone on 21 March 1608
with two men-of-war and a prize when he was surprised and defeated by
the Venetian galleys. In this, one of their rare victories over the
pirates, the Venetians killed 50 men, including Casten, and captured
forty-four more.
Ward still continued to serve in expeditions from Tunis after these
setbacks. He sailed with two Turkish captains to the Levant in 1609 and
went on further expeditions in 1610, 1612, and 1618. He even appears to
have had a hand in the capture of a Venetian vessel in 1622, when he
must have been nearly seventy years old. However, he developed other
interests and stayed ashore more in his later years. He had soon become
well-integrated into Tunisian society. By 1609 he had “turned Turk”,
taking the name Issouf Reis, and he is known to have married another
renegade, a woman from Palermo named Jessimina (despite the wife in
England to whom he periodically sent money).
[Senior, 1976: 93-4]
In 1616 the gossipy Scots traveler William Lithgow met Ward at Tunis:
“Here in Tunneis I met an English Captain, general Waird [such was
Lithgow's Scottish pronunciation: Father Dan called him Edouart], once a
great pirate and commander at sea; who in despite of his denied
acceptance in England, had turned Turk and built there a fair palace,
beautified with rich marble and alabaster stones. With whom found
domestics some fifteen circumcised English renegades, whose lives and
countenances were both alike, even as desperate as disdainful. Yet old
Waird their master was placable and joined me safely with a passing land
conduct to Algier; yea, and diverse times in my ten days staying there I
dined and supped with him, but lay aboard in the French ship.” His
legendary fame lived on because Edward Coxere, a captive at Tunis a few
years later, says that Ward always “had a Turkish habit on, he was to
drink water and no wine, and wore little irons under his Turk's shoes
like horseshoes.”
[Lloyd, 1981: 53]
As a popular ballad put it:
Contrary to the balladeer's pious hope, Ward's architectural fancy
failed to end in disgrace.
Lithgow also tells us that in his old age Ward had become interested in
the problem of incubating poultry eggs in camel dung. One imagines him
pottering about the alabaster palace with pots of this odiferous mulch,
accompanied by curious chickens. The inevitable “bad end” which all
pirates must suffer was provided by the plague, which paid one of its
regular visits to North Africa in 1623. Aged about seventy, Ward died in
bed and was buried at sea just as he'd always expected and hoped.
Ward's contemporaries in England wasted a great deal of vitriolic
language on him and other English renegades, whom they saw in an almost
medieval light, as having forsaken Christianity to espouse Islam. Yet
one cannot but sympathize with the pragmatism of the pirates against the
dogmatism of their day. Certainly Ward waged war on Christian shipping,
making no exception of English vessels, but stories that he would have
robbed his own father if he met him at sea seem simply malicious. There
was certainly another side to his nature. On at least two occasions he
is known to have freed Englishmen who found themselves enslaved at
Tunis, and Lithgow, who actually met the man, referred to him as
“Generous Waird.”
[Senior, p. 94]
C.M. Senior, the author of this epitaph, obviously cannot help a feeling
of sympathy for Ward, despite his cruelty, bungling, and apostasy. The
would-be Little John, the rather dimwitted old salt who no doubt
continued to ramble on about the good old days over the dinner
table,[15] makes an odd fit with the Tunisian gentleman, sometimes
abstemious, “generous”, and-who knows?-perhaps even a little pious.
(It's interesting to note that Ward only converted rather late in his
Tunisian career, which suggests he may have done so entirely voluntarily
and even sincerely.) This almost adds up to a convincing character
study; it has almost enough contradictions and paradoxes in it to sound
psychologically authentic. No other Renegado comes across the gulf of
time as such a fully-realized personality- with the possible exception
of Murad Reis of Salé, whom we'll meet later on. Indeed, one can't help
liking Ward-although, like William Lithgow, one might hesitate to spend
a night at his alabaster palace, for fear of missing one's watch and
wallet in the morning!
The area around Salé appears to have been inhabited long before the
emergence of homo sapiens sapiens. The Chalcolithic or “Pebble Culture”
is well represented, and the Neanderthals were there. All levels of the
Paleolithic are accounted for, and of course the Neolithic or “Atlantic
Megalithic” [Brown, 1971]. The name Salé (Sala or Sla) may be
exceedingly ancient, from the Berber word asla, meaning “rock”. The old
necropolis of Salé, called Chellah (really the same name again), dates
back at least to Carthaginian times (around 7th century BC). The Romans
called the place Sala Colonia, part of their province of Mauritania
Tingitane. Pliny the Elder mentions it (as a desert town infested with
elephants!). The Vandals vandalized the area in the 5th century AD, and
left behind a number of blonde, blue-eyed Berbers. The Arabs (7th
century) kept the old name and believed it derived from Sala, son of
Ham, son of Noah; they said that Salé was the first city ever built by
Berbers.
Salé was apparently somewhat tardy in converting to Islam, and became
known to Moslems as a “frontier town”; but by the 9th century it was
certainly Islamic, and the frontier had become the ocean itself. In the
10th century, when the Ismaili Fatimid Caliphate of Cairo conquered the
Far West, Salé apparently served as a military garrison: a fortress or
ribat, built on the South bank of the Bou Regreg river across from Salé,
became the settlement later known as Rabat. The military operations were
directed against local Berber tribes who had adopted Kharijite doctrine
(a kind of fundamentalism equally opposed to both Shusm and Sunni
orthodoxy). By the 11th century, Salé had become an established city
with essentially the same major features it still possesses. In order to
understand subsequent events it's important to visualize the
geographical and urban topography, hence this schematic diagram:
[]
European commentators would later use the name Salé (Sallee or Sally) to
refer to this entire complex, but in fact there are three distinct
“cities” here, each of which will develop a separate and unique identity
and fate: one, “Old” Salé (the present-day city of Salé). Two, the
“Casbah” on the south side of the river, a little walled enclave unto
itself. And three, “New” Salé (the basis for what would eventually be
known as Rabat, the present-day capital of Morocco). In order to
simplify matters we'll refer to these three settlements as Salé, the
Casbah, and Rabat.
In the 11th century the first Spanish Moslems or “Andalusians” arrived
in Salé from Cordoba, and brought with them their powerful and exquisite
Moorish culture, architecture, music, spirituality, food, folkways, etc.
At this point Salé took on its permanent sociological appearance-a port
city where urban “Arab” Andalusian and rural Berber culture met,
mingled, and mutated into Moroccan culture.
Under the Almoravids (1061-1164) and Almohads (1130-1269), Salé
developed into an important nexus between trade with Europe and trade
with Africa (the famous annual gold caravans), and became as well one of
the recognized centers of Moorish culture, learning, piety, and
sophistication. More Andalusians arrived, especially from Granada. Salé
was already known as a place of refuge for the pious, a city of saints,
marabouts, tombs, and shrines. Some of these saints will play an active
role in our history-even (or perhaps especially) after their deaths. Two
types of spirituality are represented here, comparable to the “urban”
Andalusian and “rural” Berber elements in the cultural mix. That is,
some saints were orthodox, intensely pious, involved in the classical
literate Sufism of the Shadhili Order;[16] and others were more
“maraboutic”, i.e., heterodox, folkish, miracle-working. Many of the
important saints of Salé appeared around the 13th century during the
“golden age” of the Marinid dynasty (1216-1645), when rich trade with
Europe and relative peace and prosperity in the Maghrib and Spain led to
a great flowering of culture and architecture. Salé's famous mosque and
Madrasa (theological school), still considered among Morocco's most
beautiful buildings, were built under the Marinids, as were a hospital,
an aqueduct, a hospice for Sufis, and other public works.
An exiled Vizier from Granada, Lisan al-Din (the “Tongue of the Faith”)
Ibn Khatib, visited Salé in the mid14th century and raved about its
beauty, and the delights of its bazaars, including “the most delicate of
Abyssinian slaves”; perhaps he was thinking of them when he wrote a
verse that became Salé's unofficial motto:
Even distraction couldn't dispel grief
from my heart
but penetrated by the breeze of Salé
it was salved.[17]
Around the same time one of Salé's most important saints-of the learned
and orthodox variety-settled in the city: Sidi Ahmad Ibn Ashir, “the
doctor”, teacher of such famous Sufis as Ibn Abbad of Ronda, and also of
a more maraboutic figure, a coral fisherman from Turkey known simply as
“the Turk”, who became a sort of patron-saint of local sailors. Sidi
Ahmad Ibn Ashir himself could bless the ocean and quiet storms, so that
his tomb later became a popular pilgrimage for pirates.
After the death of Ibn Ashir in 1362, Sale and the Marinids began a long
slow slide into decay-but it was a peaceful and still fairly prosperous
decadance. Leo Africanus, who visited the city in the 16th century, left
this description:
The houses are built in the style of the Ancients, much decorated with
mosaics and marble columns. Moreover, all of the houses of worship are
very beautiful and finely embellished. The same is true of the shops
which are situated beneath large and beautiful arcades. In passing
before some shops, one sees arches which have been built, it is said, to
separate one craft from another.
I have come to the conclusion that Salé possesses all of the luxuries
which distinguish a city of refined civilization, as well as being a
good port frequented by Christian merchants of various nationalities….
For it serves as the port of the Kingdom of Fez.
Although Salé was quickly retaken [from the Castillan attack of 1260],
it has since remained less populated and cared for. There are,
especially near the ramparts, many empty houses with very beautiful
columns and windows of marble and various colors. But the people of
today do not appreciate them.
The gardens are numerous, as well as the plantations from which a large
quantity of cotton is gathered. Most of the inhabitants of the city are
weavers and they also make a considerable number of combs at Salé which
are sent to be sold in all of the cities of the Kingdom of Fez; near the
city is a forest full of Boxtree and other kinds of wood that are good
for making these.
In any case, people live very comfortably today in Salé. There is a
governor, a judge, and numerous other officials—those of the customs and
the salt marshes—for many Genoese merchants come there and carry out
important affairs. Their trade creates important revenues for the King.
[quoted in Brown, 1971: 40-1]
The same period (late 15th-early 16th century) saw the emergence of
Salé's official patron saint, Sidi Abdullah Ibn Hassun, who was-in a
spiritual sense at least-deeply involved in the unfolding of Salé's
subsequent and unique history. Sidi Abdullah represented an interesting
mix of the learned and the maraboutic traditions. He was neither
especially learned nor descended from the Prophet,[18] but made his
living writing talismans. On his entry into Sale he was followed by a
walking palmtree which rooted itself on the site of his future
mausoleum. The Sufis of the city were so ecstatic they changed into
birds. And when the women of the city came to visit him he turned
himself into a woman so he could receive them without scandal! The
festival still held in his honor is celebrated on the eve of the
Prophet's birthday (Mawlid), and is centered around a candlelight
procession (based on Turkish custom) which the corsairs particularly
enjoyed; they marched dressed in all their most colorful finery. Sidi
Abdullah's most famous disciple was a marabout and holy warrior named
Muhammad al-Ayyashi, who played a major role in the great era of the
corsairs-which was now about to begin.
During the 15th and 16th centuries there was a dramatic change in the
balance of power among the countries of the western Mediterranean. The
fall of Muslim Granada in 1492 marked the end of over seven centuries of
Moroccan expansion into and settlement in the Iberian Peninsula. Within
a quarter of a century, all but one of the important maritime cities of
the Moroccan Atlantic coast had fallen to the rising empires of Spain
and Portugal. The exception was Salé.
Among the many people who came to Salé during this period was Mahammad
al-Ayyashi (mentioned above as a disciple of Ibn Hassun) one of the most
popular heroes of Moroccan history. Al-Ayyashi originated from the Banu
Malik, one of the Hilali Arab tribes that had settled in the Gharb, the
hinterland beyond Salé. Taking up residence in the city around the end
of the 16th century, he is said to have devoted himself to a life of
study and asceticism under the guidance of his shaykh Abd Allah b.
Hassun and to have distinguished himself by piety, silence, continual
fasting, and reading of the Quran. One day, according to the legend,
Sidi Abd Allah was presented with a horse by a group of tribal leaders
who had come to visit him. He called for his disciple alAyyashi and told
him to mount the horse and to forego his education in order to discover,
with the help of God, his well-being in this world and the one to come.
The saint swore his disciple by an oath to carry out his duty, blessed
him, and instructed him to ride to the city of Azemmour.
Within several years of this legendary episode, al-Ayyashi had become
governor of Azemmour, defender of southern Morocco against the Spanish
and the Portuguese, and a dangerous rival to the Saadian dynasty that
had come to power during the first half of the 16th century. In 1614
al-Ayyashi narrowly escaped an assassination planned by the Saadian
sultan and returned to Salé. From then until his death in 1641 at the
hands of an Arab tribe of the Gharb, al-Ayyashi fought the Spanish and
Portuguese along the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and became
independent ruler of the area north and east of Salé.
[Hesperis 45]
The people of Salé had always welcomed Moors from Spain into their
community, both before and after 1492. In the first decade of the 17th
century, a new type of immigrant began to appear. The last Moors of
Spain, whether holdovers still adhering to Islam (Mudejares.1), or
“Moriscos” (called “Andalusians” in Salé) nominally converted to
Christianity, had been goaded by the racist and revanchist policies of
Spain into a series of revolts and had been expelled en masse by Philip
II in a series of edicts between 1609 and 1614. One of Salé's
traditional historians [Hesperis, 47] tells us that when these new
refugees showed up and tried to rent houses there, “because of their
non-Muslim ways, Spanish dress, language, and manners, their lack of
shame and dignity, they were not allowed” to stay.[19] In 1610 a group
called the Hornacheros (from Hornachos in Estremadura) arrived together
as a cohesive people, still fervent Moslems and speaking Arabic, and
quite wealthy. Unfortunately it seems that their wealth had derived from
bribing Christian of ficials to let them carry arms, from brigandage and
from counterfeiting; the Hornacheros were not deemed sufficiently comme
il faut to seale in Old Salé, city of saints and shrines. So they moved
south across the river and built up the Casbah, and settled there
instead.[20]
The newly-arrived Moriscos however were even more outlandish-they spoke
Hispano-Arabic or even Spanish, had Christian names and no wealth at
all, and seemed even more vulgar than the Hornacheros. So the Moriscos
had to content themselves with land below the Casbah (part of
present-day Rabat), where they constituted a wholly separate group unto
themselves. They thirsted for revenge against Spain and quickly became
enthusiastic corsairs.
All three cities of the Bou Regreg were now inhabited- just at the point
when the Marinids had finally collapsed altogether, letting the whole of
Morocco slide into a state of turmoil, civil war, and dynastic
jockeying.[21] Nominal rulers of the land were now the Saadians of
Marrakesh, far to the South, and not very well-organized.
Meanwhile, the Marabout al-Ayyashi had been gaining a name for himself
in the jihad against Spain and other Christian powers encroaching upon
Morocco~ in fact, he is remembered to this day as a great hero of
Moroccan nationalism. He had been set upon the path of holy war by his
master Sidi Abdullah ibn Hassun, and had managed to make himself
governor of Azemmour; he was highly unpopular both with the Europeans
and with the Saadians of Marrakesh-who tried to have him assassinated in
1614, then sent an army against him.
He retreated back to Salé, where the leaders of all three cities agreed
to protect him. Soon after (the date is uncertain), the Moriscos of
Rabat declared themselves an independent republic, with a governor or
“Grand Admiral” elected only for a very short term- ayear at a time-and
a divan or council of fourteen elders or advisors or captains. The
Casbah followed suit in or around 1627 and created a Hornachero
Republic. Both republics at first agreed to recognize al-Ayyashi's
authority as “Commander in the Jihad” provided he respect their
autonomy-but these good relations were not to last long.
Al-Ayyashi took up residence in Old Salé and built himself two forts
just outside the city walls facing Rabat, with an underground tunnel
(still extant) leading to his palace just inside the walls. The
autocrats of the old city were his most enthusiastic supporters, and
Salé now also declared itself independent under his spiritual/political
authority. There were now three republics on the Bou Regreg-all engaged
in Holy War-and piracy-and rebellion against the Saadians-and incessant
quarrels with each other.
Around 1614, when the coastal city of Mamora fell to the Spaniards, a
large number of international pirates fled to Salé and were welcomed by
the Hornacheros and Andalusians.[22] They formed the nucleus of the
Renegado community, and settled in Rabat-so actually the “Sallee Rovers”
were Rabat rovers, although both settlements were commonly called Salé,
and all three republics were involved in the corsair trade. Perhaps one
might think of them as resembling three clans of Scottish Border
Raiders, feuding incessantly with each other but teaming up for razzias
on England. Sniping, quarreling, dissention, slurs on honor and other
pastimes gave way to open civil war from time to time, especially
between 1627 and 1641, but nothing was allowed to get in the way of
business or impede the flow of booty.
This is a confusing situation, and the sources are also confused, but as
far as I understand it, the situation was this: the Hornacheros financed
piracy and built the fleet, and tended both to resent the old autocrats
of Salé and to bully the lower-class Moriscos or Andalusians of Rabat.
The Andalusians served as men-at-arms on corsair vessels, and sometimes
as spies (since they could pass as Spaniards). In their city of Rabat
lived the international corsair community and the European merchants and
consuls (on the rue des Consuls, still extant), and presumably this is
where most of the taverns and whorehouses were to be found as well.[23]
The Andalusians were the least enthusiastic of all three groups about
al-Ayyashi and the Holy War, despite their original acceptance of him on
the basis of a shared hatred of Spain. They resented his
authoritarianism, and probably his attempts to interfere in their
republican politics. Finally in exasperation they refused to help him
with any further crusades- whereupon he turned his holy wrath upon them,
and opened fire on Rabat with his precious cannon (both iron and the
far-superior bronze variety), mounted on the walls of his forts in Salé.
Old Salé concerned itself primarily with alAyyashi's yihat~ and the
rebellign against the Saadians-but the Slawis were certainly not above
involvement in corsair activity, whether as investors, captains, crews,
men-at-arms, or merchants of booty, captives, and slaves. Nevertheless,
romantic title belongs so much more aptly to the Casbah/Rabat
settlements across the river. To this day a rivalry between Sale and
Rabat persists. As K. Brown puts it,
The struggles of the 17th century became in time vague historical
memories. The Slawis, who had considered the new intruders at Rabat as
an-Nasara 'l-Qashtaliyin (the Christians of Castille), came to call them
l-Mslmin d-r-Rbat (coll., the Muslims of Rabat), a slightly humorous,
partly bitter allusion to their laxity in religious maters. The Rabatis,
with a comparable irony, remember the madness of the people of Salé.
They say about them: kayihmaqu fi-l-asr (coll.: They go mad at the time
of the afternoon prayer). The Slawis remember, too. They say that in the
days of alAyyashi, while the people of Rabat treated with the infidels
during the day, the Slawis went about their work. At the time of the
evening prayer, however, they took up arms to fight against the traitors
of Rabat. But the two cities within a sackershoe one of another
(following Admiral Rainsborough's phrase), became friendly enemies. They
are called al-aduwatayn (the Two Banks) which, by the play of the Arabic
root, reminds people of al-aduwayn (the Two Enemies). The mutual
antipathy of the two populations becomes no more than bantering, and is
expressed by both of them in a sagacious colloquial proverb: wakha
ywelli l-wed hlib war-rmel zbib maykunshi r-Rbati li-s-Slawi hbib (Were
the river [Bou Regreg] to become milk and the sand raisins, a Rabati
will never be a friend to a Slawi). The friendly enemies across the
river at Rabat were at the worst hostile brothers. For all that, they
were Muslims and had assimilated to the Arabic culture of the country.
