Pirates of Barbary

by Adrian Tinniswood

  Too tired to go out on the cruise anymore, and too notorious to sue for peace with James I and go home, Ward made a life for himself in Tunis, marrying a renegade woman from Palermo called Jessimina. Perhaps he used the profits from piracy to finance new ventures; perhaps, as one rumor had it, he taught gunnery and navigation to a new generation of corsairs. Most likely he lived in quiet retirement with his desperate and disdainful entourage, swapping old men’s stories of death and fire on the high seas. William Lithgow, who stopped off again in Tunis on the way back from his trip along the Barbary Coast, left a final vignette of Ward. Twice while he was in Tunis this second time, says Lithgow, Captain Ward dispatched one of his servants to show him 300 or 400 chickens’ eggs as they hatched after being kept in ovens. The heat from each oven, said Lithgow, was “answerable to the natural warmness of the hen’s belly; upon which moderation, within twenty days they come to natural perfection.”28 There is something oddly moving about the idea that a brutish, violent man like Ward, who had been the death of so many, many people, was so fascinated at the end of his life by chicks in an incubator. Still settled in Tunis, he died of the plague in the summer of 1622.

  There are worse fates. On his way home from Tunis, William Lithgow called in at Sicily, where he found Sir Francis Verney close to death in the Great Hospital of St. Mary of Pity at Messina. Sir Francis’s career as a pirate had ended soon after he converted to Islam in Tunis. Taken at sea by Sicilians, he spent two years as a slave on their galleys before being redeemed by an English Jesuit who made him promise to return to Christianity. After another year or so as a common soldier, he fell sick and applied for admission to St. Mary of Pity, where, on September 6, 1615, he died.

  Lithgow arranged for his burial in the grounds of the hospital, and his turban and slippers were sent home to his family in England. Whatever they thought of him, the Verneys kept the things. They’re still in the family home today, treasured heirlooms in a glass case, souvenirs of a wrong but romantic ancestor.

  FOUR

  The Land Hath Far Too Little Ground: Danseker the Dutchman

  Even more than poor Sir Francis Verney, one corsair was inextricably linked with John Ward in the seventeenth-century imagination: Simon Danseker, the “Devil Captain of Algiers.” Andrew Barker promised that his True and Certain Report would tell all about the “beginning, proceedings, overthrows, and now present estate of Captain Ward and Danseker, the two late famous pirates.” “The Seaman’s Song of Captain Ward” that appeared in the summer of 1609 had as its companion piece “The Sea-Mans Song of Dansekar the Dutchman”; and the full title of Robert Daborn’s 1612 play is A Christian Turn’d Turk: or, The Tragical Lives and Deaths of the Two Famous Pirates, Ward and Dansiker.

  Danseker plays second fiddle to John Ward in all of these works, with English publishers preferring to thrill their English readers with the villainy of an English pirate. He scarcely gets a mention in Barker’s pamphlet, and even “The Sea-Mans Song of Dansekar the Dutchman” can’t resist bringing in the Dutchman’s rival, focusing throughout on the exploits of the two men together: “All the world about have heard / Of Dansekar and English Ward, / And of their proud adventures every day.”1 But Danseker’s career is the stuff of legend. He deserves a song of his own.

  Simon the Dancer came from Vlissingen and served in the Spanish Wars before moving to Marseilles in the early years of the seventeenth century. According to Thomas Butler, an English merchant who picked up stories about him as he traveled toward the Levant in the summer and autumn of 1608, Danseker had married the daughter of the governor of Marseilles and then quarreled with the authorities, who, presumably, included his father-in-law. In 1607 he stole a ship in Marseilles harbor, used her to take another, and then set out to sell his prizes—in Algiers. Within a matter of months he had established himself as a piratical power to be reckoned with in the Mediterranean, capturing twenty-nine English, French, and Flemish vessels.

  Danseker had a short but spectacular career as a corsair. In 1608 Henry Pepwell, the spy who offered to kill John Ward, listed “Captain Dansker of Flushing” as one of Ward’s commanders at Tunis. Soon afterward the Dutchman moved his base to Algiers, where he operated under the protection of the pasha, Redwan, and acquired the title by which he was known on the Barbary Coast—Dali Raïs, “the Devil Captain.”

