But Tooker’s woes didn’t count for much in light of Lawson’s considerable achievement—separate peace treaties with three of the four Barbary states. By the end of 1662, England had renewed its old articles of capitulation with Istanbul and had put in place signed and sealed agreements with Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers. If relations with Morocco were still a little rocky, at least Tangier was now a free port. English ships could move around the Mediterranean unmolested and were free to carry foreign goods and persons—“a great advantage for the trade and reputation of England,” in the opinion of the Venetians.27 Joy in England was all the keener for the news that a Dutch fleet under Admiral de Ruyter was having less success in negotiating with Barbary. Tripoli refused terms; so did Algiers. Now the news from Livorno was that fourteen pirate ships were out on the cruise, looking for Dutch merchantmen and saying that “since they had a peace with the English, they should do well enough, and were resolved to make no further agreement” with the Netherlands.28 The English government and the English people applauded Lawson’s success in negotiating a good and firm peace with Barbary, and he returned home in January to a hero’s welcome, “with great renown among all men [and] mightily esteemed at court by all.”29
Tunis kept the articles of peace, although Hammuda Pasha allowed Algerian pirates to sell their prizes there. Tripoli could be difficult, especially in the years between Uthman’s overthrow and death in 1672 and the signing of a new treaty with England by “the pasha, dey, agha, diwan, and governors of the city and kingdom of Tripoli” in 1676: the troubled state had six deys in that four-year period.30 But Tripoli posed less of a threat than Algiers because its corsair fleet was weaker—twelve ships in 1676 as opposed to at least fifty at Algiers. In any case, the treaty held after 1676, and the pirates of Tripoli focused their attention on capturing French shipping.
Algiers broke the treaty, and broke it often. Algerian corsairs boarded English merchant ships on the high seas; they took foreign cargo, passengers, and occasionally crew; and they treated English consuls in Algiers with contempt whenever they complained. (At least one consul was hacked to death.) And this, even though the articles of peace stated quite clearly that no one was to do the consul or any of the king’s subjects “any wrong or injury in word or deed whatsoever,” and that “though there be strangers and their goods on board [an English vessel], they shall be free, both they and their goods.”31
The favorite explanation in Europe for the failure of the articles of peace was the one voiced by the veteran English naval officer Sir Thomas Allin: “Never any one met with such artful, dissembling, hypocritical traitors in this world!”32 His opinion was shared by Francesco Giavarina, the Venetian resident in London who was standing in for the absent Venetian ambassador: “Anyone who knows the Turks and especially those assassins of Barbary is aware that they rarely keep their word.”33 It was shared too by Robert Browne, English consul at Algiers, who reported that it was “impossible for any but those that have been eye-witnesses to believe the rash, unjust and inconsiderate proceedings of these people.”34 Turks were treacherous—it was as simple as that.
Every nation constructs its own narrative of conflict. The English believed that although in 1662 the “perfidious pirates” of Barbary had made “an entire submission to the English flag,” they had proved to be “faithless,” going back on their word and committing “new insolencies” on English shipping, for which the fleet would “chastise” them. All these value-loaded words and phrases were used by the Earl of Clarendon, Charles II’s Lord Chancellor, in an angry speech to the two Houses of Parliament in October 1665.35 Consciously or not, Clarendon speaks of the Algerians as a conquered people.
