The Hornacheros signed a treaty with England in 1627, each side agreeing not to engage in acts of piracy against the other. But the treaty broke down four years later, when the William and John of London got into a fight with a Salé man-of-war off Cape St. Vincent. Each side blamed the other for the incident, but the end result was that the Salé rovers no longer felt any compunction about preying on English shipping.
In 1626, Trinity House had reckoned there were between 1,200 and 1,400 English captives at Salé, all or mostly taken in the English Channel. “When the ships are full of the King’s subjects, the pirates return to Sallee, sell the captives in the common market, and then return for more.”21 Ten years later, and five years after the breakdown of the treaty with the Hornacheros, a ransomed English sailor reported that ten Salé men-of-war were preparing to set out for the English coast, and the authorities at Plymouth were told that 200 Christian captives were landed at Salé on one single day. “In times past,” complained West Country merchants, “only the pirates of Algiers sometimes came into the English and Irish channels; now the pirates of Sallee are become so numerous, strong, and nimble in their ships, and are so well piloted into these channels by English and Irish captives” that no one dared put to sea.22
Something had to be done. The Salé corsairs of the Bou Regreg estuary were disrupting English trade, selling English citizens in markets from Tetouan to Tunis, and putting the fear of Mohammed’s God into coastal communities throughout the West Country. In the summer of 1636, pirates were seen lurking in the Severn estuary, and reports of losses started to pour in from ports along the coasts of Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall. John Crewkerne, a representative sent from Weymouth to petition Charles I for help, told the king to his face that coastal patrols weren’t enough, a view that (fortunately for Crewkerne) was seconded at the meeting by Archbishop Laud, who assured the merchant that “whilst he had breath in his body he would do his utmost endeavor to advance so necessary and consequential a business.”23
The merchants of Exeter argued that as well as providing regular patrols, the king should issue letters of marque to allow suspicious vessels to be stopped and searched for “supplies of munition and provisions for war”; that Exeter and the other western ports should be allowed to commission a ship or ships of their own to attack pirates in the Channel; and, most important, that the king should send a punitive expedition to mount a blockade of Salé and to intercept those pirates who were out on the cruise as they returned home. Four ships of 300 tons each and two pinnaces could mount a blockade that would ruin the corsairs within a year.
Weymouth and Exeter weren’t the only ports to propose direct action against the pirates of Salé. In June, Captain Giles Penn, a Bristol merchant who traded regularly with Morocco, approached the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Francis Cottington, and suggested the king mount an expedition against “the heathen moors of Sallee.”24 Penn was well acquainted with the complex political scene in Morocco—he may have been acting at the behest of the sultan in Marrakesh, who saw an English naval blockade of Salé as an inexpensive way of bringing down the Hornachero rebels—and Cottington gave Penn enough encouragement for him to take his proposal further. In October 1636 he wrote to the secretary of state, Sir Francis Windebank, and in December to the Lords of the Admiralty, each time setting out the requirements for a successful venture. The expeditionary force should consist of 800 men in four ships and two pinnaces, with “able surgeons, doctors of physic, and good divines.”25 Shirts and jackets should be provided for the poorer seamen, and the force should take some captured Moors along as exchange prisoners. Penn sketched out the political situation on the Bou Regreg: there was growing tension between the rovers in their fortress at New Salé and their erstwhile ally, the holy man Mohammed al-Ayyashi, who was based across the river in Old Salé. He ended by urging the fleet to set sail before the end of January. Otherwise the corsairs would leave on their spring cruise before it arrived.
