Pirates of Barbary

by Adrian Tinniswood

  They soon discovered that pardoning pirates was more difficult than anyone had imagined. Eston had gone, even before the forty-day grace period was up. He wasn’t a patient man, and he was used to being in control of his own destiny. So while the king and Council discussed his fate in London, he grew bored and took his squadron down to Cornwall. A few weeks later he was back in Ireland, putting in with nine men-of-war and four prizes ships at the isolated harbor of Leamcon in West Cork.

  Leamcon was a favorite haunt of pirates. Some of Eston’s men kept families there, and there were rumors of treasure being brought ashore and buried. It was a wild place, more like a frontier town than an Irish village. Captain Henry Skipwith, the deputy vice-admiral of Munster, made his way there as fast as he could and obtained an audience with Eston, acquainting him with the king’s intention to grant his request for a pardon on the condition that he return any stolen goods and ships in his possession.

  The trouble was, there were rather more stolen goods and ships in Eston’s possession than there had been a couple of weeks earlier. During his brief cruise he had captured a richly laden English merchant ship, the Concorde, killing one crew member and frightening three others so much that they leaped overboard (so he claimed). Moreover, he had in the meantime received letters of protection from Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who offered him sanctuary and citizenship in return for his expertise and his loot. Skipwith found Eston busily adapting the Concorde for fighting and arming her with ordnance. He didn’t want the English king’s pardon after all, he said. He had no intention of surrendering any goods—in fact, he was preparing to set sail for Barbary, where he would sell the Concorde’s cargo, spend one last season raiding around the Straits, and then head for Florence and retirement. “I told the merchants [on the Concorde] that if I might have any pardon, I would surrender up their ship and goods; but now in respect of the Duke of Florence’s offer and the greatness of this wealth, I am otherwise resolved.”4

  Skipwith was not pleased. He told Lord Deputy Chichester that if he’d had the men and the guns with him, it would have been more to the king’s honor to have taken and killed every one of the pirates instead of offering them mercy.

  But he persevered. The reformed pirate Richard Bishop was brought in to mediate and, after refusing an offer from Eston to sail away to Tuscany with his old comrades—“I will die a poor labourer in mine own country, if I may, rather than be the richest pirate in the world”5—Bishop managed to persuade Eston at least to consider giving up the Concorde, and to wait for one of the king’s agents to arrive from London with the pardon, rather than rejecting it out of hand.

  The agent, Captain Roger Middleton, was dispatched from Plymouth at the beginning of August; when he reached County Cork, on the 17th, he found he had missed his man by ten days. Eston had heard a rumor that the king’s ships were preparing an assault (which wasn’t true), and another that a Dutch naval squadron was cruising off the coast of Munster with the intention of flushing pirates out of little harbors like Leamcon (which was). Unsure about whether Eston and his men would accept their pardons, and still uncomfortable at having offered them, James had duplicitously salved his conscience by giving Dutch men-of-war permission to pursue pirates into the harbors and creeks of Ireland. Eston’s men, 500 of them, had taken fright and taken flight. They bought victuals, powder, and shot, split into three squadrons of three ships each, and set sail on August 7. With the first fair wind, Middleton intended to follow them to Barbary, pardons in hand.

  He didn’t find them. Instead of retiring to Tuscany, “that famous Arch-Pirate Peter Eston” went to Newfoundland, where his fleet, which now consisted of ten “well-furnished and very rich” warships,6 found easy prey among the fishing vessels out on the Newfoundland Banks, capturing their crews and taking their catches and supplies. He seems by now to have got into the habit of asking for pardons: although he announced to the world that “he would not bow to the orders of one king when he himself was, in a way, a king as well,”7 at the same time he begged a captured English sea captain, Sir Richard Whitbourne, to go to England and find some friends of his “and solicit them to become humble petitioners to your Majesty for his pardon.”8 By the time Whitbourne reached London he was told that a pardon had already been dispatched to Newfoundland, where again it failed to reach its intended recipient, who was now either in Morocco or off the coast of Munster or heading for the East Indies to lie in wait for a Spanish treasure fleet, depending on which of the increasingly wild rumors one believed.