[Brown, 1971: 50-51]
The initial quarrel between the Andalusians of Rabat and the Hornacheros
of the Casbah centered on customs revenue, which the Hornacheros refused
to share, saying they needed it all for defense and repair of the
ramparts. The Andalusians remained unconvinced by these arguments, and
by 1630 “the proud hosts of the Casbah and the disinherited inhabitants
of the lower city were openly in a state of civil war.” [Coindreau,
1948: 44] Old Salé sided with the Hornacheros, and ironically peace was
restored only through the diplomatic intervention of the British consul,
John Harrison,[24] who in May 1630 drew up an agreement which ended
hostilities. The three points of the agreement were:
would reside in the Casbah;[25]
Salé;
would be equally divided between the Casbah and New Salé.
The two towns thus remained independent of each other and of Old Salé,
but “in effect the Casbah became the central seat of the Moorish
republic of Salé, and its government came to exercise a more-or-less
preponderant authority over the cities of the two banks [of the Bou
Regreg].” [Coindreau, 1948: 44]
The new balance of power proved precarious, and in 1631 al-Ayyashi broke
the peace again. The Andalusians had betrayed him by refusing to send
him the scaling ladders he needed in his seige of Mamora. He asked the
religious leaders of Old Salé for a fatwa or decision allowing him to
repress the corsairs of New Salé and the Casbah, “for they have opposed
Allah and his Prophet and aided the infidels and given them counsel…they
manage to their liking the property of Muslims, depriving them of profit
and monopolizing trade to their benefit.” [Brown, 1971: 49] Al-Ayyashi
opened fire with his cannons and launched a seige against the South bank
which lasted till 1632 and then fizzled out in October of that year.
Peace prevailed only a brief while, and in 1636 the Andalusians launched
an attack against the Casbah which succeeded. Many Hornacheros fled the
city, leaving the Moriscos in complete control. The victorious
Andalusians now turned their wrath against Old Salé. They built a
pontoon bridge over the Bou Regreg and initiated a seige of the city on
the North bank. Al-Ayyashi, absent on the jihad, hurried back to defend
his people.
Unfortunately for the Andalusians, the balance of power (which seemed to
favor them) was now upset by the return of the English fleet, which had
visited Salé the year before (under Lord Carteret, founder of New
Jersey) to ransom English captives, and now reappeared, on April 3,
1637, under the command of Admiral Rainsborough. An interesting account
of this expedition has been left to us by a former pirate serving under
Rainsborough.[26]
The English decided to treat only with al-Ayyashi, whom they called (no
doubt with typical British irony) “the Saint”. Perhaps the Marabout had
refused to release English captives unless he received some help, but
Rainsborough entered the fray with apparent enthusiasm, transferring
some of his powerful up-todate cannon from ship to shore, and beginning
a bombardment of New Salé. The pontoons were sunk and the seige lifted.
Al-Ayyashi, with British aid, effectively cut off all supply routes into
the Casbah/ Rabat area, and burned the fields outside the city walls.
Rainsborough weighed anchor on August 30,1637, but the Andalusians had
had enough. They capitulated, agreed to repair the damage done to Old
Salé, allow the Hornacheros to return, and go back to the 50/50 split of
duties and booty.
At this point the Saadian Sultan of Morocco decided to get back in the
act; he hired one of the Renegado captains, a Frenchman named Morat Reis
(not to be confused with the Albanian/Algerian captain of that name
mentioned above, nor with the Dutch Renegado Murad Reis, whom we'll meet
later) to capture the Casbah in the Sultan's name. Now the Andalusians
and the Hornacheros patched up their animosity and joined arms to expel
the Sultan's men, who had reimposed the hated 10% tax, and in this
effort they succeeded. But again the peace proved short-lived; within
months alAyyashi had again decided to try wiping out the “gens sans foi
ni loi” of Rabat. This time, the embattled Moors and Corsairs decided
they needed an ally. Al-Ayyashi was a Sufi, so they looked for help to a
rival Sufi-one Mohammed alHajj ibn Abu Bakr al-Dala'i.
Muhammad al-Hajj's grandfather had been a great saint of the Middle
Atlas region, where he established an important 13ufi center and
converted the local Berber tribes into a huge confraternity-the
Dala'iyya. He taught the Jazuli/ Shadhili way of Sufism, centered on
veneration of the Prophet, and an extensive program of public works and
charity. Basically apolitical, the grandfather was succeeded by a son,
who kept up cordial relations both with al-Ayyashi and with the Saadian
Sultans (surely a proof of his diplomacy, if not his sanctity!)-but his
son M. al-Hajj had political ambitions which began to sour the family's
reputation for neutrality. Eventually M. al-Hajj succeeded his father as
third head of the Order (1636) and began reorganizing it- as an army.
[For this account, see Nasr, pp. 216-221]
In 1638 the Saadian Sultan sent his own army from Marrakesh to the
Middle Atlas in an attempt to curb alHajj's growing ambitions, but the
Saadians were completely routed by al-Hajj's Berber troops and fled
South again leaving him in control of the whole area. He now decided his
new royaume needed a seaport, and turned his holy gaze on Salé.
Coincidentally just at that moment came the desperate appeal of the
Andalusians, once again beseiged in Rabat by “the Saint” al-Ayyashi.
Muhammad al-Hajj saw in al-'Ayyashi an impediment in his gaining control
of Sala, his natural outlet on the ocean. Al'Ayyashi's persecution of
the Andalusians was therefore used as the pretext for fighting him. In
1640 the Dala'iyya army occupied Meknes, which was within al'Ayyashi's
zone of influence. Then after a protracted conflict between al'Ayyashi's
predominantly Arabian army and the Dala'iyya Berbers, the outcome was
decided in an engagement on the Sibu river in April 1641. Al-'Ayyashi
was killed, and his followers were dispersed…
Al-'Ayyashi's defeat enabled the Dala'iyya to occupy Sala.
. . .in Sala for ten years after its occupation, the Dala'iyya chief (or
sultan as he became called) preserved the Andalusians' autonomy. They
knew better how to deal with Europeans, and indirect contacts with the
Christians did not unduly compromise the chief's religious standing,
while securing the merchandise he needed, especially arms.
In the ten years (1641-51) when the Andalusians controlled Sala under
nominal Dala'iyya rule, European agents, sent mostly to deal with
questions arising from piracy or connected with commerce, dealt directly
with them. From 1643 there was a Dutch consul in Sala, and in 1648 the
French government appointed a substantive consul to reside there, after
having been satisfied since 1629 with having a merchant living in
Marseilles act as consul while having an agent in Sala. In 1651 Muhammad
al-Hajj appointed his son 'Abdulla as governor of Sala. As 'Abdulla also
acted as the superintendent of the Dala'iyya state's foreign affairs,
his appointment suggests that relations of the Dala'iyya with Europe had
become sufficiently important for them to be entrusted to a member of
the ruling family. But the Andalusians continued to influence the
conduct of foreign relations by acting as interpreters and secretaries,
drafting 'Abdulla's letters to foreign rulers and advising him on the
treaties he negotiated with some of them.
The most intimate of the Dala'iyya foreign relations was with the Dutch.
Lengthy negotiations between 'Abdulla and the Dutch over the provisions
of a treaty signed in 1651, and revised in 1655 and 1659, suggest that
the Dutch conducted an active trade with Morocco in the 1650's. A
recurring problem in these negotiations arose from the dual character of
Sala as a centre of trade and a base for piracy. The Dutch were ready to
recognize the right of the Sala corsairs to attack the ships of their
common Christian enemies, the Spaniards, while obtaining the promise
that their own ships would not be molested. At the same time they were
opposed to the friendly relations which the Sala pirates and the
Dala'iyya chiefs maintained with the rulers of Algiers. The Algerine
pirates were given facilities in Sala, and were allowed to sell their
captured goods in it. The attempt by the Dutch to include in their
treaty a provision barring the Andalusians from cooperating with the
Algerine pirates and trading with Algiers often led to a deadlock in the
negotiations. It is a revealing indication of the volume of Dutch trade
with Morocco in this period that the Dutch attitude mellowed whenever
the governor of Sala threatened to raise the duties on exports and
imports beyond the customary ten per cent. [Nasr, pp. 221-2]
The Bou Regreg Republic may have lost some autonomy under the regime of
the Dala'iyya, but perhaps gained- at last~ some peace and balance under
the nominal Jaltanat of the Sufi order. In any case, the last two
decades of the Triple Republic were its most golden, at least in terms
of piracy. Freed at last of internecine strife, all three city-states
could turn all their hostility outward-in the corsair holy war.
Moreover, if the corsair republics in their purest form (1614-1640) were
unique as political entities, one can only use a pleonasm like “/ItOlY
unique” to describe the condominium-regime of corsairs and Sufis, which
lasted from 1640 to 1660. It boggles the imagination-and indeed it was
too good to last long. The hand of the Dala'iyya and its chief in
Salé—Sidi Abdullah the “prince of Sale”—came to feel heavier and heavier
to the Andalusians and pirates. They began to look for some means to
restore their pristine state of total independence, which by now had
come to take on all the aura of an ancient and revered tradition.
Meanwhile…a disciple of the martyred marabout alAyyashi, an Arab from
Larache (and therefore an enemy of the Dala'iyya Berbers, those
“shirtless animals” as one Islamic historian called them; “beasts
unrestrained save by drunkenness or terror,” as another put it-with the
typical prejudice of urban Arabs), rose up in arms and founded a kingdom
of his own in the North. [Coindreau, p. 47; Caille, p. 222] This man,
named Ghailan, looked like a potential savior to the Andalusians of
Rabat. They staged an uprising, and besieged “Prince” Abdullah in the
Casbah. The Dala'iyya master M. al-Hajj sent an army to relieve his son,
but the army was det'eated by Ghailan in June 1660. Abdullah however
held on gamely in the Casbah for another year, helped by a shipment of
supplies sent by the English governor of Tangiers. At last, in June
1661, he ran out of food and had to surrender the castle.
By this time the Andalusians had come to distrust Ghailan as much as
they'd disliked the Dala'iyya- more, in truth. Despite the fact that
they'd just run the Dala'iyya out of town, they decided to profess
renewed loyalty to the regime in order to stave off Ghailan, lest he
prove a worse master. For four years they played hard-to-get, but
finally in 1664 capitulated to Ghailan and agreed to pay him the dreaded
10 percent.
Finally, in 1668, the last vestiges of Salé's freedom were wiped out by
the rise of the Alawite Dynasty under its Sultan Moulay Raschid, who
succeeded in reuniting the whole country for the first time since 1603.
The Alawite Sultan had no intention of putting an end to the highly
profitable holy war of the Bou Regreg against Europe, and promised the
corsairs his protection. Thus, although the Republic had vanished,
piracy survived—for a while. Unfortunately the Alawites had huge
appetites, and little by little increased the “bite” from 10% to well
over half. Eventually the corsairs realized that decent profits were no
longer possible. The Moorish pirates stayed on to become captains in the
Sultan's “Navy”, and perhaps some of the Renegadoes did the same.
Others, perhaps, were tempted to move on, to the Carribbean, or to
Madagascar, where the pirate scene now began to flourish. The later
history of Salé does not concern us, nor the later history of Barbary in
general. With the passing of the Republic we lose sight of our
Renegadoes-and so, in the next sections, we will return to the heyday
(1614-1660) of the Republic, and try to study the Renegadoes themselves,
and then the daily life of the converts-now that we've looked at their
political/military history.
“We shall have a bon voyago.”
—Murad Reis
Much as we might like to meet a whole crew of Sallee Rovers, people with
names, dates, biographies we could study, “cases” we could analyze in
order to better understand the Renegado character and fate, sadly no
such survey will be possible. If we know little about the converts of
Algiers and Tunis, we know even less about those of Salé. I've wondered
why this should be so, and can only suggest that Sale must have been
considered (by European travellers and chroniclers at least) more a
backwater than Algiers and Tunis, perhaps harder to get to, and perhaps
even more of a dangerous hell-hole. Even good Pere Dan, who gives us a
brief chapter on Sale, apparently never visited the place but described
it on the basis of hearsay; and the few first-hand accounts are
uninformative. In any case writers about Sale—i.e., literate
Europeans—had little curiosity about the Renegadoes, whom they despised
and feared, and represented in the most sensationalistic manner
possible. Meanwhile, those who could tell us something interesting-the
converts themselves-were not writers All categories in which we might
discuss the corsairs have been predetermined by outside hostility and
propaganda. This is the fate of the revisionist historian attempting to
investigate the culture-or the politics of resistance-of a long vanished
non-literate community. Recently, of course, the revisionists themselves
have developed (or resurrected) some categories of their own. Marxist or
Marxizing historians of “social banditry” and millennialism, like
Hobsbawm and Cohn, provide some useful methodology, while writers of a
more libertarian-leftist slant (like Hill, Lemisch, Linebaugh, and
Rediker) have actually created a whole new historiography of maritime
radicalism. But none of them has discussed the Renegadoes. As far as I
know, no comparable school of thought has arisen amongst Moroecan or
Algerian or Tunisian historians, who might have access to untapped
documentary resources (assuming such exist); orientalists have ignored
the issue, whether out of their own innate cultural conservatism or
because no texts can be found; and so the field has been left to us
amateur piratologists, faute de mieux.
Coindreau (1948: 80-84) has scraped together a brief list of Sallee
Rovers from archives and unedited source material in European
collections. Thus we have El hajj Ali probably a Moor, who, on October
14, 1624, off Cape Finistere, captured a Dutch ship under one Captain
Euwout Henriexz, during a period when Salé was supposed to be at peace
with Holland and therefore ceased to molest its shipping. Hajj Ali
demanded that the captain declare himself to be French—and thus a
legitimate prize—or else be thrown overboard.
Rais Chafer (Ja'far), an English renegade (mentioned in 1630), Hassan
Ibrahim (probably native, 1636), and Maime Rais, a Dutch renegade
(1636). This last, commanding a ship of 200 tons with 13 cannon,
captured an English ship and was on his way back to Salé when he himself
was taken.
Chaban Rais Portuguese renegade, in 1646 commanded an Algerian ship, The
Crabbe (16 cannon and a crew of 175), stopped in Salé to take on stores
and arms. At sea for three months, he'd seized nothing better than an
English cargo of salt and one fishing boat in the Gulf of Gascony, when
(on July 22) he was himself taken by the Dutch pirate Cornelis Verbeck.
Ahmed eI-Cortobi a Spanish renegade (or Morisco?) from Cordoba, was a
“fat man.” On October 6, 1658, commanding the Saletine ship The Sull he
met with a Dutch Qeet off Cape Finistere. Again Holland and Salé were
supposed to be at peace, and Ahmed Rais decided to pay a friendly visit
to the flagship. After returning to his own ship, he watched in horror
as one of the Dutch vessels, The Prophet Daniel of Lubeck under Captain
Pieter Noel, suddenly attacked him. Several corsairs were killed, and
the rest-including Ahmed-taken prisoner. The Dutchman then looted The
Sun, set fire to her, and sank her. This singular event caused a great
diplomatic scandal to erupt. Salé demanded recompense, and the Dutch
(anxious to preserve the peace) took the affair quite seriously. In
January 1659 the Admiralty fined the captain of The Prophet Daniel 9,500
florins, and handed over to Salé a vessel equal in tonnage and armament
to the sunken Sun, while The Prophet Daniel itself was awarded to Ahmed
el-Cortobi. [Coindreau, 1948: 187]
Ali Campos (Spain), Case Mareys (England), and Courtebey (the son of
Ahmed al-Cortobi, who must have been as “short” as his father was
“fat”-unless his name is simply a corruption of Cortobi) are a few more
names to add to our list; and Venetia an Italian renegade, famous for
his audacity and courage. This fairly exhausts the roster of Renegadoes
from the Republican period of Rabat-Sale-with one major exception.
Murad Rais (a.k.a. Morat, John Barber, Captain John, Caid Morato), the
most famous of all Sallee Rovers, was born as Jan Janz in Haarlem,
Holland, day and year unknown.
<quote>Jan Jansz began his career, as did most of the Dutch seafaring
men who ultimately turned pirates, as a privateer of the States against
the Spaniards during the War of Liberation. But this quasi-lawful type
of warfare yielded more glory than profit, and Jansz presently
trespassed on his commission and found his way to the Barbary coast.
There he waged war on the ships of all Christian nations alike, those of
Holland not excepted, save that when he attacked a Spaniard he flew the
standard of the Prince of Orange as a tribute of sentiment to his
origin. When occupied against any other nation's shipping he flew the
red half-moon of the Turks.(Gosse, 54 5)[27] </quote>
Captured at Lanzarote in 1618 by Barbary Corsairs, Janz apostasized at
Algiers-and although the conversion may have been forced, it seems to
have taken root, for Murad never begged a pardon or gave the least sign
of wishing to return to Christendom. He took up his trade under the
leadership of the great Algerian corsair Sulayman Rais (who may also
have been Dutch) who died however next year in 1619. Murad provides us
with a perfect example of the links between Algiers and Salé, since he
now began to move back and forth between them like a man with dual
citizenship.
Gosse has this to say about Murad:
At first he sailed as mate to a famous corsair called Suleiman Reis, of
Algiers, but after his chief's death in 1619 settled at Sallee. The port
(“its name stunk in all Christendom”) was extremely well situated for
the new form of piracy, being on the coast of the Atlantic, only fifty
miles from Gibraltar, where the corsairs could lie in ambush for
everything that passed through the Straits and dash out quickly to meet
the East India and Guinea traders. The Sallee fleet was not large, about
eighteen all told, and the individual vessels were small, since a bar in
the harbour prevented ships of deep draught entering unless they were
first unloaded. The port was nominally subject to the Emperor of
Morocco, but shortly after Jansz's arrival the Sallentines declared
themselves independent and established what was in effect a pirate
republic, governed by fourteen of themselves, with a president who was
also the Admiral. The Dutchman was the first to be elected, and to show
his adopted countrymen how thoroughly he had become one of themselves he
married a Moorish woman, though he had left a wife and family at
Haarlem.
[Gosse, p. 55]
Other sources say that Murad was appointed Governor of Sale by the
Moroccan Sultan Moulay Zaydan in 1624, but this misunderstanding
probably arises from the fact that the Sultan, wishing to preserve at
least the outward show of sovereignty, merely approved the fait accompli
of Murad's election. We can assume that Murad was a man of charisma and
genuine talent as a leader, and that he had the quality prized by
pirates above all others-Itzck. We can assume that he was an enthusiast
for the corsair republic, and perhaps its chief ideologue as well as its
first elected Admiral. We might even go so far as to assume that a
person of such obvious intelligence and courage may have attained a
certain degree of political consciousness and revolutionary fervor.
Business prospered under Jansz's efficient administration and he was
soon compelled to find an assistant, a post for which he selected a
fellow countryman, Mathys van Bostel Oosterlinck. The Vice-Admiral
celebrated his appointment by following his superior's example, turning
Mohammedan and marrying a Spanish girl of fourteen, although he had a
wife and small daughter in Amsterdam.
