In the late summer of 1645 (as it happened, just a few weeks after a raiding party of Turks landed on the Cornish coast and kidnapped 240 men, women, and children), Cason set sail for Barbary aboard the Honor, taking with him several thousands of pounds in cloth and ready money with which to ransom English captives.30
The voyage was a disaster. The Honor sailed down the Portuguese coast and through the Straits, where she waited in the Bay of Gibraltar for favorable winds. While she lay at anchor, a fire broke out on board, and locals “rescued” the cargo, which was never seen again. Cason managed to save some of the cash, and put it aboard an ancient Levant Company ship, the 140-ton Diamond; but a few days later the Diamond went down off Cadiz, and the money went down with it. “Thus one affliction is added to another,” lamented the anonymous author of a contemporary pamphlet about the expedition, “and misery, like waves, tread one on the other’s heel. And now who could have otherwise thought, but that with this sad disaster, the work itself would have been laid aside?”31
But it wasn’t laid aside. In July 1646 a determined Parliament issued a second order, identical in every way with their first, and an undaunted Edmund Cason set off once again for the Barbary Coast, now in the frigate Charles.
He had better luck this time. The Charles arrived safely off Algiers on September 21, and Cason was granted an audience with the pasha the following day. Yusuf entertained him well and agreed straightaway to the idea of a peace treaty between the two countries. (Perhaps the £2,500 which Cason offered him helped to make up his mind.) From now on, neither side would interfere with the other’s shipping; any Englishman—and for all intents and purposes that meant any Briton—who was brought into Algiers as a captive would be released immediately. “So this peace shall be continued,” declared the members of Yusuf ’s diwan, “and that if it please God it shall not be broke, so long as the world endures and that God and the Great Turk’s curse may fall upon him that breaks this peace.”32
As Cason must have anticipated, Yusuf was less enthusiastic about giving up the English slaves. They had been bought in good faith, and their owners couldn’t be expected to part with them for nothing. The agent tried initially to negotiate a single flat rate per head, but eventually he agreed to pay every owner the original purchase price of their slaves.
As those owners came to see him over the next five weeks, he and an Algerian scribe took down names, prices, and places of origin. Judging from the partial list which survives, fifty percent of the victims came from the West Country, as one might expect, and around thirty percent from London. But there were also captives from every corner of the British Isles, from Swansea and Aberdeen and Newcastle and Youghal. “Divers Turks and Moors caused us to set down much more than their slaves cost,” complained Cason, but Yusuf promised that no one would be allowed to cheat him.33 Others thought they could get more money by holding out for a ransom: they made over their slaves to Tunisian friends who, because they weren’t Algerian nationals, were exempt from the agreement. An unknown number of captives had converted to Islam, and they weren’t part of the deal, because Cason didn’t want them or because Yusuf wouldn’t release them or because they were happily settled in Barbary. In any event, Cason was told, “the young men (after turned) they carry to Alexandria, and other parts to the eastwards.”34 Even so, more than 650 men, women, and children from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were entered on the register. Another hundred men at least were away on the galleys, sweating at their oars in a long and bloody Ottoman campaign to take the Venetian citadel at Heraklion on Crete.
The English were a tiny minority in a slave population which was estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, and they were scattered all over Algiers. Most of the women and children worked in household service. The men worked as dockers and porters. They built ships and labored on urban construction sites and outlying farms. They ran shops of their own in the souks, selling tobacco and wine, lead shot and iron goods. Wherever they were, on the quays and in the fields and in the bagnios, they heard the story that an Englishman had come to Barbary to take the lost ones home. Peter Swanton, whose wife, Katherine, led the 1643 Westminster petitioners, heard the news. So did Thomas Sweet, who had been captured off the Barbary Coast in 1639 and who, like so many slaves with special skills, was prized by his master, a French renegade: “I do keep his books of accompts and merchandise, and that keeps me here in misery.”35
There were old men and boys. There were young mothers with babes-in-arms. There were whole families waiting patiently and impatiently for liberation. The Puritan Robert Lake waited, “an ancient person . . . very wise and religious.” Joan Broadbrook, who had been taken in Murad Raïs’s dawn raid on Baltimore fourteen years earlier, waited. John Randal, the glovemaker who had worked making and selling canvas clothes in William Okeley’s shop, waited with his wife, Bridget, and their little son for the moment when the three of them might see England again. There were slaves from Dartmouth and Dover and Liverpool and Lyme Regis and Southampton and Sandwich. There were masters of ships and carpenters, caulkers, coopers, sailmakers, and surgeons. They all waited.