The Algerian narrative was different. The English, according to the dey of Algiers, were “a people without faith, not observing their promise; they [have] made war with us without cause, and without declaring against us; they have taken vessels, and made slaves of our people.”36 Algiers was convinced that nations with whom they had no treaty were packing their ships with English crew, or flying English colors illegally: “English” ships with Spanish crews and Spanish goods were plying back and forth across the Straits to supply Tangier; Dutch vessels sailed under English colors, the Algerians claimed. This was perfectly true. When a Venetian merchant ship was intercepted by an English squadron off Sardinia while flying the flag of St. George, its Dutch master freely admitted that for the past fourteen years he had “got free of all Barbary corsairs with his Royal Highness’s pass.”37
The Algerians couldn’t accept that when they searched an English ship and found it carrying Turks and Moors as slaves for sale in another country they must let it go without saving their fellow Muslims. When they met a ship flying English colors and sent a boat to examine its credentials—something they were allowed to do under the terms of the treaty—they were often fired on “and not suffered to come near enough to speak with and examine them, so that they cannot possibly tell who they are, and, for aught they know, foreigners.”38
England did make concessions. In the summer of 1669, as Sir Thomas Allin set off on a peacekeeping mission to Barbary, he was authorized by the Lord High Admiral, Charles II’s brother James, Duke of York, to insert a new clause into the Algerian treaty declaring that no English ship could carry more foreigners than Englishmen, passengers, or crew; and another that English ships would henceforth not carry any Muslims “that are slaves or that are sent to be sold in any other country.”39 On the same expedition, Allin was told explicitly that he was to behave with “all possible truth and fidelity” toward the Algerians. If they agreed to a new peace, he was to return to them all ships, goods, and men he might have taken on his way through the Straits, without keeping anything back, and to give presents to the pasha (although James’s suggestion that he might reward the Algerians with gunpowder seems rather rash in the circumstances).40
But it was a case of small carrot, big stick. The incident which had led the Admiralty to send Allin to Algiers on this occasion had involved the taking of an English ship carrying sixty-one Spaniards, whom the Algerians sold. If the pasha and the diwan wouldn’t agree to terms and promise to mend their ways, Allin was empowered to attack their ships wherever he found them, to go into the harbor and torch their fleet, and to sell any Turks and Moors he captured. In a separate, and presumably secret, order, the Lord High Admiral also told Allin that if conditions were favorable when he arrived at Algiers, he should attack the corsair fleet immediately without waiting to begin negotiations.
The weather was too calm for a surprise attack when Allin arrived at the end of August 1669, but when the agha and pasha responded to his demands by “raving like so many mad dogs, calling us all their language would afford them,” he deployed his considerable fleet of eighteen warships and three fireships to blockade Algiers, to patrol the coast for returning corsairs and their prizes, and, as necessary, to convoy English merchant shipping through the Straits. Prisoners were sent to Spain or Minorca and sold, including noncombatants. Fifty-four men, women, and children were dispatched to the slave market at Cadiz in September. Two months later, Allin recorded that he left with the Spanish vice-consul at Port Mahon on Minorca “one blind, one lame, one old Moor and one about 30 years, to be sold for his Majesty’s use.” At Málaga in December, “we disposed of ten slaves I sold and one presented to the governor free for his civilities.”41 The Turks didn’t have a monopoly on slavery.
But they didn’t have a permanent garrison on the moral high ground, either. The Algerian economy depended on piracy, to a much greater extent than that of its neighbor Tunis. In order to function as a state, Algiers needed to be free to prey on at least one of the major trading nations—England, France, or the Netherlands. As all three engaged in an arms race during the third quarter of the century, building up powerful naval presences in the Mediterranean in response to the threat posed by the others, the taifat al-raïs found it harder and harder to make a living. The French and the Dutch, like the English, per
iodically sought and enforced treaties that would safeguard their merchant shipping in the Mediterranean, and which, consequently, curtailed the activities of the corsairs. With or without legitimate pretexts, the Algerians had to break those treaties simply in order to survive.
In 1664 an English squadron had sailed into Algiers Bay to demand that the Algerians keep their side of the bargain. This show of force was followed by a renewal of the articles of peace and a humiliating public confession from the Algerians that the breach was caused by their subjects, and theirs alone, “for which,” they promised in a certificate appended to the renewed articles, “we have drowned one, banished another, some others fled to escape our justice, and divers have been imprisoned to give satisfaction in part to his most excellent majesty [Charles II].”42
Five years later, in 1669, the Mary Rose, which was taking Wenceslaus Hollar and Henry Howard back to England from Tangier, was fired on by Algerian corsairs off the Spanish coast and chased into the Bay of Cadiz. They left off the attack, but only after eleven members of the Mary Rose’s crew had been killed, seventeen wounded, “and the ship much damaged.”43
In 1671 Admiral Sir Edward Spragge, then in command of the Mediterranean fleet, came on seven new and heavily armed corsair vessels at anchor on the Algerian coast in the Bay of Béjaïa (known in Europe as “Bugia” or “Bougie”). The corsairs tried to defend themselves by throwing a boom across the bay made of their topmasts, yards, and cables, all buoyed up with casks. But Spragge’s men cut the boom, and the fireship he sent in among the Algerians, the Little Victory, burned them all. “Our lovely bonfires,” the admiral wrote in his journal, “was the most glorious sight that ever I saw, so great variety was in it, some of the ships’ ports appearing in the flame, others their sterns, and some their timbers all naked. When the powder came to blow up, it was terrible.”44
By his own account, Spragge’s squadron dealt a deadly blow to the Algerian fleet at the Battle of Bugia Bay, wounding the Algerian captain-general and killing seven of his captains (including a renegade called Dansiker—the name had lived on, until then at least) and 300 Janissaries. The incident was followed by a palace coup in which the agha was murdered and power transferred to an old raïs named Mohammed Tariq, or “Old Treky,” as the English called him. With the new regime there was a renewal of the articles of peace.