And because it had all been his idea, and because private gain and public office were inseparable in seventeenth-century culture, Captain Penn asked the Admiralty to make him commander of the expedition—and “surveyor of all goods taken in reprisal during the voyage.”26
The political will to suppress the activities of the Salé pirates and to secure the release of their English captives was there. And so, for a change, was the cash to fund an expedition. The writ for the first ship-money levy of 1634, which was directed solely toward the maritime counties, stated that one reason for its imposition was the need to finance action against “thieves, pirates, and robbers of the sea.”27 When writs, now extended to the inland counties, were issued in 1636 to fund the ship-money fleets for the following year, nearly £190,000 was collected. As resistance to the ship money began to grow, it would do the king no harm to produce a very public demonstration of how well that money was being spent.
At four o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, March 24, 1637, three English ships anchored off New Salé and began a blockade of the harbor. There was a 400-ton merchantman, the Mary, which had been chartered for the voyage, and two 600-ton men-of-war, the Antelope and the Leopard. John Dunton, the English captive who had helped to steer his captors to the Isle of Wight and justice the previous year, had got a place as master aboard the Leopard, the expedition’s flagship, still hoping for news of his little boy in Algiers.
Giles Penn was nowhere to be seen. Having accepted his advice and his proposal, the Lords of the Admiralty decided he wasn’t the man to command the fleet, in spite of his plaintive assertions that he had no equal when it came to a knowledge of the Moroccan people. Their choice as “general of the south squadron of the Salé fleet,”28 and Dunton’s captain aboard the Leopard, was William Rainborow, a forty-nine-year-old professional mariner and shipowner. One of the most respected figures in the English maritime world, Rainborow was a past master of Trinity House, an adviser to the government on naval matters, and the flag captain to the Lord High Admiral, the Earl of Northumberland, when the latter commanded the king’s fleet in the Channel in the summer of 1636.
It was probably Northumberland who put his flag captain’s name forward for Salé. Rainborow was known as a man who understood maritime warfare, and he had direct experience of dealing with corsairs: back in 1618 he had earned a commendation from the Levant Company for his service against pirates in the Mediterranean.29 And in 1628 he achieved considerable renown when, as the master (and co-owner) of the Sampson, a heavily armed merchantman that sailed back and forth between London and Istanbul for the Levant Company, he fought off an attack by four galleys manned by the Knights of Malta, who maintained, quite falsely, that the Sampson had just robbed a Maltese cargo ship. The battle, which was “as sharp as hath been upon these seas in many years,” lasted for seven hours, during which time the Knights scored 120 hits on the vessel’s hull, masts, and rigging.30 The English ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, returning home aboard the Sampson after more than six years at the sultan’s court, narrowly missed death when he was knocked flat by a flying piece of timber. (His wife’s parrot was not so lucky—it was killed by a shot that smashed into the cabin.) But Rainborow, “who behaved himself with brave courage and temper,” gave as good as he got, and the galleys eventually retreated with the loss of 300 men. The Sampson lost the parrot, two sheep, and one unnamed passenger.
Rainborow was a good leader, a good sailor, and a good choice to command this expedition. But a series of events beyond his control meant that things were going badly. His fleet arrived off Salé seriously under strength. The Hercules, another merchant ship that had been chartered for the expedition, had lost its main mast in a storm off the coast of Portugal and been forced to put in at Lisbon for repairs. And the Leopard, the Antelope, and the Mary should have been supported by two 300-ton pinnaces, the Providence and the Expedition, specially designed for fast inshore work, intercepting any pirate galleys that might try to slip in and out of harbor by keeping to the shallow coastal waters where the b
ig men-of-war couldn’t follow. But neither vessel had been launched by the time Rainborow was ready to sail, and he made the decision to leave without them, fearful that, as Penn had pointed out, the corsairs might be gone when he reached Salé. And he was right not to wait: French and Spanish slaves who swam for the Leopard and their freedom when they saw the English fleet arrive told Rainborow that the renegade captains of Salé were on the point of setting off for the English coast on a slaving raid.