And they all wanted to go home.
The logistics of the ransom were formidable. Cason had a limited amount of ready money and a consignment of cloth, which he could exchange for captives or sell. If he sold, he might get his price in doubles—the native Algerian currency—or in Spanish dollars, “pieces of eight.” The exchange rates fluctuated, with a double worth around an English shilling and a dollar worth between 4s. 4d. and 4s. 11d. (roughly between 21.5 pence and 24.5 pence). The price per captive varied enormously. It depended on an individual’s age, status, and skills, and his or her master’s greed. Cason paid a paltry £7 for one Edmond Francis of Dorset, and well over £80 for Elizabeth Alwin of London. The average price was just under £30 per captive, which was the usual rate for ransoming ordinary mariners and boys, but rather more than Cason had hoped to pay. “The reason is, here be many women and children which cost £50 per head first penny, and [which their owners] might sell . . . for an 100 [pounds].”36
There were other charges to be paid over and above the purchase price. Normal expenses for redemption included port taxes and fees for taking a bill of exchange; payments to the pasha and the customs officer and the officials who inspected the outgoing ship carrying the slaves; gratuities to the interpreter and the Janissaries who stood guard during negotiations. The final cost of liberating a slave whose ransom was set at 1,000 doubles might end up being well over 1,600 doubles. Cason managed to negotiate this down, but he still had to pay the pasha a charge of six percent on all the money he brought into Algiers. He then had to pay twenty dollars in export duty for each slave, again to the pasha, and half duty to the pasha’s officers—a total of between six and seven pounds sterling. Food and drink for each freed slave on the homeward voyage came to between ten and fifteen shillings (50-75p.) a person. It all mounted up.
Cason just didn’t have enough money to redeem all the slaves. He wrote and explained to Parliament that he originally hoped “to have taken away the better sort of people first, and the rest afterward,” but that in the event he had opted for quantity rather than quality.37 Swanton and Lake and the Randal family and Joan Broadbrook of Baltimore were all freed. Poor Thomas Sweet, whose French renegade owner was determined to hold out for a ransom of £250, was not. Sweet remained behind, still doing his master’s accounts, “when others that are illiterate go off upon easy terms for cloth, so that my breeding is my undoing.”38 Altogether, Cason negotiated the release of 245 captives; they sailed for home aboard the Charles in the autumn of 1646.
That was quite an achievement, and both Houses of Parliament formally approved Cason’s conduct. But more than 400 Britons were left behind. Cason urged Parliament to send more goods and money, and to make haste:I beseech your Honors not to think that this redemption may be part one year, and part another. And I desire your people may go home in summer, for I do assure you, their clothes
be thin. I think two good ships and a pinnace will be fit to fetch away the rest of the slaves.39
The ships didn’t come. And it isn’t clear why. Perhaps it was just that government didn’t move that quickly. In November 1651, four and a half years after Cason’s letter reached England with the first group of redeemed slaves, the Parliamentary Committee of the Navy claimed to have got together “ten or fifteen thousand pounds in pieces of eight,” which they planned to send in the forty-four-gun Worcester “for redemption of English captives in Argier, Tunis, and Tripoli.”40 (The vagueness about the actual sum suggests that the operation had hardly reached an advanced stage.) The following March the Worcester actually set out for the Straits, but she had scarcely cleared the chain at Chatham when war broke out with Holland and she was recalled and ordered to the Downs.
