Pirates of Barbary

by Adrian Tinniswood

  The Captain of the Sea’s reputation suffered some hard knocks in the late 1630s and early 1640s. The 1638 Battle of Valona, in which he commanded a combined Algerian and Tunisian force, and where Francis Knight made his spectacular escape to freedom, ended disastrously with the loss of sixteen galleys and ten times that number of slaves. Violent recriminations flew so thick and fast in Algiers among Janissaries, corsairs, and merchants that the pasha declared it a capital offense for anyone to remove their thumbs from their girdles while they were arguing with another: “The contending parties, blaming each other for the late miscarriage, could only vent their spleen by bitter invectives and reflections, scurrilous language, punches with their elbows, and, as occasion offered, now and then throwing their head in each others’ jaws.”10 Ali Bitshnin took a lot of the blame for the defeat—according to one source he was actually sentenced to death, but the sentence was rescinded. In 1643 he fell out with both the Ottoman court at Istanbul, for refusing to contribute to Sultan Ibrahim I’s battle fleet against the Venetians without a hefty subsidy, and the Algerian Janissary corps, for refusing to pay them money they claimed he owed them. Forced to flee Algiers for a time, he was reconciled with Ibrahim in 1645 and came back, only to sicken and die. It was popularly believed in Algiers that agents of the sultan had poisoned him.

  But when Ali Bitshnin was at his peak, the galleys of the taifat al-raïs took shipping from just about every European nation that ventured into the Mediterranean and raided coastal villages from the Adriatic to the Atlantic. In the nine months leading up to January 1640, English losses to pirates were estimated at nearly seventy ships and more than 1,200 sailors, a figure which almost matched the nine years of losses between 1629 and 1638. The casualties included the Rebecca, which was carrying a cargo of silver worth £260,000 to England; when the news of her capture broke at the beginning of 1640, it caused a slump in the pound and a crisis in European banking. (The corsairs who took her were so pleased with their prize that they gave the crew a boat and set them free.) Coastal raids on the British Isles, while not as common as they were in the western Mediterranean—where whole communities moved inland for fear of pirates and chains of watchtowers were built to give advance warning of their arrival—were still a reality. In the summer of 1640, the presence of Algerines off the Cornish coast caused first anxiety and then downright panic when a raiding party landed by night at Penzance and captured sixty men, women, and children. The following year, 1641, Algiers put no fewer than sixty-five pirate ships on the cruise, bearing out the opinion of the great Levant merchant Lewis Roberts when he listed Algerian commodities as “Barbary horses, ostrich feathers, honey, wax, raisins, figs, dates, oils, almonds, castile soap, brass, copper, and some drugs; and lastly, excellent piratical rascals in great quantity, and poor miserable Christian captives of all nations.”11

  William Rainborow had proposed taking a fleet to Algiers in January 1638, as a follow-up to his Salé expedition of the previous year. But Algiers was a much more daunting prospect than Salé. Not for nothing was the city known in the Arab world as al-Mahroussa, “the well-guarded”; the Algerians had developed, and were still developing, an elaborate defensive system of forts, batteries, and ramparts. The walls were of brick and stone, with square towers and bastions and trenches, and there were seven fortresses, all built “regularly according to the art of modern fortifications,” well-manned and equipped with heavy guns—two of which, according to a guidebook of 1670, once belonged to “Simon Dancer [i.e., Danseker], a notorious Flemish pirate.”12

  Rainborow suggested an expensive three-year-long blockade of the harbor by ten men-of-war and six pinnaces, reckoning that by the end of that period most of the Algerian vessels would be rotted out and trade with the city would have been destroyed.13 Around the same time, Sir Thomas Roe reminded Parliament of an earlier proposal of his, in which he had argued for a trade embargo of the entire Ottoman Empire and the sending of a strong fleet to Alexandria, to attack Algerian and Tunisian vessels trading to the Levant. From there the fleet should “range the coast of Barbary, land among the villages, and make prisoners of all men, women and children,” exchanging the captives at Algiers and Tunis for English captives. If the corsairs refused to exchange, added Roe, the prisoners could be sold “for money” in Majorca, Sardinia, or Spain.14