Jansz, what with prizes taken at sea and his perquisites as Admiral,
which included all dues for anchorage, pilotage and other harbor
revenues, as well as brokerage on stolen goods, soon became an
enormously rich man. Nevertheless he occasionally found the routine of
business irksome, the pirate in him asserted itself and he went off on a
cruise. During one of these, in November 1622, when he was trying his
luck in the English Channel, he ran out of provisions and was forced to
put in at the port of Veere in Holland to replenish his stock. It seemed
a risky undertaking, but the Admiral of Sallee was a subject of the
Emperor of Morocco, who had lately made a treaty with the States of
Holland; hence Jan could legally claim the privileges of the port,
though the welcome he received was a cold one.
The first visitor to come on board was the Dutch Mrs. Jansz, accompanied
by all the little Janszes. “His wife and all his children,” a
contemporary writer records, “came on board to bid him leave the ship;
the parents of the crew did the same but they could not succeed in
bringing them to do this as they (the Dutch renegade crew) were too much
bitten of the Spaniards and too much hankering after booty.” Not only
did his crew remain, but it was swelled by recruits, despite a stern
order by the magistrates that no one was to take service on the vessel.
But times were hard in Holland as a result of nearly half a century of
war with Spain; the youth of Veere were more tempted by the opportunity
of collecting an easy livelihood while getting in a blow at their old
enemy than afraid of magisterial displeasure. Jan left Veere with a
great many more hands on board than when he entered it.
A few years later, in mid winter, Jansz called at Holland again, this
time having barely escaped disaster. Off the coast he had met a big ship
flying Dutch colors. Jan, momentarily forgetful of treaties, was “at
once enamoured of the fine ship and tried to take her”-it was quite
probable that after he had succeeded, the lawyers would again enable him
to claim the advantage of the treaty. But the affair turned out quite
differently: as he came alongside the vessel the Dutch flag was hauled
down, the standard of Spain run up in its place and in a moment Spanish
troops were swarming on to his deck. The pirates, outclassed, just
managed to escape after a bitter fight, many of the crew being killed
and wounded. They were glad to get safe into the harbour of Amsterdam.
Jan applied to t he authorities for assistance for his sick and wounded
but was flatly refused. The unfortunate corsair had meant to violate the
treaty, had failed and been punished, and was now receiving further
punishment by having its benefits denied him just as if he had
succeeded. He was not even granted permission to bury his dead, so the
corpses had to be pushed beneath the ice as the only means of disposing
of them.
After several comparatively bad years in the Straits of Gibraltar, Jan
decided to try his luck where no pirate, Barbary or other, had ever
before ventured. In 1627 he engaged as pilot a Danish slave who claimed
to have been to Iceland, and instructed him to lead the way to that
remote island. Jansz's three ships contained, besides Moors, three
English renegades.
The voyage was a daring feat of navigation for the time but the results
were not commensurate with the risk. They plundered Reykjavik, the
capital, but only obtained some salted fish and a few hides. To make up
for their disappointment they caught and brought back four hundred- some
say eight- Icelanders: men, women and children.
[Gosse, pp. 55-7]
By 1627 the political situation in Salé had grown a bit warm. The
Hornacheros declared their own Republic in the Casbah that year, and
al-Ayyashi was actively establishing himself in Old Salé. Murad's
Admiralship, which had kept him from sea, may have ended awkwardly; in
any case, after his return from Iceland he moved with his Moorish family
back to Algiers, and at once resumed the active Corsair life. In 1631 he
organized another great adventure, his sacking of the town of Baltimore,
County Cork, Ireland.
The real and still unanswered question about the sack of Baltimore is
not “how?” Although Murad's seamanship was obviously superb, he was by
no means a pioneer in this case, as with Iceland. “Little John” Ward had
visited Ireland several times and we can be sure he wasn't the only
corsair to follow that route.[28]
The real question about the sack of Baltimore is “why?” And for once in
our studies, the mists of lost history seem to clear-just a bit-offering
us some glimpses of possible motives.
In the first place, Southern and Western Ireland was at this time nearly
as infested with pirates as the Barbary Coast. The famous woman pirate
Grace O'Malley ruled her own little kingdom in Mayo during the time of
Elizabeth, and in fact had paid that ruler a kind of state visit,
queen-to-queen, in 1593. [Chambers, 1979. Elizabeth and Grace got on
very well-kindred spirits, no doubt.] As for County Cork, we learn (from
a rather rare book, Pirate Harbours and their Secrets by B. Fuller and
R. Leslie-Melville):
Sir William Herbert, the Vice President of Munster, summed up the state
of the province in 1589 in these words: “If piracies be there
maintained, and every port and haven in those parts be made acceptable
for them, we must give over our inhabitation there, since we shall pass
neither our commodities or ourselves over the seas, but at their mercy.
The province generally is made a receptacle of pirates. They are too
much favoured in Kerry. Sir Edward Denny has received Gascon wine which
was robbed from Frenchmen, and Lany Denny has received goods which were
taken from 'Brittaines.' One Captain Maris, oi Youghal, a known
negotiator in these kinds of affairs, is shortly to remove to Tawlaght,
a castle of Sir Edward Denny's, near Tralee, there to exercise that
trade.” Denny, later created Earl of Norwich, also had seats in
Cornwall, and was therefore a neighbour to the Killigrews. He, in fact,
did for the pirates in Ireland what the Killigrews and Sir John Perrot
did for them in Cornwall and South Wales. When influential noblemen
acted as “fences” piracy was certainly a paying game… As the Royal Navy
was practically non-existent until the latter half of the century, when
James II placed it on a sound basis, it was virtually impossible “to eye
and awe the inhabitants from traffic with these caterpillars,” to use
the picturesque words of Lord Danvers.
The extent to which the pirates held the upper hand may be judged from
the fact that early in 1609 Danvers himself was blockaded in Cork by
four sail of pirates carrying some three hundred men. The Lord-President
could not raise even one ship strong enough to defy the marauders, and
so in Cork he had to stay, while the unwelcome visitors sailed up and
down the coast seeking sustenance. So as to prevent them re-victualling
in Co. Kerry, the supplies of corn which were usually exported from Co.
Cork were held up, but this seems to have annoyed the inhabitants far
more than the pirates.
Later in the year an even greater force of pirates, numbering eleven
ships and 1,000 men, assembled off the coast. [This was Captain Ward and
his fleet from Tunis.] Sir Richard Moryson, then the Elce-President of
Munster, was powerless to take action against them, and had to fall back
on the old and obviously unsatisfactory method of pardoning them. “The
continual repair of the pirates to the western coast of the province,”
he told Lord Salisbury, “in consequence of the remoteness of the place,
the wildness of the people, and their own strength and wealth, both to
command and entice relief, is very difficult for us to prevent or
remedy.”
Such was the position of affairs when Berehaven first attracted the
angry attention of the English Government. This was in the days of
Donnell O'Sullivan Beare. As a haven the spot was and still is ideal. In
proof of this it is necessary to say no more than that it is one of the
naval bases retained by Great Britain under the Treaty of 1921. It is
really a haven within a haven, for it lies far into Bantry Bay, which
itself is famous as one of the world's finest natural harbours as well
as a very beautiful one.
Even in the middle of the eighteenth century it could be said that
Bantry Bay was large enough to hold all the shipping in Europe, and the
statement was by no means absurd, for the Bay is about twenty-one miles
long and averages three miles in width. Moreover, it is deep. Berehaven
is formed by Bere Island, a humpbacked strip of land about seven miles
long and one-and-a-half wide, which lies off the northern shore of
Bantry Bay. Seen from the head of the Bay, that is to say from its
eastern end, the island bears a striking resemblance to a basking
crocodile. Lying as it does roughly parallel to the mainland, and almost
joining it at its seaward end, the island affords shipping a perfect
haven of refuge when Bantry Bay itself is lashed into fury.
Donnell O'Sullivan's chief stronghold was Dunboy Castle, on the mainland
and commanding the narrow seaward entrance to the haven. He was a wild
sea-rover, bold in the knowledge of the strength of his lair and in the
backing of the powerful O'Sullivan clan to which the district belonged.
Even to-day at least seventy-five percent of the inhabitants of
Castletown Bere, the remote little town on the mainland opposite the
island, are O'Sullivans. Here came pirates great and small, and a merry
trade they ran, for Berehaven had a rival for their favours, the
neighbouring harbour of Baltimore known also by the picturesque name of
Dunashad, or the Fort of the Jewels. Dunashad Haven is a sheltered bay
“where infinite number of ships may ride, having small tides, deep
water, and a good place to careen ships,” to quote Sir Thomas Stafford.
The haven is formed by Sherkin Island, which acts as a natural
breakwater. Further out to sea is Clear Island, the nearest land to the
Fasnet Rock Lighthouse, whose powerful beam has cheered many a
transatlantic traveller. This well-sheltered lair and the surrounding
district, then the largest barony in Ireland, was run by the O'Driscolls
who, perhaps, deserve to be remembered as the most notable clan of Irish
sea-rovers. Rich pickings were to be had from the pirates who came
running before favourable winds with prizes snatched from the hands of
the hated English. And so it is to be supposed that little affection
existed between the O'Sullivans and the O'Driscolls. It cannot be
doubted that the pirates were well aware of this fact and made excellent
capital from their knowledge.
Thus Berehaven and Baltimore were not pirate lairs in the sense that
they were owned by self-confessed sea-robbers who used them as an
essential base for their operations. They were useful stations into
which any pirate could sail to secure a long price for his cargoes or
retreat for protection if hard pressed. At the same time, there is no
doubt that the owners of both harbours did a certain amount of pirating
on their own accounts and that they were not foolishly particular in the
matter of infringing each other's interests, or the interests of any
other Irishmen. There was, for instance, the occasion when Sir Fineen
O'Driscoll-Sir Fineen of the Ships, as he was known- burnt his fingers
badly over a cargo of rich wine.
One stormy February day this worthy, in company with his bastard son,
Gilly Duff, nicknamed the Black Boy, saw a ship beating about helplessly
at the entrance to Baltimore Bay. Jumping into a boat the thoughtful
pair offered to pilot the stranger, much to the relief of the harassed
sailors. She was a Portuguese vessel laden with one hundred tuns of wine
consigned to certain merchants in Waterford. All this the O'Driscolls
very soon found out, and they determined to make the valuable cargo
their own. The Portuguese captain was delighted when the charming
strangers asked him and his officers to dine with them in their haven.
Apparently he suspected nothing when the crew were included in the
invitation. It was a case of the spider and the fly. No sooner were the
sailors inside the castle than they were seized and clapped into irons,
and the work of transferring the wine began. But the Waterford merchants
were not the men to have their pride (and their pockets) hurt in this
way, and they speedily fitted out an armed vessel to avenge their loss.
The O'Driscolls, still dismantling the wineship, were surprised, and
barely escaped with their lives. Flushed with the victory, the Mayor of
Waterford sent another expedition some days later, and they laid
Baltimore Castle in ruins besides burning all O'Driscoll's ships, about
fifty in number. His own galley of thirty oars they towed back to
Waterford as evidence of their prowess. Baltimore Haven did not take
long to recover from this reverse. Fresh wealth Qowed in readily enough
from trade with the pirates.
The people of Berehaven were not behindhand in turning their attention
to any scheme that would make them money. Their pride, if not their
self-interest, would not allow them to play second fiddle to Baltimore.
So Donnell O'Sullivan added to his activities as “fence” on a grand
scale by leasing fishing rights to foreigners. And, strangely enough,
the rights he hired out were for the most part his own to sell. “The
coast yields such abundance of sea fish as few places in Christendom do
the like,” wrote Sir Thomas Stafford, “and at the fishing time there was
such a resort of fishermen of all nations, although the duties which
they paid unto O'Sullivan was very little yet at the least it was worth
unto him £1500 yearly.” Today the equivalent sum would be at least
ÂŁ15,000.
So continued the rivalry between the two pirate lairs for many years.
But Berehaven was the first to fall. On September 16th, 1602, Sir George
Carew opened a fierce attack upon the castle of Dunboy. The siege formed
part of the General's ruthless suppression of the rebellion of
1600-1603. At the time the haven was garrisoned by one hundred and
twenty men only, and Carew's forces numbered at least five thousand, but
the gallant defenders held out until the 18th, when the walls were
finally breached and the attackers burst in. Even at the very last
moment, when the Royalists were inside the castle, the Irish nearly
achieved a pyrrhic victory. As the soldiers burst into the magazine they
saw Richard MacGeoghegan, the gallant commander of the castle, painfully
crawling towards a number of powder barrels with a lighted candle in his
hand. They seized him in the nick of time, and although he was mortally
wounded, killed him out of hand in a fit of senseless and disgusting
brutality.
O'Sullivan himself was fighting elsewhere, and managed to escape to
Spain, only to be treacherously stabbed to death by an Anglo-Irishman.
As a pirate den, Berehaven may have thoroughly deserved suppression, but
Carew did not attack it on this score. He punished the pirates for their
alleged disloyalty to the Crown, a matter which was by no means proven.
Consequently, the wholesale slaughter which accompanied the capture of
Dunboy Castle is a matter which Englishmen prefer to forget. It was
unnecessary, unworthy, and unjustified. Only a crumbling fragment now
remains of Dunboy Castle, and the point on which it stood is overgrown
with trees. Thus fell Berehaven for a time.
[Fuller and Leslie-Melville, 1935: 168173]
As for Baltimore, we are indebted for its story to an Irish source, “The
Sack of Baltimore” by H. Barnby (1969) Sir Fineen O'Driscoll “Of the
Ships,” who appears as an engaging rogue in Pirate Hal 60ul d now takes
on a less romantic air. He turns out to be a collaborator with the
English; he sided with them in the Desmond Rebellion. He turned several
“murderers” (rebels?) over to the authorities, and was so deeply in debt
he began to sell leases on parts of his demesne to English colonists.
His Irish subjects were left to fend for themselves.
In 1605 an Englishman named Thomas Crooke offered to purchase a lease
for twenty-one years of the town of Baltimore and its surrounding
ploughlands for ÂŁ2,000. Sir Fineen O'Driscoll accepted his offer and the
lease was drawn up. Surprisingly, there is no record of there having
been any complaint from the existing townsfolk. It is possible that by
1605 many Baltimore residents, offended by the presence of English
troops in the area, may have moved away to the north or to the
comparative sanctuary of one of the larger islands of Roaring Water Bay.
When Thomas Crooke purchased his lease from Sir Fineen O'Driscoll in
1605, the English physical presence in West Cork was very small and his
scheme to plant several hundred English settlers in the Baltimore area
must have been highly acceptable to the authorities in Cork, Dublin and
Westminster If however these same authorities had stopped to ask
themselves how such a considerable party of settlers were to maintain
themselves in this area, they might have come to some slightly
disturbing conclusions. In the words of the old saying, “the law ends at
Leap.” In the Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1606-1608, there are
twenty-one references to Baltimore and most of these refer to piracy.
However, the formal establishment of the English plantation at Baltimore
went steadily ahead. On 3 July 1607 Baltimore was authorised by “His
Majesties High Court of Chancery…to hold…a Friday Market, and two Fairs
on 24 June and 28 October and two days after each…” On 26 September 1612
the borough received its official charter. This appointed “…Thomas
Crooke, Esq., to be the first Soveraigne, and James Salmon, Daniel
Leach, Joseph Carter, William Hudson, Joseph Hoskins, Stephen Hunt,
Thomas Bennett, the elder, Thomas Bennett, the younger, Roger Bennett,
William Howling, Thomas Germon, and Richard Commy to be the first twelve
burgesses….” The sovereign was to hold court for minor offences and
civil actions every Friday, while he and his council were empowered to
establish byelaws. They were also invested with the duty of electing two
discreet men to attend the parliament that James I was planning to
summon at Dublin in the near future. Thomas Crooke had been appointed
the first sovereign, but for the future, the burgesses were to meet once
a year for the especial purpose of electing one of their own number to
hold this office.
Those Irish who remained to mingle with the new planters appear to have
been quite prepared to put up with any sort of change. However not many
elected to remain and a Spaniard who came into Baltimore harbour on a
ship in 1608 was told that there were now very few Irish there.
Thomas Crooke's achievement was remarkable. He had, in the words of the
Lord Bishop of Cork, “…at his own charges…gathered out of England a
whole town of English people, larger and more civilly and religiously
ordered than any town in this province that began so lately….”
The reliable Anglican theology of the new West Cork planters enabled the
representatives of King James to overlook less attractive features about
Thomas Crooke's new plantation. It seems more than possible that Thomas
Crooke established his plantation at Baltimore with the intention of
trading with pirates. This does not imply that the planters there were
to occupy themselves with no other activities, but they were a
sea-harbour settlement and relied on visiting ships to purchase their
produce and skills in return for money or trade goods. The way in which
their customers had acquired money and trade goods was no concern of
theirs. The new planters at Baltimore were behaving in exactly the same
manner as many harbours in southwest England had behaved for decades,
but England under a legalistically-minded king was becoming unsafe for
pirates. Thomas Crooke had foreseen this situation developing and had
taken steps to profit by it.
The official trade carried through Baltimore was ludicrously small.
According to one source, only three ship loads of wine entered the
harbour during 1614 and 1615. The unofficial trade must have been
considerable. Certainly pirates' goods brought into Ireland through
Baltimore were supplied throughout the province and the president of
Munster himself and many other leading citizens of Cork are known to
have bought from that source. By 1608, no more than two years after the
establishment of the English at Baltimore, Thomas Crooke was called
before the Privy Council in London to answer charges of having had
dealings with pirates. It was this charge that prompted the bishop of
Cork's letter of recommendation. The Privy Council acquitted him with
all honour; how could they do otherwise? There had been revolts before
in Munster, in which English planters had had their throats cut. If
ambitious, energetic men such as Richard Boyle and Thomas Crooke were
able to persuade large parties of Protestant English to go and colonise
this uncertain area, how could the English authorities jeopardize their
enterprise by being too nice about their trading methods?
The Privy Council may have acquitted Thomas Crooke and his fellow
planters but others were less complaisant. By 1608 the Venetians were
writing that there were two chief nests of English pirates, and one of
these was on the Irish coast at Baltimore. An English source stated
during 1608 that all the harbours of Munster were safe for pirates but
that Baltimore was most by them. also during 1608 the president of
Munster wrote that Robinson, a pirate, arrived at Baltimore in a ship of
one-hundred twenty tons and twenty cannon. “…at first his strict
directions being observed by those that inhabit Baltimore…although they
could not be denied ordinary relief by the weak inhabitants, yet they
hindered for a while from the commodities that might repair their
defects; until, daily re-inforcing themselves with fresh men they grew
so fearful to the fisherman and all the country, that having neither the
means to defend their own nor to offend them, he was forced to confirm a
treaty…with them…” Since the kings chief Officer in the province of
Munster confirms having dealings with a pirate at Baltimore, it is
reasonable to assume that the inhabitants of that place, surrounded by a
still largely Gaelic hinterland and with the nearest officer of the
crown many miles away, would have been ready and willing to trade.