Meanwhile Cason was still in Algiers. His original orders had been to travel on to Tunis to negotiate the release of English captives there, but because there were so many waiting for their freedom in Algiers, he had decided to wait with them. They were released in dribs and drabs as Cason found the money, and they went home whenever a suitable vessel could be found to take them. This didn’t happen very often: in the summer of 1653 Cason informed Parliament that he had freed Mathew Aderam of Plymouth at the beginning of 1649, and that Aderam had acted as his servant without pay for the past four years, “waiting in vain the arrival of a ship to take him to England.”41 A few weeks later he announced that he wasn’t going to lodge any more freed captives in his house, “as some of them have been troublesome.”
From 1648 to 1653 Cason shared his duties and his house with Humphrey Oneby, a Barbary merchant dispatched by Parliament to be the English consul in Algiers. With Oneby’s help, he continued to do an admirable job. By trading on his own account or getting credit with other merchants, he managed to redeem the old captives and arrange for their passage home, and he ensured that any English man or woman who came into harbor aboard a foreign prize was freed and eventually repatriated. He placated the pasha and the diwan, who after ratifying the peace treaty had become increasingly exasperated that every nation in Europe seemed to carry three or four English sailors and English colors to avoid being attacked by corsairs. (The pasha wasn’t imagining things, either: the English factor at Livorno openly admitted that he was shipping a valuable consignment of Neapolitan wine in Italian merchantmen which had “2 or 3 Englishmen in each, with English colors, to save them from the Turks of Algiers.”42)
And Cason sent back intelligence. No likeness of him survives, but we can still imagine him wandering down to the harbor through the narrow streets of brightly colored houses to see the cosmopolitan prizes that the galleys of the taifat al-raïs had brought home: a Frenchman carrying oil, figs, and almonds; a Flemish hoy bound for Spain with a cargo of raw linen; a Portuguese intercepted on its way to Brazil; a little English fishing boat which had been taken by the Dutch and captured from them by the Algerians. And the occasional English sailor, brought in among the crew of another nation’s vessel. “Since my last,” wrote Cason to the Navy Committee, “we have eight men given us by the governors. We do not want to keep them if we could dispose of them with safety.”43
It is much harder to imagine how he felt as the months turned into years and he became just another Frank in a foreign land, as much an outcast from his own kind as the renegades who drank in the taverns and whored in the brothels and knelt at Friday prayers before setting out on the cruise. He had a widowed sister in England, and a merchant nephew whom he saw occasionally. Did he yearn to be back in London, doing deals and gathering gossip at the Royal Exchange? Did the souks and alleys of Algiers come to feel more real than Cheapside and Cornhill, the Byzantine dome of the Djemaa Ali Bitchine more familiar than the soaring Gothic tower of St. Paul’s?
Unlike the hundreds of men, women, and children he rescued, Cason never saw home again. He died in Algiers on December 5, 1654, eight years after he arrived there aboard the Charles, and the authorities carefully inventoried his goods and shut up his house until his nephew Richard could come out and take stock of his possessions. The fact that in 1652 Parliament could note that “none of the vessels or mariners of this Commonwealth have been surprised by the men of Argier, since the confirmation of the peace in 1646” reflects some measure of his success.44 The treaty he brokered may not have lasted so long as the world endures, but it demonstrated that cordial Anglo-Algerian relations were possible.
And that, in the volatile political climate of Barbary, was no mean achievement.
TWELVE
The Greatest Scourge to the Algerines: The Occupation of Tangier
Wenceslaus Hollar, “scenographer and designer of prospects” to King Charles II, sat on the wall and watched the little procession trooping past along the breakwater that snaked out into the harbor. He sketched quickly: first the driver, flicking his whip at the flanks of his stocky Barbary horses, shouting, urging them on as the two-wheeled wagon, piled high with stones, bumped and shivered over the rutted ground. Then two workmen, deep in conversation, with picks on their shoulders and high-crowned felt hats on their heads. Finally a pair of wary soldiers in scarlet and green coats, keeping their eyes out for snipers who might lie hidden in the sandhills. A third soldier was on sentry duty on the shore, marching up and down outside a little guardhouse built against a massive outcrop of rock a few yards from the beach; ten more soldiers lolled around in the sun, talking and smoking. They seemed relaxed. But their muskets were lined up ready against the guardhouse wall, and the ramparts and towers and gun emplacements which loomed over them were not for show.
