The result was an epic 5,000-mile voyage to Iceland and back. Murad’s men, a motley mixture of Christians and Muslims, Franks and Turks, free men and slaves, arrived off the Icelandic coast in June 1627 and immediately began raiding small settlements and spreading terror and confusion. They took three Danish merchant ships. They killed. They raped—the Icelanders were shocked to see it was the European renegades rather than the more disciplined Janissaries who “killed people, cursed and beat them, and did all that is evil.”8 Eventually, in one final raid, they stormed ashore on July 16, 1627, at Heimaey, an island off the coast which was inhabited by a little community of fishermen and traders. Terrified at rumors of “Turks with claws instead of nails, spitting fire and sulfur, with knives growing out of their breasts, elbows and knees,”9 the islanders mounted a halfhearted defense and then surrendered. Murad was back in Barbary a month later. He had with him 400 Icelanders, whom he sold in the slave market of Algiers. The Icelandic liturgy still includes a prayer beseeching God for protection against “the terror of the Turk.”10
Now Murad was out on the cruise again. On Friday, June 17, 1631, somewhere off Land’s End, the farthest point of Cornwall, in the southwest of England, he caught up with a sixty-ton Englishman out of Dartmouth and treated her as he had the two French vessels. His men “took therewith forth masts, cordage, and other necessaries with all the men, and sunk the hull.”11 Her crew of ten were shackled and put down in the hold with the other captives.
Nine of them, at least, were. The master, Edward Fawlett, traded regularly with Ireland. He knew the lay of the Waterford coast, the harbors and coves of County Cork. When he was questioned, he made no secret of the fact. Realizing the man might prove useful, Murad offered Fawlett his freedom in return for that knowledge.
And the raiding party sailed on.
OLord our heavenly father, high and mighty king of kings, lord of lords, the only ruler of princes, which dost from Thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth, most heartily we beseech Thee with Thy favor to behold our most gracious Sovereign Lord King Charles.”
It was the morning of Sunday, June 19, and Baltimore was at prayer. The modern Protestant church stood on the shore of a small bay opposite the island of Ringarogy, a little way out of the town; and a long, straggling line of men, women, and children had just walked along the cliff and down to the strand, to that church, just as they did every Sunday. The talk as they picked their way over the coastal path would have been of ordinary things: the summer fair which was to take place the following weekend, the imminent arrival of the year’s first pilchard shoals. Like its church, the Protestant community was young; there were plenty of small children to fidget through the endless sermon.
And like its church, the community was set apart. Protestant settlers were not universally admired in Ireland. A resentment at English inroads, already common enough, had been fueled in recent years by clumsy attempts to repress Catholic institutions and to Anglicize Irish society. On St. Stephen’s Day in 1629 there had been a riot in Dublin when a 3,000-strong crowd stoned the archbishop, the mayor, and their officers for interrupting a Catholic service and attempting “to lay hand upon the friars, and seize upon the house.”12 Anyone who wore the traditional Irish cloak and woolen trousers was barred from bearing arms or keeping gunpowder. The time-honored practice of carrying a skene (a short dagger) was outlawed. In fact, anyone who persisted in “the barbarous custom of wearing mantles, trousers, skenes and such uncivil apparel . . . to the disgrace of this kingdom amongst civil nations” risked the humiliation of being brought before a sheriff and having their skene broken in two, and their cloak and trousers taken from them by force and cut up in pieces.
There is no evidence that the Baltimore planters ever tried to un-trouser their neighbors or take a pair of scissors to an O’Driscoll leine-chroich. They were hardworking, decent people who kept to themselves, rather than arrogant colonialists determined to impose their culture and values on a native people. They were strangers in a strange land who wanted nothing more than peace and an opportunity to worship in their own way.
“In all time of our tribulation,” intoned the minister in the little church on the strand that Sunday, “in all time of our wealth, in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment”—and here he paused for the congregation’s response.
“Good Lord deliver us.”