  At the end of 1608 Danseker pulled off a major coup. He and his crew of Dutch, English, and Turks ambushed a Spanish grain convoy off the coast of Valencia. The corn was useful, but the prizes’ real value lay in their human cargo: among the 160 passengers found aboard the main vessel, the Bellina, were the son of Viceroy Sandoval of Majorca and the illegitimate son of Viceroy Viliena of Sicily, one of whom (the dispatches aren’t clear which) was transporting 300,000 crowns to Spain for his father.

  A month later there was an unconfirmed report that Danseker was in the eastern Mediterranean and that he had taken a Venetian merchantman six miles off the southern coast of Cyprus. By April 1609 he was threatening to blockade the Spanish fortress on Ibiza with a fleet of five ships, including the Bellina.

  One of his victims that spring was a particularly unlucky English merchantman. On March 15, 1609, the Charity put out from Ancona on the Adriatic coast of Italy with a cargo of corn, bound for Málaga and home. As she rounded the heel of Italy she met with the Pearl of London; and, mindful of the corsairs who hunted in those waters, the Charity’s master, Daniel Banister, suggested the two vessels should stick together as they headed west to the Straits.

  With a steady wind from the northeast (known by sailors as a “levant”), the pair made tremendous progress, covering the 1,300 miles or so to Cartagena on the southern coast of Spain in only fifteen days. Then things began to go wrong. On April 3, as they struggled in choppy seas with a wind now coming from the west, the watch on the Charity sighted three vessels closing fast. They reached the Pearl, which immediately lowered her topsail in a gesture of surrender, confirming Banister’s fears that the three ships meant them no good. The Charity’s crew gave her all the sail they could and tried to run, but after a long chase the pirates overtook them and ordered the ship to stand to in the name of their master, the great Turk.

  What shocked the men aboard the Charity more than anything else was the realization that their pursuers were a mixture of Englishmen and Turks, and that all three ships were commanded by Englishmen. They later discovered that the pirates were members of John Ward’s Tunisian fleet.

  What followed was a perfect example of typical pirate tactics. The corsairs began by trying outright intimidation. One of their commanders, an old man named Foxley, “most sternly looking up, as sternly told us, that if we would not presently strike our topsail, thereby to show our yielding was immediate, they would lay us directly aboard with their ships and as readily sink us.”2

  That approach produced no results, even though the crew of the Charity numbered just twenty men and faced three heavily armed opponents—one with thirty guns, the other two with twenty-eight apiece—and a small army of about 600 Turks brandishing small arms. With a splendid rhetorical flourish, Banister bid the pirates welcome and invited them to board, telling them that “such a hot entertainment should they find, as all the water that bare them, should hardly bring them into a cool temper again.”3 Every man made frantic preparations to fit the ship for action and to fit his soul for heaven. Cannon were unlashed and dragged into place; rope netting was suspended above the deck, so that boarders trying to jump down into the vessel would find themselves entangled; canvas drabblers were laced to the bottoms of the sails to give extra speed when the ship was maneuvering. And the crew waited.

  But the pirates didn’t want a fight. They wanted prizes. Their next step was to parade a group of English captives on deck, clanking their chains. Foxley and the other commanders had recognized Banister—the Charity was well known on the Barbary Coast for transporting passengers between Tunis, Algiers, Alexandria, and Istanbul. Unnervingly, their prisoners called on him by
name and begged him to surrender. If his crew ever wanted to see their homeland again, they shouted across at him, “if we had parents to mourn for their sons, wives to lament for their husbands, or children to cry out for their fathers,” they should not fire so much as a single shot.4 The corsairs had sworn to show them no mercy if they put up the least sign of resistance: the lucky ones among the Charity’s crew would die; the rest would be taken into slavery.

  This display was enough for Banister. He struck his topsail and surrendered. As night fell, he and his company were taken aboard the pirate ships and placed under guard.

