Pirates of Barbary

by Adrian Tinniswood

  Roper replied that this wasn’t good enough, and Kassan Qaid Kussa countered with a list of English attacks on Algerian shipping, going back sixteen years to Richard Giffard’s raid of 1604. He was told James I would certainly give satisfaction for any of his subjects’ transgressions.

  After listening to a noisy debate between the twenty-five senior officers of the Janissary corps who made up the inner cabinet of the diwan, the pasha rose from his cushions once again and proposed that losses sustained on both sides should be set against each other, that the city should return “such ships and goods as were forthcoming,”13 and that all English captives, including those who had turned Turk but now wished to change their minds and their religion, should be released and handed over to the English. “To all this the whole douana [i.e., the diwan] assented.”14

  Either Roper misunderstood the audience and its outcome (which isn’t likely, considering he was accompanied by the experienced Frizzell), or the Algerians decided the quickest way to make him go away was to agree to his demands. They certainly made hardly any attempt to honor their pledges. No ships were forthcoming. No goods were forthcoming. And although the diwan handed over to Roper a derisory eighteen captives, they promptly took them back (and placed Roper under house arrest) the moment Sir Robert Mansell suggested that for the future Frizzell should keep a register of all English ships, men, and goods brought in by pirates. The diwan demanded a properly appointed consul, and it was only after Mansell dressed a hapless common sailor in fine clothes and put him ashore as the official representative of James I that Roper and the captives were released.

  On Thursday, the 7th of December, ten days after the fleet’s arrival and four days after the pasha’s promise, one of the English captains brought word that men were unrigging the two prizes in the harbor and unloading all their goods. Admitting to himself at last that the Algerians had no intention of honoring their bargain, Mansell sent the pasha a cross letter “to let him know how ill we took his perfidious dealing.”15 The next morning the fleet weighed anchor and sailed out of the bay, with the admiral feeling foolish and complaining bitterly about “the fair promises, faithless dealings and treacherous intents of the viceroy.”16

  It was easy for contemporaries to criticize Mansell for his gullibility and his reluctance to fight. And they did. But having once opted for negotiation rather than intimidation, it is hard to think what else he could have done. The two new pinnaces still hadn’t arrived, and without them to stop the pirates from slipping in and out along the shore, he didn’t have the resources to mount an effective blockade. There was now no question of surprising the Algerians. And the pointlessness of a blustering show of force was brought home to him while Captain Roper and the pasha were engaged in their diplomatic dialogue at the Sunday diwan when a Spanish squadron of six warships sailed into the bay in hot pursuit of pirates who had just burned a 700-ton ship off Cartagena and carried off 270 men. The Spanish admiral exchanged cannon fire with the shore batteries, but he knew better than to come within range of their guns and he left soon afterward. “The distance between them was so far,” said John Button in his journal, “that the shot falling short, no harm was done on either side.”17 And no prisoners were recovered, he might have added.

  For the next three months the English fleet cruised the western Mediterranean between Alicante, Málaga, and Gibraltar, waiting for supply ships and pinnaces to arrive from England and searching without success for pirates. The succinct but disconsolate entries in John Button’s journal tell their own story:The 27 [December] at night the rear-admiral’s squadron went out to sea in pursuit of two Turks, pirates.

  The 29 the rear-admiral returned but saw no Turk.

  The fourth [of January] the Constant Reformation and the Golden Phoenix had order to go to sea to seek two pirates’ ships which we heard were on the Christian shore.

  The fifth at night the Constant and the Phoenix returned into the road [at Alicante] again, but met not with any.

  The 13 the Reformation, the Samuel and the Restore put to sea, to see if they could meet with any pirates.