James Hackett was a Catholic and afraid. While the people of Baltimore knelt in prayer, his twelve-ton fishing boat was being boarded by pirates, and he and his crew of five were being quizzed by the pirate captain, “Matthew Rice, a Dutch runogado.”13
Murad Raïs came upon Hackett’s little mackerel boat as it put out its nets off the Old Head of Kinsale, about sixty miles west of Hackett’s home at Dungarvan and forty miles east of Baltimore. By luck or by judgment, the Earl of Cork’s informant had been right—Murad’s target was Kinsale, and although Edward Fawlett, the master of the vessel captured off Land’s End, knew the coast, the renegade corsair was looking for someone with more detailed local knowledge of the harbor—a pilot who would be able to guide him safely up the river Bandon to where the town lay. During the Iceland raid in 1627 one of his ships had sailed into harbor while the tide was low and run aground. He’d learned his lesson then.
Murad also needed boats to take his men ashore. A prize crew piled into Hackett’s vessel and went after a second fisherman from the Dungarvan fleet, while the captain interrogated Hackett about Kinsale and its harbor.
The man was scared and eager to please. He told Murad straight out that Kinsale was too hot for them. To get anywhere near the town they would have to pass under the guns of the king’s fort at Castlepark, which stood on a small promontory on the west bank of the Bandon and covered the approach. And if they managed to negotiate that obstacle, they would sail straight into Francis Hooke and the guns of the Fifth Whelp.
Murad was well armed. His own ship carried 200 men and twenty-four pieces of brass ordnance, and he was accompanied by another with eighty men and twelve iron guns. But that wasn’t the point. He wasn’t looking for a fight. So he listened carefully as Hackett offered to guide him to a far easier target less than a day’s sail away. It didn’t take him long to make up his mind: he ordered his ships to alter course for the west, and at ten o’clock that night the raiding party reached Baltimore.
They anchored just outside the harbor in the calm summer twilight, out of sight of the town at the mouth of a little inlet called the Eastern Hole. Fired up and keen for action, Murad himself led a small reconnaissance party, ordering his men to wrap sacking round their oars to deaden the sound of their rowing and taking as his guide not James Hackett but Edward Fawlett, who clearly also knew Baltimore well. According to the official report of the incident, Fawlett “piloted them all along the shore, and showed them how the town did stand, relating unto them where the most able men had their abode.”14
They were gone for more than two hours. Aboard the two ships, Janissaries and corsairs waited in silence, listening for the shouts or the barking of dogs or the popping of muskets which would tell them their captain had been discovered. It was after midnight before Murad returned.
“We are in a good place,” he told them with a smile. “We shall make a bon voyago.”15
The water lapped against the shore in the darkness, and Baltimore
At two o’clock on the morning of Monday, June 21, the pirates came ashore at the cove. There were 230 of them in all: eccentrically dressed European renegades, ragged Christian slaves, and fearsome Janissaries in tall red caps, long robes, and tight canvas breeches, with iron-shod slippers and drooping mustaches. Most carried muskets and scimitars. Some brought firebrands to set light to the thatched roofs of the little houses; others had iron bars to break down their doors.
The raiders ran up the pebbly beach in the darkness as quickly and quietly as they could and stationed themselves in groups of nine or ten outside the first houses. Then they waited.
But on
ly for a matter of seconds. At a word from Murad, hell came to Baltimore, as the pirates smashed their way simultaneously into every home in the cove, screaming at the tops of their voices. Bleary-eyed, bewildered, and half asleep, families were punched and kicked and dragged out into the street, where the flames from the torches and the flickering light thrown by burning buildings showed them a scene beyond their nightmares. English renegades in Murad’s crew were ordering them down to the boats in their own language, but others used lingua franca, Turkish, Arabic, perhaps even Gaelic. All used the unmistakable language of violence and intimidation. People were milling around in the dark, crying, begging on their knees, calling for their children. One of the townspeople, a heavily pregnant woman named Joan Broadbrook, was separated from her husband in the confusion. He managed to escape inland; Joan was taken, along with their two small children. John Davys put up a fight; he was killed. Timothy Curlew tried to defend his wife; he was killed, too, and his wife was taken. William Gunter was away from home that night: when he returned he found his home in ruins and no sign of his wife or their seven sons.