  By this stage, the English government had decided to extend a general pardon to all subjects of James I who had taken to piracy, about 3,000 men in all. The idea was supported by the king’s eldest son, Prince Henry, who wanted to see “the mariners of this kingdom augmented by those who are now buccaneering,” 9 but it was also a tacit admission that Eston and his fellow pirates were so powerful that James I’s ramshackle navy simply wasn’t capable of overcoming them by force. The Privy Council secured the agreement of merchants, clearing the way for an amnesty that allowed pirates to hold on to goods they had stolen prior to entering into negotiations for pardon, and in February 1612 the general pardon was announced. “What effect it will have is the subject of various opinions,” reported the Venetian ambassador, diplomatically.10

  It was the news of this general pardon that missed Eston in Newfoundland. King James issued another pardon in Eston’s name in November 1612, still insisting rather fretfully that the Concorde be restored to its rightful owners. But by the time the reluctant penitent read it (if he ever did), he had moved on to sunnier climes. At the beginning of 1613, in an attempt to compete with the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s free port of Livorno on the northwest coast of Italy, the Duke of Savoy declared Nice and Villefranche, both then part of the Duchy of Savoy, to be free ports also. Bonded warehouses were opened where goods could be stored and sold, no questions asked; likewise, “all mariners and merchants belonging to any nation, none excepted, shall have safe conduct.”11 Weeks later Eston sailed into Villefranche with four ships, 900 men, and, according to rumor, a colossal fortune of 400,000 crowns and goods “to an amount that seems incredible.”12 Then aged about forty, he bought himself a palace and a marquisate and married a wealthy woman from Nice.

  And as far as history knows, he lived happily ever after.

  Eston wasn’t the only pirate to reject James I’s advances. Within weeks of the general pardon being announced in 1612, an English naval officer caught up with a fleet of thirty pirates who were wreaking havoc in the Straits and told them the good news. But they turned down his offer of a pardon out of hand, replying that “in the present state of peace they could not maintain themselves in England.”13 There was little legitimate employment at home for sailors, and what there was was so poorly paid that they preferred life on the cruise with all its dangers and uncertainties but greater prospects for profit.

  As the years passed, however, James’s pragmatic approach did prove effective. As times changed and it became more difficult to make a living as a pirate, one captain after another came in and claimed amnesty. Various reasons have been proposed to explain this change of heart: Spanish attacks against traditional pirate bases on the coast of Morocco; the outbreak in 1618 of the Thirty Years’ War, which provided rich pickings for mercenaries; the development of new trade routes to English possessions in the Americas. Taken by themselves, none of these reasons is particularly compelling, but each perhaps contributed something to the indisputable fact that by the end of James I’s reign, in 1625, the threat posed by the English pirates who drifted between Barbary, Ireland, and the Newfoundland Banks was, if not exactly eradicated, at least eclipsed by the highly organized state-sanctioned Islamic corsairs of North Africa.

  The giving and receiving of pardons took place in a dark and treacherous world, as the case of John Nutt demonstrates. Nutt was a bad man and a good representative of the less romantic side of seventeenth-century piracy. In the early 1620s he ha
unted the seas off the southwest coast of England in a small but heavily armed vessel of 120 tons, preying on the merchant ships that sailed between the western ports and Ireland and selling the goods he stole in Holland.

  “A merciless villain [with] a crew of wicked villains,” Nutt kept a wife and three children at Topsham, near Exeter in the southwest of England, and in May of 1623 he decided he should spend more time with his family.14 After a terrifying spree off the Irish coast—in which he and his crew kidnapped a man out of Youghal harbor, ransacked four ships, took rings, jewelry, and ready money from sixty or seventy passengers, and raped fourteen women—one of whom, a saddler’s wife from Cork, he kept locked in his cabin for several weeks—he dispatched a man to England to inquire about a pardon. He had already obtained one from the Dutch; but he had heard that the English government had issued another in his name. What he did not know was that it was time-limited and had, in fact, already lapsed.