  The pirates hadn’t finished with them. It was customary for sailors on merchant ships to do some trading on their own account—a piece of silk or woolen cloth, perhaps, or a little oil—and the crew of the Charity was no exception. Every single man had “some little particular venture for ourselves, or our friends,” and when the Charity was boarded, they all pleaded with Foxley and the other English pirates not to take their personal possessions. There was no need to worry, they were told: “It was in no way their intents, neither was it their captain Captain Ward’s pleasure that any private seafaring man’s venture should be in any ways hindered.”5 But the renegades said they couldn’t vouch for their shifty Turkish comrades, who would steal the shirts off their backs if they had the chance. Perhaps the captives ought to hand their things to the English pirates so they could keep them safe overnight from the greedy, dishonorable Janissaries?

  They did. They never saw their possessions again.

  But they did see their freedom. It so happened that on a recent voyage the Charity had carried the pasha of Tunis from Istanbul, and in consideration of this Foxley and his comrades decided to let the ship go, together with its entire crew and the crew of the Pearl. They took the Pearl itself back to Tunis as a prize; and while they ignored the Charity’s cargo of corn, they took her powder, muskets, match, pikes, ladles, sponges, swords and daggers, its cables, and most of its beef, pork, butter, cheese, and oil. And “when they saw they could take no more, they heaved up their hands and bade us be gone.”6

  If the sailors were feeling sorry for themselves, they were soon reminded of how much worse things might have been. At dawn the next day they saw the same pirates about a mile away, engaged in a confrontation with a French vessel whose crew was rash enough to put up a fight. The men of the Charity watched appalled as the corsairs boarded her, hanged the master from the yardarm, and forced the eighty-four survivors to plead on their knees for their lives. They were all destined for the slave market in Tunis.

  But it turned out that the Charity wasn’t as fortunate as its name might suggest. The ship steered a course for the Spanish coast. The next morning they sighted a French vessel, which unfortunately for them also turned out to be a pirate, and one, moreover, “of whose cruelty we had heard of so many [times] before, that we accounted ourselves compassed even in the arms and grip of death.”7 For two days she chased them, getting closer and closer with each passing hour, until there was less than a mile between them. The Charity’s crew had all but given up hope when they saw on the horizon five ships under sail. Not caring who or what they were, they made straight for them, shouting, kneeling on the deck, holding up their hands and generally expressing “the lively motions of distressed men.”8

  The convoy, which consisted of four merchantmen from the east coast of England and one Fleming, realized what was happening and steered a course toward the Charity, and the Frenchman veered off, unhappy at the odds. It seemed the Charity’s luck had changed.

  It hadn’t. While the crews were exchanging greetings and news, another vessel came into view. It was Danseker—terrifying, irresistible Danseker the Devil Captain, in a huge man-of-war that bristled with cannon and Turkish Janissaries:Comes he amongst the thickest of our fleet, as if he had the power to sweep us away with his breath. But when he came near to us, he caused his followers to waft us amain with their glistering swords, threatening to sink us one after the other, if at his command we did not immediately strike.9

  This was too much. The master of the Prosperous, the first vessel Danseker approached, was an Englishman named Startop. He was so overawed by the spectacle of 400 Turks brandishing small arms and scimitars that he struck his sails immediately. Even when his comrades rallied round and shouted out that “they would never forsake him, they would fight for him, rescue him, or die with him,” he steadfastly refused to put up any resistance. The three remaining Englishmen scattered, leaving the Prosperous , the Charity and the Fleming to the mercy of Captain Danseker and his Algerian Janissaries.

  There is something magisterial, almost theatrical, about accounts of Danseker in action. An English seaman who was on the Swan, which put into port along the coast from Algiers in 1609, told of how Danseker boarded the vessel and declared “after his Dutch pronunciation, ‘Aha Swan, dow binst myne!’”10 And now, as he drew alongside the Charity, the first words he spoke were “I command you to strike sail and follow me!”