We know nothing about these people except for some names recorded in a tally of the lost after the raiders had gone: Bessie Flood and her son; Bess Peeters’s daughter; Richard Lorye, his wife, his sister, and four children; John Harris, his wife, his mother, three children and a maid. There were ninety-nine in all.
Murad wasn’t done with Baltimore yet. A dozen or so men were detached to herd his victims down to the boats, while James Hackett—who had come ashore with the corsairs and was playing his part as local guide with rather too much enthusiasm—led the pirates up toward the main part of the town, which lay about 500 yards away along a narrow coastal track. Like a good general, the pirate captain secured his line of retreat by deploying sixty musketeers to guard the track, while he and the remaining force advanced into the town and began smashing their way into house after house.
Fugitives from the cove had got there before them. Although they broke into forty homes, they only found another ten settlers; the rest had fled into the darkness or taken shelter behind the walls of the Fort of Jewels. Farther up the hillside someone took a potshot at them; someone else began pounding a drum to warn the neighborhood.
That was enough for Murad, who wasn’t interested in becoming involved in a siege or a gunfight. He ordered his men back down to the cove. As quickly as they could, they pushed off the crowded little boats and rowed into the bay. Before daybreak they were aboard their ships and preparing to hoist their sails, while their bruised and frightened new captives—22 men, 33 women, and 54 children, 109 in all—were put belowdecks with the rest.
By sunrise the whole countryside was alive with fear and rumor. The mayor of Baltimore, Joseph Carter, scribbled a note to Sir William Hull, the deputy vice-admiral at Leamcon:This last night, a little before day, came two Turk men of war of about 300 tons, and another of about 150, with a loose boat to set their men ashore, and they have carried away of our townspeople, men, women and children, one hundred and eleven [he was off by two], and two more are slain. The ships are at present going westward.16
The pirates were heading toward Leamcon and Crookhaven. Carter begged Hull to warn people.
At the same time the shocked burgesses of Baltimore dispatched a messenger cross-country to Castlehaven, ten miles to the east. A merchant ship was lying at anchor in Castlehaven harbor, and they pleaded with its master to set out in pursuit of the pirates. He could not be persuaded. The news of the raid was taken on to the Lord President of Munster, Sir William St. Leger, at Mallow; and to Captain Hooke at Kinsale. On the following day, Tuesday, Sir William Hull reported (wrongly, as it happened) that the Turks were still in sight, plying off the southwest tip of Cork and waiting for more of their number to arrive for an attack on the returning Newfoundland fishing fleet later in the summer. St. Leger urged Hooke to give chase. The burgesses of Baltimore urged Hooke to give chase. Everyone urged Hooke to give chase.
The Fifth Whelp was one of two naval pinnaces charged with scouring the seas around Ireland for pirates. The other, the Ninth Whelp, was commanded by Sir Thomas Button. The valiant but venal veteran of the 1620 Algiers expedition was still admiral to the Irish coast and was supposed to patrol the Irish Sea while Hooke looked after St. George’s Channel and the western seas. However, Button spent most of his time ashore, leaving command of the Ninth Whelp to his lieutenant (and nephew), Will Thomas, while he concentrated on extracting money from the Admiralty. His current strategem involved contracting to supply both Whelps himself, but keeping Hooke on short, poor-quality rations and pocketing the difference. The previous October he had rather splendidly informed the secretary to the Admiralty that he was too ill to travel and suggested that perhaps the pay and supplies due to both Whelps might be sent directly to him at his house in Cardiff?
As a result of all this, Francis Hooke was engaged in an acrimonious dispute with Button, firing off letters of complaint to anyone in government who might listen. On June 10, 1631, only ten days before the Baltimore raid, he had written to Lord Dorchester: “Victual goes through so many hands before it reaches us that we are made poor to make others rich. If only I could get the right to victual my own ship, I will engage my own life that the King’s service will not be impeded in the future as it has been in the past.”17 He was supposed to be in Limerick to escort a fleet of corn ships, he said. But as things stood, he felt unable to leave Kinsale unless he got some decent victuals on board.
