Pirates of Barbary

by Adrian Tinniswood

  Lingua franca was primarily a spoken language. Its purpose was to facilitate face-to-face communication between traders and sailors around the Mediterranean basin, and documentary sources are few and far between, although almost every European who set foot on the Barbary Coast, from William Lithgow to Samuel Pepys, mentions it. The Spanish poet Juan del Encina used the language in a villancico, a song he wrote after returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1520. Dryden parodied it in his 1678 comedy Limberham, or The Kind Keeper: LIMBERHAM. Now I understand him; this is almost English.

  MISTRESS TRICKSY. English! away, you fop: ’tis a kind of lingua Franca, as I have heard the merchants call it; a certain compound language, made up of all tongues, that passes through the Levant.

  LIMBERHAM. This lingua, what you call it, is the most rarest language! I understand it as well as if it were English; you shall see me answer him: Seignioro, stay a littlo, and consider wello, ten guinnio is monyo, a very considerablo summo.15

  And Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670) contains a “Turkish ceremony,” with music by the Florentine-born composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, in which the Mufti speaks in lingua franca:Se ti sabir,

  Ti respondir;

  Se non sabir,

  Tazir, tazir.

  Mi star Mufti:

  Ti qui star ti?

  Non intendir:

  Tazir, tazir.

  (If you know [lingua franca], / You will reply; / If you do not know it, / Be silent, be silent. / I am the Mufti: / Who then are you? / If you do not understand: / Be silent, be silent.)16

  Such literary sources are stylized, concerned more with dramatic impact than accuracy. And because of its amorphous and unstable nature, because of the paucity of written sources, because by the nineteenth century it had all but been replaced in North Africa by French and in the Levant by a more correct Italian—for all these reasons lingua franca remains strangely elusive. (Bizarrely enough, fragments are thought to have survived in Polari, the secret language used by fairground people, street entertainers, and the gay community in nineteenth- and twentieth-century London.) But it is still possible to catch a hint of its real and fluid nature here and there in Tunisian and Algerian letters of marque and other official and semiofficial documents. For example, the Genoese renegade Agostino Bianco, known also as Murad Raïs, is referred to as “agostin bianco alis morato raixi genovesz,” and as “Caytto Morato Genovese Turco,” and also as “Juldàg bene Abedolo [ibn Abdullah] Turco Genovese.”17 And a whole raft of Italian, Greek, and Spanish nautical terms found their way into the Turkish language via lingua franca. So galión, the Venetian word for “galleon,” was absorbed into Turkish as kalyon; disbarco (disembarcation) became dizbarko; and corsar (corsair) became korsar. Lithgow claimed that the Turks “borrow from the Persian their words of state, from the Arabic their words of Religion, from the Grecians their terms of war, and from the Italian their words and titles of navigation.”18

  “Since it is only recently that the Moslems have conquered the Land of the Rhommaioi [Romans] and begun to sail the seas,” wrote the Ottoman encyclopedist Hadji Khalifa in the mid-seventeenth century, “most of the terms and names given to things pertaining to ships and to the sea are some Spanish, some Italian, and some Greek; they have taken them over at their pleasure.”19 I can only guess how much the renegade corsairs of the Barbary Coast facilitated this process; but the thought of Ward and Jennings and Danseker addressing their victims and their friends in this lost pidgin tongue is strangely intriguing.

  In July and August 1609, rumors reached England that Simon Danseker wanted to negotiate a pardon with Europe and retire to Italy or France. Perhaps he had amassed enough wealth to retire from piracy; perhaps he was just tired. Certainly, the Mediterranean was becoming a more dangerous place for corsairs that summer. Three Dutch trading centers, Amsterdam, Middelburg, and Vlissingen, launched a combined expedition to Barbary in an attempt to stamp out the threat to their shipping (although the Venetians, always suspicious of other European powers, were privately convinced their real motive was to establish trading links with the Turks); and a fleet of more than a dozen Spanish galleons under the command of Don Luis Fasciardo passed the Straits with express orders to hunt down corsairs, at one point forcing Danseker to take refuge in Algiers harbor. Anthony Sherley, an English ex-privateer employed by the king of Spain to suppress piracy in the Mediterranean, wrote a letter to Ward and the other corsairs, urging them to take up arms against the Turks instead of siding with them. Ward’s response was to say he felt safer with Turks than with Christians; Danseker, in a characteristically flamboyant gesture of defiance, released a captured Spanish caravel and its crew on condition that they seek out Sherley and tell him that if he cared for a fight, the pirate would wait for him at the mouth of the Straits. “This was the pride of his mind, this was (as he thought) a revenge for the letter, and in manner of a challenge upon the same.”20

