Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PREFACE
ONE - Prosperity at Sea: The Mediterranean World
TWO - Where Are the Days? The Making of a Pirate
THREE - Hellfire Is Prepared: Turning Turk on the Barbary Coast
FOUR - The Land Hath Far Too Little Ground: Danseker the Dutchman
FIVE - Your Majesty’s New Creature: Pardons and Pragmatism Under James I
SIX - Rich Caskets of Home-Spun Valour: Fighting Back Against the Pirates
SEVEN - Treacherous Intents: The English Send a Fleet Against Algiers
EIGHT - Fishers of Men: The Sack of Baltimore
NINE - Woeful Slavery: William Rainborow’s 1637 Expedition to Morocco
TEN - The Yoke of Bondage: A Slave ’s Story
ELEVEN - Deliverance: The Liberation of Barbary Captives
TWELVE - The Greatest Scourge to the Algerines: The Occupation of Tangier
THIRTEEN - Breaches of Faith: Making Peace with Barbary
FOURTEEN - No Part of England: The Evacuation of Tangier
FIFTEEN - The King’s Agent: Life in Late-Seventeenth-Century Tripoli
SIXTEEN - The Last Corsair: Colonialism, Conquest, and the End of the Barbary Pirates
Acknowledgements
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ALSO BY ADRIAN TINNISWOOD
The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness
in Seventeenth-Century England
By Permission of Heaven: The True Story of the Great Fire of London
His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren
The Art Deco House
The Arts & Crafts House
The Polite Tourist: Four Centuries of Country House Visiting
Visions of Power: Ambition and Architecture from Ancient Times to the Present
Life in the English Country Cottage
Country Houses from the Air
The National Trust: Historic Houses of Britain
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tinniswood, Adrian.
Pirates of Barbary : corsairs, conquests, and captivity in the seventeenth-century
Mediterranean / Adrian Tinniswood.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-44531-0
1. Pirates—Mediterranean Region—History—17th century. 2. Pirates—Africa,
North—History—17th century. 3. Mediterranean Region—History—1517-1789.
4. Africa, North—History—1517-1882. I. Title.
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For Carol, Clive, and David:
absent friends
Imagine (as thou readest) that thou hearest the cannon playing.
—JOHN BUTTON, Algiers Voyage (1621)
And there were some who went on the sea jihad and found fame.
—AHMAD BIN MOHAMMAD AL-MAQQARI (c. 1621)
PREFACE
Pirates are history.
The history of my own obsession with them goes back nearly ten years, to a time when I was researching a seventeenth-century English family, the Verneys. In 1608 a country squire named Sir Francis Verney fell out with his mother-in-law, walked out on his teenage wife, and went to North Africa, where he became a Muslim and embarked on a brief but spectacular career as a Barbary Coast pirate. How did that happen, I wanted to know. Did other Englishmen turn Turk like Sir Francis? I discovered that they did. And then I wanted to know what life was like for this community of renegades that operated at the interface of Christendom and Islam, a community that seemed to move effortlessly between those two worlds.
As I looked for answers to those questions, I discovered the stories which make up this book—tales of bravery, brutality, and betrayal, tales in which heroes and villains changed roles in the blink of an eye, like the characters in some Cold War spy novel. I found that robbery on the high seas was far from being the private enterprise I’d imagined it to be: behind it lay a sophisticated system of socialized crime, state-sanctioned and state-regulated, an early and efficient example of public-private partnership. And I came to understand the enormous economic importance of the Mediterranean trade in slaves, a trade which took the liberty of around one million Europeans and at least as many North Africans in the course of the seventeenth century.
While I was working on the cluster of interlocking narratives which make up Pirates of Barbary, stories of modern-day piracy started to appear in the news. First it was Indonesia. Then there were reports of Nigerian pirates using small speedboats to hijack fishing vessels off the West African coast. There were an average two attacks a week in 2007, increasing to two a day in the first month of 2008.
But it was the Somalis who really captured my attention. Adopting the same tactics as the Nigerians—the same tactics, in fact, as the Barbary pirates I was writing about—groups of Somali militiamen began to prey on merchant ships as they passed along the coast of Somalia, which, at 1,880 miles, is the longest in Africa. Some of their weapons were different—rusty Kalashnikovs and dodgy-looking grenade launchers rather than culverins and cutlasses—but others hadn’t changed in 400 years. They still relied, for example, on shock and awe, intimidation and physical courage. There were 130 robberies and attempted robberies on the high seas involving Somali pirates in 2008. A Ukrainian cargo ship packed with antiaircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and Russian tanks was hijacked that September, and two months later pirates captured the $150 million Sirius Star, a colossal supertanker three times the size of an aircraft carrier.