Those victuals still hadn’t arrived by the time of the raid. And so, unfortunately for Captain Hooke’s subsequent career—and even more unfortunately for the Baltimore captives—he chose this moment to make a stand. For four days he refused point-blank to sail. When he finally did set out from Kinsale, there was no sign of Murad. Button, for his part, remarked piously to the Admiralty on “how dishonorable and how unchristianlike a thing it is, that these Turks should dare to do these outrages and unheard-of villainies upon his Majesty’s coasts, by reason of the weakness of the guards.”18
Murad had little use for old people—they had no value. Before he hoisted sail for Algiers he sent ashore an elderly man and woman, Old Osbourne and Alice Heard. Edward Fawlett, James Hackett, and another unidentified Dungarvan fisherman went with them.
Murad kept his promises.
Hackett and Fawlett were picked up and interrogated soon after being put ashore, and while the Englishman seems to have convinced the authorities that whatever he did to aid the pirates he did under duress, Hackett was not so lucky. The Lord Justices of Ireland—the Earl of Cork and Viscount Loftus, who shared the post of chief governor at the time—were of the opinion that he had “expressed much disloyalty and disaffection in bringing them [to Baltimore], when it appeared plainly that he might have put them into other harbors where they might have been taken, and so the mischief which happened might have been prevented.”19 They made it clear to the judges of the Cork assize that the unfortunate man was to be arraigned and tried, that due process was to be observed, and that he should be found guilty. The judges did not disappoint: Hackett was condemned and hanged “as an enemy to the state and country.”20
The raid caused outrage and alarm. The justices of the peace for Pembroke begged the government to fortify Millford Haven in southwest Wales, because they feared “the accession of another imminent peril by the Moors who have carried captives out of Baltimore.”21 The same month, the Lord Justices of Ireland wrote to the Privy Council with a list of the victims, describing the raid as a disaster without precedent, even in war-time. It was an insult to the king’s honor, they said.
Charles I agreed. After two months of bickering, in which the Lord Justices put the blame on Captain Hooke for refusing to stir out of Kinsale at the crucial moment and on Button for staying at home—and the Admiralty blamed the Justices for failing to control the two sailors, and the two sailors blamed each other—on August 23 the king sent an impatient letter to Cork and Loftus, urging them to di
scover exactly what had gone so wrong with the defense of the realm that two Algerian pirate ships could sail into an Irish harbor, abduct more than a hundred of his subjects, and sail away again without anyone doing anything to stop them. “You shall inform us where the responsibility for this negligence lies,” he told them. “You blame the two captains appointed to guard the coast, and they blame each other, but we are not satisfied with these recriminations. You shall inform us about what was left undone to guard against such a thing.”22
No one paid much attention to the captives. There was a rumor that Murad was still hovering off the Irish coast; another that both his ships had been taken by Spaniards off the Spanish coast. In fact, he made for the Straits and Algiers as soon as he left Munster. An entry in a register of captives kept by the English consul at Algiers records that on July 28, “Morrato Fleming and his consort brought from Baltimore in Ireland 89 women and children with 20 men.”23 (The figures were off by two—there were eighty-seven women and children.) Two weeks later the consul informed London of the captives’ arrival and asked for money to pay their ransom. None came.
Autumn turned to winter, and in Dublin the two Lord Justices were still pondering their response to the king’s demand for someone to blame. In January 1632 Lord Dorchester wrote from Whitehall to say that Charles I was surprised not to have received word from them regarding “the Turkish piratical raid at Baltimore,” and this galvanized them into action. Their report went out of its way to exonerate themselves. “The attempt was so sudden as no man did or with reason could expect it.”24 The pirates were only in Baltimore for a few hours. Dublin was so far away. There were so many harbors in that part of West Cork that it was impossible to predict where a raid might take place or “to guard every one of the places with competent strength to resist invasion.”
Pirates of Barbary Page 16