The harbor at New Salé was behind a small headland at the mouth of the river, out of sight and out of range of the English guns; for the moment at least, the corsairs had little to fear from their enemy. When the governor of New Salé, Abd Allah ben Ali el-Kasri, heard that the three ships which had appeared off the coast were English, his response was defiant: “What care I for the King of England’s ships, or all the Christian kings in the world? Am I not King of Salé?” And his reaction to the letter that Rainborow sent in to the citadel, demanding the release of all Christian slaves and “satisfaction for ships and goods, and for all those Christians that they sold away both to Algier and other countries before we came here” was simple and, for the English, frustrating. He did absolutely nothing.31
Rainborow deployed the Antelope and the Mary to the north and south of the estuary, while he took the central position in the Leopard. The loss of the Hercules was inconvenient, but the absence of the two pinnaces was much more serious, as the English found out three days into their blockade, when a corsair arrived from Algiers. By staying close in to the shore, he sailed straight into harbor in the middle of the afternoon, despite the fact that the Antelope, which had to stand off in deep water, “did shoot above 100 pieces of ordnance at that ship.”32
There was no way of knowing when the other half of the fleet would turn up. (The Hercules sailed into Salé Road in mid-April, nearly four weeks after Rainborow and the others; the two pinnaces didn’t arrive until the middle of June.) But as Rainborow pondered the unpleasant prospect of sitting helplessly at anchor while all the thirty or so vessels in the Salé pirate fleet slipped away in ones and twos, the watch on the Leopard reported that fighting had broken out along the shores of the Bou Regreg between the inhabitants of Old Salé, the walled port that lay on the northern bank of the river, and the corsair community on the south bank. It was more than just a skirmish, too: the battle lasted all day, “and a great many men and horses were killed and hurt.”33
That evening a white flag of truce appeared on the ramparts of Old Salé. Rainborow dispatched a party of men in longboats, heavily armed and wary. They returned with two hostages, a request for a surgeon to treat the wounded, and a letter from Mohammed al-Ayyashi, the rebel leader and holy man who had encouraged the corsairs to set up their own republic in the first place, and who was now using the old town as his headquarters. His hopes of enlisting the pirates of New Salé in his holy war to drive the Spanish out of their Moroccan enclaves had gone sour—their political and religious aspirations didn’t match up to their passion for profit and privateering—and from taking the occasional potshot at each other across the Bou Regreg, the two communities had graduated to skirmishes and now to pitched battle.
Rainborow realized that the situation could work to his advantage. He agreed to al-Ayyashi’s request for medical help, and while his surgeon’s mate was tending the wounded, he opened peace negotiations with “the Saint,” as the English called the Muslim holy man.
This infuriated and scared the New Salé pirates. They accused al-Ayyashi and his men of “turning Christian”—an ironic twist to the familiar English insult—and on April 20 they launched another assault on Old Salé. “The two towns . . . were in fight very hard one against another,” wrote John Dunton, “and did kill a great many men on both sides. We did stand and look upon them in our ships as they were at fight.”34 The next day the Saint, convinced now that his enemy’s enemy must be his friend, invited Rainborow’s senior gunner ashore to inspect his fortifications, telling him “he should have all the old town at his command, as castles, forts, and guns, and men, and all to lay siege and battery against the new town.”35
The Leopard’s gunner, Richard Simpson, had combat experience stretching back at least to the Duke of Buckingham’s ill-fated 1627 expedition to La Rochelle, where by his own account he “made many a shot . . . before any other.”36 Now he was sent ashore with a couple of others to find suitable emplacements on the northern bank from which the fleet’s heaviest guns could be brought to bear on New Salé—and on the corsair fleet, still at anchor in the shallow waters of the Bou Regreg. The English gunners mounted four of al-Ayyashi’s guns on the ramparts of Old Salé and provided their new allies with shot, barrels of powder, and expertise. Sending for the best gunners on each ship, Rainborow “appointed every gunner and his company his day, and to take power and shot with them, and so to go to work with their ships to sink and burn them all.”37
Three of the corsair men-of-war were sunk the first day, and ten more in the coming weeks. The walls of Old Salé and New Salé were about 750 yards apart and to achieve greater accuracy with their shot, English sailors excavated a huge defensive earthwork on the sandy northern river bank, half that distance from the enemy’s city, where they set up a platform and mounted their heaviest guns.
