Corsair

by Tim Severin

  ‘If we return to St Louis, the governor will want to know what has happened to the ship. We will be accused of failing in our duty to the captain, or even of killing him and the foreign crew. We may be hung and certainly we will lose our freedom and be sold again as slaves.’

  ‘Can’t you go ashore somewhere else, not at the Residence?’

  Again Benjamin shook his head. ‘We are Laptots. We were brought to St Louis as slaves, and our own homelands are far away. The local people would not accept us. Besides, without us you will never cross the bar.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There are many sandbanks and mud shoals where the river runs into the sea. Ships can come in and out when the river is in flood, but now it is almost too late. This is the season when the sea breaks heavily on the bar, and it is very dangerous. It needs local knowledge to find a way through the obstacles and a travado to help us.’

  ‘A travado?’

  ‘A great gale of wind from the north-east, from the desert. The wind blows opposite to the sea, and drives back the waves. Also the ship is pressed forward and crosses the bar quickly.’

  ‘Then we must all hope for a travado.’

  Benjamin appeared to hesitate, then asked, ‘Once we are out to sea, who will show us the way, who will navigate the ship? You said you were not a ship’s captain, but now you are sounding like one.’

  Hector found himself saying nervously, ‘I’ve never navigated a ship before. But I think I can learn.’

  WITH THE RIVER CURRENT sweeping her along, L’Arc-de-Ciel took less than a week to reach the bar at St Louis. Hector spent much of the time studying the dead captain’s sea charts and trying to understand his navigation instruments. The main item was a mystifying device as long as his arm and carefully stored in a cherrywood box. Its open frame supported two wooden arcs engraved with degrees of angle. Three small vanes were attached to each of the arcs, and he found he could slide the vanes back and forth. One of them was fitted with a lens. Puzzled, he took the instrument on deck and tried to use it. But it defied logic. He held the instrument up to his eye and tried looking through the lens. Then he slid the vanes to different positions. The angles they recorded made no sense. He turned the device around, and tried looking through it the other way. Still nothing worked. Bourdon strolled over to see what he was doing, and commented that he had seen an architect using something similar when he had visited the building work at Versailles. ‘It’s for measuring angles,’ he commented. ‘I know that already,’ snapped Hector, increasingly frustrated. ‘If I could use it to find the angle of the sun or of the north star, then it would be better than the astrolabe I learned to use among the Turks. There’s a book of tables among the captain’s possessions which gives the height of the sun or the star at different locations at different times of the year. With that knowledge I might even be able to take us to the Caribees.’

  The Frenchman tactfully withdrew, leaving Hector to wrestle with his problem. Unexpectedly Benjamin provided the solution. He had seen the captain of a visiting ship use a similar gadget. Benjamin had thought the captain was touched in the head, for he had held the instrument to his eye in broad daylight and when facing out to the open sea. There was nothing on the horizon to look at. ‘You must be wrong, I’m sure he was measuring the angle of the sun,’ Hector growled. He was really irritated now.

  ‘No,’ the Laptot insisted. ‘He was looking out to sea. The sun was behind him.’

  To save his dignity, Hector waited until Benjamin had walked away before, still doubtful, he turned his back to the sun, peered through the lens, and fiddled with the vanes. By chance he saw the shadow of a vane pass into vision and across a graded arc. He lifted the instrument until it was level with the horizon and adjusted the vanes again. He placed the vane’s shadow steadily on the arc, then brought the instrument down and took the reading. It was in the range of numbers in the captain’s book of tables. He had discovered how to bring the ship to her destination.

  They stopped only once on the river voyage, a brief halt at a friendly village to take fresh supplies and top up their water barrels. Then they dropped downriver until they began to feel the rise and fall of the tide, and Benjamin warned that the Residence of St Louis lay just ahead. ‘We must stay close to the left-hand shore. The guns of the Residence do not reach that far. A few ships will be anchored in the roadstead, maybe a man of war also, but we can slip past them if the wind favours us.’ He pointed to the north. A small dark cloud could be seen, far in the distance. ‘I think we are lucky with the weather.’