They had ways also of covering their actions with a semblance of
legality. One of the most successful of this time was a man named Henry
Mainwaring. He had accepted a pardon from the King and wrote a most
comprehensive work on the methods employed by pirates on the coast of
Ireland. He states that when pirates needed supplies of meat they would
send a discreet man on shore to seek a farmer with cattle for sale. The
farmer would say where he would put the cattle and the pirates would
send a party of men ashore to fetch them after dark. These would fire
off a musket or two as though they were making a land raid. The local
people, amply forwarned, would keep well out of the way. The business
was very welcome, said Mainwaring, because cattle sold by this means
usually fetched double their market value.
The new English plantation at Baltimore seems to have flourished. King
James, embarrassed by the complaints of foreign merchants, insisted on
steps being taken to suppress the pirates of south-west Ireland. Once in
a while a royal man-o-war sailed along the coast. But the royal ships
were usually old and badly maintained. The pirates, whose necks depended
on their agility, used small Dutch-built warships which, when regularly
defouled, were the swiftest sailors afloat. They seldom allowed
themselves to be caught by the royal ships, and if caught, they often
seem to have managed to come to an understanding with their captors.
Many pirates were operating but very few were hanged. The Dutch obtained
King James's permission to search the creeks and harbours of south-west
Ireland for pirates, but when they appeared off Baltimore and asked for
a pilot to bring them into the harbour, Thomas Crooke told them to be
off. This would seem to be a very high line to take with the commander
of a Dutch squadron operating with royal permission; but Thomas Crooke
must have known what he was doing because he continued to prosper. It is
only possible to guess the extent of his financial prosperity, but we
know that he became a baronet in 1624 shortly before he died.
The new English community at Baltimore was almost entirely the product
of the enterprise, energy and lack of scruple of Sir Thomas Crooke,
Bart. It is therefore strangely appropriate that things should have
started to go wrong almost from the time of his death.
It seems possible, and in fact is assumed by some writers (e.g Pivate
hTa/hora), that after Crooke's death the people of Baltlmore declded to
go straight. Their pilchard fisheries were proving remarkably
profitable, and the authorities were slowly increasing their control
over the “lawless” regions. We may hypothesize that in 1624 the leaders
of Baltimore made it known on the pirate grapevine that the days of
hospitality were over, and the port closed to all illegality save a bit
of harmless smuggling.
Meanwhile the feckless Sir Fineen had sunk himself even deeper in the
mire of debt. A creditor appeared on the scene.
Sir Walter Coppinger, Bart., was a magistrate at Cork City whose
acquisitiveness bore a marked resemblance to the swashbuckling behaviour
of his MIking forefathers. He recognised just as clearly as Richard
Boyle or Thomas Crooke that West Cork was underpopulated and ripe for
development. He was, however, a staunch Roman Catholic and no lover of
the new English Protestants that were beginning to settle the land. He
had no wish to plant Englishmen in West Cork. His interest was in
building up his personal estate in this area. His original acquisitions
were mainly from the old Irish proprietors; sometimes their title was
confused and Sir Walter found himself in dispute with other occupants.
On these occasions his manners could be rough. The London East India
Company purchased woods high up the tidal estuary of the Bandon river in
1612. Here they began to build ships. Sir Walter chose to believe the
land belonged to him. He did not care to see Englishmen cutting down his
trees so he set armed men to harry them. These hired muscle-men
terrified the shipyard workmen and broke down the dams that had been
built to operate the hammer mills. The dispute over Dun Daniel woods
subsided into oblivion, but Sir Walter was soon appearing in the records
again. He next made an attempt to take over Baltimore. His claim was not
a frivolous one.
In 1573 Fineen O'Driscoll had surrendered his lands to the English Crown
along with other tribal lords of Munster. This was part of a complicated
land title reform the net result of which was that Sir Fineen now held
title to his lands in person and not, as previously, merely in his
condition as elected leader of the Sept. Fineen had been a young man
when he took this step; for many years the change had no practical
effect and his life in West Cork continued in its normal pattern. In
1583 he visited London and received his knighthood. As Sir Fineen
O'Driscoll his standard of living may well have proved more expensive.
In 1602, his prestige suffered a serious blow when he was obliged to
hand over three of his castles to the English, but his writ still ran in
West Cork and in the same year he detained and handed over to the
English authorities wanted murderers who had sought refuge in his
territories. However, his financial position seems to have deteriorated
sharply about then and one of the immediate results of this was his sale
of a twenty-one-year lease of Baltimore to Thomas Crooke in 1605.
About 1616 it seems likely that Sir Walter Coppinger lent Sir Fineen
O'Driscoll a sum of money on security of his lands occupied by the
plantation at Baltimore. Sir Thomas Crooke had purchased the lease of
Baltimore only for twenty-one years. The purchase had been made in 1605,
which meant that in 1626 the lease either had to be renegotiated or the
use of the property returned to Sir Fineen, his heirs or assignees. If
Sir Fineen did not repay the loan, Sir Walter Coppinger automatically
became his assignee and the absolute owner of Baltimore on expiry of the
lease. In the meantime he demonstrated the firmness of his intentions by
harrying the English planters in every way that he was able. At first
[Sir Walter] used force but the planters seem to have soon organised
themselves adequately for their own defence; accordingly, he altered his
tactics and began to institute civil and criminal actions against
individual planters in rapid succession. As a magistrate of long
standing in Cork city, Sir Walter must have made a disturbing opponent.
Sir Thomas Crooke died in 1624 and the Baltimore plantation lost its
main guide and sponsor. In 1626 the lease held from Sir Fineen came to
its end and the land and buildings occupied by the English at Baltimore
would fall into the hands of that inveterate opponent of the new
English, Sir Walter Coppinger. The planters applied to the House of
Lords for relief. This was a shrewd move, for the English authorities
were obviously going to be most reluctant to see a Protestant English
plantation, so strategically placed in the remote south western parts of
Ireland, fall into the hands of a Roman Catholic gentleman of doubtful
loyalty. Negotiations were set in hand. It is not known what form these
took but there were certain results. On 14 April 1629 a deed of
defeasance was signed by Sir Fineen and Sir Walter. The result of this
was that the English planters remained in undisturbed possession of
their leasehold property at Baltimore, although Sir Walter got
possession of the fort of Dun na Sead.
[Barnby, 1969]
So—to sum up—in 1629 the creditor Sir Walter Coppinger was bilked of
possession of Baltimore. Sir Walter hated the English, and had used
violence against them several times. He hated the people of Baltimore
because they had successfully resisted his advances, and because they
were Imperialist Protestants. Sir Walter had two very good motives-in
his own mind at least for doing an injury to that little colony
patriotism and profit. Two years later, a great injury did in fact
befall Baltimore. Cui bono?, as the lawyers say.
In late April or early May 1631, Morat Rais sailed from Algiers with two
well-armed ships probably of Dutch construction. They are reported to
have taken "... 9 Portingales, 3 Pallicians (?), 17 Frenchmen ..." and
to have sunk two French ships after thoroughly loot ing them, before
reaching British waters. Then, on 17 June an English ship of about 60
tons was seized half way between Lands End and the coast of Ireland. The
name of the mas ter of this ship was Edward ffawlett and he had with him
a crew of nine men. Morat treat ed this ship exactly as he had dealt
with the French coasters. This seems, at first glance, to have been a
gross waste of valuable hulls. North African corsairs, however, were men
with a keen sense of values and they would certainly have had good
reason for so dispos ing of hardly acquired assets. The three small
vessels may all have been old and in a state of bad repair, or else too
slow to keep up with the swift sailing Dutch ships. Also, they were
probably considered too weak to stand much chance of reaching Algiers
unescorted. A prize crew of renegade seamen and Turkish soldiers
attempting to sail back to Algiers in ships this size stood a strong
chance of being picked up near the Straits of Gibraltar by some Catholic
warship and of ending their days chained to a galley oar.
Morat's two ships continued northwesterly towards the Irish coast. He
and probably some of his crew still had bitter memories of being badly
mauled by a Spanish warship off the Dutch coast. The English Channel and
North Sea certainly teemed with valuable mer chant ships but it also
teemed with warships Charles I was interested in the royal navy and was
building it up once again. The two Algerian warships made landfall off
the Old Head of Kinsale on the morning of 19 June and it was here they
scooped up two fishing boats working out of Dungarvan har bour. These
boats were too small even for Morat and his crew to have any interest in
plundering and they took them purely for the sake of the information
they could yield. <quote>
The captain of one of these boats was a Roman Catholic named Hackett.
From now on, keep an eye on this man. Everything he does looks
suspicious.
Morat's ships would have been like hundreds of other vessels busy about
the coastal waters of northern Europe. So there was noth ing to alarm
the two fishing boats from Dungarvan. By the time Hackett and his men
became apprehensive, it would have been too late to escape. The red felt
caps and embroidered red waistcoats of the Janissaries would have soon
told them who their captors were. They were ordered up into Morat's
ship, while their own fishing boat under a prize crew rowed in pursuit
of the other mackerel fishermen.
The Algerians' voyage had lasted for per haps two months and all the
booty they had to show for their trouble was a few mackerel, a quantity
of indifferent ship's stores and forty captive seamen. This was small
loot when it had to be divided between two hundred and eighty hungry
men; particularly so when half had to go to the owners of the man-o-war
and a further twenty to twenty-five percent to the militia and customs
officers of Algiers.
There would probably have been rene gades or even Christian slaves among
Morat's crew who would have known Kinsale. These men may well have urged
their captain to sail into Kinsale harbour on the chance of finding a
rich ship or two lying at anchor. But when Morat ordered John Hackett to
pilot them in to the landlocked anchorage, the Dungarvan man told them
that Kinsale would be too hot for them. As an alternative he suggested
attacking Baltimore. One wonders why.
Dungarvan lay to the east of Kinsale. It may therefore have seemed a
good idea to Hackett to persuade the Algerians to move westerly.
Baltimore was the first harbour of any size west of Kinsale. It also had
a reputa tion as a place of refuge for English pirates and it might have
seemed only just to Hackett to encourage dog to eat dog. But probably
the major reason why John Hackett suggested Baltimore was that it was a
comparatively new English Protestant plantation.
It strikes me — and this is only a hypothesis — that Hackett might have
had a "deeper" reason for his odd behav ior. All that we know about him
derives from his own testi mony at his trial, when presumably he was
trying to justify his actions with some cover story. What if the
"scooping up" of Hackett's vessel off Kinsale was not an accident but a
rendevous? What if Hackett, a Catholic, were an agent of the Catholic
Sir Walter Coppinger? What if Coppinger had been in touch with corsair
representatives - easy enough in County Cork, it would seem - and had
suggested a raid on Baltimore? Perhaps he painted it as a richer prize
than it proved in fact, or perhaps he sweetened the suggestion with an
offer of payment - he could afford it. And maybe on June 19 Hackett
deliberately put his boat in the way of "capture", so he could act as
pilot and guide to the corsairs. (We know the corsairs always sought out
such experts, like the Moriscos who acted as spies in Spain, or the
Danish slave who guided Murad to Iceland.) A lot of pure conj ecture, of
course. But ... keep an eye on Hackett.
The two Algerian ships headed westerly. The first place at which they
were recorded as being noticed from th e shore was at Castlehaven, five
miles east of Baltimore. They were seen here to sail past the entrance
to the anchorage at sunset, but their appearance caused no alarm.
Darkness was just falling when the two ships dropped anchors off the
entrance to Baltimore harbour. Their exact position was reported as one
musket shot to the south-east of this entrance.
It was ten o'clock on a Sunday evening and most people were already at
home, if not actu ally in bed. The two Algerian ships. swinging to the
movement of the tide at their anchor cables, were as unseen and
unsuspected as if they had still been secured to the Mole at Algiers.
Morat made his decision without delay. He took one of the ship's rowing
boats and led a reconnaissance into the harbour. For guide, he took
Captain ffawlett, master of the English ship he had seized near Lands
End. This proves that the English captain must have vis ited Baltimore
before, probably with cargoes of contraband wine from Spain or
south-west France. With strips of sacking tied round the boat's oars to
deaden the sound of rowing the reconnaissance party moved quietly along
the broken shore line of the harbour, while Captain ffawlett pointed out
the lie of the land and the main parts of the township. Morat soon made
up his mind. "We shall have a bon voyago," he announced to his waiting
crew when h e returned to his ship and he immedi ately outlined his plan
of action.
A landing like this from the sea by the Algerians was always the same.
It depended on causing panic, and panic comes more easily in the chill
hours before dawn. At two a.m., the large landing party clambered down
from the two ships and crowded into the rowing boats and the two fishing
boats that they had towed from Kinsale. The Janissaries carried muskets
and scimitars, the rest had armed themselves with long knives and
carried iron crow bars and tar-soaked strips of canvas wrapped round
long sticks ready for lighting. John Hackett accompanied the landing
party, a point which must have told heavily against him at his sub
sequent trial. A man could possibly be forced to point out the lie of
the land from a rowing boat by having a knife held against his ribs. But
for so recent a captive to accompany a landing party with its distinct
possibilities of escape strongly implies some special under standing
with his captors. The boats followed one after the other between the
points of Sherkin Island and the mainland. They gave a wide berth to the
rock on the east side of the harbour entrance which showed its presence
by a slight surge and break in the ground swell. The dark file moved
Northwards to Coney Island, skirted along the small cliffs, then swung
round into the sheltered semi-cir cle that is the Cove. The boats picked
their way between the anchored fishing craft and ran up on to the mud
and gravel beach. The invaders lit their firebrands and then with a
concerted shout they leapt from their boats and ran up the beach.
Today there are only a few houses at the Cove, but the stone foundations
of many more can still be seen in the fields overlooking the water. In
1631, most would have been thatched with straw and built of wood and
plaster, or of rubble packed between wood and plaster shuttering. These
houses were proba bly extremely damp, but in June their roof timbers, at
least, would have been dry enough to burn. Suddenly there was noise,
light, and confusion erupting in the peace of a summer night. But there
was little killing. Dead bodies have no value, and the Corsairs seldom
forgot their commercial interests.
Speed was all-important. The night was dark for the invaders too. They
could only guess at what was lying just outside the circle of light
thrown by their burning brands. They knew that it was unlikely that
there were many armed men within close quarters, but they could not be
sure. They had no wish to delay any longer than was quite necessary. It
is not known whether the tide was rising or falling at the time, but
Morat Rais was seaman enough to have made sure that competent men had
been left with his boats to keep them in readi ness. The captives were
driven down to the shore and herded into the Algerians' boats....
Morat Rais decided that the main part of the village was worth an
attack. There was an element of risk involved, he knew, and he made his
plans with this in mind. Accompanied by the curious John Hackett, who
was putting the rope more securely round his neck with every step, he
led a party of men towards the fort and jetty. Halfway along this narrow
track the hillside slopes steeply in above it. Here he left sixty of his
musketeers in position dominating the track and foreshore. He then
continued to the main village accom panied by men equipped for the
assault.
The attack on the first houses proceeded smoothly; the firebrands set
the roofs alight, the crowbars tore open the wooden doors. The official
account claimed that the Algerians broke open forty houses in the main
part of Baltimore, looted thirty-seven and took ten captives. Obviously
the element of surprise had been lost. There must have been many more
than ten people among thirty-seven houses; the others must have had
ample warning to escape.
The hillside slopes gently upwards from the empty fort. Here, where
there were more homesteads, one of the planters, William Harris, was
taking defensive measures. Already he had fired a number of random shots
from his musket, while one of his neighbors had started to beat a drum.
Marat Rais would have noted all these signs. He probably found the
beating of the drum the most disturbing. Drums make martial music and
are usually carried by soldiers. He ordered his men to withdraw to the
boats. They obeyed promptly, went quickly back along the track,
collected their musketeers waiting in ambush, and continued down to the
Cove. They boarded the waiting boats and pulled away from shore. The
next terra firma they would touch would be the dry soil of Africa.
The list contained in the official records is not exactly clear. It
gives both names and num bers in some detail but its wording is slightly
ambiguous. Yet James Frizell, reporting on the arrival of the Baltimore
captives at Algiers on 10 August gives the figure as eighty-nine women
and children and twenty men, two more than listed as officially having
been taken from Baltimore. The official list names two men killed in the
raid, and two elderly captives sent ashore when Hackett and one of his
fellow Dungarvan fishermen were released together with ffawlett the
Cornish sea captain.
So it seems only the Celts were set free! Irish and Cornish "prisoners"
released, and English captives taken back to Algiers! And above all, the
ubiquitous Hackett, so infor mative, so ... enthusiastic about this
chance to cooperate with Moorish corsairs! He would have done better to
stick with Murad and flee to Algiers. But presumably he had reasons to
remain in Ireland -perhaps to report to Sir Walter? To be paid off?
An amusing account survives in English official archives, describing the
futile attempt to pursue Marat Rais:
On the day aforesaid before yt was light news came to one Thomas Bennett
by some that escaped of the first surprisal who present ly poasted a
letter to Mr. James Salmon of Castlehavn praying him to use his best
endeav ours to persuade Mr. Pawlett who then lay in the harbour with his
shipp, to hast to the res cue of the foresaid captives, who yt seems
could not prevail; Then Mr. Salmon presently with all speed sent to
Captaine Hooke, Captn of the king's shipp, then ryding in the harbour of
Kinsale, informing of the proceedings and Sir Samuell Crooke likewise
sent a letter to the Soveraigne of Kinsale, manifesting the calami tyes
aforesaid, and praying him to hasten the Captain of the king's shipp to
their rescue; Mr. Salmon's man by his direction, went also from Kinsale
to Mallow, to informe the Lord President of the proceedings who
presently sent his comand to the Soveraigne of Kinsale; and Captaine
Hooke to set forth with the king's shipp, and to hasten her to the
service, who came accordingly within four days. But the Turks having not
continued in the harbor longer than they could bring in their anchors,
and hoyst sayle, were gotten out of view, and the king's shipp followed
after them, but could never get sight of them. [Sir Samuel Crooke must
be the heir of the late Sir Thomas Crooke.]
And so, by Hooke or by Crooke, the pirates got clean away. (Hooke's head
later rolled, since apparently the buck stopped with him, and he was
blamed for the whole debacle, as we shall see.)
Barnby does an excellent job of tracing the fate of the prisoners of
Baltimore.
There is no record left of this journey but, by comparing the accounts
left by the Icelandic captives with two other contempo rary descriptions
of voyages in Algerian ships, it is possible to form some idea of the
condi tions with which the Baltimore people had to contend.
The men were confined in the ship's hold, along with the English and
French seamen taken earlier in the voyage and the ten or so Dungarvan
fishermen. All were fettered, or else had their legs confined in wooden
stocks. According to one Icelandic account the male captives were
released from their chains when the ships were well away from land.
The women and children were not fettered or chained. In fact they were
free to go any where that they wished on the ship, except the quarter
deck; to set foot here they had to wait for an invitation . The
Icelanders reported that Morat's men made a great fuss of the children
while the Turks particularly were often to be seen giving them titbits
of food from their own private stores. The Icelandic parson who left the
most detailed account of the voyage, described how, when his wife gave
birth to a baby during the course of their voyage, two of the renegade
seamen each gave her one of their shirts to use as swaddling cloths.
This same account says that the ship's officers issued the women with
lengths of canvas so that they could erect temporary cabins between
decks and thus enjoy some sort of privacy. It is rea sonable to assume
that the Baltimore women were granted the same consideration.