  The 18 the Reformation with the other ships returned into the road, where we found the rear-admiral with his squadron likewise returned, but met no pirates.18

  On the single occasion when the fleet did encounter pirates—eight or nine accidentally sailed in among the English ships one night—a squadron chased them and fired at them but still couldn’t catch them, “by reason it was a dark night, and that they sailed better than our ships.”19 The expedition’s only trophy was a French merchantman captured on her way from northern Morocco to Algiers with a cargo of oil and some Moorish and Jewish passengers. Ironically, this was itself an act of piracy: although the vessel was crewed by Turks (who took to the boats and escaped), there is no suggestion that she was anything other than legitimate.

  Mansell’s men had seen virtually no action, yet casualty rates were high. The fleet had sickness aboard when it left England, and by the time it reached Gibraltar, nineteen days later, the situation was bad enough for the admiral to put an unspecified number of ailing crewmen ashore and arrange lodgings for them. One of his captains, a Virginia trader named John Fenner, died there. More sick men were put ashore at Alicante less than three weeks later, including thirty-seven from Mansell’s own company. By the time the fleet regrouped at Alicante in the spring of 1621, sickness had claimed two more senior officers: Captain Eusabey Cave of the Hercules, one of the armed merchantmen, and Captain Arthur Manwaring of the king’s ship Constant Reformation, “a gentleman of an excellent temper . . . [whose] death bred a general lament in the whole fleet.”20 Manwaring’s chaplain, who had earned the crew’s respect by selflessly ministering to them “in the extreme of their sicknesses,” was also dead. One of the pinnaces was unable to sail because its captain and master were too ill, and Mansell was now paying to lodge a substantial number of sick men in Málaga, including forty-two from the Reformation alone. Button’s Rainbow was “so grievously infested [probably with dysentery] that he had not able men in her to manage her safely.”21

  Altogether more than 400 men were seriously ill. Mansell asked that a physician and two surgeons be sent out from England, complaining at the same time that “the great sickness and mortality wherewith it hath pleased Almighty God to visit this fleet” was due to squalid living conditions, a lack of clean clothing, and inadequate supplies.22

  The ships were in no better shape. Hawkins, the oldest and most experienced of the three commanders, wrote to the Lord High Admiral in England that all three flagships—Mansell’s Lion, Button’s Rainbow, and his own Vanguard—were “very unfit for these seas” and needed to be replaced. Mansell followed this up with a detailed report from his master carpenter, who confirmed that the Lion’s hull was so leaky at the bows that in a head sea (when waves were running directly against the course of the ship) the crew had to man the pumps constantly to keep her afloat.

  And all the English had to show for their efforts were a small French merchant ship and a handful of rescued captives.

  There were two reasons the hunt had been so disappointing. In addition to the English fleet, twenty-two Dutch warships and two Spanish squadrons were patrolling the western Mediterranean over the winter of 1620-21. It didn’t take long for the news to spread along the entire Barbary coast from Tangier to Tunis. As Sir William Monson had predicted, the corsairs were on their guard.

  Even if the navies of three nations hadn’t been cruising the high seas in search of them, it was the wrong time of year for them to be out. There would always be corsair captains who were bored enough, broke enough, or reckless enough to venture out during the stormy winter months, but the season for Mediterranean piracy traditionally lasted from March or April until October, and over the winter most pirate ships were safely in harbor, being careened and repaired and refitted in preparation for the spring.

  Mansell was feeling isolated and frustrated. His instructions from the Lord High Admiral were to remain
in the Mediterranean for at least another six months, and James I was talking of maintaining a presence there for three years. The fleet was in desperate need of supplies, which proved inadequate when they eventually arrived, along with the two new pinnaces, in mid-February 1621. (And the word “arrived” needs qualification: the supply ships had sailed from England with orders to go to Málaga, where their masters refused point-blank to obey Mansell’s command to sail on to Alicante, forcing the fleet to weigh anchor and sail 300 miles to meet them, and making him very cross indeed.) He didn’t know how he was to receive fresh orders or supplies from now on, either, “for being resolved in my intention to spend most of this summer on the Turkish shore, I know not whither the pirates may lead me.”23

  At home, rumors were spreading that the expedition had proven a fiasco. Government officials and diplomats started to distance themselves; the City merchants who had put up the money for it were muttering; and there were stories put about by Mansell’s enemies that he had “made an agreement with the pirates to [his] shame.”24 Count Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador in England, complained that “the English and those robbers are now all one,”25 and the Venetian ambassador sent a coded message home to the doge, reporting that the fleet was “very short of provisions and money, upon which account the men complain and are half mutinous, some having deserted to join the pirates, while many have died of sickness.” 26 (There were in fact no desertions.)