  But in spite of the outward show of defiance, the rumors that Danseker wanted to give up the life of a sea-raider were true. In October he suddenly turned on his Algerian comrades, killing some, taking others prisoner, and liberating several hundred Christian slaves. Then he headed for the Straits. As he reached the Gulf of Cadiz he came on a Spanish treasure fleet entering the Guadalquivir estuary on the way to Seville and captured a great galleon and two ships. According to the Venetian ambassador at Madrid, “Half a million of gold in booty was taken and that, one may say, in the very harbor of Seville.”21 Reasoning that it would be hard for the French authorities to take a high moral tone toward him when presented with gifts such as these, he sailed into Marseilles harbor, where he was met by the governor of Provence, Charles, Duke of Guise, “with every sign of joy.”22 No wonder, since he presented the duke with a hefty bribe, the freed Christian slaves, and his Muslim prisoners, who were to be held hostage against the release of some of Danseker’s comrades in Algiers who had been arrested in the aftermath of his escape.

  The Duke of Guise secured a safe-conduct through France from Henry IV for the pirate and accompanied him on a public progress to the French court at Paris, where he arrived in the middle of December 1609. Conservative estimates put his personal wealth at 500,000 crowns—he laid out 60,000 on various things as soon as he landed in Marseilles—but attempts by the Spanish and English governments to obtain compensation were waved aside by Henry IV, who told them airily that Europe ought to be grateful to France “for clearing the sea of such a famous pirate.”23

  And that should have been that for Danseker and the Barbary Coast. Reunited in Marseilles with his wife and young son after an absence of two years, fêted as “a famous pirate” by the French court, rich enough to live in comfort for the rest of his life, he had no need to go to sea ever again.

  The French had other plans.

  Those plans had their origins in an idea mooted in March 1610 by Henry IV’s loyal old Protestant general, the Duke of Lesdiguières, for a seaborne assault on Genoa, using a fleet led by Danseker. Henry IV was assassinated on May 14 and the scheme came to nothing, but by the end of that month Danseker was preparing to go back to sea on behalf of the merchants of Marseilles, who were up in arms at the losses they were suffering at the hands of corsairs. Still only in his thirties, and perhaps a little bored with life ashore, the “most notable freebooter”24 had been persuaded out of his early retirement to lead an expedition under French colors against his old allies, the Algerians. His knowledge of the Barbary Coast was too valuable to waste, and the Marseilles merchants clubbed together and spent 24,000 crowns on equipping and victualing three men-of-war to sail for Algiers under his command. Most of the crews were Marseilles men—Danseker was allowed to keep “only two or three of his old lot with him”25—and he was asked to leave his fortune behind as a deposit against his return. The French crown authorized a tax on imports and exports to help pay for the expedition, which was to cruise between Tunis and Algiers, intercepting, intimidating, and if possible destroying any pirate vess
els that ventured out of port. Danseker promised that if the French came up with additional ships to reinforce his own, he would “clear out those pirates’ nests within a year.”26

  The expedition sailed on October 1, 1610, and before the end of the year, reports were filtering back to Europe that Danseker was dead. According to Antonio Foscarini, the Venetian ambassador in France, the Dutchman scored a few successes against the Algerians and then, with characteristic directness, he hoisted a flag of truce and sailed right into Algiers harbor, asking for a parley. Invited to come ashore and discuss the matter of corsair attacks on Marseilles shipping, he accepted, whereupon he was “made prisoner and has paid by his death for his excessive credulity.”27

  The reports, which Foscarini admitted were still unconfirmed, were premature. But they were eerily prophetic. Danseker survived the Algiers expedition, returning safely home to France in late 1610, although he wasn’t successful in putting an end to Algerian raids on Marseilles’s Mediterranean trade.

