Pirates of Barbary

by Adrian Tinniswood

  By the end of June everything was ready. The keel, the ribs, the waterproof canvas, and all the other bits and pieces had been smuggled out of the city and hidden in fields around a little hill which stood a safe distance beyond the walls and about half a mile from the coast. On the night of June 30, 1644, about an hour after dusk, the little party gathered by the hill, retrieved the parts of their boat, and got to work in the darkness:The two parts of our keel we soon joined. Then opening the timbers, which had already one nail in every joint, we groped for the other hole and put its nail into it. Then we opened them at their full length and applied them to the top of the keel, fastening them with rope yarn and small cords, and so we served all the joints to keep them firm and stable. Then we bound small canes all along the ribs lengthways, both to keep the ribs from veering and also to bear out the canvas very stiff against the pressing water. Then we made notches in the ends of the ribs, or timbers, wherein the oars might ply, and having tied down the seats and strengthened our keel with the fig tree [they had sawed down a small fig tree which stood on top of the hill to serve as reinforcement for the keel], we lastly drew on our double canvas case, already fitted, and really the canvas seemed a winding sheet for our boat, and our boat a coffin for us all.34

  Four of the group hoisted the boat onto their shoulders and carried it the half-mile to the sea. The other three followed in the pitch-darkness, like mourners at a ghostly funeral.

  When they reached the sea they all stripped naked and threw their clothes into the boat, tossed the goatskins and the bread in after them, and dragged the craft as far out into the waves as they could manage. Then they jumped in.

  It sank.

  There were no leaks, and the frame held up to the waves. It was simply that the little dinghy couldn’t bear the weight of seven men. This was enough for one of the washermen, who was already nervous at the prospect of going to sea in such a frail craft; he volunteered to stay behind. So they rescued the boat, bailed her out, and refloated her; but she was still so low in the water that there was no question of taking her any farther. They jettisoned most of their clothing, leaving themselves with just shirts or loose coats, but it was not enough. After an awkward pause, the second washerman waded ashore, and the remaining five slaves—Okeley, John Jephs the sailor, the bricklayer William Adams, and the two carpenters—said a prayer, bade their friends farewell, and set sail for Majorca.

  They were still a long way from liberty. For the rest of the night they worked frantically to get clear of Algiers. Four men manned the oars while the fifth bailed out the seawater that was seeping through the canvas hull. But the wind was against them. When the sun rose at five-thirty the next morning they were still in sight of the ships in Algiers Road, making them redouble their efforts and row like men possessed. No one came after them, but they soon found another problem: their entire store of bread was soaked with seawater—“like a drunken toast sopped in brine”—and the same seawater had seeped into the goatskins, bringing out the tanning liquor in the skins and turning the fresh water foul. In desperation they ate the bread anyway. There was none left on the third day. By then they were drinking their own urine.

  They kept on, heading north all the time. One of the group—presumably John Jephs—had a small mariner’s compass that he used to take their bearings by day. At night they followed the stars. By early on the fifth day they stopped rowing, too exhausted now to do anything but bail out the boat. They were ready to give up—blistered by the scorching sun, faint with hunger, and dehydrated by the seawater they were now drinking. Their lives were saved by an unsuspecting turtle that was dozing in the sea. “Had the great Drake discovered the Spanish plate fleet,” wrote Okeley, “he could not have more rejoiced.”35 They hauled the unlucky creature aboard; chopped its head off; then drank its blood, ate its liver, and sucked the warm flesh. “Really it wonderfully refreshed our spirits, repaired our decayed strength, and recruited nature.”36

  Around noon they sighted land. It was still a long way off but, overcome with relief, the whole crew leapt into the sea and swam for joy. They climbed back into the little boat and fell asleep and drifted. “And here we saw more of divine goodness, that our leaky vessel did not bury us in the sea and we awaking find ourselves in the other world.”37 But they rowed hard all night and all the next day, finally coming ashore on the coast of Majorca late on the night of July 6, six days after escaping from Algiers and slavery.