The Algerian ships had been at sea for many weeks. The Turks of Algiers
and their renegade seamen had a fearsome reputation in Christian Europe
for savagery and lechery towards women and boys, and they retained this
reputation until the last days of their exis tence in Africa. Yet
neither the accounts of the Icelanders nor any other contemporary
accounts of similar voyages mention women captives being molested in any
way. This could mean, possibly, that molestation was taken for granted
and not considered worth mentioning; but the Icelandic parson did write
in his account that the Algerian renegades had raped one Icelandic girl
while they were ashore on the Vestmanna Islands, and what is worth a
mention ashore is surely worth a word afloat. Europeans writing from
Algiers were always ready to describe the sufferings of Christian
captives in affecting terms, yet the English Consul James Frizell
writing from Algiers about the arrival of the Baltimore captives,
mentioned no complaint by the women....
The total human booty that Morat Rais had brought back from his voyage
was not outstandingly large. Two hundred and eighty men had been away
from the city for some thing like three months and had returned with
twenty men and eighty-seven women and chil dren from Baltimore; nine
Irish fishermen, nine English sailors from Captain ffawlett's ship,
about seventeen French sailors, nine Portuguese and three other sailors.
This adds up to one hundred and fifty-four bodies the proceeds from
which had to be divided among all members of the crew plus a great many
other financially interested people. It was probably already mid-morning
by the time this rather pathetic squad was led off the Mole, through the
harbour gate and into the city.
The new captives were brought to the Bashaw's palace. Fifteen of Morat
Rais's cap tives belonged to the Bashaw by right. It was doubtless a
dramatic and pathetic moment when this fifteen were separated from their
fellows. The Algerians were not sentimental about captives. The Bashaw
would have cho sen those slaves that pleased him most, and if this meant
that he was separating one member of a family from another, it would
have been a matter of no importance to him. Pere Dan the French
Redemptionist priest who reached Algiers in 1635 said that it had been a
pitiful sight to see the Irish families separated, while the nine year
old son of the Icelandic Parson captured in 1627 was sold separately
from his parents and sent to Tunis.
The British consul, James Frizell, must certainly have visited the
captives from Baltimore shortly after their arrival at Algiers for he
wrote during August 1631 to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
in London that "107 prisoners had arrived of which 20 were men and the
rest women and children...." At least this establishes that they all
survived the voyage. They were more for tunate in this respect than the
Icelanders had been four years previously, amongst whom there had been
four deaths at sea. James Frizell was a sparse letter writer; having
stated that the captives from Baltimore were alive, he asked for funds
to be sent to enable him to arrange their ransom, and left it at that.
He gave no details of their experiences when they reached the city.
We know that the one hundred and seven men, women and children who were
surprised from their modest beds between two and four in the morning on
the 20 June 1631 had reached Algiers in safety. They were then exposed
on the open market before hundreds of alien eyes, and were sold and
delivered over to their purchasers. There is no record left of their
sale and purchase. No one actually knows the fate of any of the
Baltimore cap tives. However, bearing in mind the recorded experiences
of other Algerian captives at about this time, it is possible to
speculate with some confidence on their fate.
At Algiers a slave had four potential sources of value; as a labourer,
as a companion, as a source of income or as a step towards par adise.
The first category included all men of strength, able to haul an oar, to
dig a drain, carry a load, work in the fields or labour in the city's
stone quarries. Also included in this cat egory were the women captives
considered to be fit only for domestic drudgery.
The second category included all those Christian slaves who were
purchased to serve as companions to their owners, personable young males
to be employed as pages and young women to fill the role of concubines.
The third class comprised all captives of wealth or particular skill.
These captives were usually purchased as a speculation, large sums being
paid on the expectation that their ransom would in a short time yield an
even larger return. Jewish and Italian merchants in Algiers would, on
appropriate references, lend captives funds to purchase their own
redemptions, the debt to be repaid in due course in their country of
origin. This was a much sought after trade as it meant good profits and
a rapid tum-over for everyone. A skilled captive was a long-term
investment. Generally his purchaser would advance him sufficient funds
to purchase the tools of his trade and to set up a workshop. This sum
would then be added to a redemption price and the captive would be free
to follow his trade. He would be obliged to pay his owner a monthly
payment representing interest on the capital invested, the rest he lived
on and saved up. When he had saved sufficient to pay his ransom and
repay his owner's loan, plus the city's redemption charges, he was free
to return home. Some captives in this category possessed only mercantile
skill. An Irishman who was held a captive at Algiers not long after the
Baltimore episode described how an English captive searched the streets
of Algiers for work to enable him to keep his wife and child with him.
After a difficult start, this man became a prosperous merchant.
The fourth category of captives was those that were purchased as a
tribute to Allah. This applied exclusively to young boys.
A number of the wealthy citizens of Algiers city would purchase young
Christian boys on the market place in order to take them into their
homes and have them instructed in the Moslem faith for the greater glory
of Allah. Once having got over the uncomfortable hur dle of circumcision
these young converts seem to have settled well into their new
environment. In the same way most young Christian women who found their
way into the women's quarters of Algerian households wealthy enough to
own slaves seem to have settled in without much drama. Accounts at this
time imply that a concubine in Algiers was seldom ill-treated and, with
most of the domestic drudgery being performed by negress slaves, life
was probably a good deal easier for a woman there than it had been in
far West Cork. Certainly the climate was dryer and the houses sturdier
and more convenient.
In the letter-book of the great Earl of Cork, preserved in the muniment
room at Chatsworth House there is a six-page report on the Baltimore
raid written at Dublin during the following February (1632). This letter
places the blame for the attack on Baltimore firmly on the shoulders of
Captain Hooke of the Fifth Whelp and Sir Thomas Button. The letter
further says that despite the fact that the government has since paid
out ÂŁ3649.3.5. nei ther of the Whelps are providing much service. The
Fifth Whelp's crew was still very disor derly and had slain a lieutenant
and wounded several soldiers in a fracas. The Earl states that Hackett
was put on trial at his command . He also claims to have heard
indirectly from an escaped captive that the Turks planned anoth er
attack the following summer on a much larger scale, and that rumours of
this assault were likely to frighten away the pilchard fish ermen from
the seas and the English planters from the coast. He estimates the
fisheries brought between twenty and fifteen thousand pounds worth of
French and Dutch currency into the country every year and that it might
be a good investment to send more warships to defend the Irish coast. He
states that the English planters of Baltimore would agree to contribute
heavily towards building a fort or blockhouse if the king would give
them some cannon and protect them from the demands of Sir Walter
Coppinger. He implies that Sir Walter could probably be persuaded to
leave the planters in peace.
"Wee may not omitt upon this occasion to make known to your lordships
... what miseries those poor english captives which were taken from
Baltimore doo suffer at Argeers ... as by letters sent from thence may
appeare ... and doo herewith humbly offer them to your lpps views,
Beseeching ... that you will be pleased to direct some course ...
whereby the English Consull now Lodgied at Argeers may use his best
meanes for their enlargement, Amonge many others yt suffer by yt
accident there is one willm Gunter who beares ye greatest pt in that
loss, having his wife and seaven sonns car ried away by ye Turkes, Hee
will not bee dis suaded from reparing thither to sollicite yr lpps
applyinge some remedie to his greife ..."
How frustrating it is that not one of these captives' letters seems to
have survived the years!
By 20 June 1632 little seems to have changed at Baltimore itself. It is
reasonable to suppose that some of the houses down by the Cove would
have been re-thatched and refur bished; others would have been left
empty and roofless to disintegrate in the moist sea breezes. Now,
however, there were soldiers billeted at Dunna Sead, the town fort that
Sir Walter Coppinger had been obliged to hand over to the military by
the Council of Munster. There were rumours circulating that the
Algerians would return this year. The Fifth Whelp had been sent away to
join the Ninth at Briston for a complete re-fit. Beacons had been set up
on the summits of all prominent hills along the coast. Certain reliable
men had been given the task of lighting these, but only when Algerian
warships had been definitely sighted making to land. Small forces of
cavalry were stationed at strategic points inland ready to move quickly
to any point on the coast where danger threatened.
So, somehow or other, Sir Walter had lost even the fort, DĂşn na SĂ©ad,
which was supposed to have compensated him for being cheated out of
Baltimore. Why was Sir Walter thus ill-treated? What did the English
suspect about his role in the events at Baltimore? As for Hackett, he
was hanged not two years later, as some say, but very soon, as soon as
possible. In 1844 an Irish nationalist poet named Thomas Davis wrote a
ballad on the Sack of Baltimore in which he implied that Hackett was a
traitor to Ireland:
Tis two long years since sunk the town beneath that bloody band,
And all around its trampled hearths a larger concourse stand,
Where, high upon a gallows tree, a yelling wretch is seen —
'Tis Hackett of Dungarvan—he who steered the Algerine!
He fell amid a sullen shout, with scarce a pass mg prayer,
For he had slain the kith and kin of many a hundred there,
Some muttered of MacMurchadh, who brought the Norman o'er
Some cursed him with Iscariot, that day in Baltimore.
The joke here is that Hackett was not a traitor to Ireland but to
England; he was executed by the English for betray ing English interests
in Ireland. By modern standards Hackett was an Irish Patriot, and Murad
Reis can be com pared to those Germans recruited by Roger Casement in
1916 (who however never showed up, leaving the Easter Rising to fail on
its own):—Murad was a Moorish supporter of the Irish Cause.
To summarize the rest of the story of the captives:
—No money was sent to ransom them from England, since the official
position was that success would only encourage the corsairs to try
again. "No negotiations with terrorists," as we might say.
—Consul James Frizell in Algiers fell on hard times. There are
indications that his desperate financial position forced him to unworthy
measures. An English captive writ ing to his wife in 1632 advised her to
send his ransom money to Leghorn. He urged her at all costs not to send
it to the Jewish brokers of Consul Frizell for these people had a way of
holding on to ransom monies until the slave for whom it was sent had
died, and after that no one ever heard of the funds again.
—By 1633 only one captive (a woman) had been redeemed, by a mysterious
character named Job Frog Martino of Lugano. All the rest, according to
Consul Frizell, had either died or turned Turk.
—In the list furnished by the Lords Justices and Council of Ireland to
the Privy Council, which is reproduced in the Calendar of State Papers
for Ireland of 10 July 1631, are numbered eleven boys; there is also
listed a number of children. As all the children were unlikely to be of
the same sex, it seems reasonable to assume that the term "boy" as used
in this list meant male child old enough to be separated from his
mother. It was "boys" of this age that were of most interest to devout
Moslems and it is likely that the eleven listed would have been
persuaded by the Algerians to embrace Islam. All accounts left by
Christians held captive at Algiers, from that written by Cervantes in
the 16th century until the last days of the Regency in the early 19th
century, insist that strenuous efforts were made to convert boy captives
to the Moslem faith. Most of these conversions were effected by
kindness, for the Turks and renegades seemed to get pleasure out of the
cheerful manners of their young converts; but there are also,
distressingly, accounts of force being used when boys resisted
conversion.
—Allowing for a number of conversions and a few sales to other parts of
North Africa and the Levant, it still seems that a substantial number of
the captives must have died dur ing the first two and a half years of
their captivity. Yet the Baltimore captives were fortunate, for the
plague which was a menacing and regular visitor along the coast of North
Africa, had not been recorded in Algiers since 1624. Nevertheless,
smallpox, cholera, typhoid, typhus and measles took constant toll there,
while some of the very young children may have soon succumbed to new
strains of dysentery.
—A growing conviction that they had been forgotten by the authorities
and their families at home must have per suaded many to shrug their
shoulders and throw in their lot entirely with the new estate into which
they had been so roughly introduced. It could well have been that the
people from Baltimore, seeing how the Icelanders had settled down at
Algiers, may have decided that there was something to be said for the
Mediterranean coast, as opposed to the windswept shores of the North
Atlantic.
—After the Revolution, Cromwell decided to ransom all the English
captives in Algiers, and sent one Edmund Carson there to arrange for
their release.
The list compiled by Edmund Cason in 1645 includes only one of the
people seized out of Baltimore in 1631. Her name is given as Joan
Broadbrook and although she is written down in the records she still
remains some thing of a mystery. Amongst the people named as having been
taken out of Baltimore in the document sent to the Privy Council at
Whitehall m July 1631 was Stephen Broadbrook, wife and two children.
Joan Broadbrook, accordingly, could either have been Stephen's wife or
daughter. Not one of the other Baltimore people is listed as having been
redeemed by Edmund Cason. One hun dred and five people had vanished
without trace. One woman is_ recorded as having ran somed herself in 1
634 but of the rest we know nothing. There is nothing in any records to
show if any one of them ever returned to Baltimore.
Sometime after his return from Ireland, Murad Reis had the incredible
bad luck — for once in his life — to be taken prisoner by the Knights of
Malta. Our old friend Père Dan was actually present in Algiers when the
news of this calamity was reported. "One day I saw in the street more
than 100 women rushing pell-mell to console the wife of that renegade
and corsair" [Murad Reis]; "this they accomplished, vying with one
another in great demonstrations of dole and woe, not without shedding of
tears, whether real or feigned, as is their custom upon such untoward
and fatal occasions."
In 1640—no one knows how—Murad Reis effected his release or escape from
the dreadful Knights of "the religion", and reappeared in his old haunts
again. He returned to Morocco, where the Sultan was moved to appoint him
gov ernor of the fortress of Oualidia, near the coastal town of Safi,
not far from the old stomping grounds of Salé. As Coindreau says, it was
a sort of "golden retirement" for the aging pirate. <quote> On December
30th [Coindreau says the 24th] of that year a Dutch ship entered Sallee
[actually Safi], where Jansz was Governor of the Castle. The ship
brought a new Dutch con sul who had with him, as a pleasant little sur
prise for the pirate, his daughter Lysbeth, now grown into an attractive
young woman.
The meeting moved all beholders. Jansz "was seated in great .pomp on a
carpet, with silk cushions, the servants all round him." When father and
daughter met, "both began to cry, and having discoursed for some time he
took his leave in the manner of royalty." Lysbeth afterwards went to
stay with her father until the following August in his castle at
Maladia, some miles inland, "but the gener al opinion on board was that
she had already had her fill of that people and that country. " In any
event she returned to Holland and we hear no more about her. Presumably
she married a worthy Dutchman who had nothing to do with the sea or
Morocco. How Jansz died no one knows. The only hint we have, an ominous
one, is contained in the biography of him by the Schoolmaster of
Oostzaan, whose concluding sentence is "His end was very bad." [Gosse,
57-8]
Naturally, as a pirate, Murad had to come to a "bad end." But the pious
biographer here cannot even call on the plague (as with Captain Ward) to
conjure up some sort of fearful and exemplary demise for Jan Jansz. For
all we know he died asleep in bed—perhaps even in the good graces of
Allah.
Throughout this study we've used the words corsair and pirate as if they
were synonyms, but this is really not quite correct. In the strict sense
a pirate is a sea-going criminal, while a corsair operates like
privateer who is granted “letters of marque” or a commission by one
government to attack the shipping of another. A privateer is only a
criminal from the point of view of the ships he attacks; from his own
point of view he's committing a legitimate act of war. In the case of
the corsairs, the situation is complicated by the concept of a religious
war which transcends national interests. Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli
commissioned privateers in the name of the Sublime Porte, which expected
the corsairs to honor all Ottoman treaties, and not to attack ships of
nations at peace with Turkey. Several times attempts were made to
discipline corsairs who broke this rule; if the attempts were
half-hearted and usually unsuccessful, the corsairs-by their own
lights-were simply obeying a higher power, the demands of the permanent
jihad. Brown quotes Moroccan historians to demonstrate the ideological
basis of Salé's actions:
In a chapter headed “The Fleet of the Holy War or the Slawi Piracy”
(ustul al-jihab aw al-qarsana as-salawiya), Muhammad Hajji has pointed
out that piracy, the Arabic qa/lvana} is not to be understood in terms
of the foreign derivations of its original Latin meaning, that is, the
French course privateering. “Rather,” he writes, “I mean by the Slawi
corsairs those warriors (mujahids), Andalous and Moroccans, who boldly
embarked in their ships on the waves of the ocean to defend the
territory of the homeland or to rise against the Spaniards who forced
upon the Muslims of al-Andalus the worst kind of suffering and unjustly
made them leave their homes and possessions.”
Thus, for the people of Salé, fighting and looting on high seas or the
coasts of Europe was justified as a continuation both of the holy wars
of the earlier dynasties and of the defense of the coast by the likes of
al-Ayyashi. The corsairs, “men of noble and proud character,” had the
blessings of the saints of Salé and were integrated into the community
of the city. That is not to deny, however, that at least some pirates
were renegades and that their original purpose in coming to Salé was to
share in the general wealth brought by the “holy war,” “Look in the
trunk of the Hassar family and you will find an old Christian sailor's
cap. The uluj [Christian slave] origin of the Fenish family is no more
hidden than the blue of their eyes” are derisory comments still heard in
Salé when people talk about some of the old renegade families of the
city. Although there were aslamis (coll., converts to Islam) in Salé,
their origins were not an obstacle to complete assimilation to the norms
and values of the community, nor to their reaching positions of power in
Society. The pressures toward social and cultural integration in Salé
made these renegade pirates into warriors in the name of religion.“
[Brown, 1971: 53]
Salé-Rabat of course, was beholden to no outside government in the first
half of the 17th century, but commissioned corsairs in the name of the
Republic; and the Republic consisted-more-or-less-of the corsairs
themselves. Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli have been called “corsair
states”, but in truth only “Sallee” deserves that definition.
The easiest way to understand the difference between a pirate and a
privateer is to examine the different ways they split up the booty.
Pirate captains very frequently took only one-and-a-half or two shares,
the ship's officers took one-and-a-half or one-and-a-fourth, the crewmen
one share, and noncombatants (boys and musicians!) one-half or
three-fourths. By contrast a privateer captain usually took 40 shares to
the crewman's single share. Of course, one share in a successful
privateering cruise could be worth far more than a salary in the
merchant marine-or unpaid impressment into a Navy- but the contrast with
piratical egalitarianism is very striking. Pirates were very nearly
communistic in their pure state. Scholars who see them simply as
proto-capitalists are making a big mistake. Pirates don't fit the
Marxist definition of “social bandit” (i.e., “primitive revolutionary”)
because pirates have no “social” context no society of peasants for whom
they serve as focal elements of resistance. Marxists like Hobsbawm never
include the pirates among their approved “precursors” of true radicalism
because they see the pirates-at best-as individuals involved in
resistance simply as a form of self-aggrandizement and primitive
accumulation. They forget that groups of pirates formed their own social
spheres, and that the “governments” of these groups (as expressed in
ships' “articles”) were both anarchistic in affording maximum individual
freedoms, and communistic in eliminating economic hierarchy. The social
organization of the pirates has no parallel in any of the states of the
15-18th centuries—except Rabat-Salé The Republic of Bou Regreg was not a
pure pirate utopia, but it was a state founded on piratical principles;
in fact, it was the only state ever founded on these principles.[29]
Once again, an examination of the division of spoils will give us a
precise structural insight into corsair society. In the Ottoman Barbary
states:
The scale for division of the profits of a cruise is instructive. In the
1630's the pasha took 12 percent in Algiers, 10 percent in Tunis, the
repairs for the mole 1 percent; the marabout, 1 percent. Of the
remaining 88 or 86 percent, half went to the shipowners, and the other
half to the crew and soldiers. Of the second half the reis received
10-12 parts, the agha 3 parts, the pilot 3 parts, navigator 3 parts,
sail master 3 parts, master of the hatch 2 parts, surgeon 3 parts,
sailors 2 parts; if there were Moors aboard, they were given only 1 part
“because they are people on whom one does not count much.” If any of
these people were slaves, the patron took their shares and sometimes
gave part of it to the slaves. Dan's account of the division corresponds
approximately with those of other informants. [Wolfe, 1979: 144. The
Marabout is the Sufi or shrine-guardian who blesses the ships and prays
for their success.]
