This was a common ploy among Christian slaves trying to avoid harsh punishments. And sometimes it worked. But Hasan Abaza Dey wasn’t having any of it. He told Nassimbene he couldn’t. As he wrote to Charles II in a letter absolving Baker of any part in the deception, “we had [Nassimbene] sent from our presence with insulting and threatening words as merits his falsity, to be taken to a public place where there should have been executed our sentence that his hand should be separated and chopped from his right arm.”15 “Should have been,” because this was all too much for Baker, who leaped up from his seat in the court and, to quote Hasan Abaza Dey again, “urged, prayed and beseeched us for a moderation of the penalty.” The sentence was commuted: Nassimbene had the right side of his head and the left side of his beard and mustache shaved, after which he was paraded through the streets in chains and then set to work in the quarries. He was also thrashed with a tarred rope by the Guardian of Slaves on the assumption that this would please the consul. It didn’t.
The episode suggests Baker had a compassionate side, and this was borne out again and again during his stay. Two days after Nassimbene’s trial, the consul was in the Assaray Al-Hamra citadel on business when he received word that a drunken Janissary had burst into his house and stabbed one of his servants. He demanded satisfaction and the soldier was duly sentenced to a thousand blows with a baton, which would almost certainly have killed him. Once again Baker pleaded with the dey to show mercy, and the man was pardoned—thus earning the consul the gratitude not only of the culprit but of the entire Janissary corps.
He was an astute political operator, rigid in his determination to claim his rights as set out in the articles of peace (Article 16 clearly stated that the English consul should be allowed to live “at all times with entire freedom and safety of his person and estate”16) but aware that there was also power in magnanimity. When one of the port officers contravened the articles by preventing him from taking a boat out into the bay, Baker immediately demanded the man’s dismissal. This was duly done, and the consul let him sweat for a few days before petitioning the dey for his reinstatement. He had made his point. And when Baker began to have problems with his interpreter, a Norfolk man named Edward Fountain, he opted for the gentler path again. Fountain, a convert who had taken the name of Hasan Agha, had a drinking problem. Instead of firing the dragoman, Baker gave him a gold coin against a forfeit of ten that he couldn’t stay away from alcohol for the next six months. He doesn’t say whether or not he won the bet, but I suspect not, judging from the fact that a year later he noted in his journal that “I cashiered my conceited, foolish, impertinent false, traitorous, base, drunken dragoman, who is called Hasan Agha.”17
Besides the impertinent false Hasan Agha, Baker’s household included at least one English servant, Thomas Landsford. He employed a French secretary, and later a Venetian. There may have been an English chaplain—the articles of peace stipulated that the consul must be allowed a place to pray in—but if so, Baker never mentions him, or indeed makes any mention of his own religious observances. The majority of the 800 or so Christian slaves in the city were Italian and French Catholics, and their spiritual needs were managed by a small community of missionary priests.
The consul’s main sources of contact with home were the English merchant ships that called to trade or to take on supplies. And those contacts were few and far between. In his first year, Baker welcomed just five English ships to Tripoli.
In fact he only saw thirteen during his entire six-year stay. Some were regular visitors: the Francis and Benjamin, which regularly plied between Livorno and Barbary, put in at Tripoli four times between March 1680 and May 1681. Others came once and then vanished back into the Mediterranean. The Content, for instance, put in with forty-seven butts of Sicilian wine and some timber boards at the end of December 1679; she stayed in port for two months, waiting for good weather before leaving for Malta and Messina with a cargo of dates, and was never mentioned again. The following summer the Resolution arrived from Syracuse on its only visit during Baker’s consulate, bringing one hundred butts of wine. (An English butt was 105 gallons, or 477 liters.) Wine was a valued commodity in Tripoli, in spite of repeated attempts by Istanbul to outlaw the consumption of alcohol throughout the Ottoman Empire. At various times Baker recorded the arrival of consignments of wine from Sicily, Cephalonia, Zante, Livorno, Marseilles, and Frontignan. The imperial edict banning alcohol from any town or village with a Friday mosque was clearly more honored in the breach than in the observance on the Barbary Coast: one English visitor to Tunis in 1675 commented that “they drink more freely wine [here] than in other parts of Turkey,” while near the marine gate in Tripoli, slaves kept taverns “where commonly all sorts of religion go to play from morning until evening.”18 Baker’s problems with his dragoman and the close encounter with the drunken Janissary suggest the residents played hard.
At the end of his first year in Tripoli, Thomas Baker sat down and made out a list of all the prizes that had been taken by the corsair fleet since his arrival.
It wasn’t a long list. In fact, for a state whose economy depended on piracy, it was remarkably short. The corsairs had brought in five ships, and that included the little bark so unsportingly apprehended on her way into harbor. All five were French. Far and away the most valuable was the St. Louis, a brigantine of fourteen guns homeward bound for Marseilles. Karavilli Raïs, the Tripolitan vice-admiral, came upon her one night in October as she tried to pass between Sardinia and the coast of Tunis, and after a brief scuffle she surrendered.