  Okeley and John Anthony went in search of some fresh water, leaving the other three to keep an eye on the boat. The pair immediately got lost in a forest and fell out rather nastily over which way to go. “Good Lord!” recalled Okeley. “What a frail, impotent thing is man! That they whom common dangers by sea, common deliverances from sea, had united should now about our own wills fall out at land.”38 After wandering around and arguing for a while they came upon one of the watchtowers that lined the coast of Majorca, mostly built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to provide advance warning of raids by corsairs. After they’d shouted up to the armed sentry and explained their circumstances—keeping a discreet distance in case they were fired on—the man threw them down a moldy old cake. “But so long as it was a cake, and not a stone, nor a bullet,” said Okeley, “hunger did not consider its mouldiness.” 39 The man also gave them directions to a nearby well. The pair returned to the boat, gathered up the others and went in search of the well. They were all in a bad way, wearing only their soaked shirts and limping on blistered feet, and they started bickering amongst themselves about what to do next.

  The bickering stopped abruptly when William Adams suddenly collapsed at the side of the well, his throat so swollen that he couldn’t drink. His comrades immediately rediscovered the sense of solidarity that had carried them across the Mediterranean. They lifted up their distressed comrade, who croaked, “I am a dead man,” and forced him to take sips of water interspersed with little pieces of the cake. Slowly they managed to revive him.

  The five of them slept beside the well that night, and went back to the watchtower the next morning to ask for directions to the nearest town. It took them another two days to hobble the twelve miles to Palma.

  The island was sparsely populated, and only as they entered the outskirts did they begin to attract serious attention. “The strangeness of our attire, being barefoot, barelegged, having nothing on but loose coats over our shirts, drew a crowd of inquirers about us: who we were? whence we came? whither we went?”40 Brought before the viceroy in the ancient Almudaina Palace, they answered questions on the strength of the Algerian fleet, the size of the Algerian military. But what intrigued the viceroy most of all was the story of their escape. It so impressed him that he announced he would maintain them at his own expense until a passage to England could be arranged. The people of Palma held a public collection to buy clothes and shoes; and the prefabricated boat that had carried them across 190 miles of open sea was rescued from the beach where it lay, and hung in Le Seu, Palma’s great Gothic cathedral. It was still there, battered and now skeletal, nearly thirty years later—a monument to their miraculous deliverance.

  William Okeley got back to a war-torn England in September 1644, just over five years after he had left for the Caribbean. The English merchant ship which was taking him home narrowly escaped capture by Turks off Gibraltar, a reminder that the threat of piracy had in no way diminished during his time in Algiers. The experience was so frightening that Okeley and the two carpenters went ashore and made the rest of the journey in stages, first to Cadiz, then overland to St. Lucar, before obtaining passage on another homeward-bound English vessel.

  In London, Okeley met up with Devereux Spratt, who had come home by more conventional means and who dutifully handed over his money, still in its false-bottomed trunk. Nothing more is heard of him until 1675, when with the help of an unidentified friend who tidied up his prose, he published Eben-ezer, or, A Small Monument of Great Mercy Appearing in Miraculous Deliverance of William Okeley, William Adams,
John Anthony, John Jephs, John—Carpenter, from the Miserable Slavery of Algiers, with the Wonderful Means of Their Escape in a Boat of Canvas. The book was sold by Nathaniel Ponder, a prominent Nonconformist bookseller who acquired the nickname of “Bunyan” Ponder three years later through publishing John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.

  Okeley reframed his Algerian experience as a Protestant parable, seeing his capture as evidence of the mysterious workings of Providence, and his escape as a testament to God’s redemptive power. “We called on Him in the day of our trouble,” he tells his readers in his lengthy and earnest preface. “He delivered us, and we will glorify Him.” The book’s title, Ebenezer (Hebrew for “stone of help”), is a reference to 1 Samuel 7:12, in which after defeating the Philistines, Samuel took a stone “and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.” The message is reinforced by the book’s epigraph from Psalm 103: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with loving-kindness and tender mercies.”

  Okeley’s readers were exhorted to take heart and take heed from the narrative. Servants who were unhappy with their lot should think themselves lucky that they were not slaves to Turks. Those whose thoughts turned toward sin should realize that if provoked, God could punish them in terrible ways for their transgressions, just as He could reward them for their faith with the gift of eternal life. Everyone must learn to walk in the ways of righteousness and remember that “God can carry us to Rome or Algiers, or else send Rome and Algiers home to us.”41 Even for those who would never see the bagnios of the Barbary Coast, slavery was a spiritual reality.