We see that ship owners receive half the profits after “taxes”, but in
many cases the captains owned their own ships. Even so, this practise
certainly seems proto-capitalist. On the other hand, the captain as
captain (rather than as owner) receives only 10 to 12 times as much as
the worst paid crew man, while European privateer captains were paid 40
times. This seems to indicate a somewhat egalitarian approach.
The data from Salé is a bit difficult to interpret. According to
Coindreau,
the usual method of divvying the spoils under the Moorish Republic was
as follows:
—10% to the central authority (the Divan of Salé);
—half the remainder, to the outfitter [l'arnzateur] (or to the rais) to
indemnify him for damages incurred on the expedition;
—the other half-45% of the total booty-to the ship's crew. Officers,
pilot, master gunner and surgeon usually received 3 parts, while the
master of manoevers, the calfat, and the cannoneers-two parts.
[Coindreau, p. 64]
No prey, no pay, as all pirates agreed-but even in the event of a
fruitless voyage, the crew was not charged for provisions.
This doesn't tell us what the captain received if he was not the
owner/outfitter of the ship, but rather commissioned directly by the
Divan (which owned ships in its own right) or by some group of
shareholders or shipowners. Assuming the captain owned and provisioned
his ship, he earned 45%, more or less the same as a European privateer
captain. If not, he probably made something more like the 10-12% of the
Algerian captains. Captains who owned many ships could become
exceedingly wealthy, as in the case of Murad Reis, the Dutch Renegado
who actually rose to the leadership of the Republic.
Clearly Rabat/Salé was not organized like a pure pirate venture-but it
was not organized like a European or Islamic mOnarchy either. The big
difference between Algiers and Salé was that the “tax” off the top went
to Istanbul in the first case but in the second case, stayed in Salé. It
was used to benefit the cOrsairs (repair the ramparts, finance
expeditions, etc.) rather than to fatten some distant sultan. Salé's
wars with the Saadians, the Marabout al-Ayyashi, and the Alewite
dynasty, ete.} all centered around the 10%, which was both the symbol
and the cost of corsair independence. Sale was neither as anarchic nor
as communistic as “Libertatia” (see below) or Other real-life pirate
utopias-but it was far more so than any European country. Its
Governor-Admiral and its Divan were elected and could be un-elected
every year if they failed to represent the people's interests. Everyone
capable of shipping on a cruise stood a chance at wealth. Even “captives
of war” could earn freedom and wealth as Renegadoes. As for the
Professional pirates who joined the Republic, once again we see that
although they lost the pure autonomy of real piracy, they gained a home,
a society, a source of backing, a market, and a place to enjoy their
wealth-everything a pirate might well lack and most yearn for. It was
worth taking a cut in pay to gain all that, obviously.
The mouth of the Bou Regreg river, which served RabatSale as a harbor,
was protected by a treacherous sand-bar which prevented enemy ships and
European naval fleets with their deep keels from getting close enough to
shore for an effective bombardment—but this feature also limited the
corsairs in certain ways. For one thing, their vessels—even the “round
ships”—had to be small and shallow-draft, which made long cruises
difficult. Fleeing into port under pursuit, they might be detained by a
low tide and suffer capture within sight of home, as happened on several
sad occasions. But whatever the Saletin ships lacked-storage for
provisions, for example, or sufficient tonnage to support much heavy
cannon-they made up for in speed and maneuverability, and in the
profound seamanship of their captains. Moreover, Moslem navigators were
familiar with (and even invented) such scientific devices as the
astrolabe, and no longer depended on dead reckoning or coast-hugging
tactics. Officers and crew alike made do with very short provisions and
very uncomfortable quarters. Thus the area of activity of the corsairs
was greater than might be expected; the raid on Iceland was an
exception, but even the English channel was unsafe (a Sallee Rover was
once captured in the Thames estuary).
In the 17th century Winter was still an off-season for merchant
shipping, corsairs, and even grand navies. The corsairs followed a
seasonal pattern and spent at least three or four months every year at
home in Salé, attending to politics or love affairs, married life or
debauch, wheeling and dealing, repairing and shipbuilding-or perhaps
even to the practise of Sufism-according to their wonts and wants.
Come Springtime, usually in May, a corsair would look for a position
with the fleet, which probably consisted (during our period) of forty or
sixty small ships of the types depicted by Coindreau:
[]
Roughly half the fleet would head north, probably to the lucrative
hunting ground off the Iberian peninsula, and the other half would turn
south toward the Canaries and Azores, where they would lurk in wait for
stragglers from the huge flotillas of Spain and Portugal returning from
the New World with cargoes of gold. For ordinary cruising purposes two
or three ships would stick together; in case a prize was captured, a
vessel could be spared to escort it back to Salé while the rest kept
prowling the waves. Each ship held scant provisions of boucan[30] and
cous-cous for perhaps two months at most. If ships needed to
re-provision or repair, they might call in at any of several Moroccan
coastal towns (at least during periods when these were not held by
European powers) such as Tetouan, Mamora, Fedala, Azemmour, or Safi.
Sometimes some of the fleet headed through the Straits of Gibraltar and
raided the shipping and even the coasts of Mediterranean Spain and
France- but this was usually considered the proper stomping grounds of
Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. But the other Barbary state corsairs seldom
if ever made it as far into the Atlantic as the Sallee Rovers. In 1625
they carried off captives from Plymouth in England; in 1626 five ships
were seized off the coast of Wales; in 1627 they reached Iceland and
sacked the city of Reykjavik, where the booty was scant but the blond
captives no doubt proved popular in the slave markets. A great deal of
activity centered in the waters between England and Ireland, and we
assume that the corsairs used some of the remote lawless smugglers'
ports of Southern and Western Ireland as friendly harbours. In the
Newfoundland banks the Saletin fleet captured more than 40 fishing
vessels in the space of two years, and in 1624 a dozen or so ships from
Salé appeared on the coasts off Acadia or Nova Scotia. When the English
fleet came to Salé in 1637, the purpose was to ransom poor fishermen
from English vessels seized off Newfoundland.
One musn't imagine the typical Sallee Rover-or indeed any sensible
pirate-as lusting for violence, or even as particularly cruel. The Comte
de Castries put it thus: “Rather than chance the glory of combat they
preferred their prey disarmed and peaceful.” [Quoted by Coindreau, 1948:
133] It's an historian's cliche to say that the 17th century was
“cruel”, or indeed that any century prior to the l9th or 20th was
“cruel”. Once the modernist Euro-American chauvinism is stripped from
such remarks, we are left with a perceived difference between “then” and
“now”. The modern era has succeeded in repressing consciousness of its
own cruelty by mediating between the act and the perception of the act,
by means of technology. We call up and revel in images of violence in
ways that would seem utterly diabolical to the meanest thug in the Bou
Regreg Republic, and we create death and destruction in precisely the
same disembodied and alienated fashion: by pushing a button. In the 17th
century, despite advances in artillery, most life-and-death struggles
had to be decided in hand-to-hand combat, using a technology not much
advanced over that of the Bronze Age. (In fact, one credulous European
traveller, William Lempriere, was persuaded by a humorous “native
informant” in Salé that the corsairs' chief tactic was to hurl rocks at
other ships-and this seemed quite reasonable to him, if a trifle
primitive.) [Lempriere, 1791] A few pirates, like Low and Blackbeard,
appear to have been sea-going sadists in a very precise and clinical
sense of the term, and no doubt Salé attracted a few such types. But the
truth is that combat is dangerous, and it's hard work. Corsairs were
interested in booty, not “glory” (as a Frenchman might assume) or
“manliness” (as an Englishman might assume); they were happy to be
considered “cowards and bullies” so long as they won. And therefore they
resorted to trickery and camouflage first, and only whipped out their
flintlocks and scimitars as a last resort. Piracy can be viewed as an
extreme case of the zerowork mentality: five or six months lolling
around the Moorish cafes, then a summer cruise on a nice blue ocean, a
few hours of exertion, and hey presto, another year of idleness has been
financed. If pirates weren't lazy, they'd be cobblers or lead miners or
fishermen-but like gangsters in old movies they thought “work is for
saps,” and used every expedient to avoid it. As Pere Dan said, “The
corsairs give chase to no Christian merchants without believing
themselves the stronger; for if it be not the case that they enjoy an
advantage of several to few, or of a great fleet to a small one, they
rarely attack-for it's true that these infamous pirates are dastardly
cowards at heart and never give battle without possessing great
advantage.” [Coindreau, 1948: 134]
Naturally every corsair vessel would carry a fine collection of the
flags and pennants of all nations, and would first attempt to pass as
English to an English ship or Spanish to a Spanish; their own flag, the
Man in the Moon, was doubtless rarely seen.[31] The trick of switching
flags with Algerian corsairs has already been described.
Henry Mainwaring, in his memoirs, relates that the Sallee Rovers would
strike all their sails at dawn and send a look-out aloft to scan the
horizons for possible prey-once sighted, the potential victim would be
scrutinized at length and discussed: merchantman or naval vessel? Too
big to tackle or too small to bother? What strategy to adopt, what flag
to unfurl, etc.? [Quoted in Coindreau, 1948: 137]
Having decided on pursuit and action, the corsairs would hope that a few
cannon shots would induce a rational mood in the enemy captain
(especially if his ship was insured!), and an immediate surrender. If
not, they would have to board. “It is a terrible thing,” says Pere Dan,
“to behold with what fury they attack a vessel. They swarm aboard the
poopdeck, sleeves rolled to elbows and scimitars in hand, all together
making a great hullabaloo to wither the courage of their victims.”
Hopefully the show of menace and the wild shrieking would do the
trick-real combat was the last resort and least favored tactic of all.
Whether or not a ship carried specie or cargo of any value, its crew and
passengers constituted a guaranteed source of income.[32] In Islamic Law
“Captives of (holy) war” were not considered in the same category as
“slaves”, but in some ways their position was worse. Slaves had distinct
rights in Law, after all, but captives were simply human booty. That
Salé financed its freedom by the ransoming and sale of human beings
naturally tarnishes that freedom in our eyes, but we should hesitate to
apply our modern sentiments to Salé alone. The Knights of Malta
practised the same economics, but enjoyed no protodemocratic
freedoms-and the British Navy “impressed” unwilling recruits into
virtual slavery. In any case, since Moroccan sailors had given up the
use of oar-driven galleys, few of their captives would suffer the fate
of thousands upon thousands (like Miguel de Cervantes, or the early
American anarchist William Harris of Rhode Island) [See Wilson, 1993]
who languished as “galley slaves” in Algerian ships-or for that matter,
in Maltese or Spanish ships.
He that's condemn'd to th'oare hath first his face,
Eyebrowes and head close shaven (for more disgrace
cannot betide a Christian). Then, being stript
to th' girdle (as when roagues are to be whipt),
Chain'd are they to the seates where they sit rowing,
Five in a row together; a Turke going
on a large plancke between them, and though their eyes
are ready to starte out with pulling, he cryes
“Worke, worke you Christian curres,” and though none needs
one blow for loytering, yet his bare back bleeds
and riseth up in bunches.
— from “The Lamentable Cries of Prisoners in Algiers under the Turkes”
(1624) [in Norris, 1990: 66]
Defoe describes Robinson Crusoe's life as a Sallee captive in more
realistic terms than the fund-raising fanatics who toured Europe
edifying audiences with tales of exotic tortures and rapes, and who were
frequently suspected even then-of “yellow journalism”. Salé had no vast
agricultural lands upon which to use their slaves, as in America, nor
any industries in which to employ unskilled forced labor. The captives
were primarily merchandise and as always with merchandise the rule was,
you break it, you buy it. No one pays ransom for a corpse.
Thus the corsair's first task, which began immediately after taking a
prize, was to determine the identities, or at least the qualities, of
their captives. Renegadoes who spoke their languages would interrogate
them, using guile by preference to torture, to elicit details. The
corsairs developed a fascination with banA.s: soft hands of an aristo or
merchant, calloused hands of a mere mariner, peculiar signs and
deformations of certain trades and crafts, the telltale inkstain of
literacy, even the lines of chiromancy to determine health, fate,
personality. Certain captives, too poor for ransom but possessed of
valuable skills, would be offered freedom if they turned Turk- armorers,
metallurgists, shipbuilders, and the like were highly prized, and a
literate man might aspire to the rank of seagoing scribe (one for each
crew, to read captive ships' manifests and logs), or even a clerk's job
in the Divan, or with some merchant or consul.
A young Irishman from Galway named Richard Joyce (or Joyes), emigrating
to the West Indies in 1675, was captured by Algerian corsairs and held
captive in Algiers for 14 years. There upon his arrival
he was purchased by a wealthy Turk who followed the profession of a
goldsmith, and who observing his slave…to be tractable and ingenious,
instructed him in his trade in which he speedily became an adept. The
Moor, as soon as he heard of his release [i.e., that Joyce had been
ransomed], offered him, in case he should remain, his only daughter in
marriage, and with her half his property, but all these, with other
tempting and advantageous proposals, Joyce resolutely declined; on his
return to Galway he married, and followed the business of a goldsmith
with considerable success, and, having acquired a handsome independence,
he was enabled to purchase the estate of Rahoon…from Colonel Whaley, one
of Cromwell's old officers.
[Quoted from J. Hardiman, 1820.]
The secret of Joyce's success, according to Galway legend, was a ring he
designed in Algiers based on Moorish symbols, a crowned heart (sometimes
with a rose) held by two hands-the famous Claddagh Ring, symbol of love
and friendship, almost as “Irish” as the Shamrock.
[]
Joyce was not the only Barbary captive who ended by owing his fortune to
some trade practiced or even learned in captivity.[33]
One of the rare first-hand accounts of Salé was written by a French
captive, Germaine Mouette, “captured at sea December 16, 1670, sold at
Salé on All Saints Day, for the sum of 360 écus.”
His owners numbered four, of whom one actually held him as a slave. The
other three each owned one-sixth of Mouette, having gone right away to
the fondouk [or bagno, slave quarters] where he was taken after his sale
[i.e., the other three bought sub-shares from the first owner]. The
oldest was Muhammad al-Marrakohi, a government official, the second was
a merchant of wool and oil called Mohammad Liebus, and the third was a
Jew, Rabbi Yamin. M. al-Marrakohi took the slave home with him, where
his wife gave Mouette white bread and butter with honey, and a few dates
and raisins of Damascus. He was then returned to the fondouk, where he
received a visit from the Jew who greeted him ceremoniously and promised
him his freedom if his family would pay the ransom demanded by the four
owners. If he did not at once write a letter to France to ask for this
sum, he would be beaten with sticks and left to die in a pit. Mouette at
once complied, but decided to lie and pretend to be no more than the
brother of a cobbler-so the renegado who was serving as translator for
the Jew declared that no profit could be expected in the sale of this
slave. Next day Mouette was sent to the third owner, the wool and oil
merchant, whose wife and mother-in-law took pity on the captive. At
first they put him to grinding wheat, but when that task proved too
tiring, they made him companion to the merchant's little son. When the
good wife saw that the boy had grown attached to Mouette, she regaled
him with more bread and butter, honey and fruits, and had removed from
his legs the 25-pound chain he'd been forced to wear. She begged him to
turn renegade and marry her niece.” [Mouette managed to weasel out of
this situation by showering the woman with "the most tender and touching
words in the world," ending up more in favor than before.]
Mouette remained there for a year without suffering too much, thanks to
his supposed poverty. But at last the fourth owner, now Governor of the
Casbah, grew impatient. He claimed his rights in Mouette and took him
off to work in his stable. The slave was now reduced to black bread, and
shared cramped and noisome quarters with other captives and poor Arabs.
The governor renewed his demands for a ransom of 1,000 ecus, but Mouette
still insisted on his poverty, and so now was sent to work with masons
who were repairing the castle ramparts. The other workers mistreated him
and beat him cruelly-thus finally inspiring him to raise the ransom
money-and at last regain his freedom.
[Penz, 1944: 13-14]
Compared with the horrendous tales of captivity circulated by
Redemptionist Friars and other propagandists, Sieur Mouette's story has
the ring of authenticity: clearly the captive's fate was no picnic, but
it had its ups and downs, and even its possible routes of salvation or
escape. Thus such accounts as the legend of Richard Joyce seem credible;
and thus also we may understand how seductive the possibility of
conversion to Islam might appear to captives like Joyce and Mouette.
Those Moorish “nieces” for one thing! Those oriental women with their
(almost) irresistible love magic!
[...]
And so, having followed our Corsairs' calendar through the social season
-Winter -we return to Spring and the urge to set out once again roaming
the open seas. I can't say that these scattered images of Renegado
culture add up to anything like a hypothesis or a theory or even a very
coherent picture. We've certainly had to use our imagination more than a
“real” historian would allow, erecting a lot of suppositions on a shaky
framework of generalizations, and adding a touch of fantasy (and what
piratologist has ever been able to resist fantasy?). I can only say that
I've satisfied my own curiosity at least to this extent: That something
like a Renegado culture could have existed; that all the ingredients for
it were present, and contiguous, and synchronic. Moreover, there exists
good circumstantial evidence for this culture in what we might call its
one great artifact-the Moorish Corsair Republic(s) of the Bou Regreg.
Such an original concept would almost seem to depend on a depth of
origin which can only be labelled “cultural”, i.e., sociologically
complex, and self-involved enough to be called (and to call itself)
different. The Mafia names itself “Our Thing”; the corsairs called their
“thing” the Republic of Salé—not just a pirate hang-out or safe harbor,
but a pirate utopia, a planned structure for a corsair society. Perhaps
a kind of Franco or lingua franca might have emerged in Salé as in
Algiers, though we have no evidence for it. But Salé had its own
language of signs and institutions, of relations and ideas, of goods and
peoples, which clearly coalesced into some identifiable social entity.
Exiles-whether Jews, Moriscos, or European rogues-created a
cross-cultural synergy (against a Moorish background) which can be
identified as a new synthesis rather than simply a mishmash of styles.
In our conclusion we shall try to analyze this culture as a patterns of
conversions, of literal cross-cultural adventures, of translations.
As a preliminary move in this analysis, it might prove interesting to
compare the political structure of the Triple Republic with other
political structures. Two obvious comparisons spring to mind-first, the
other Barbary states, especially Algiers; and second, other “pirate
utopias” elsewhere in the world.