Five years later Admiral Sir John Narbrough burned four ships of war in Tripoli harbor, destroyed Tripolitan merchant ships, and bombarded the city itself, a prelude to a public apology from Tripoli for contravening their treaty with England and a payment of reparations to the value of £18,000 in money, goods, and slaves. There was a renewal of the articles of peace.
By the later 1670s, Algerians were taking English ships in the Channel, just as they had half a century earlier. Admiral Narbrough was blockading Algiers. English and Algerian ships were engaging in pitched battles in the western Mediterranean. Now there was no renewal of the articles of peace for five years. England and Algiers were at war from 1677 until 1682, when the dey and his son-in-law Baba Hassan tired of the losses their fleet was suffering and concluded yet another treaty with Narbrough’s successor in the Mediterranean, Sir Arthur Herbert. A list published in London in 1682 showed that between 1677 and 1680, 153 British ships had been taken by the corsairs of Algiers. Some were small: the Robert of Dartmouth, for instance, captured on October 29, 1677, with its crew of six; or the Speedwell of Topsham, taken with five crew in September 1679. Some were not: the Phoenix of London, which was taken two days before the Robert, had forty-nine men aboard. The William and Samuel, also of London, was blown up, and of its crew of forty-six, twenty-five were killed in June 1679; the other twenty-one were taken to Algiers to await ransom or slavery. Gregory Shugers, master of the Danby, escaped in his longboat with twenty-one of his crew when they were attacked; no one knew the whereabouts of the remaining twenty-five. The anonymous author of the list reckoned that altogether around 1,850 seamen and passengers had been captured. When the ransoms of the sailors (£100 a man) and the ransoms of the more important passengers (up to £1,000 each) were added to the value of the vessels and their cargoes, he put the cost to England of Algerian piracy in those three years alone at anything up to half a million pounds.
It was the 29th of July, 1683, and in the scorching heat of an Algerian summer, Janissaries and a few townspeople watched as a heavy Venetian cannon was dragged into position on the battery overlooking the bay. Out beyond the mole, a French battle fleet lay at anchor.
Admiral Abraham Duquesne had visited Algiers before. In 1682, shortly after Herbert concluded England’s most recent peace treaty with the dey, the French had arrived to demand terms and reparations from Mohammed Tariq. But Algiers had made peace with the Dutch, peace with the English. Tariq could not afford peace with the French as well. So he refused Duquesne’s demands, and the French admiral used a new and terrible weapon of war to punish him. Heavy mortars mounted on specially adapted ships known as bomb-ketches lobbed huge explosive shells into the city, causing terror among the population and destroying dozens of houses and shops. The great mosque was badly damaged, and thousands of people fled to the safety of the countryside, “crying out with a general voice, that the world must needs be now at an end, that never such things as these were seen, that they certainly were not of man’s invention, but sent by the Devil from Hell.”45 Even the French consul, a saintly Vincentine priest named Jean Le Vacher, couldn’t persuade the admiral to stop. It was only the prospect of the coming winter which made Duquesne withdraw with a promise to return.
Now Duquesne was back, and threatening once again to rain down on Algiers his “allamode tennis balls,” as the English consul at Tripoli called them.46 At the first sight of the enemy ships, there was a general panic, which was only exacerbated when the sixty-four-year-old Père Vacher returned from an interview with the admiral and announced regretfully to the diwan that the French weren’t interested in negotiating. They wanted to hurt Algiers. They wanted to destroy the city.