  For the next four years he lived quietly with his family. Then history repeated itself. At the end of 1614, Louis XIII asked him to come out of retirement once again for a last mission to the Barbary Coast. In recent months pirates operating out of Tunis (including renegades working for the aging John Ward) had captured a total of twenty-two French vessels. They and their crews were being held at La Goulette, at the mouth of the Lake of Tunis, and the young king—or, more likely, the irate Levant merchants of Marseilles—pleaded with Danseker to go to Tunis and negotiate with Yusuf Dey for their release.

  Danseker agreed. He eventually anchored in the Gulf of Tunis with two French ships in February 1615, and immediately sent a party of men ashore to pay his respects to the dey and to open negotiations. They were welcomed, and the next day Yusuf himself came aboard Danseker’s ship with twelve followers. He was perfectly amenable to the request to free the French vessels—in fact, he had them brought out into the bay as the two men talked—and Danseker, who was pleasantly surprised at his reception, put on a great feast in return, “with good cheer, great quaffing, sounding trumpets, and roaring shots,” according to the Scottish traveler William Lithgow, who was in Tunis at the time and visiting John Ward.28

  The rituals of hospitality demanded that the following day Danseker should come ashore to be entertained to dinner in his turn by Yusuf Dey at the Borj el-Karrak. As the Dutchman crossed the drawbridge at the head of his own entourage, a pair of Janissaries came out to greet him and lead him into the fortress.

  There was nothing unusual in that. But when Danseker stepped inside, things went quickly and terribly wrong. The Janissaries slammed the gate in the faces of his twelve followers and, leaving them to wait in confusion, marched Danseker straight to the dey. Far from welcoming him to dinner, Yusuf berated him at some length for his crimes against Islam. The ex-pirate was forced to his knees and made to listen to a tirade of accusations about “the many ships, spoils, and great riches he had taken from the Moors, and the merciless murder of their lives.”29 Then a Janissary stepped forward and cut off his head.

  Danseker’s corpse was thrown over the fortress wall into a ditch, a signal for every cannon on the ramparts to open fire on the two French ships at anchor in the bay. The ships cut their cables and fled, leaving their dead captain and twelve live comrades behind. The survivors were, in fact, treated decently by the Tunisians, who obviously felt that their point had now been made. They escorted the men aboard one of the redeemed merchantmen and allowed them to set sail for Marseilles with the news of their commander’s death.

  The rise and fall of Simon Danseker the Devil Captain was more theatrical, more tragic, than the careers of most Barbary Coast renegades, which tended to be squalid, fragmentary, or both. His adherence to a moral code of sorts, his refusal to renounce Christendom, his return to the European fold, and the manner of his death at the hands of “Turks” gave commentators license to admire him. The Scottish Protestant Lithgow, who loathed Islam almost as much as he hated Catholicism, was convinced that Yusuf Dey had arranged the taking of so many French merchant ships purposely to lure Danseker to his doom: “There was a Turkish policy more sublime and crafty,” he wrote, “than the best European alive could have performed.”30 And even before the Dutchman’s rejection of piracy, English ballad writers were marveling at the majestic scope of his ambition with a frank admiration which wasn’t often accorded to corsairs:His heart is so aspiring,

  That now his chief desiring

  Is for to win himself a worthy name;

  The land hath far too little ground,

  The sea is of a larger bound,

  And of a greater dignity and fame.31

  There was precious little dignity in Danseker’s brutal death. In life, though, there was a certain fame. “Mundo cosi, cosi,” as his lingua franca- speaking friends might have said. Such, such is the world.