Pirates are history? History was repeating itself. As I wrote of how a handful of men using small boats, scaling ladders,
and sheer nerve had managed to hold the world to ransom in the seventeenth century, I watched on TV as a handful of men using small boats, scaling ladders, and sheer nerve were managing to hold the world to ransom in the twenty-first. And the sums involved were enormous. It cost the owners of the Ukrainian cargo ship, the M.V. Faina, $3.2 million to get their vessel back. The Sirius Star with its crew and its cargo of two million barrels of crude oil was handed over in exchange for $3 million.
That winter, the winter of 2008-2009, marine insurers from all over the world gathered in London to discuss the problem of African piracy. Senior figures condemned the Somali pirates as the scourge of modern shipping, calling them “vermin” and demanding a concerted response from the international community—just as they had in seventeenth-century London. Meanwhile, shipowners began to avoid the Gulf of Aden—just as they avoided the coast of Barbary four centuries earlier. The owners of very large crude carriers (VLCCs) refused to use the Suez Canal. Vessels were sent around the Cape of Good Hope, or through the Russian Northeast Passage, navigable without the aid of icebreakers for the first time in history as a consequence of global warming. The Philippines barred its nationals from working on any vessel that was due to travel through the waters off Somalia, and other seafarers were given double pay as danger money. Iranian and Pakistani nationals were reported to be joining the Somalis, raising the specter of jihad and links with al-Qaeda. In the summer of 2009 a Republican congressman introduced a bill into the U.S. House of Representatives giving immunity to any American merchant sailor who wounded or killed a pirate in response to an attack.
While the pirates’ own communities hailed them as heroes, the international community sent in their navies. In 2009 the U.S. Navy established a multinational task force to carry out counterpiracy operations in and around the Gulf of Aden. Warships in the U.S. Fifth Fleet’s Combined Task Force 151 (CTF-151) were joined by ships from Operation Atalanta, the European Union’s first-ever naval operation, which mandated vessels to “bring to an end acts of piracy and armed robbery which may be committed in the areas where they are present.” Norway, China, Russia, and South Korea sent warships to the region; so did India and Pakistan and Turkey. Croatia, eager to take part in Operation Atalanta as a way of furthering its application to join the EU, was allowed to send a vessel only after promising to respect the human rights of any pirates its forces might capture. Japan relaxed its pacifist constitution to allow the deployment of two destroyers.
By the summer of 2009, warships, aircraft, and military personnel from twenty-two nations were patrolling two million square miles of ocean in the biggest antipiracy operation the world has ever seen. It failed. And it continues to fail, for exactly the same reasons that it failed in the past: as the story of the Barbary pirates shows, the long-term solution to the problem lies onshore, and it can be achieved only by making fundamental changes within a culture which regards piracy as a legitimate activity.
There is another parallel between the Barbary Coast corsairs of the seventeenth century and their twenty-first-century comrades in Somalia. In the West (although not in their own homelands) neither group has been able to boast the glamour of the buccaneers of the Caribbean—the Henry Morgans and the Captain Kidds, the swashbuckling Errol Flynns of old romance. Those pirates have been held up by historians as heroic rebels without a cause, cheerful anarchists or ardent democrats, proto-Marxists or proto-capitalists, promoters of gay rights and racial equality, praiseworthy dissidents rather than villains.
The pirates of Africa, past and present, have not. The white West regards them as the irreconcilable Other—not rebels against authority but plain criminals, not brave Robin Hoods (that would make us the Sheriff of Nottingham), but cowardly thieves. When the old pirates of Barbary described themselves as mujahideen on a sea-jihad against encroaching Christendom, Christendom portrayed them as demons bent on world domination; when modern-day Somali pirate chiefs say that the real sea-bandits are those who steal their fish stocks and pollute their coastal waters, we patronize them and then send a gunboat. An underlying racism and a more overt anti-Islamism make it hard to imagine Captain Blood or Jack Sparrow as North African Muslims, spilling over into contemporary popular culture. It would be difficult to imagine a modern-day pirate movie about a plucky little band of Somalis taking on the combined might of the world’s navies. We’re much more likely to see another Black Hawk Down, with the military battling against underwhelming odds in the Gulf of Aden.