  Both schemes were ambitious. They would have been difficult to resource and manage at the best of times. And these were not the best of times. The Spanish assembled a fleet at Dunkirk in the spring of 1638, ostensibly to take on soldiers for an expedition to Brazil; the English government decided that ships were needed in the Channel to ensure there was no trouble. The following January, deteriorating relations between Charles I and his Scottish subjects led the king to dispatch a fleet to blockade the Firth of Forth, rather than Algiers. And that autumn, sixty-odd Spanish vessels faced a hundred Dutchmen off the coast of Kent, as a dozen English men-of-war looked on, having received the optimistic instructions to “take, sink, and destroy” any ship of either side that attempted anything which might be construed as disrespectful to England.15

  In the spring of 1640, Charles I summoned Parliament, after eleven years of ruling without one. It was dissolved three weeks later when the king realized that the House of Commons was rather more anxious to discuss its long-held grievances than to vote him the financial resources he needed to resume his campaign against the Scots. But the Short Parliament was followed that November by the Long Parliament, so-called because it was to sit, in various incarnations, for the next twenty years; and the members of the Long Parliament included a fair number of people whose involvement in overseas trade gave them a powerful interest in finding a solution to the problem of piracy. The Levant Company, the East India Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Company were all represented by the four MPs for the City of London. Some London merchants held seats further afield, like John Rolle, a Turkey merchant who sat for Truro, and Edward Ashe of the Drapers’ Company, who sat for Heytesbury in Wilt-shire. And local merchants predominated in the returns for the West Country, which had suffered more from the depredations of pirates than any other part of England.

  Even outside the merchant class, there were plenty of MPs who took a keen interest in the activities of pirates. William Rainborow, described as “Captain Rainborow” in the Commons Journals, was returned for Aldburgh in Suffolk; Sir Thomas Roe was returned for Oxford University. And while one of the two members for Fowey in Cornwall was Jonathan Rashleigh, who came from a local merchant family, the other, Sir Richard Buller, was a lawyer and a commissioner for piracy. Richard King, who sat for Melcombe Regis in Dorset, was another lawyer and another commissioner for piracy. One of the provisions of the Offences at Sea Act of 1536, which aimed to make it easier to gain convictions against “traitors, pirates, thieves, robbers, murderers and confederates upon the sea,” was for the appointment of commissioners in the maritime counties who were empowered to try cases before a jury “as if such offences had been committed upon the land within the same shire.”16 While some commissioners regarded the job as more of a business opportunity than a judicial appointment, others pursued pirates with vigor and rectitude.

  With a good many MPs having an interest in Algerian piracy and its consequences, it isn’t so surprising that in the midst of all its other pressing concerns, the Commons still found time to debate the problem. They also seemed to have received encouragement from the king himself: on October 3, 1640, exactly one month before the Long Parliament sat for the first time, Charles I had been presented with a petition from about 3,000 of his subjects who were currently held captive in Algiers, where they were undergoing “most unsufferable labours, as rowing in galleys, drawing in carts, grinding in mills, with divers such unchristianlike works most lamentable to express and most burdensome to undergo.”17 (It isn’t clear quite why rowing in galleys, drawing carts, and grinding in mills were “unchristianlike” pursuits.) That December Parliament appointed a committee to look into the matter. It in
cluded Roe, Rainborow, and Melcombe Regis’s Richard King.

  King was appointed chairman of the Committee for the Captives in Algiers, as it was called, and he reported back to the Commons in March 1641. Between them, he said, Algiers and Tunis were holding up to 5,000 British subjects, and a fleet of thirty corsairs was expected off the English coast that summer. A further thirty pirate ships would be out on the cruise in the Mediterranean. There was no point in trying to ransom captives—that would only encourage the corsairs to take more, and it would persuade sailors to give in to their attackers without a fight, knowing their government would buy them out of trouble. Parliament should deploy six naval vessels “to guard the western coasts against the Turkish pirates,” and authorize private individuals to take reprisals against “any Turkish, Moorish, or other pirates”—an idea which caused concern among other European states, whose ambassadors recalled the propensity of the English to abuse privateering licenses.