  To make matters worse, Admiral Mansell was fretting over his business interests in England. He had acquired a monopoly on glassmaking in 1615 and had “melted vast sums of money in the glass-business,” according to James Howell, whom he sent abroad to look for foreign expertise. Though it was, again according to Howell, “a business, indeed, more proper for a merchant than a courtier,” Mansell clung tenaciously to his patent, investing some £25,000 in glassworks in London, South Wales, Dorset, and Newcastle-on-Tyne, and news that elements in the government were trying to have the patent revoked added considerably to his woes.27

  Mansell could have ignored his orders and gone home, arguing that crew shortages and an unseaworthy fleet made his mission impossible, and trusting to ride out the humiliation and the awkward questions. Or he could have continued patrolling the seas between the Straits and Majorca in the vague hope that his quarry would venture out before his demoralized men died of dysentery and his ships fell apart.

  What he decided to do was to attack the corsair fleet as it lay in harbor. That April he hired a 120-ton polacre and three two-masted brigantines. All were fast and maneuverable compared with the lumbering warships, and the brigantines were equipped with nine pairs of oars each. Then he rented a house in Alicante and turned it into a bomb factory.

  The harbor at Algiers was still protected from the elements by Khair ad-Din’s Great Mole, a causeway of stone and earth that was six or seven yards wide and three hundred yards long. The mole connected the city to a small fortified island in the bay, forming a giant capital J, which, as one English observer noted, “giveth shape to the port, where there are usually above an hundred vessels for piracy, and others.”28

  Even if the fleet could maneuver through the shallow inshore waters until it was close enough to the mole to cause serious damage to the ships moored there, by doing so it would come within devastating range of the heavy ordnance mounted along the city walls. The other obvious course, a lengthy blockade, required the kind of reliable supply network that was conspicuously lacking. Mansell’s best hope was to trust he would find a good number of pirate vessels moored within the mole when he returned and to send in fireships to destroy them under cover of darkness.

  In the house at Alicante, his gunners went to work. They cooked up buckets of lethal wildfire from brimstone, gunpowder, and petroleum oil; made a quantity of incendiary grenades; and prepared fire-pikes, which they would use to pin bags of explosives to the timbers of a pirate vessel. Mansell eschewed the traditional way of deploying fireships—setting fire to a couple of smaller ships and setting them adrift among the enemy—and opted instead for a more tactical approach. He had his men prepare two fireships, one of one hundred tons and the other of sixty. (John Button describes both as having been “taken from the Turks”—presumably one was the Frenchman captured in February, but it isn’t clear how they laid their hands on the other.) The one-armed reformado, Captain Walsingham, whose previous career had provided him with firsthand experience of the harbor at Algiers, was given the command of one; a Captain Stokes had the other. Both were filled with incendiaries, piled high with dry timber, oakum, pitch, tar, and brimstone, and equipped with chains and grapnels for fixing them fast to their victims. Their crews were to sail them into the mole, fasten them to a couple of suitable pirate ships, fire the incendiaries, and at the last moment make their escape in longboats, which they towed behind them for the purpose.

  A third fireship, a much smaller single-masted barge, was also fitted out with incendiaries and iron grapnels: she was to be sailed right into the middle of the pirate fleet and set alight; and her crew were also to make their escape in a longboat.

  The fireships were supported by the three brigantines Mansell had hired in Alicante. They carried fire-balls, buckets of wildfire, and fire-pikes, all of which could be hurled onto the decks or jabbed into the timbers of the pirate ships.