  As the day wore on, banks of thick, dark cloud formed on the horizon and began to coalesce into a solid black mass. From the underbelly of the clouds flickered distant flashes of lightning. Along the river there was an atmosphere of foreboding. The breeze dropped away and was replaced by an oppressive calm. The air seemed to thicken and become slightly opaque. It was difficult to breathe. The sloop glided on, her sails slack, carried only by the current. Hector listened carefully. There was a faint roaring sound far away. ‘What’s that noise?’ he asked Benjamin. ‘That’s the sound of the waves breaking on the bar. Let us hope that the travado reaches us before we are in the overfalls, and that the ship survives the wind.’

  Half an hour later the storm broke. There was a tremendous thunderclap and a great gust of wind swept across the river, driving spray from the surface. The squall struck the sloop like a fist. With a loud clap of canvas, the mainsail bellied out, and the sloop heeled over. Hector heard the groan of the stays under the sudden strain. L’Arc-de-Ciel surged forward as Dan and Benjamin struggled to control her helm.

  A peal of thunder close at hand, and suddenly the horizon was blotted out by torrential rain which reduced visibility to a few paces. Hector’s clothes were saturated in an instant. He remembered the long parched days in the desert and tilted back his head in sheer delight. He opened his mouth and let the rain pour in. When he swallowed, he could taste the faint grains of dust which the travado had brought from the interior. Benjamin appeared at his side, gripping him by the elbow. ‘Go help Dan at the helm,’ he shouted. ‘I will show which way to steer.’

  When Hector reached the wheel, Benjamin was already standing in the bow, peering into the murk. He raised his arm and pointed away to starboard. Obediently they steered to his instructions. Now the rain was hissing down, ochre rain on a brown river, and it was impossible to tell where the air and water met. More thunder, a massive growl which seemed to shake the sloop. A tremendous crack of lightning split the gloom.

  Moments later the sloop was bucking and lurching as she was caught in the overfalls. Out of the murk raced a continuous onslaught of breaking waves. A lightning flash close at hand lit their foaming crests and turned them blinding white. L’Arc-de-Ciel surged on, the wind driving her forward. Benjamin gestured again, urgently this time, and Dan and Hector spun the wheel to bring the ship on her new course. There was no pattern to the waves breaking on the bar. They came from different directions, now smashing into her bow so she was tossed backwards, now heaving up along her sides so that she slewed sideways.

  They never glimpsed St Louis. For two hours they battled with the overfalls, trusting to Benjamin’s directions, ploughing onward until they were sure that the turbulence was easing. Then the little ship ceased her wild gyrations and, though she still pitched and rolled uncomfortably, there was no mistaking that she was sailing on smoother water.

  By nightfall the rain had ceased. The sky was still overcast so it was impossible to tell when the sun set, but the wind had eased to a moderate breeze and the air felt washed and clean. Benjamin came back from his lookout in the bow, and announced that they had cleared the bar and passed through the anchorage as well. They were in open water. Hector went down to the cabin and brought up the ship’s compass and set it down beside the helm. ‘Steer west,’ he said to Dan. ‘Tomorrow I will check the charts and set course for the Americas.’ He looked up at the sky. As swiftly as it had arrived, the travado h
ad swept onward and out to sea. The first stars were showing through rents in the clouds. He thought he recognised the constellation of Orion. Now he would use its stars to find his way across the ocean. He gave a slight shiver of apprehension. There was so much to learn, and it was so easy to make mistakes. He thought back to Ibrahim, his corpse lying on the sand and the crusted blood of the wounds where the Labdessah had speared him to death, because he had followed Hector’s plan to ambush the Tooarick. And he recalled his last glimpse of Karp, the glint of the scimitar as it descended in a killing stroke. Poor mutilated Karp had believed in peace and forgiveness to the end, refusing to resort to violence even as he found a way to save his friends. Despondently Hector wondered if Dan and Jacques had been wise to place their trust in him. Too often he seemed to bring death and suffering upon his comrades.