  The Commons agreed with the Committee’s findings, but asked it to think of a way to finance the patrols and the liberating of captives. The response was devastatingly simple. A tax of one percent levied on all goods coming into and going out of the kingdom would, in the words of the “Act for the Relief of the Captives Taken by Turkish, Moorish and Other Pirates,” raise enough money for the “setting forth to the seas a navy as well, for the enlargement and deliverance of those poor captives in Argier [sic] and other places.”18 The Act passed into law at the beginning of 1642.

  This wasn’t at all what the merchants of England had in mind. It was “more than trade can bear,” complained the Levant Company. The Venetian ambassador maintained it was a clever ruse, so that Parliament could claim it was doing something about the pirate menace while diverting the revenue toward “other emergencies, which certainly are plentiful.”19 The Commons thought it necessary to convene another Parliamentary committee to “consider of the grievances pretended to be occasioned by the Bill for the Relief of the Captives of Algiers.”20 Merchants avoided paying the tax by offering promissory bonds instead.

  Optimists continued to press for a punitive expedition to blockade Algiers. Henry Robinson, a reformer, pamphleteer, and fourth-generation City merchant, argued that even this wouldn’t be enough. In Libertas, or Relief to the English Captives in Algier (1642), he wrote that an English fleet before Algiers wouldn’t be able to prevent every single corsair from entering or leaving harbor; and that although the Ottoman sultan, Ibrahim I, had granted permission for England to attack Algerian pirates, it was, in practice, impossible to distinguish between pirate vessels and legitimate merchantmen: “Scarce a ship of them, but is both merchant, and a pirate, many times in the self-same voyage.”21 Istanbul would leap at the chance to retaliate against the English community there every time an Algerian “merchant” was attacked. Even if Algiers were brought to its knees, other nations along the Barbary Coast would take its place “and prove more pestiferous to us in matter of our commerce for the future.”22 No, the only sensible course was for England’s Turkey merchants to sell up their businesses in the Levant (at a cost estimated by Robinson at £300,000) and come home. All trade with the Ottoman Empire must cease, and the government should then dispatch a fleet of forty ships into the Bosphorus to blockade Istanbul itself. Cut off from trade with the Mediterranean, within a year or two the blockade would “raise the price of all provisions and merchandise, which used to come from thence, so much as will easily cause a tumultuous and rude multitude to rebel,” thus forcing Ibrahim I to treat for peace.

  This was, in fact, exactly the strategy which the Venetians adopted fourteen years later. In the continuing struggle between the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire for control of Crete, Venetian troops in the eastern Aegean occupied the islands of Limnos, Samothraki, and Bozca Ada at the entrance to the Dardanelles, and blockaded Ottoman trade routes to Egypt and the Mediterranean so effectively that in Istanbul, famine “scorched Moslems with the flame of misery and filled them with sorrow.”23 But Venice was 700 miles closer to Istanbul than London was: the Republic had its own supply lines, its own bases in the Eastern Mediterranean, and its own more pressing need to halt the empire’s westward march. Robinson was a little hazy as to exactly how an English blockade of Istanbul would force Ali Bitshnin and the taifat al-raïs to free their captives and cease their piratical ways.

  In any case, the question was academic. In August 1642, Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham, the plentiful “other emergencies” to which the Venetian ambassador had referred coalesced and erupted into full-blown civil war, and Parliament pushed to one side all the plans for a punitive expedition to Algiers or to the Ottoman capital. By the following year the prime movers on the Committee for the Captives in Algiers had all gone: Rainborow had died at the age of fifty-five; Roe and King had deserted Parliament to join their sovereign in Oxford.