  For William Okeley, it was more than that.

  ELEVEN

  Deliverance: The Liberation of Barbary Captives

  R obert Blake and Jawdar ben Abd Allah left the English court and returned to Morocco in May 1638, taking with them fulsome expressions of friendship, a one-sided trade agreement which gave members of a newly founded English Barbary Company a monopoly to sell high and buy low, and some extravagant presents for the sultan, including a gilded coach painted with flowers and five Denmark horses to draw it, a hundred lances, several pieces of fine linen, and “the king and queen’s pictures drawn after the Van Dyck originals.”1

  As they set sail from Portsmouth there were already rumors that Thomas Rainborow’s triumph at Salé was unraveling, and by the early summer those rumors had been confirmed. The Saint’s followers in Old Salé were ignoring the peace with the corsairs of New Salé; the corsairs were ignoring their promises of loyalty to the sultan, and English merchant vessels were ignoring the Anglo-Moroccan treaty and selling arms to the sultan’s enemies. It was business as usual.

  Or almost as usual. The threat from Salé rovers in the Narrow Seas did diminish in the wake of Rainborow’s expedition, although this was as much due to the continuing civil unrest along the Moroccan coast. Abd Allah ben Ali el-Kasri, the leader of the Salé corsairs, was killed fighting the Saint’s men across the Bou Regreg, and the citadel at New Salé was taken, besieged, and retaken by different Morisco factions. When the sultan marched on the coast to restore order, his camp was overrun by hostile mountain tribesmen and he had to ride for his life. In 1641 the Saint was killed in battle with the Moriscos he had ousted from New Salé, who had entered into an alliance with rival rebel groups.

  The surviving Salé rovers eventually regrouped and resumed their activities against European shipping outside the Straits. In October 1641, for example, four English merchant vessels were on their way home from La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast of France, when they were intercepted by a heavily armed man-of-war who rounded them up without a struggle, brought them back to New Salé, and sold their crews to an Algerian merchant. In 1650 the Dutch blockaded Salé as Rainborow had done, in an unsuccessful attempt to put a stop to their activities. Seventy years later the Salé rovers were still a potent force: at the beginning of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe has his eponymous hero surprised off the Canary Islands “in the grey of the morning by a Turkish rover of Sallee” who captures the crew and carries them into Salé to be sold.

  But for much of the mid-seventeeth century the dominant force along the Barbary Coast was Algiers, whose corsairs moved effortlessly and terrifyingly to fill the gap in the market; and their captain-general was Ali Bitshnin, the Italian renegade from whom Francis Knight escaped so dramatically during the Battle of Valona in 1638.

  Under a bewildering variety of names, Ali Bitshnin was a Barbary Coast legend. He was probably the Ali Pizilini who owned sixty-three Christian slaves in Algiers in 1619. He was certainly the Ally Pichellin who by the 1630s was “for greatness renowned in all Africa”;2 the Ali Piccinino who terrorized and terrified Venetian merchantmen the length and breadth of the Adriatic; the Ali Pichinin who kept forty young pages “for ostentation” but refused to let them out of doors for fear they might be sodomized; and, last but not least, the Alli Pegelin whose cheerfully impartial approach to spiritual matters enabled him to laugh at the Qur’an during Friday prayers while smiling benignly at a Carmelite priest who told him to his face that he was bound for hell because he had “no other religion than an insatiable avarice.”3