Desperate to avoid a repetition of the previous year’s bombardment, Baba Hassan, who was now the real power behind his father-in-law, Mohammed Tariq Dey, panicked and handed over 560 French slaves without even asking Duquesne for ransom. The Janissaries and the taifat al-raïs were so incensed that they killed Baba Hassan. Tariq Dey fled to Tunis, and the captain of the galleys, Hajj Hasan, was elected in his place.
Mezzo Morto, the “half-dead,” as everyone called the new dey, was of the opinion that begging for mercy did not become an Algerian.
Hence the cannon.
He sent word to Duquesne that if the bombardment of the previous year was repeated, the fleet could watch as he blew Vacher and all the other French merchants and redemptist priests living in Algiers from the mouth of that cannon. Still the heavy French bomb-ketches moved within range of the city, and Mezzo Morto’s men dragged the old priest onto the gun platform and tied him across the barrel of the big Venetian artillery piece. More than a hundred years old, it was one of the most impressive guns the Algerians possessed. Handled by expert gunners, it could fire a shot a good two miles with accuracy.
But on this summer day, accuracy wasn’t needed. With a roar and a flash the first mortar-shells sailed over the mole and landed with a thick crump in the city. And Jean Le Vacher said a prayer and exploded in a dreadful burst of blood and bone which splashed into the blue waters of Algiers Bay.
The mortar-shells kept crashing down, and another twenty Frenchmen died in the same terrible way as Père Vacher. (The Dutch renegade who actually fired the cannon reportedly suffered from awful nightmares for the rest of his life.) Duquesne left without his articles of peace, but a French fleet was back in 1688. The population of Algiers fled, leaving the pounding mortars to wreck the city. For two weeks the ketches worked in shifts, dropping a total of 13,300 shells. When they left, the English consul went to survey the ruins. “Three-quarters of the town is defaced,” he wrote, “and I believe it will never be r
ebuilt in its former splendour.”47 The following year Algiers signed articles of peace with France.
FOURTEEN
No Part of England: The Evacuation of Tangier
The siege of Tangier was a triumph for Morocco and a disaster for English hopes of a permanent base on the Barbary Coast. The short-term consequences were dramatic enough: some of the explosives at Charles Fort failed to go off, and Umar ben Haddu managed to retrieve 3,300 hand grenades and all of the guns, which his men un-spiked and un-wedged and turned on the town. They were helped by one of the captured English soldiers from Henrietta Fort, who turned Turk—or, rather, Moor—and was promptly promoted to master gunner in Umar’s army. Four days after the fall of Charles Fort, Inchiquin sued for peace. Of his thirteen outworks, ten were either demolished or in enemy hands, while the three remaining were “not defensible, when it shall please the enemy to reduce them.”1 Whitby and its stone quarries were lost, which meant that all work on the mole had to stop. “We shall be brought to the condition the Portuguese were in,” wrote an anxious member of the garrison, “but we can’t bring the Moors to the same they were in.” Umar and his Algerian and Levantine siege specialists had turned the Moors “from a cowardly and inconsiderable enemy . . . to a puissant and formidable foe.”2
No one was surprised when the Earl of Inchiquin concluded a four-month cease-fire with the qaid and set sail with his pair of ostriches for a difficult interview with Charles II and a quiet retirement at his family mansion in County Cork. Nor when soldiers aboard ship in the Thames heard that they were destined for Tangier and “leaped overboard to escape, where they were taken up half drowned and secured again.”3 The English government responded to the news of Umar’s victory by sending troops to reinforce the deputy governor, Sir Palmes Fairborne, and his survivors. A contingent of volunteers led by the young Earl of Plymouth, illegitimate son of Charles II, landed on July 2, 1680, along with 600 regular troops under the command of Colonel Edward Sackville of the King’s Own Royal Regiment.4 Over the summer their numbers were supplemented by twelve Scottish and four Irish companies led by Sir James Halkett, a major in Dunbarton’s Regiment; by four troops of English horse and 200 Spaniards; and by 500 or so English seamen who were put ashore to help with the defense of Tangier by their admiral, Sir Arthur Herbert. By the time Inchiquin’s four-month truce with Umar ben Haddu expired, on September 19, there were well over 3,000 English, Irish, and Scots soldiers crammed into the town. At five o’clock the next morning the gates of Tangier opened and this army marched out in battle array and took up positions on the site of Pole Fort, 300 yards south of the town.
Pirates of Barbary Page 27