We've already noted that although Algiers never really attained
independence from the Sublime Porte, it managed to concoct a bizarre
sort of freedom for itself out of the shouting-matches in the Divan of
the Ocak, the connivances of the pirate Taiffe, the sheer cowardice of
various Ottoman bureaucrats, and-if all else failed-the “democracy of
assassination”. The legislative structure of the Bou Regreg Republic was
almost certainly modeled on that of the Algerian taiffe -in fact, at
times the two bodies may have even shared members. But in Salé, the
“Taiffe” ruled alone, as a Divan, without other power-sharing
institutions as in Algiers. Apparently the Salé Divan, or rather Divans,
were organized more democratically than the Algerian model. Grand
Admirals were elected for one-year terms, as were the 14 or 16 captains
of the assembly. Bureaucratic appointments were made-Customs and Excise,
port officials, guardians of the peace (not a very efficient lot, one
might surmise), etc.-but there was a clear and obvious intention to
prevent political power from ossifying or even stabilizing to any
significant degree. Clearly the Andalusians and corsairs liked to keep
things fluid- even to the point of turbulence. All attempts to establish
real control, at least in Rabat and the Casbah, were met with immediate
violence.
May we surmise that this autonomy meant something more to the corsairs
than merely a chance to maximize profits? In fact-was their brand of
“perpetual revolution” really compatible with any serious
proto-capitalist designs and ambitions? Wouldn't a monarchy (preferably
a corrupt monarchy) have better served the purposes of simple fiscal
aggrandizement? Isn't there something quixotic about the whole Bou
Regreg phenomenon? With the possible exceptions of the Venetian or Dutch
Republics of oligarchs, and the Taiffe of Algiers, the corsairs lacked
any real-world models for their democratic experiment. [They might have
known about the Uskoks, pirates who lived on islands off the Yugoslavian
coast and preyed mostly on Moslem and Venetian shipping, and seem to
have had a kind of egalitarian-tribal form of government. [See
Bracewell, 1992]] But the idea of a republic was very much in the
air-and by 1640 would emerge into European history with the revolutions
in England, then America, then France. Was it just an accident of
history that all this should be preceded by the Republic of Salé? Or
should we re-write the historical sequence to read: Salé, England,
America, France? An embarrassing thought, perhaps: Moorish pirates and
renegade converts to Islam as the hidden forefathers of Democracy.
Better not pursue it.
Later in the 17th and early in the 18th century, a number of independent
“pirate utopias” came into being elsewhere in the world. The most famous
of these were Hispaniola, where the Buccaneers created their own
short-lived highly anarchic society; Libertatia, in Madagascar; Ranter's
Bay, also in Madagascar; and Nassau, in the Bahamas, which was the last
classical pirate utopia.
Most historians have failed to note the significance of the pirates'
land enclaves, seeing them simply as resting-places between cruises. The
notion of a pirate society is a contradiction in terms in most theories
of history, whether Marxist or otherwise-but the Buccaneers of
Hispaniola (modern Santo Domingo) constituted just such a society.
Hispaniola was a sort of No Go Zone in the late 16th or early 17th
century; the Native population had declined, and no European power held
an effective claim. Shipwrecked sailors, deserters, runaway slaves and
serfs (“Maroons”) and other dropouts began to find themselves in
Hispaniola, free of all governance, and able to make a living of sorts
as hunters. Feral cattle and pigs, descended from the herds of failed
and vanished attempts at settlements, roamed the forest, along with wild
game. Boucan or smoke-dried meat (a technique learned from the native
Caribs) could be exchanged with passing ships for other merchandise.
Here originated the “Brethren of the Coast”, quite conscious of their
freedom and organized (minimally and egalitarianly) to preserve it.
Later communities were founded in Tortuga and New Providence. The
Buccaneers turned only gradually to piracy, and when they did so they
banded together under “Articles” or ships' constitutions, some of them
quoted by Exquemelin (the only eye-witness chronicler of the Buccaneers
in their “golden age”). The Articles are almost the only authentic
pirate documents in existence. They generally called for election of all
officers except Ship's Quartermaster and other “artists” such as
sailmaker, cook, or musician. Captains were elected and received as
little as one-and-a-half or two times a crewman's share. Corporal
punishment was outlawed, and disagreements even between officers and men
were resolved at a drumhead court, or by the Code Duello. Sometimes a
clause would be inserted by some dour Welsh pirate (like “Black Bart”
Roberts) forbidding women and boys on board ship- but usually not.
Liquor was never forbidden. Pirate ships were true republics, each ship
(or fleet) an independent floating democracy.
The early Buccaneers lived a fairly idyllic life in the woods, a life
marked by extremes of poverty and plenty, cruelty and generosity, and
punctuated by desperate ventures to sea in leaky canoes and jury-rigged
sloops. The Buccaneer way of life had an obvious appeal: interracial
harmony, class solidarity, freedom from government, adventure, and
possible glory. Other endeavors sprang up. Belize was first settled by
Buccaneers. The town of Port Royal on Jamaica became their stomping
ground; its haunted ruins can still be seen beneath the sea that drowned
it whole in 1692. But even before this quietus of biblical proportions
the Buccaneer life had already come to an end. The brilliant Henry
Morgan, bold and lucky, rose to leadership, organized the amazing
Buccaneer invasion of Panama in 1671-then took the Pardon along with an
English appointment as Governor and High Judge, and returned to his old
haunts as the executioner of his old comrades. It was certainly the end
of an era; the surviving Buccaneers, cut adrift from permanent land
bases, became pirates.
But the “golden age” dream lingered on: the sylvan idyll of Hispaniola
became both a myth of origin, and a political goal. From now on,
whenever the pirates had a chance, they would attempt the foundation of
permanent or semi-permanent land enclaves. The ideal conditions included
proximity to sea-lanes, friendly Natives (and Native women), seclusion
and remoteness from all writ and reality of European power, a pleasant
tropical climate, and perhaps a trading post or tavern where they could
squander their booty. They were prepared to accept temporary leadership
in a combat situation, but on shore they preferred absolute freedom even
at the price of violence. In pursuit of booty, they were willing to live
or die by radical democracy as an organizing principle; but in the
enjoyment of booty, they insisted on anarchy. Some shore-enclaves
consisted of nothing more than a hidden harbor, a beach where ships'
hulls could be scraped, and a spring of clean water. Others were vicious
little ports like Port Royal or Baltimore, run by “respectable” crooks
like Thomas Crooke, who were simply parasites on piracy. But other
enclaves can really only be called intentional communities-after all,
they were intended, and they were communal and therefore can rightfully
be considered as Pirate Utopias.
In the early 1700's the scene of action shifted from the Caribbean to
the Indian Ocean. Europe had begun its colonialist-imperialist relations
with the “Near” East and India, but a great deal of territory remained
“untamed”. The perfect location for land-enclaves proved to be
Madagascar, conveniently located near the Islamic pilgrimage sea route
to Arabia and Mecca. The famous Capt. Avery established a legend by
scoring the imperial Moghul dhow on its way from India to the Hajj,
winning a diamond the size of an egg, and “marrying” a Moghul princess;
the diamond and other jewels were reputedly buried somewhere around or
in Boston Harbor and have never been recovered. Other pirates had no
desire to return to either America or Europe, and Madagascar looked
promising. Neither Islam nor Christianity had penetrated the huge
island, which remained tribal, pagan, and even “megalithic in its
hundreds of Native “kingdoms”. [For Megalithic practices in Madagascar,
see Mohen, 1990: 55-58] Some tribes proved eager for alliances with the
pirates, and some of the women too. The climate was ideal, a few trading
posts were opened, and the concept of the Pirate Utopia was revived. In
some cases an individual adventurer might “marry the king's daughter” or
in some other way insinuate himself into Native society; in other cases
a group of pirates would settle in their own village, near a friendly
tribe, and work out their own social arrangements.
One such utopia was founded at “Ranter's Bay”-a place-name which, as C.
Hill points out, lends some credence to the assumption that radical
antinomian sects may have found adherents amongst the pirates [Hill,
1985l. according to Daniel Defoe's The King of the pirates (1720), Capt.
Avery himself settled for a while in Madagascar as a “mock-king”. Hill
points out that “Defoe stressed the libertarian aspects of Avery's
settlement. 'In a free state, as we were, everybody was free to go
wherever they would.”' [ibid. p. 178] Another Madagascar settlement was
made by one Capt. North and his crew. But without a doubt the most
interesting and the most famous of the Madagascar utopias-certainly the
most otopi(zll-was “Libertatia” (or Libertalia).
Our only source for Libertatia and its founder Capt. Mission is a book
written by Daniel Defoe, under the pen-name “Captain Charles Johnson”,
The General History of the Pyrates (1724-28). It is not a work of
fiction, and a great deal of it can be supported by archival material,
but it is clearly meant as a popular work, long on color and excitement,
short on documentation. Defoe claimed to have derived all his
information about Libertatia from a “Mission MS” in his possession.
According to Defoe, this was the tale told by the manuscript:
Youngest son of an ancient Provencal family, Mission leaves home at 15
to study at the military academy at Angiers, then volunteers for service
aboard a French man-of-war in the Mediterranean. While on leave in Rome
he meets a “lewd” Dominican priest named Caraccioli who has lost his
faith and decides to ship out with Mission. In a battle with a pirate,
both are distinguished by their bravery. Gradually Caraccioli converts
Mission to atheism and communism, or rather to “perfect Deism”.
Then, in a fight with an English ship, the French captain and officers
are killed. Caraccioli nominates Mission for the captaincy, and both men
deliver long speeches to the crew, persuading them of their
revolutionary designs (and mentioning Alexander the Great, Henry IV and
VII of England, and “Mahomet”, as figures of inspiration!) They persuade
the crew to found a “new marine republic.” “Every man is born free, and
has as much right to what will support him as to the air he respires.”
The bo'sun Mathew le Tonder suggests flying the black flag (the
so-called Jolly Roger) as their standard-but Caraccioli objects, saying
“they were no pirates but men who were resolved to effect the Liberty
which God and Nature gave them.” He makes reference to “Peoples' Rights
and Liberties,” “shaking the yoak of tyranny,” the “misery of oppression
and poverty.” “Pirates were men of no principle and led dissolute lives;
but their Iives were to be brave, just, and innocent.” For their emblem
they choose a white ensign with the motto “For God and Liberty.” (All
this sounds more like Deism than “Atheism”, but in the early 18th
century the terms were still virtually interchangeable.)
Mission and the crew now engage in a series of successful attacks on
ships, taking as booty only what they need, then letting them go free.
Episodes of chivalry and kindness alternate with courage and violence.
Off the coast of Africa they capture a Dutch slaver; Mission makes
another long speech to the crew, arguing “that the Trading for those of
our own Species, cou'd never be agreeable to the Eyes of divine Justice.
That no Man had Power of the Liberty of another; and while those who
profess a more enlightened Knowledge of the Deity, sold Men like Beasts;
they prov'd that their Religion was no more than a Grimace!” Mission
goes on to say that he, for one, “had not exempted his Neck from the
galling Yoak of Slavery, and asserted his own Liberty, to enslave
others,” and he urges the sailors to accept the Africans as fellow
crewmen-which they do.
Some time afterwards they settle down on the island of Johanna in the
Indian Ocean, where Mission marries the daughter of “the local dusky
queen,” and the crew also find wives. For a few years Mission continues
to make speeches, rob ships, and occasionally-when forced by
circumstances-to slaughter his enemies. (As Lord Byron put it, Mission
“was the mildest manner'd man/ That ever scuttled ship or cut a
throat.”) [Quoted by Gosse, 1924: 218]
Mission now decides on a venture in intentional community, and moves his
people to Madagascar. [According to Course (1966), Libertatia was
located near the NE tip of the island in Diego Suarez harbor or
Antsirana.] Here they begin to construct a purely socialist society in
which private property is abolished and all wealth held in a common
treasury. No hedges separate the pirates' plots of land. Docks and
fortifications are built, and two new ships, Childhood and Liberty, are
sent to map the coast. A Session House is built, and Mission is elected
“Lord Conservator” for a three-year term. The elected Assembly meets
once a year, and nothing of moment can be undertaken without its
approval. The laws are printed and distributed, as “they had some
printers and letterformers among them.” The English pirate Capt. Tew is
Admiral of the Fleet, Caraccioli is Secretary of State, and the Council
consists of the ablest pirates “without distinction of nation or
colour.” A new language is invented, a melange of French, English,
Dutch, Portuguese, etc. This progressive regime fails to satisfy a few
extreme radicals (including Capt. Tew), who break away to found their
own settlement, based on pure anarchism—no laws, no officers. For a
number of years (the Manuscript seems to have been vague about
chronology) the Pirate Utopia flourished. When it finally fails it is
not by fault of inner contradictions but of outside aggression: a tribe
of unfriendly Natives attacks, the settlers put off to sea in their
ships, and are destroyed by a freak hurricane.
Defoe himself lived during the last heyday of piracy, and much of his
information derived from interviews with pirates imprisoned in London. A
great many of his readers would have known a great deal about late 17th
and early 18th century piracy, if only from news pamphlets and gallows
ballads. As far as I can see, however, no contemporary reader ever
questioned the reality of Capt. Mission. Despite the fact that Defoe's
two chapters on Mission read like pages out of Rousseau-or Byron!
(neither of whom were yet born)- and despite the fact that Libertatia's
politics were in some ways far more radical than the politics of
revolutionary America (1776) or France (1793)-or even Russia (1917), for
that matter-despite all this, no one in 1728 blew the whistle on
“Captain Johnson” or accused him of inventing Mission's story out of
thin air. The material was believed, presumably, because it was
inherently believable. Of course plenty of people believed in Lemuel
Gulliver and Baron Munchhausen too; one cannot prove anything on the
basis of popular belief; nevertheless, Capt. Mission was accepted as a
fact until 1972.
In that year a new edition of the General History was prepared by Manuel
Schonhorn (1972). In the introduction to this work, the reality of Capt.
Mission was vigorously attacked on two main counts. First, negative
evidence: no corroborating archival material exists (of course, it could
have disappeared). Much more damning, however, was the problem of Capt.
Tew. Plenty of archival and historical material exists on Tew, and there
is no doubt of his existence-but the material shows that Tew could not
have been in Madagascar long enough to carry out his role in the story
of Libertatia. On this basis it was concluded that Mission's story is a
fiction, a sort of Robinson Crusoe-type hoax, embedded in an otherwise
historical (or more-or-less historical) text. The purpose of the hoax
was to make radical Whig agit-prop. No “Mission MS” ever existed.
Libertatia was a literal utopia: it was “nowhere”!
We must admit that the Tew problem casts the Mission narrative in a
somewhat apocryphal light; however, I believe that the verdict of
nonexistence is forced and over-hasty. Several other logical
possibilities should be considered: (a) Mission existed and the
Manuscript existed, but contained misinformation about Capt. Tew
(perhaps the name Tew was used to mask someone else), which Defoe
uncritically accepted; (b) the Manuscript existed and described real
events, but Defoe himself invented the episodes concerning Tew
(including the “anarchist” schism) for reasons of his own, perhaps to
flesh out a sparse narrative; © the Manuscript never existed, nor did
any persons named Mission or Caraccioli-but some experiment like
Libertatia actually occurred in Madagascar, and was thinly fictionalized
by Defoe (Robinson Crusoe had a real-life model in Alexander Selkirk, a
genuine castaway survivor). “Johnson” added the name of a real pirate,
Tew, to pump up the verisimilitude of the text, failing to realize that
he was thereby giving the game away to future historians. None of these
hypotheses can be proven or disproven on the basis of the Tew problem.
Therefore the Revisionist Debunking Hypothesis - complete
fictionalization - must also remain unproven. The mere passion for
debunking should not be allowed to push us into abandoning the solid
historicity of a revolutionary hero or a real utopia. [See, for example,
the preface to Burroughs, 1981; also Law, 1980] Ranter's Bay was real
enough, and so were the “Kingdoms” carved out in Madagascar by the
“halfbreed” children of the pirates. [See Deschamps, 1949, esp. pp.
215-229] The Buccaneers were real, and so were the wild crew at Nassau
in the Bahamas (including Blackbeard, and “Calico Jack” Rackham and his
two pirate wives, Ann Bonney and Mary Reade), which flourished for a few
years in the early 1700's. Libertatia could have been real, and should
have been real; this much will suffice for the admirers of Capt.
Mission. Christopher Hill, for one, refuses to accept Mission as pure
fiction. Hill points out that although Defoe was a fire-breathing
radical as a youth, he had become a hack by the 1720's, and a supporter
of bourgeois property values. “This is what makes the fairness of his
description of Libertatia so remarkable. This would be surprising if he
had invented the whole thing, less so if he had been listening to old
sailors' tales and saw the possibility of using Libertatia to criticize
aspects of capitalist society which offended him.” [op. cit., p. 179]
However, assuming for the sake of argument that the Mission chapters of
the General History are at least as fictionalized as Robinson Crusoe, an
interesting question arises. Defoe, it seems, knew rather a lot about
the Republic of Salé. In the first few chapters of Robinson Crusoe the
hero is captured by “Sally Rovers” and then taken to Morocco to be sold.
As with St. Vincent de Paul and the Sieur Mouette Robinson discovers
that his Moorish master is not such a bad chap: he offers the English
sailor a chance to escape slavery by converting to Islam. Crusoe,
however, decides to attempt escape, and eventually succeeds in stealing
a small boat. He is accompanied by a winsome young Morisco boy, with
whom he shares no language-a clear foreshadowing of Friday, the beloved
companion. Defoc, it seems, could have used Salé as a partial model for
Libertatia.
However, the comparison cannot be stretched too far. Salé was
undoubtedly more libertarian than the Barbary Coast states of Algiers,
Tunis, and Tripoli, but it certainly had far more conventional structure
than any of the pure Pirate Utopias. The pirates of Salé clearly decided
to accept a republican form of government (and the 10% tax) in order to
safeguard their liberties on a (hopefully) permanent basis; Sale can be
seen as a sort of compromise.
It would appear that they did this deliberately and consciously,
although without any ideological/ intellectual framework other than a
hatred of European class oppression, and an admiration (or at least
acceptance) of Islam. The so-called “democratic” aspects of Islam may
have facilitated the emergence of Salé's unique experiment, but cannot
fully account for it (since Islamic governments elsewhere were all
monarchic). Protestant extremism (with its denial of all worldly
“magistry” or government) may have been a factor-but not enough of a
factor to save the Renegadoes from apostasy! Without any texts from Salé
it's impossible to say for certain- but it looks as if the Bou Regreg
Republic might have been the direct creation of the Andalusian Moriscos
and European Renegadoes, with (perhaps) a bit of inspiration from
certain Sufis-a genuine act of spontaneous political genius.
When the Renegadoes disappeared, they left behind them no “issue”-no
obvious permanent trace of their existence. In Madagascar the pirates'
“half-breed” children created a new culture, but in North Africa the
converts and their descendants were simply absorbed into the general
population. Their influence on European civilization seems to be nil, or
even less than nothing: like relatives who have disgraced themselves,
they are not mentioned-not just forgotten, but deliberately forgotten.
They did nothing to shift the border of Islamdom toward the West despite
their centuries of jihad. They created no distinctive art forms, and
left behind not one page of “literature”. A few names, a few anecdotes
of cruelty…the rest has vanished. Despite the sheer anomalous mystery of
their existence-thousands of 17th century European converts to
Islam!-they have received almost no attention from analytical or
interpretive historians; they have aroused no curiosity amongst
historians of religion; they have faded to insignificance, almost to
invisibility.