  Ironically, Ali Bitshnin is remembered today for building a mosque. The domed, almost Byzantine Djemaa Ali Bitchine (yet another variant on “Bitshnin”) still stands in the Bab al-Oued district at the heart of the Algiers medina—albeit in a rather mutilated state, having been turned into a Catholic church by the French. Put up in the early 1620s at Ali Bitshnin’s command soon after he arrived on the Barbary Coast from the Adriatic, it was one of Algiers’s first Ottoman mosques, built above a vast complex of basements and shops. His bagnio was nearby “in a street of his house,” according to the Spaniard Emanuel D’Aranda, who was captured off the coast of Brittany in 1640 and spent the next two years as Ali Bitshnin’s slave. D’Aranda’s description of the bagnio suggests that far from being the squalid slave-pit of popular imagination, it was actually a thriving community resource:It had a very narrow entrance, which led into a spacious vault, and that received its light, such as it was, through a certain grate that was above, but so little, that at mid-day, in some taverns of the said bath, there was a necessity of setting up lamps. The taverners, or keepers of those taverns are Christian slaves of the same baths, and those who come thither to drink are pirates, and Turkish soldiers [i.e., Janissaries], who spend their time there in drinking, and committing abominations. Above the bath there is a square place, about which there are galleries of two storeys, and between those galleries there were also taverns, and a church for the Christians, spacious enough to contain three hundred persons, who might there conveniently hear Mass. The roof is flat, with a terrace, after the Spanish mode.4

  D’Aranda spent his first night as Ali Bitshnin’s slave up on this roof terrace, under a coverlet provided for him by the pasha’s men. The next day he was ordered out (in lingua franca, “the common language between the slaves and the Turks, as also among the slaves of several nations,” he noted5) and set to work making rope in Bab al-Oued. He reckoned Ali Bitshnin kept about 550 Christian slaves of all nationalities in the bagnio; they spoke twenty-two languages between them—in addition to lingua franca—and included Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Puritans, and a smattering of minor sectaries. For years a Dominican friar, “a fat, corpulent person,” celebrated Mass for everyone on Sundays and got drunk on weekdays until, despairing of ever being ransomed, he converted to Islam, “with extraordinary acclamations of the Moors and Turks.”6

  The son-in-law of a legendary Albanian renegade named Murad Raïs the Elder (not to be confused with the Dutch renegade Murad Raïs, who carried out the Sack of Baltimore in 1631, or the Genoese renegade Agostino Bianco, also known as Murad Raïs), Ali Bitshnin was appointed Captain of the Sea in the early 1620s. As head of the taifat al-raïs, the guild of pirates, he managed to maintain an equilibrium of sorts between the interests of the corsair
s, those of the merchant class which financed his raids, and those of the Janissary corps which was at once both eager for a slice of the pie and suspicious of anyone who threatened their supremacy. By the later 1630s he had become an immensely powerful figure in Algiers—so powerful, in fact, that European outsiders regarded him as the de facto head of state above the pasha, above even the agha, who commanded the Janissary corps. When he entertained on his country estate, the pasha was there, along with all the other naval commanders, the captains, “the richest setters-out of galleys.”7 When he went to sea, the admirals of Tunis and Tripoli were happy to serve under him.

  Yet he remained an outsider, even in a community well used to making outsiders its own. He refused to provide his slaves with food, encouraging them instead to steal what they could and allowing them out for two or three hours every evening to burgle, scavenge, and pick pockets. On one occasion, his galleys were taking in water near Oran when a Moor came up to him and asked if he might be allowed to kill one of the Christian slaves, “which is the most acceptable sacrifice that can be made to the Prophet.” The Captain of the Sea told him he’d be happy to oblige, and then gave a sword and a dagger to his biggest, roughest galley slave and sent him to chase the Moor away. When the man summoned up the courage to come back and complain, Ali Bitshnin laughed at him, saying there was no honor in killing a man who couldn’t defend himself: “Mahomet was a generous and valiant man; go and bid your sherif [Muslim priest] furnish you with a better explication of the Alcoran.”8

  The problem in understanding Ali Bitshnin as a man and a leader is that most of our knowledge of him is both fragmentary and filtered through uncertain European eyes. And because the anecdotes are personal and partial, the picture is inconsistent. How is it that a convert to Islam who built one of Algiers’s finest seventeenth-century mosques could mock the Qur’an? Or that to Francis Knight, “Ally Pichellin” was an arrogant, pompous tyrant—“in truth we were all exquisitely miserable that were his slaves”9—while Emanuel D’Aranda, who knew him just as well if not better, saw him as that stock seventeenth-century figure, the jovial, amoral pirate who spurned convention and invited grudging admiration because of it?