  His sense of gloom deepened as he allowed himself to recall his final meeting with Elizabeth, only to find that the details of that heart-rending encounter were already blurred. It seemed that the ordeal of the long trek across the desert had not only separated him from her physically, but was part of a great void that was growing wider and wider. In a moment of unhappy clarity he knew that, although he might return one day to trace what had happened to his mother, he would never see or hear from Elizabeth again.

  Then he heard someone singing under his breath. It was Bourdon somewhere in the shadows. Hector could not distinguish the words of the song but it sounded like a Paris street ballad. Clearly Jacques was in good spirits and looking forward to reaching the Americas. At the helm there was a slight movement as Dan adjusted the wheel to hold the little sloop on her westward course. The Miskito appeared untroubled by the violent and sudden changes of fortune of recent days. Hector found himself taking comfort from his friend’s composure. ‘What’s it like there, out in the Caribees?’ he asked quietly. There followed such a long silence that Hector thought Dan had not heard his question. Then the Miskito’s voice answered, ‘There are places more beautiful than anything you could dream, sea as clear as glass, sand so fine and white that it looks and feels like flour, wreaths of mist hanging over jungle-covered hills.’ There was another long pause. ‘The people who live there are no different from those we have already known. Some are honest. Others are rogues and cheats. A number are men who have known hardship and are seeking a fresh beginning. They are like ourselves. When you have brought us across the ocean and I have visited my people, maybe we should try to join them.’

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  In 1631 a particularly brazen Barbary corsair was operating from Sallee on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. A sea captain from Flanders, he had ‘turned Turk’ and taken the name Murat Reis. That year, with two ships, he made a surprise raid on the Irish coastal village of Baltimore and successfully kidnapped almost the entire population: 107 men, women and children. He then took them back to North Africa to sell. A French missionary priest working in Algiers saw several of Murat’s Irish victims put up for auction. After that, very little more was heard of them.

  Slavery in various guises was flourishing on all sides of the Mediterranean throughout the seventeenth century. The Regencies of Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli were infamous in the Christian world as places where the unfortunate captives were either set to work or held for ransom. Yet there were also thriving slave markets in Malta and Livorno where Muslims – and sometimes non-Muslim as well – were bought and sold. The Knights of St John of Malta were at the forefront of the trade in much the same way that the corsair guilds in the Regencies, the taifas, were the chief providers of human merchandise in North Africa. By the same token, it was virtual slavery to be condemned to the oar in France’s Royal Galley fleet, one of Louis XIV’s pet projects. On the Sun King’s galleys, French convicts sat alongside Turkish prisoners of war as well as Iroquois Indians captured in North America. The Turks could hope to be freed in a prisoner exchange, but many of the French galeriens died in chains while the unfortunate Indians mostly perished from fevers and malnutrition.

  The turbulence of politics in the Mediterranean encouraged this state of affairs to continue. Against the general background of the Eternal War between Cross and Crescent, the various European nations were competing with one another for commercial and territorial advantage. France was suspicious of Spain; the Spaniards mistrusted the Portuguese; the English, Dutch and other Protestant nations jostled with one another even as they warily dealt with the Catholic powers. Everyone was nervous of the Turkish Sultan in Constantinople. Amid such disarray the Barbary corsairs thrived. A shipping list for the period between 1677 and 1680 (roughly the time of Hector’s and Dan’s fictional adventures) shows that the Algerines captured no less than 160 British ships. This would have provided approximately 8,000 British captives for the slave pens of that Regency.