The St. Louis was on her way back from Sidon and Cyprus with a cargo of fine silk, cotton yarn, pistachio nuts, and spices. She also carried fifty-two Christian passengers. Baker initially valued the prize at 100,000 dollars without the slaves—more than £23,000. And although he later revised his estimate downward slightly (to 98,000 dollars), the St. Louis still represented sixty percent of the entire year’s haul, which, including a grand total of 152 Christian slaves valued at 300 dollars each, came to 165,200 dollars, nearly £39,000.
That seems a lot of money. But the Tripolitan captains had to set against it the expenses of successful and unsuccessful cruises. They still had to buy victuals, powder, and shot and maintain their vessels, whether they came home with a prize or not. When they did capture a prize, the treasury took a huge cut. (In Uthman Pasha’s time the treasury’s cut rose as high as fifty percent, which was one of the reasons for his overthrow.) Private individuals expected a return on their investment. And the corsairs themselves, sailors and Janissaries, had to have their shares.
Corsairing was a precarious business: at least one raïs didn’t manage to take a single prize in the whole time Baker was in Tripoli. “I would to God Algier afforded no better sailors or soldiers!” noted Baker in his journal, as the raïs, whose name was Mustafa Qadi, set off on his thirteenth trip. (He was back a month later “without a rag of purchase.”19) If it hadn’t been for Karavilli Raïs’s chance midnight encounter with the St. Louis, the taifat al-raïs would have had a very lean year indeed. And as a result, so would the whole of Tripoli.
For the next five years Baker held to his habit of sitting down each April on the anniversary of his arrival in Tripoli and making out a list of all the prizes and slaves brought in by the pirates over the past twelve months. Success rates varied dramatically. The cruising season of 1680-81 proved good for them, if not for the eighteen French, Venetian, Ragusan, Genoese, and Maltese vessels they captured: “The damages which have accrued to the navigation of Christendom by the depredations of these corsairs” amounted to 428,100 dollars, or well over £100,000.20 The following year was disastrous (for Tripoli), with prizes and slaves valued at only 124,800 dollars (less than £30,000). The 1682-83 haul was better, at 204,500 dollars (£48,000); but only because of the capture off Crete of “the richest prize that was ever brought into this place by a single ship,” the Three Kings of Marseilles, which was homeward bound from the Levant and was valued at 120,00
0 Spanish dollars (£28,200).21
Takings were down again in 1683-84 at 129,300 dollars (just over £30,000); and, again, they would have been a great deal worse without the capture of a substantial French vessel, the Golden Sun, worth 50,000 dollars (£11,750). Baker’s final year as consul, 1684-85, was the corsairs’ worst. This time there was no big prize. They took sixteen ships, but all were small, and six were empty. Baker reckoned the lot, plus seventy-nine slaves, at a mere 105,500 dollars, or less than £25,000. Lean times.
Times were destined to become leaner yet. When Baker arrived in 1679, England was the only European nation to have a treaty with Tripoli, which meant that the Tripolitan corsairs felt no compunction in taking any vessel which wasn’t flying English colors. The two other major trading nations in the Mediterranean, France and Holland, were keen to reach similar agreements. In April 1685, articles of peace with Holland were concluded when a Dutch man-of-war arrived at Tripoli with masts, cables, 150 barrels of gunpowder, and 3,000 shot as presents for the dey and the other senior officers “to confirm their peace with this government,” noted Baker.22
The French were also keen for peace. In 1680 a French squadron arrived at Tripoli with an offer to negotiate, but the overture was roundly rebuffed by the dey, who simply could not afford it. War with France was essential to the Tripolitan economy: during the six years of Baker’s time as consul, French ships accounted for more than seventy-five percent of all prizes taken, by value.
The French persisted, and the presence in the Mediterranean of Admiral Duquesne and his fleet persuaded the dey to change his mind. In December 1681 he accepted the presence of a French consul and an offer to begin peace negotiations—to the disgust of his captains, who complained they could barely scrape a living by preying on little barks out of Genoa or Malta. At the end of 1682 they broke the peace by taking a Marseilles merchant ship on its way home from Syria with a valuable cargo, and, faced with the prospect of having to give it back, the captains forced a full meeting of the diwan at the citadel, where raïs after raïs argued for war. The French were enemies to Islam and the empire. They had not returned to confirm the treaty as they had promised. And, most telling of all, “as long as a peace were maintained with France t’would be time and money spent to no purpose to arm out these ships, whilst all the Italians would enjoy the same security to their navigation by abusing these Turks with French colors, French passes and French sham-captains.”23
The result was a declaration of war. The French consul was placed under house arrest; the diwan agreed to keep the Marseilles merchantman and make slaves of its crew and passengers. Six weeks later, corsairs took the 120,000-dollar Three Kings. But Duquesne’s robust response to the taking of French merchant ships in the Mediterranean, demonstrated by his ruthless bombardments of Algiers in 1682 and 1683, was a worry. It is significant that in the middle of all the clamors for war in the diwan, one of the few voices raised in dissent was that of the Tripolitan admiral himself, leading the dey to tell him to his face that if he foresaw “evil contingencies which might arise by the war,” now was the time to say so.24 He was silent.