  Finally, there were seven longboats “which we called boats of rescue,” recalled John Button. They were to wait outside the mole. Armed with incendiaries to throw at any pirates they found within range, they were “well-filled with armed men, who were to rescue and relieve the boats of execution if they should chance to be pursued by other boats or galleys at their coming off.”29

  It was a desperately dangerous venture. The fireships and the brigantines would have to pass under the walls of Algiers, exposing their crews to fire from heavy ordnance and small arms. The mole itself had a strong parapet running its full length, and if this was properly manned and defended by the Turks, the English boats would be caught in a lethal crossfire. The element of surprise was crucial.

  At the end of April the fleet moved to Majorca, where for weeks Mansell rehearsed the coming operation over and over again until the crews—more than 230 men in thirteen vessels—knew exactly what they were to do.

  There was a full moon on the night of May 24, and the tumbling clusters of low houses gleamed white through the darkness. Silhouetted against the hillside, the minaret of the Djemaa el-Kebir loomed over the harbor, a landmark for the little flotilla as it made its way across the bay. The stench of brimstone and sweat and fear was wafted away in the light southwesterly that carried the boats closer and closer to their quarry.

  This was Mansell’s fourth attempt to burn the corsair fleet. His own fleet had reached Algiers three days before, and the battered men-of-war had anchored within sight of the town while six of the merchantmen were deployed to patrol the coast “to prevent the coming in of any pirates between the fleet and the shore.”30 As soon as everyone was in place, the admiral had summoned Walsingham, Stokes, and the captains of the brigantines and the “boats of rescue” aboard the Lion to go over the plan one more time and give them their orders.

  The crews were already aboard their vessels and ready to set off for the mole when Mansell decided to abort the operation. There was not enough wind to fill the sails of the two fireships, and Button, Hawkins, and the other senior commanders advised against going in with just the boats and the brigantines.

  The next night the men prepared again, and again the assault was called off, for the same reason. The night after that was stormy, but the flotilla braved gales, thunder, and lightning to set out—only for the skies to clear and the wind to shift against them before they came near the mole, pushing them out into the bay and forcing them to abandon the attack for a third time.

  The Algerians didn’t show the slightest sign of being concerned at the reappearance of the English battle fleet. They didn’t place an extra watch on the city walls. They didn’t attempt
to open negotiations. According to a Christian captive who escaped and swam out to the fleet, they hadn’t even put guards on their ships, “saving one or two in a ship.”31 They simply didn’t believe that Mansell would attack.

  Tonight, the admiral watched from the deck of the Lion as his assault force approached the entrance to the harbor, in what was to prove their final attempt to destroy the pirate fleet. They were almost there. The open boats of rescue and the fireships were passing beneath the ramparts when once again the wind veered and began to push them slowly, inexorably, back out into the bay. “The two ships with the fireworks having almost recovered the mouth of the mole,” Mansell told the Marquess of Buckingham a few weeks later, “the wind, to our great grief, turned to the opposite side of the compass.”32

  As they milled around in the darkness calling to each other, a Captain Hughes cried out from the deck of one of the brigantines, “Go on! Give the attempt with the boats!” The others took their cue from him, and pulling hard on their oars, the crews of boats and brigantines crossed into the harbor, chanting “King James! King James! God bless King James!” Sentries on the walls raised the alarm, and the watchers out in the bay heard shouts and then the popping of muskets coming from across the water. The flotilla pressed on, returning fire as best they could in the darkness and trying to keep the moored ships and galleys between themselves and the gunners and militiamen on the city walls. They lit their buckets of wildfire and grenades and hurled them onto the decks of one vessel after another, until seven of the pirate ships were burning. “Striving in the end who should have the honor to come off last,” said Mansell, “the which at length, as a due to his former resolution and courage, they left to Captain Hughes, and so returned, all the ships continuing still their cheerful cry, ‘King James!’”33 As they rowed out from the cover of the moored ships, they came under sustained fire from the Algerians. Six men were shot dead and seventeen or eighteen wounded; four or five later died of their injuries.