Tangier was a dangerous place.
England acquired its first and only outpost on the Barbary Coast under the terms of Charles II’s marriage treaty with the Portuguese infanta, Catherine of Braganza. The king announced the match at the opening of Parliament on May 8, 1661, telling the Lords and Commons that he would “make all the haste I can to fetch you a Queen hither, who, I doubt not, will bring great blessings with her, to me and you.”1 So she did. Catherine brought the English free trade with Brazil and the East Indies, the promise of a portion of £300,000 in ready money, and the trading center the Portuguese had established on the west coast of India at Bombay, now Mumbai.
But the jewel in Catherine of Braganza’s bridal crown was Tangier. The Portuguese, who had occupied the town since 1471, were in no position to hold it against the Spanish, with whom they were currently at war and against whom they needed the support offered by an alliance with England. The outpost’s position on the Moroccan coast at the western entrance to the Straits of Gibraltar meant it possessed an obvious strategic value for any maritime power with trading interests in the Mediterranean. No vessel could pass through the Straits without being seen from Tangier during daylight hours, and regular nighttime patrols by four or five men-of-war could easily intercept any which tried to slip through in darkness. If money were invested in building a proper harbor, ships could ride at anchor securely in all weathers and, as one of Charles II’s admirals told him, a nation could “keep the place against all the world, and give the law to all the trade of the Mediterranean.”2
The place could be developed into a commercial hub to rival Livorno or Genoa. Even Algiers, that “den of sturdy thieves, form’d into a body,”3 would make use of the port when it wasn’t actually at war with England, their ships anchoring in the bay while the Algerians sold their prizes in the market square and supplied themselves with fresh provisions.
Best of all, Tangier was perfect as a base for naval patrols engaged in convoy work and punitive raids against the corsairs. The Salé rovers, who still made a nuisance of themselves by preying on smaller merchantmen and fishing vessels off the Atlantic coast, were only 140 miles south; by using Tangier as a safe haven at which to careen and revictual, three or four small frigates could maintain a blockade of Salé so that “those inconsiderable rogues would by such care be soon reduc’d to nothing.”4 Five hundred miles to the east,
the pirates of Algiers posed a much more serious problem, but a carrot-and-stick approach which made use of the base could yield results, as an ardent advocate of English occupation, the military engineer Henry Sheres, pointed out:Tangier well managed, may be rendered the greatest scourge to the Algerines in the world: and may afford them the best effects of friendship. For if in time of war we can force them from this so beloved station, and attack them or their prizes bound in or out; and in time of peace (which we cannot refuse them) they can be admitted to make use of Tangier, and the port, as their occasions require; they may perform their voyages in half the time, and with half the trouble of returning home, to refit and victual.5
A view of Tangier in 1669, by Wenceslaus Hollar. The Royal Collection © 2009 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
Commercially, politically, militarily, the place was, as Charles II told his ministers, “of that strength and importance, as would be of infinite benefit and security to the trade of England.”6
There were a few stumbling blocks. Tangier possessed no defensible harbor, only an open bay which offered no protection against the elements or an enemy. And potential enemies were gathering: Portugal was at war with Spain and the Netherlands, and both nations had designs on the place. Moreover, it was by no means certain that the Portuguese governor of the city would relinquish control to the English, royal wedding or no royal wedding. And, last but not least, Tangier was surrounded on three sides by a hostile army of Moors. Their leader, Abd Allah al-Ghailan, was trying to establish a breakaway state in northern Morocco, and his response to an infidel settlement in his territory was jihad.
Pirates of Barbary Page 23