  A fortnight later Nutt sailed into Dartmouth harbor, looking for news of his pardon. The young, eager, newly appointed vice-admiral for Devon, Sir John Eliot, was determined not to lose such a prize. After negotiating with the pirate for days on end, and waiting for detailed guidance from London, he went aboard Nutt’s ship at some personal risk, where he waved the expired pardon under the pirate’s nose and induced him and his crew to come ashore. Then he had them all arrested. Nutt was sent to London for trial and his men were packed off to Exeter jail.

  A victory for truth and justice? Not even close. Before the summer was out Nutt was free and complaining of his ill-treatment to anyone who would listen, while Eliot was in the Marshalsea prison, awaiting trial at the Admiralty Court.

  The explanation of how this happened depends on whose lies one believes. Nutt claimed that he offered £500 for a pardon that would allow him to keep his stolen goods, and that when he came in and told Eliot he didn’t have it, the vice-admiral told him to go and find it in money or goods, whereupon he took an English merchant ship with a cargo of sugar worth £4,000. The master of that ship claimed that Eliot had come aboard and taken away fourteen chests of sugar while Nutt looked on.

  Eliot admitted taking £500 for the pardon, saying it was for the Lord Admiral’s use. He also admitted that his deputies had accepted on his behalf six packs of calfskins and four pieces of baize—clearly stolen goods—which were also laid aside for the Lord Admiral’s use. He flatly denied encouraging Nutt to commit any further acts of piracy and taking the sugar from the merchant ship, and said he had urged the pirate to restore the vessel to her master, at which “the said Nutt presently fell into a passion and vowed not to accept the pardon but upon condition to enjoy what he had.”15

  Eliot made two mistakes in his dealings with Nutt. He spent several hours alone with the pirate in his cabin with no witnesses present, which was stupid, because it raised the suspicion that some underhand dealings were taking place. And he didn’t realize until it was too late that Nutt had a powerful patron at court. A year or so earlier the pirate had helped to defend the young English colony in Newfoundland against an attack by the French. The chief promoter of the colony was Sir George Calvert, James I’s secretary of state, and it was Calvert who had procured Nutt a pardon in the first place, and Calvert who now secured Nutt’s release from prison. “The poor man is able to do the king service if he were employed,” he told Sir Edward Conway, his fellow secretary of state, “and I do assure myself he doth so detest his former course of life as he will never enter into it again. I have been at charge already of one pardon, and am contented to be at as much more for this, if his majesty will be graciously pleased to grant it.”16

  Without even knowing it, Eliot had managed to irritate Sir George Calvert, “who may suppose himself therein crossed by me,” as he plaintively wrote to Conway. To teach him a lesson, Calvert ensured Eliot was kept in prison over the summer, leaving the indignant vice-admiral to rant against the unfairness of a system in which “the words of a malicious assassin now standing for his life, shall have reputation equal to the credit of a gentleman.”17 Nutt was released immediately and went home to a quiet retirement in Devon.

  The most distinguished product of James I’s amnesty for English pirates was Sir Henry Mainwaring, whose route to redemption was accompanied by a seemingly effortless transition from outlaw to senior naval officer. After giving up a life of piracy himself, Mainwaring went on to become an MP and a master of Trinity House, the guild that looked after the interests of the seamen and shipping of England. He became vice-admiral of the royal fleet that guarded the Narrow Seas in the late 1630s, and as a staunch Royalist in the English Civil War he was one of the captains entrusted with taking the teenage Prince of Wales to safety as the king’s cause unraveled in the autumn of 1645. When Mainwaring joined Charles I’s court at Oxford in 1643, the university made him a doctor of physic—an honor not usually granted to ex-pirates, but a credit to Mainwaring’s support of the Royalist cause.