Pirates are history. The history of piracy, whether on the Barbary Coast or around the Horn of Africa, shows us—what? That we never learn? That we invent our heroes? That those we cast as demons play their parts too well?
All of those things. Above all, it shows us that the demons are human, too.
ONE
Prosperity at Sea: The Mediterranean World
On a wintry day in December 1609, a solemn group weaved its slow and stately way by barge down the Thames from Marshalsea Prison in Southwark to Wapping. The tide was out, and as the first barge came to rest, the sound of the water lapping at the foot of the steps and splashing over the thick, stinking mud was drowned out by the shouts and laughter of a crowd which had gathered in front of the wooden cranes and warehouses.
The figures made their way through the jostling mass of people toward a gallows, which cast its long, sinister shadow over the riverbank. At the head of the procession was a marshal from the High Court of Admiralty, who carried a little silver oar as his baton of office. He was followed by the hangman, by a chaplain from the Marshalsea, by constables—and by seventeen men who walked with their heads down and their hands clasped tightly in front of them. All seventeen were Barbary pirates. None of them would see the sun go down that night.
Piracy is a hard business. To be a good pirate captain you need excellent seamanship, good leadership skills, a streak of brutality, and a disregard for conventional morality. And, because you face death for a living on a regular basis, you need to be brave.
These men were brave. As they faced death together and alone on that cold winter’s day, every one of them must have shivered to think about what they might have done differently—a path not taken, a stone left unturned. None of them realized—how could they?—that they were key players in a tradition that shaped relations between Christendom and Islam in the seventeenth century, a tradition that continues to inform those relations to this day. These Barbary pirates couldn’t see beyond the sunset.
The first to entertain the noisy crowd was Captain John Jennings, whose bloody career in the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic had lasted a decade before his own crew betrayed him to the authorities. Two of his men had remained loyal: their reward was to hang with him, and it was to them rather than the jeering spectators that Captain Jennings addressed his final speech. The pair had followed him “through the foot-steps of transgression on earth,” he reminded them, where “bullets like hail have fallen about our ears”;a and they must follow him still. “I go before you on the highway to my salvation in heaven, where we shall meet amongst the fellowship of angels.”1 With that rather optimistic prediction he turned and climbed the gallows to his death.
One by one, the other sixteen pirates followed him—some sullen, some penitent, all frightened, and all determined to die well. William Longcastle, William Taverner, and John Moore, who had always denied that they stole a merchant ship as it lay in a Moroccan harbor, now made a full and public confession; Taverner kept his eyes on the sky the whole time, declaring as he mounted the scaffold that “this is Jacob’s ladder, on whose steps I assure I shall be reared up to heaven.”2
Bristol-born Captain James Harris, leader of a gang which preyed on merchant shipping all the way along the Barbary Coast from Morocco to Tunis, went boldly to meet his maker, nonchalantly tossing away his hat as he climbed the ladder. He sang psalms in a loud voice and, when someone in the crowd asked if he had not had news from the king about a rumored reprieve, replied, “None, sir, but from the Kin
g of Kings.”3
Two of the last to hang were the brothers John and Thomas Spencer, both members of Captain Harris’s crew. John died cleanly, but the awful slowness of Thomas’s death silenced the jeers of the crowd as he swung wildly on the short rope, beating his fists on the chest of his dead brother while he choked.
The seventeen executions were over in an hour. Harris, whose corpse had been bought by a relative, was cut down and taken away to be given a Christian burial. The others were left to hang, a traditional warning to others, until three high tides had washed over them. Then they were either sold for dissection, or tarred and caged in gibbets along the Thames, where their bodies twisted gently in the breeze, a reminder to passing sailors of the dreadful penalty for piracy.
Captain Harris had made a full confession, and copies were on sale all over London within hours of his death. He spoke of how he had turned to piracy after being captured and imprisoned in Tunis. How he had preyed on the small trading ships which plied their trade in the Narrow Seas—the English Channel, the Irish Sea, and the stretch of the North Sea separating England from the Netherlands. How he had cruised from the Atlantic coast of Spain down to the Straits of Gibraltar in the hope of coming across homeward-bound East India ships, merchants on their way back from the Near East, perhaps even a straggler from the Flota de Indias, the annual treasure convoy which brought silver, gold, and gems from the Americas back to Spain. “Making my felicity out of other men’s miseries,” he recalled, “I thought prosperity at sea as sure in my grip as the power to speak was free to my tongue.”4
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