Day in and day out the guns boomed, and the heavy shot rained down on ships and storehouses and homes. Timbers splintered and cracked. Plumes of dirt and dust filled the air. Dense clouds of smoke drifted across the river as raiding parties sent by al-Ayyashi set fire to the corsairs’ corn in the fields. Ships that tried to slip in or out of harbor were intercepted or sunk or driven onto the shore, where the Old Salétians captured or killed survivors. Slaves ran for their freedom whenever the opportunity presented itself. Food began to run short. Pirates slipped away and deserted to the other side. And at the beginning of June those who were left in the city mounted a coup. The governor, Abd Allah ben Ali el-Kasri, was deposed, and the rebels sent him in chains to the new sultan at Marrakesh, the eighteen-year-old Mohammed ech-Cheikh el-Ashgar, in the hope that now that they were at war with his enemy al-Ayyashi, he would come to their aid, or at least intercede against the English. Dunton noted ruefully that although the English fleet had intelligence that this was about to happen, “it was such a night, and so dark, and such a fog, that our boats could not meet with him.”38
A week later, on June 13, the arrival of the two pinnaces and the sight of their crews using their oars to chase after a ship that was trying to get into harbor, as though they were swift Mediterranean galleys, alarmed the beleaguered pirates so much that they sent a delegation out to the Leopard to sue for peace. But Rainborow maintained his demand that the pirates not only surrender all their Christians, but also provide adequate compensation “for all that ever had been taken by them,” and the negotiations broke down.39
Not so the blockade, which was maintained with awesome efficiency. On July 3 the Leopard forced a Salé man-of-war ashore, with the death of fifty-five Moors and Turks; on July 12 the Providence chased another into the arms of al-Ayyashi’s men, who captured and killed its crew of eighty-five. Ships that came to trade at New Salé were all turned back. They included the Neptune of Amsterdam, which arrived with a cargo of gunpowder that, her captain claimed rather unconvincingly, was really intended for rebels farther down the coast and not for the corsairs at all. Rainborow confiscated forty of the fifty-one barrels and sent the Neptune on its way.
On Thursday, July 27, 1637, four months after the English fleet began its blockade, a Moroccan ship arrived off the coast of Salé. It brought a delegation from the young sultan. There was an English merchant named Robert Blake, who lived in Marrakesh and who had volunteered to act as interpreter; Mohammed el-Ashgar’s personal representative; and, much to everyone’s surprise, el-Kasri, the deposed former governor of New Salé. Instead of beheading el-Kasri, as the English had expected, the sultan had offered to restore him to office—but only if the corsairs would disband their re
public and recognize Mohammed’s (i.e., the young sultan’s) authority, pay him a huge sum in customs duties which they had originally promised to collect on his behalf, and accede to all the English demands.
Rainborow’s initial response was to bring el-Kasri aboard the Leopard and threaten to hang him, “at which he trembled very much.”40 On the Saturday, after talking with Blake, the besieged corsairs sent out thirteen Christian captives as a token of goodwill, and Rainborow finally agreed that el-Kasri and the sultan’s official, or qaid, could enter New Salé to present terms to the besieged Moriscos. “They desire to see whether you have any Moors amongst the renegadoes,” Rainborow informed George Carteret, his vice-admiral aboard the Antelope. “If they say they be Moors, I pray let them have them. If they say they be Christians, I pray keep them.”41
The deal was done by Monday, and over the next three days another 293 slaves were handed over. “They did make as much haste to bring our Christians aboard as they could,” wrote Dunton, “because they would have us gone.”42
Pirates of Barbary Page 18