  This was also a time when the nature of naval warfare in the Mediterranean was altering. Oared vessels, the preferred warships since the days of ancient Greece, were obsolete. Too expensive to build, their huge crews were too costly to maintain, and their hulls and rig insufficiently seaworthy. Above all, they could not carry the numbers of heavy cannon which gave their rivals, the sailing ships, such devastating firepower. Nevertheless the flamboyant galley with its colourful pennants and massed ranks of half-naked oarsmen remained a potent symbol, much loved by contemporary painters and illustrators, many of them Dutch. They often depicted imaginary battle scenes between galleys and sailing ships. These same artists also found the Barbary city states, particularly Algiers, to be a worthy subject, basing their images on the reports of the embassies to the Regencies as well as the harrowing tales told by returned captives. There were many such memoirs by the ‘white slaves’ from Barbary though, by contrast, hardly any of the galley slaves of Christendom wrote about their experiences. An exception is the account written by a Frenchman, Jean Marteilhe, a Protestant condemned to the oar in 1701. He joined his first galley at Dunkirk on the Channel coast and describes the extraordinary pantomime – hiding under the oar benches, kicking their legs in the air, holding up their hands, coughing, bowing, and so forth – which he and his shipmates had to perform for the amusement of their captain’s guests on board.

  Unlikely though they may seem, several of the characters mentioned in the preceding pages were real: the reverend Devereux Spratt, Rector of Mitchelstown in North Cork, had been a slave in Algiers. Samuel Martin was the English consul in Algiers between the years 1673 and 1679, while Jean Baptiste Brodart, the Intendant of the Royal Galley base at Marseilles, was renowned for his venality. Joseph Maimaran, a Moroccan Jew, acted as chief financial adviser to the megalomaniac Emperor Moulay Ismail and served for many years as virtually his first minister as well as chief money lender. Unwisely Maimaran asked for repayment of a loan, and paid for his lese-majesty with his life. He was knocked down and trampled to death in the street by a loose horse belonging to a member of the Black Guard. The death looked like an accident but contemporary opinion held it was an assassination ordered by Moulay. The Emperor himself ruled until 1727, dying in his eighty-first year, and he did have an Irish gun founder who was overfond of the bottle. What happened to his monstrous favourite wife, Zidana, is not known. Famously, Moulay is reputed to have sired 888 children – 548 sons and 340 daughters – during his lifetime.

  Read on for an exclusive extract from Hector Lynch’s next adventure . . .

  Published by Macmillan in March 2008

  Copyright © Tim Severin 2007

  ONE

  HECTOR LYNCH leaned back and braced himself against the sloop’s mast. It was hard to hold the little telescope steady against the rhythmic rolling of the Caribbean swells, and the image in the lens was blurred and wavering. He was trying to identify the flag at the stern of a vessel which had appeared on the horizon at first light and was now some three miles to windward. But the wind was blowing the stranger’s flag sideways, directly towards him, so that it was difficult to see against the bright sunshine sparkling off the waves on a late-December morni
ng. Hector thought he saw a flicker of blue and white and some sort of cross, but he could not be sure.

  ‘What do you make of her?’ he asked Dan, offering the spyglass to his companion. He had first met Dan on the Barbary coast two years earlier when both had been incarcerated in the slave barracks of Algiers, and Hector had developed a profound respect for Dan’s common sense. The two men were much the same age – Hector was a few months short of his twentieth birthday – and they had formed a close friendship.

  ‘No way of telling.’ said Dan, ignoring the telescope. A Miskito Indian from the coast of Central America, like many of his countrymen he had remarkably keen eyesight. ‘She has the legs of us. She could be French or English, or maybe from the English colonies to the north. We’re too far from the Main for her to be a Spaniard. Perhaps Benjamin can say.’

  Hector turned to the third member of their small crew. Benjamin was a Laptot, a freed black slave who had worked in the ports of the West African coast before volunteering to join their vessel for the voyage across the Atlantic and into the Caribbean.

  ‘Any suggestions?’ he asked.

  Benjamin only shook his head. Hector was unsure what to do. His companions had chosen him to command their little vessel, but this was his first major ocean voyage. Two months ago they had acquired their ship when they had found her stranded halfway up a West African river, her captain and officers dead of fever, and manned only by Benjamin and another Laptot. According to the ship’s papers she was L’Arc-de-Ciel, registered in La Rochelle, and the broad empty shelves lining her hold indicated that she was a small slave ship which had not yet taken on her human cargo.