  FIVE

  Your Majesty’s New Creature: Pardons and Pragmatism Under James I

  The summer of 1611 was hot and dry. James I postponed his annual progress on account of the drought, and while he was stuck in Whitehall he mustered the Privy Council to advise him on a delicate problem in ethics. Word had come from Sir Arthur Chichester in Dublin that a pirate was offering to surrender himself to the authorities in return for a royal pardon. And James, punctilious and principled, was unhappy at the prospect. His conscience, he said, would not allow him to grant impunity so easily to one who had done so much harm to shipping in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

  It might have been easier for the king to maintain the moral high ground—or, indeed, to grant a quiet pardon—if Peter Eston had been just any pirate. But he wasn’t. Il Corsaro Inglese, as the Venetians called him, was known all over Europe as a fearsome general-at-sea who sailed at the head of a fleet that numbered as many as twenty-five ships. Like most English pirates of the period, he divided his time between Barbary and the West of Ireland, “the former of which is beyond all rule and justice, being wholly given up to barbarism,” commented an exasperated English government official, “while the latter is inhabited either by natives who, from motives of interest or of fear, are ready to supply their necessities, or by persons of our own nation who have taken places there with the express purpose of commercing with the pirates.”1

  Nothing is known for certain of Eston’s early life: he first attracted attention in 1608, when he was seen in command of a vessel anchored off Baltimore, County Cork, and then at Essaouira on the Moroccan coast. Both times he was in the company of Tibault Saxbridge, an associate of John Ward. Within a couple of years Eston had acquired such a formidable reputation inside and outside the Straits that his mere presence at the mouth of the Avon was enough to send Bristol merchants begging the Lord High Admiral for help to safeguard their ships. Unlike some English pirates, who still thought of themselves as privateers, Eston felt no compunction about attacking the ships of his own nation. He released the master of one English vessel he captured, for instance, and sent him to London with a warning. Tell the merchants on the Exchange, he said, that Eston “would be a scourge to Englishmen” and that “he esteemed English men no other than as Turks and Jews.”2

  But in spite of his success and his fearsome reputation, Eston had grown tired of the pirate’s life. He wanted to come home, which was why in the late spring of 1611 he turned up off the coast of Cork with a squadron of ships and a request to parley.

  Lord Deputy Chichester’s response was to offer Eston a forty-day promise of protection while he consulted with Whitehall. The pirates must report to the vice-president or deputy vice-admiral of Munster (the southernmost province of Ireland, comprising the counties of Clare, Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary, and Waterford) if they wanted to come ashore, and could buy only enough fresh supplies to last them a day or two at a time. (They couldn’t revictual for their next expedition, in other words.) In the meantime, king and Council wrangled over what was right and what was expedient.

  The arguments in favor of p
ardoning a man like Eston were powerful. A pardon would take him out of circulation. It would act as an incentive to others to abandon piracy. It would reduce the numbers of pirates and make those who remained in action less capable of resistance. And if Eston and his men could be enlisted in the king’s cause, their experience of seamanship—and of piracy—could be turned to good use.

  There were precedents. Gilbert Roupe had received a pardon in 1609, two years earlier, although that had been as a reward for turning in his comrade John Jennings. (It hadn’t been an unqualified success, either. Roupe was currently out on the cruise again—with Eston, as it happened.) Richard Bishop, who had sailed with Jennings and with John Ward, had turned himself in a few months before Eston made his offer to retire. Bishop hadn’t actually been pardoned, but he had been granted a protection and allowed to build himself a house and settle quietly in West Cork.

  Against all this was the niggling feeling that pardoning pirates was wrong—the same moral qualms that were felt in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, when the Blair administration agonized over the morality of releasing terrorists in return for peace in Northern Ireland. For James I to promise one moment that he would wield his “royal sword of justice” against the common enemies of mankind and let them off scot-free the next was inconsistent with England’s sense of honor, conscience, and natural justice.

  Eventually James’s advisers, always more pragmatic than their sovereign, prevailed. They agreed to pardon Eston, but there were conditions: he had to surrender the ships and goods in his possession, so that they might be restored to the poor men he had ruined. But he could come in. “Out of consideration for the safety of the persons and goods of his subjects, which were imperiled by so formidable and so wicked a course of piracy,” recalled the lords of the Council later, the king “consented to [forgo] the strict course of justice.”3 Messengers were dispatched to Ireland with the good news.