  But Mainwaring’s background was not the usual one. Born into a gentry family in Shropshire in about 1587, he graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford, at the age of sixteen and entered the Inner Temple in London as a law student two years later. Around the same time he became a student of the writing-master John Davies of Hereford, “the greatest master of the pen that England in her age beheld.”18 In 1612, when Mainwaring was preparing to escort the Persian ambassador on his return journey to the shah’s court, Davies addressed him in a farewell ode as “heroic pupil, and most honored friend.”19

  This embassy would prove the cause of Mainwaring’s decision to turn to piracy. The Persian ambassador was actually a flamboyant Englishman, Robert Shirley, who had converted to Catholicism (and married the daughter of a Circassian chieftain) during an eight-year stay at the shah’s court. Shirley, who had been created a count twice—once by the pope and once by the Holy Roman Emperor—habitually wore Persian dress with a large gold crucifix attached to his turban. He was sent to Europe by Shah Abbas I to enlist support for Persia’s struggle against the Ottoman Empire, but while he was negotiating a military alliance with James I, a declaration of peace between the Persians and the Turks made his mission pointless and he decided to return to Persia.

  Four English merchant ships were to accompany Shirley through the Straits and the entire length of the Mediterranean, and Henry Mainwaring, who paid over £700 for the 160-ton Resistance that summer in England, was meant to sail with this fleet, perhaps even as its commander. But Spain and Venice were both convinced that as soon as the English ships reached the eastern Mediterranean they would turn to piracy, and in 1613 pressure from the Spanish ambassador caused the English to abandon the plan and send Shirley back to Persia in a single vessel. Mainwaring was so angry that he took off for Barbary in the Resistance and proceeded to work out his frustration on Spanish shipping by becoming exactly what his critics had claimed he would.

  Looking back in later years at his career as a pirate, Mainwaring portrayed himself as the scourge of the Mediterranean. He treated his listeners to incredible stories of his escapades on the Barbary Coast: how the emperor of Morocco called him “brother” and gave him a castle to protect his fleet of twenty-four galleys where they rode at anchor; how he amassed a vast fortune in gold and silver and used it to ransom English slaves in Tunis and Salé, and compelled all the pirates in Ma’amura—his base on the Atlantic coast of Morocco—to swear they wouldn’t attack any subjects of James I. How he was so feared by European nations that he received offers of pardon from Spain, Savoy, and Tuscany, while Yusuf, the dey of Tunis, swore “that if I would stay with him he would divide his estate equally with me, and never urge me to turn Turk.”20 How, with all his cannon shot depleted, he fought off an attack by a superior force by loading his guns with pieces of eight.

  There may be traces of truth in some of this, although there is little corroborative evidence for most of it. But Mainwaring was a famous pirate—famous enough for the naval officer Sir William Monson to impersonate him d
uring an operation in the west of Ireland to root out sympathizers and suppliers of pirates. His base in 1613, Ma’amura, lay at the mouth of the Sebou River, about 150 miles south of the Straits, and had enjoyed something of a vogue as a popular pirate stronghold in the early 1600s, a “place of rendezvous” for a reported forty ships and 2,000 men.21 But a Spanish force under Don Pedro de Toledo had managed to close off the harbor in 1611 by sinking eight ships in the entrance; and although the Moors soon cleared away the wrecks, crews were starting to drift away to the safer havens of Algiers and Livorno.

  Not Mainwaring. For more than a year he used Ma’amura as a base from which to raid Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch shipping. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he was particularly careful not to take vessels or goods belonging to his own countrymen, later telling King James that “I have abstained from doing hurt to any of your Majesty’s subjects, where by it I might have enriched myself more than £100,000.”22 Then in the late spring of 1614 he headed north, intending to prey on the fishing fleets off the Newfoundland Banks. It was a timely decision: in August an armada of ninety-nine ships and several thousand men under the command of Don Luis Fajardo de Córdoba stormed Ma’amura’s defenses and occupied the town, declaring it to be Spanish territory.

  Mainwaring arrived in Newfoundland “with divers other captains” on June 4, 1614. His fleet of six ships was quickly augmented by two prizes, “one whereof they took at the bank, another upon the main,” according to a list of piratical depredations drawn up by the Newfoundland Company.23 He spent three and a half months cruising off Carbonear on the south-east coast of Newfoundland, helping himself to victuals and munitions he found on French and Portuguese ships. He helped himself to men, too, by all accounts: when he left for warmer waters on September 14, he took with him about 400 sailors and ships’ carpenters, “many volunteers, many compelled.”24