  Banister did as he was told. What choice did he have, with no powder, no weapons, not even a dagger among twenty men? But he did point out to Danseker that they had been robbed by Ward’s men less than six days before. The Devil Captain’s response was as grandiloquent as his other gestures. “Since the men of Tunis had had us in hand, he scorned to rob a hospital, to afflict where there was misery before, or to make prey of them who had nothing left.” He would let the Charity go free—all the crew had to do was to fire a three-gun salute by way of tribute, “as a thanks to him or ransom for our liberty.”11

  Banister pointed out that “such was the cruelty of our enemies” that they hadn’t left him even enough powder to do that, so Danseker simply sent him on his way, although he kept the Prosperous—and the Flemish vessel, which was carrying £20,000 in silks and other precious materials. In fact, when the crew of the Pearl, still aboard the Charity and rather tired of being captured by pirates, begged Danseker to put them ashore, he presented them with four shillings each “to help to carry them up into the country of Spain.”12

  Detaining sailors only to give them money was not the usual practice among pirates of the Barbary Coast, and Danseker’s Robin Hood practice of robbing merchants and respecting mariners, coupled with his refusal to convert to Islam, earned him the admiration of the Charity’s crew, who contrasted his behavior with that of Ward’s men:This is the difference between these two pirates. . . . Ward makes prey of all and Danseker hath compassion of some: the one contemning [i.e., disdaining] to be charitable to any, the other holding it hateful to take any thing from them, who labour in continual danger to maintain their lives.13

  Back in London, the merchant community was less impressed. The news of the loss of the Pearl and the Prosperous brought a temporary halt to the Levant trade, and merchants petitioned the government for protection.

  Danseker may have been the most famous Dutch renegade, but he wasn’t the only one. Zeerovers with Barbary Coast connections attracted attention and alarm throughout the early seventeenth century. They included Simon Maartsszoon Stuijt, who commanded a fleet of corsairs off Tangier in 1611; “Big Pete” (Grote Piet), who terrorized shipping in the English Channel in the early 1610s; and—a rare example of a corsair dynasty—Simon Danseker the younger, who, after his father’s death, became a renowned pirate in his own right, ending his days in Morocco, where he ran a successful business dealing in stolen goods. And unlike the “Great Danseker,” numbers of Dutch pirates converted to Islam. Hassan Raïs began life as Meinart Dircxssen; Murad Flamenco came from Antwerp; and Assam Raïs was better known in his home town of Sommelsdijk as Jan Marinus.

  With all the different nationalities that frequented the Barbary Coast, communication was something of a problem. Arabic, the language of Islam, was universal throughout North Africa, although in a variety of different dialects. Turkish was the official language of the Ottoman Empire, and in the three Barbary states which owed a nominal allegiance to Istanbul—Algiers, Tunis, an
d Tripoli—it was the language in which government business was conducted. The situation was slightly different in Morocco, which wasn’t part of the empire. There, Arabic was also used in government and diplomatic circles, although the Sa’di sultans didn’t necessarily confine themselves to Arabic—the Spanish said of Abd al-Malik, Arab ruler of Morocco from 1576 to 1578, that he knew Turkish, Spanish, German, Italian, and French.

  Corsairs and other renegades who spent any length of time in the Barbary states obviously picked up a fair smattering of Arabic. But there was an alternative. When the Puritan William Okeley was captured by Algerian pirates on his way to the West Indies in 1639, he found himself chained belowdecks with some English galley slaves. “From them,” he wrote, “we learned a smattering of the common language, which would be of some use to us when we should come to Algiers.”14

  The common language to which he referred was the language of the Franks, a curious pidgin tongue in which Italian predominated, but which included Greek, Provençal, and Turkish words, with a dash of Spanish and Portuguese thrown in. (When Daniel Banister’s Charity was first boarded by pirates, the Turks among them addressed his crew in a language he thought was Italian.) Spoken by pirates and the merchants, brokers, and slave masters they dealt with, this pidgin language originated in Palestine around the time of the Crusades, perhaps at Acre, where Venetian, Pisan, and Genoese communities settled close to each other around the harbor. In Egypt it was lisan al ifrang, in North Africa sabir, and, later, petit mauresque . By the seventeenth century it was being referred to in the West by its most common name, lingua franca—so common, indeed, that the phrase has since come to mean any common medium of communication between people who speak different languages.