Pirates, apostates, traitors, degenerates, heretics- what positive
meaning could possibly be expected to emerge from such a dire
combination? Must we simply confess to a fascination with the perverse?
After all, this constitutes the real motive of the piratologist despite
all protestations of shocked moral outrage, does it not? Not to mention
the heresologist!
To answer this objection I would just point out (as indeed I've
maintained elsewhere, e.g. Wilson, 1991, introduction) that heresy is a
means of cultural transfer. When a religion from one culture penetrates
another culture, it frequently does so (at least initially) as “heresy”;
only later do the Orthodox Authorities arrive to straighten everyone out
and make them toe the line. Thus, for example, early Celtic Christianity
absorbed a great deal of Druidry, and was seen from Rome as “heretical”.
In the process, not only was Christian culture introduced into Ireland,
but Celtic culture was also introduced (more surreptitiously) into
Christianity, or rather, into Christian European culture. A cultural
transfer occurred, and this cross-cultural synergy added up to something
new-something which produced (for instance) the Book of Kells. Spain
during the Moorish Era represents a culture based on three-way transfers
amongst Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions, especially in such
“heretical” fields as alchemy (or poetry!). Alchemy as a “heresy”
transferred Greek science intO Renaissance Christendom, via Islam. And
so on, and so forth.
Apostasy can be considered as a special case of “heresy”. And in the
case of the Renegadoes, one very obvious area of cultural transfer
consists of maritime technology. We can assume that not only did the
Renegadoes introduce “round ships” and advanced metallurgy to Islamdom,
they may also have introduced Islamic navigational mathematics and
devices like the astrolabe to European mariners. This permeable boundary
between “East” and “West” was most apparent in Moorish Spain, where
mutual osmosis eventually generated a Columbus; and the process
undoubtedly continued into the 17th century. We should be careful not to
interpret this technical transfer as devoid of all spiritual
significance- remember that Jewish Captain from Smyrna who was deemed a
wizard for his navigational skills. The mariner's trade was a mystery,
and the sailor (like the desert nomad) a man of suspect orthodoxy.
We have speculated that 17th century mariners shared more than the
secrets of a craft-they may have shared certain clandestine ideas as
well: the idea of democracy, for example, or for that matter the idea of
spiritual freedom, of freedom from “Christian Civilization” and all its
miseries. If Islamophiliac notions circulated amongst educated Masons,
why not also amongst a 'masonry of poor mariners? From ship to ship in
whispers a rumor was circulated, a tale of the Barbary Coast, where
wealth and “Moorish nieces” were to be won by the brave-by those few
free spirits bold enough to renounce Christianity. If we have no written
record of this “conspiracy”, we may also ask what documents ever emerge
from an oral and non-literate (sub)culture? We need no texts because we
have proof of conspiracy in the otherwise-inexplicable historical fact
of thousands of conversions, not only voluntary but emphatic; we have
the evidence, in fact, of mass apostasy.
Here then we are given an example not only of heresy as a means of
cultural transfer, but also (and even more interesting) heresy as a
means of social resistance. And it is here (as I've already implied)
that I find the “meaning” of the Renegadoes and their lost world. It's
true that this theoria or “vision” of the pirates must be suspect as a
prolongation of my own particular subjectivity- and even as a “Romantic”
prolongation, to be sure. But it's also true that no subjectivity is
entirely unique. If I make bold to interpret the Renegadoes' experience,
it's because in some sense I recognize it. Every history comprises in
some degree a “history of the present” (as Foucault says), and perhaps
even more so, a history of the self. But “every history” is not
therefore to be deemed devoid of “objectivity” or to be merely
subjective and romantic.
I think I recognize the Renegadoes because somehow they too are
“present”. When Col. Qaddafi and the Irish Republican Army are accused
of collusion and gunrunning, would it be misleading to mention the old,
old Atlantean connection between Celts and North Africans? Just as the
European Consensus of the 17th century denounced such conspiracy as
treason and apostasy, so our modern media dismiss it as “terrorism”. We
are not used to looking at history from the terrorist's point of view,
that is, from the point of view of moral struggle and revolutionary
expropriation. In our modern consensus view, the moral right of killing
and stealing (war and taxes) belongs only to the State; even more
specifically, to the rational, secular, corporate State. Those who are
irrational enough to believe in religion (or revolution) as a reason for
action in the world are “dangerous fanatics.” Clearly not much has
changed since the 1600's. On the one hand, we have society; on the other
hand, resistance.
The 17th century knew no such thing as a secular ideology. Neither
States nor individuals justified their actions by philosophical appeals
to science, sociology, economics, “natural rights”, or “dialectical
materialism”. Virtually all social constructs were predicated on
religious values, or (at least) expressed in religious language. As for
the ideology of Christian monarcho-imperialism—or for that matter the
ideology of Islamic piracy-we are free to interpret both as mere
window-dressing, hypocritical verbiage, sheer hypocrisy, or even
hallucination; but this is to reduce history to a psychology of rape and
plunder, devoid of all thought and intention. The influence of “ideas”
on “history” remains problematical and even mysterious-especially when
we hypostatize such vague complexities as categories or even as
absolutes; but it does not follow from this that we can say nothing
meaningful about ideas or about history. At the very least we must admit
that ideas have histories.
History has tended to view the Renegadoes' story as meaningless, as a
mere glitch in the smooth and inevitable progress of European culture
toward world domination. The pirates were uneducated, poor, and
marginalized-and hence (it is assumed) they could have had no real ideas
or intentions. They are seen as insignificant particles swept away from
the mainstream of history by a freakish eddy or swirl of exotic
irrationality. Thousands of conversions to the faith of the Other mean
nothing; centuries of resistance to European-Christian hegemony mean
nothing. Not one of the texts I've read on the subject even mentioned
the possibility of intentionality and resistance, much less the notion
of a “Pirate Utopia”. The idea of the “positive shadow” of Islam is an
ad hoc pro tem category I constructed in order to try to understand the
enigma of apostasy; no historian (as far as I know) has ever posited a
connection between the intellectual Islamophilia of Rosicrucianism and
the Enlightenment, and the bizarre phenomenon of the Renegadoes. No one
has ever interpreted their conversion to Islam as a kind of ultimate
form of Ranterism, or even as a means of escape from (and revenge upon)
a civilization of economic and sexual misery-from a smug Christianity
based on slavery, repression, and elite privilege. Renegado apostasy as
self-expression-mass apostasy as class expression-the Renegadoes as a
kind of proto-proletarian “vanguard”-such concepts as these have no
existence outside this book-and even I hesitate to advance them as
anything more than quaint hypotheses. The “vanguard” failed, the
Renegadoes vanished, and their incipient culture of resistance
evaporated with them. But their experience was not meaningless, nor do
they deserve to be buried in oblivion. Someone should salute their
insurrectionary fervor, and their “temporary autonomous zone” on the
banks of the Bou Regreg river in Morocco. Let this book serve as their
monument; and through it let the Renegadoes re-enter the uneasy dreams
of civilization.
[1] Isabelle Eberhardt, daughter of Russian anarchists, traveled and
lived in Algiers, sometimes dressed and passed as a man, converted to
Islam, and supported Algerian independence. She wrote romantically about
her bizarre and erotic adventures and died young and tragically. See
Bowles (1975) and de Voogd (1987).
[2] Clearly at least some of the Renegadoes were quite eager to convert.
An arrogant French Consul to Algiers (1731-2) named Leon Delane, "who
had previously served as French consul in Candia (Crete) and had caused
much trouble by his haughtiness and scorn for the Turks, interfered with
the attempt by a sailor from St. Tropez to turn renegade, although the
treaty between the two states specifically stated (Article 19) that if a
Frenchman persisted for three consecutive days in his intention to turn
Muslim he should be so recognized." Delane was transferred back to Crete
by an embarrassed French government [Spencer, 1976: 159]
[3] One Captain Hamilton explained the motive which induced some
Renegadoes to stay on in Barbary: "They are tempted to forsake their God
for the love of Turkish [i.e., Moslem] women who are generally very
beautiful." He forgave the poor wretches their weakness, for these women
"are well versed in witchcraft. . .captives never get free." [Wolfe,
1979: 237]]
[4] This essay will not constitute a genuine microhistory because it is
based largely on secondary sources. I simply wish to express a
methodological debt to Ginzberg and his school, without claiming in any
way to match them for rigor and originality.]
[5] Spencer, 1976: 58
[6] A useful term for the pirate enclaves—perhaps still not quite the
mot juste—might be "ordered anarchy", originally applied by E. E.
Evans-Pritchard to the tribal organization of the Nuer, and quoted by
Richard Drinnon, who re-applies it to the "red-white republic of
Fredonia" founded in Texas by the Cherokee chief Richard Fields and the
fascinating John Dunn Hunter- a white who'd been captured by Indians as
an infant, went to London where he met Robert Owen and other radicals,
and returned to America in 1824. Hunter was another kind of Renegado-a
convert to "Indianism"- and as such was hated and denounced. Fredonia
failed and Hunter was murdered in 1827 [Drinnon, 1972: 208]
[7] Spencer has this note on the various kinds of music to be heard in
Algiers:
Algerian music was primarily military in nature, reflecting its Ottoman
origins. The ocak military band consisted of twenty-seven pieces: eight
large drums called davul, played with the fingers; five kettledrums
(nakkare); ten bugles; two trumpets; and two pairs of cymbals. The type
of music was mehter, a strongly accented rhythmic style popularized in
the Ottoman Empire by the Janissary corps and synonymous with Ottoman
military pomp and power. A second popular type of music was the
Andalusian, brought by Morisco refugees from Spain and incorporating the
use of such Oriental instruments as the 'oud, tar, rebeb (a two-stringed
violin), and ney (a reed flute) featured in Anatolian Mevlevi dervish
compositions, on a semitonal scale. During the period of the Regency,
Andalusian orchestras of twenty or thirty persons could often be heard
in Algerian cafes, "playing all by ear, and hastening to pass the time
quickly from one measure to another, yet all the while with the greatest
uniformity and exactness, during a whole night," as Renaudot tells us.
[8] In 1659, the Ottoman-appointed Pasha demanded a bigger cut of the
Gorsairs' booty: This produced a revolution that ended the powers of the
pasha of Algiers. A boulouk-bachi, Khalil, rallied the divan to an
insurrection to "re-establish the ancient ways." These "ancient ways"
were alleged to be a constitution that placed all effective powers in
the hands of the janissary agha and the divan. Of course, this was pure
mythology, but like revolutionaries in mid-seventeenth-century England,
France, Barcelona, Naples, and elsewhere, the Algerian divan insisted
that it only wanted a return to ancient forms. No one in this era would
admit to being a "revolutionary." The result, however, was
revolutionary. A few years later d'Aranda could write, "The
pasha...acknowledges a kind of subjection to the Grand Seigneur in
words, but takes little account of his orders.... The soldiers are more
dreadful to him than the Grand Seigneur." They had become the rulers of
Algiers, leaving the pasha as a ceremonial officer, paid a regular
salary, but without power. [Wolfe, 1979: 84]
[9] When Khaireddin was about 50, he captured a young Italian
noblewoman, Marie de Gaetano, and married her. Wolfe mentions also that
the wife of one of the later Deys of Algiers was "an English renegade".
Perhaps we can permit ourselves to imagine that not all such wives were
unhappy captives, but that some of them enjoyed the adventure.
[10] Ali Bicnin's mosque, built in 1622, was based on Ottoman models,
with "an octagonal cupola set on a central arcaded square courtyard,
with smaller octagonal cupolas serving as the roofs of the arcades."
[Spencer, 1976: 77] Building a mosque is no proof of a sincere
conversion, of course, but it does demonstrate that Ali Bicnin at least
wished to appear pious.
[11] Senior, p. 87. Dr. Johnson remarks somewhere that any sensible
person would prefer prison to the British Navy; one could be sure, at
least, of better food and companions!
[12] He'd been planning simply to rob the ship of its treasure, which
belonged to an English Catholic recusant fleeing to Spain, but
apparently he'd been misinformed and found "the goldfinches flowen out
of their nest"-so he stole the ship instead.
[13] Six years later, in 1609, Ward and his comrade Captain Bishop
visited Munster again at least once. Local officials had to be
imprisoned for dealing with the pirates, who, after all, had 10 or 11
ships and about 1,000 men. Unable to repel them by force the English
"Vice-President" of Munster tried to pardon them instead-but this
expedient also failed. Later that year the British Lord Admiral sent a
ship to Barbary under one Captain Pepwell to persuade Ward and his
confederates "to forsake their wicked course of life. " His mission not
only failed, but all his sailors deserted him and joined Ward. Pepwell
had to "part with his pinnace at an under rate to the Turks" and return
to London looking foolish. Captain Bishop, who now claimed to despise
Ward for turning Turke (in 1609), was bribed to murder him, but failed.
Bishop pleaded for a pardon, saying supinely: "I will die a poor
labourer in mine own country, if I may, rather than be the richest
pirate in the world." [Ewen, 1939: 20-21] Ward obviously had other
plans.
[14] This essay will not constitute a genuine microhistory because it is
based largely on secondary sources. I simply wish to express a
methodological debt to Ginzberg and his school, without claiming in any
way to match them for rigor and originality.]
[15] Once in 1608, Ward sailed into Algiers with a Spanish prize laden
with a cargo of "alligant wines", and there met another pirate (one John
King of Limehouse) who'd just captured a ship carrying beer. Ward traded
him a tun of wine for a tun of beer, losing money on the deal, and
revealing his working-class taste! [Ewen, 1939: 9]
[16] Originally from Egypt, founded by Abul Hasan alShadhili in the 13th
century, divided into numerous branches all over the Islamic world, but
especially Egypt, North Africa and Yemen. See Douglas (1993); az-Zirr
and Durkee (1991).
[17] With a pun on Sala, the name of the city, and sala, Arabic for
"console". See Brown, 1971 34.
[18] Sayyids or Sharifs-descendents of the Prophet- are of course
honored everywhere in the Islamic world, especially by Shiites and
Ismailis, but they've played a major role in Sunni Morocco as well.
Great political prestige attaches to these families-one of them still
rules Morocco today. This veneration oE the Sharifs may owe something to
Fatimid influence, which still survives in popular lore in the form of
the famous "Hand of Fatima", used everywhere in North Africa as a charm
against the Evil Eye. See Westermarek (1968) [1926]; see index under
"Evil Eye", "Hand", etc.
[19] The newcomers had alien-sounding names like Vargas, Pelafres
Blanco, Rodriquez, Carasco, Santiago, Galan, Guzman, etc-ani many of
them knew not a word of Arabic. [Caille, 1949 248]
[20] The Casbah included the ruin of the old ribat or t'ort. Abun Nasr
calls it an Almohad construction; it was built (or re-built) around
1150, along with the tower of Hassan, a minaret which served as a
landmark for vessels at sea. [Coindreau, p. 30-31]
[21] As one Moroccan historian put it, the universal turmoil was "enough
to whiten the hair of a suckling babe!" See Caille (1949: 209), quoting
El-Oufrani.
[22] In effect, Mamora had functioned as a pirate republic under the
inspired leadership of Captain Henry Mainwaring. This Englishman
apparently never converted to Islam, which suggests that turning Turke
was still a voluntary act, and one which he chose not to perform,
despite his strong connection with Barbary. He later crowned a hugely
successful career by "taking the pardon" and retiring to England, where
he wrote an important treatise on navigation and lived like a gentleman.
He also wrote a treatise on how to suppress piracy-don't offer any
pardons, Mainwaring advised.
[23] As Pere Dan describes it, day and night the noise of quarrels arose
from the taverns and Moorish cafes, most of them owned by indigenous
merchants "to whom the pirates sold their booty"; the corsairs at once
spent their profits in "cabarets and other places of debauch, since
their greatest passion was to waste on revelry the wealth they'd won at
sea." [Coindreau, 1948: 41] Some feeling for the "scene" might be gained
from descriptions of Port Royal, the later pirate town in Jamaica, which
was so wicked that a flood swallowed it up like a watery Sodom.
[Exquemelin, 1699]
[24] Harrison must have been popular. Charles I had signed a treaty with
Morocco, and this "gentleman of the chamber of the Prince of Wales" had
arrived with gifts for Salé, including six cannon. For Harrison's story,
see chapter 7 below. [Coindreau, 1948: 108.]
[25] At this time the Hornacheros were led by Mohammed ibn Abd al-Qadir
Ceron, and the Andalusians chose as Caid one Abdallah ibn Ali elCaceri;
both of them remained active in one office or another during the
Republican period [Caille,1949: 2171 _ although Caceri was assassinated
in 1638.
[26] See Dunton, 1637; Carteret, 1638, published from MS in
Philadelphia, 1929. Carteret himself later summed up his impression of
Salé: "...[as] for the government, fundamentall lawes they have not any,
for all that I could learne"! [Sources Inedites III, 1935: 453]
[27] Coindreau identifies this flag as the 3 gold crescent moons on a
red ground often flown by Ottoman privateers and corsairs, but It might
also refer to the flag of Salé, showing a gold Man in the Moon on a red
ground.
[28] In fact, as B. Quinn points out in his wonderful book Atlantean:
Ireland's North African and Maritime Heritage, the raid on Baltimore may
be viewed as the last episode of a history stretching back into
Neolithic and even Megalithic times. It's interesting to note that the
pre-Celtic tribes of Munster were called the Hibernii, assumed to be a
branch of the Iberii from Spain; the syllable BER is only one reason
(Quinn offers many more) to believe that both peoples were related to
the Berbers of North Africa. This opens up a vast and unplowed field for
research and speculation on Irish-Moroccan connections, which Quinn has
only begun to cultivate. See also Ali and Ali (no date) for an
"Afrocentric" treatment of the same theme.
[29] Unless it be G. d'Annunzio's infamous Republic of Fiume (1919),
which financed its brief existence by piracy, and had a constitution
based on the idea of music as the only force of social organization. See
Philippe Julien, trans., D'Annunzio.
[30] On Hispaniola the Buccaneers were hunters who prepared boucan or
smoked dried meat for ship provisions.
[31] The flag of Salé, using an Islamic crescent but adding the image of
a human face, seems to symbolize the Renegado's creed with heraldic
precision. One is reminded of the legend that the Templars worshipped
the Head of Baphomet and that the Moor's Head is a symbol in Rosicrucian
alchemy; it's interesting to note that some modern Christian
Fundamentalists consider the Man in the Moon a satanic device.
[32] "From 1618 to 1626 alone, 6,000 Christians were captured and
ransomed and prizes taken to the value of more than fifteen million
pounds. In ten years, 162939, the Morisco Customs registered a total of
25 or 26 million ducats." [Caille, 1949 224] In 1626 a petition was
presented to the Duke of Buckingham by "the distress'd wives of almost
2,000 poor mariners remaining most miserable captives in Sallee in
Barbary." These poor husbands are "suffering such unspeakable misery and
tortures that they are almost forc'd to convert from their Christian
religion." [Norris, 1990: 66] The price of saving 2,000 souls from
turning Turke might well be too high even for a Duke.
[33] For this and other fascinating legends (e.g. the first Claddagh
ring was dropped in the lap of a young girl by an eagle!), see the
delightful amateur history by Richard Joyce's descendant Gcily Joyce,
Claddagh Ring Story, 1990.