  But the victims of piracy—or, more accurately, their grieving relations at home—refused to go away. Desperate wives and mothers clustered every day in Westminster Hall, to petition individual MPs, to remind the great and the good of the human cost of piracy, to beg for alms. Wives were placed in an impossible position by the prolonged absence of their husbands, and the law was confused about their options. According to civil law, a woman could marry again if her husband had been gone for five years “and nothing known whether he lived or no.” But common law dictated that a spouse couldn’t remarry “till the death of him or her that is missing be certainly known.”24

  Uneasy at its failure to act, the Commons in the summer of 1642 ordered that the fines taken from members who came late into prayers should go to “the poor women that daily attend the House, whose husbands are captives in Algiers.”25 Still nothing happened, and the following spring seven of these poor women, unhappy that they had seen nothing of the promised one percent tax on imports and exports, organized another petition on behalf of themselves and the thousands of others like them. Katherine Swanton, Elizabeth Chickley, Susan Robinson, Mary Savage, Mary Taylor, Julian Morris, and Lucie Michell—all we know of them is their names. All they had in common was the fact that their husbands had been taken by pirates, and that in spite of having begged and borrowed money from friends and relatives and selling their possessions, they still couldn’t raise the ransom that Algiers demanded for the release of their men.

  Parliament responded to the presence of these poor women with an admission of failure. The plans “for the setting forth of a fleet of ships, for the suppressing of those pirates, and deliverance of those poor captives . . . hath not taken that success which could be wished.” In a halfhearted attempt to remedy the situation, the Commons issued an ordinance which authorized collections to be taken at churches in and around London, with proceeds going toward the redemption of captives.26 With a war on, ships, guns, and men were too precious to be wasted on a high-risk operation to Barbary: ransom rather than liberation by force now seemed the best course.

  Actually, that wasn’t quite true. The very best course was to ask, politely but firmly. In July 1643 the Lords and Commons sent a London merchant who traded at Livorno with polite but firm letters to the pasha and the diwan in Algiers, desiring them “to vouchsafe your justice and compassion unto those poor captives, and to grant them a speedy deliverance from their thralldom.”27 A reply from the pasha, Yusuf II, reached England about six months later, and although it doesn’t seem to have survived, Parliament understood its contents perfectly. Yusuf and his council would be happy to negotiate a peace treaty with England, but slaves were commodities with a monetary value, and if the English wanted their captives released, they would have to compensate the owners.

  It is a measure of how seriously everyone viewed the piracy problem that even in the middle of a civil war—and a civil war which could still go either way—Parliament resurrected the one percent levy on imports and exports with the aim of raising £10,000 for the captives’ ransom. As an incentive, those merchants who came forward and answered for the bon
ds they had lodged in lieu of payment only needed to find a quarter of the amount they owed; if more than £10,000 was raised, Parliament promised the surplus would go toward reimbursing them.

  The levy, which gave the Lord Admiral and the Committee of the Navy responsibility for disposing of the money, was to continue for one year. It was still in operation at the Restoration, seventeen years later. Cynics might say that Parliament had discovered a useful way of financing the navy. And they would be right: out of a total of nearly £70,000 raised by the levy, only £11,100 ever found its way to Barbary.28

  Edmund Cason was the agent charged by Parliament with leading the negotiations with Yusuf II and the diwan of Algiers about the freeing of English captives. He is a shadowy figure. We know that in 1638 he owned a reasonable-sized house near Old Fish Street at the northern entrance to London Bridge, and he is referred to in government records as a “gentleman” rather than a merchant. He was never an MP, but he was a founding member of the powerful Committee for Taking Accounts of the Whole Kingdom, formed in February 1644, which meant he was also one of the City men empowered to supervise the collection of the levy for the redemption of distressed captives.

  Cason’s name first appeared in connection with the Algiers expedition on August 15, 1645, when the Lords and Commons agreed:That Edmund Cason Esquire be sent as agent to Argier, with the ship and goods prepared, for the redemption of the captives in Argier and Tunis, and renewing the ancient peace with them. And it is further ordered, that the Committee of the Admiralty and Navy do draw up letters credential, commission, instructions, and all other documents fit for him: which the Speakers of both Houses are, upon presentation of the same unto them, to subscribe; that so the said agent may, with all speed, be sent away.29