The French would mortar-bomb the Tripolitans into submission three years later.
Faced with a difficult economic climate, Tripolitans began to cast around for alternatives to corsairing. Tunis had been quite successful in making the switch from piracy to agriculture and legitimate commerce, establishing control over the countryside beyond Tunis itself, extracting taxes from the inhabitants, and exporting a range of commodities, from staples like rice, dates, and olive oil to sponges and coral. Visitors commented on the wealth of foodstuffs available: flatbread (“not unpleasant whilst it is new”25); sheep, goats, and bullocks; fresh fish like mullet and bream; dates, oranges, lemons, and limes.
The countryside beyond Tripoli, on the other hand, the Fezzan, just wasn’t that fertile. It consisted mainly of mountains, steep ravines, and inhospitable desert, and it was populated by equally inhospitable nomads. So the Tripolitans’ options were limited. They exported a certain amount of salt from the salt pans of Zuwarah along the coast, and they occasionally tried to supplement the income they derived from prizes by raiding coastal villages in Calabria and the Morea for slaves. They also began to look to the tribes of the interior, for tribute and for slaves. In 1682, Murad Bey, the governor who had helped to topple Aq Mohammed al-Haddad, and who was now general of land forces and the power behind the throne in Tripoli, returned from an expedition deep into the Fezzan, where his soldiers killed a tribal chieftain who refused to pay tribute and brought away five hundredweight of gold and a thousand black slaves, who were later sold to Albania.
Peace meant poverty for Tripoli. And Baker knew it. He knew, too, that occasional forays into the Sahara for slaves wouldn’t sustain the Tripolitan economy. The choice was war with England or war with France. In November 1682 he was relieved when Admiral Herbert’s flagship, the New Tiger, arrived to confirm the articles of peace once again. The dey welcomed him with a spectacular display of arms on the shore. For three hours Murad Bey’s soldiers drilled and exercised, while Herbert watched from a barge and the dey looked down from the battlements of the citadel, “where he caused to be spread abroad a great flag of green silk most richly wrought with gold, a respect whereith the Turks’ most solemn festivals have not been known to be honored.”26 Herbert invited Baker and most of the senior officers of the government to dinner aboard the New Tiger. Only Murad was absent, because he couldn’t stand the rough sea. (That’s why he was commander of land forces, presumably.) There were salutes and presents and expressions of mutual admiration, and the articles were once more confirmed, although that didn’t stop Baker smuggling two fugitive slaves aboard in disguise. One was a Swede with a Newcastle wife; the other, a Muscovite named Gabriel, had been hiding in Baker’s house for the past nine months.
Herbert’s arrival was a relief to the consul. “I do verily believe it will have turned the scale on our side,” he wrote in his journal as the New Tiger weighed anchor and sailed away. “A poor barren country, an empty treasury, and a good peace continued with his majesty and the French king, destroys the very foundations of [Tripoli’s] existence.”27
Baker was a familiar figure in Tripoli, in the souks and narrow streets, down by the harbor, around the courtyards and fountains of the Assaray Al-Hamra citadel. In the later seventeenth century, Europeans—those who weren’t renegades, at least—tended to adopt the same dress all over Barbary and the Levant: a broad-brimmed beaver hat, a knee-length black silk suit, perhaps with high red stockings and a red waistcoat; and for winter, a long gray woolen coat. Baker’s journal gives fleeting glimpses of his day-to-day activities. One moment he is firing off an angry note to a raïs called Mustapha Four-Beards who is flying English colors from his bowsprit: “I must have that flag immediately taken down and sent to my house without more ado.” (And it was.)28 Another time he receives word that an English gunner from the Francis and Benjamin has decided to convert to Islam. He immediately sets off for the citadel, where he finds that the man, whose name is William, has already presented himself to the dey, announced his wish to turn Turk, and recited the shahada. Technically that means the consul is too late, but Baker pays no attention to such niceties. He drags William away from the dey, down to the harbor, and aboard his ship, where he is locked up—for his own good, of course—until she sails, three weeks later.
But Baker is tantalizingly reticent about life in Tripoli—with two exceptions. He takes a keen interest in court gossip about the power struggles and falls from grace and regime changes. Deys come and go: Hasan Abaza is packed off to the island of Djerba in June 1683; his replacement lasts for two days before being banished to Crete (Djerba is full, presumably) himself replaced by a Rumelian renegade, Ali al-Jazairi, who lasts for thirteen months before taking the boat to Djerba. The Janissaries strike for their pay: the rear admiral, who is blamed for stirring them up, is abruptly taken off his ship as she’s about to set sail for the Levan
t and put aboard a small boat for Djerba. The daughter of a high-ranking court official, “the finest woman of the town,” is murdered by one of the dey’s officers. The treasurer dies suddenly; Baker assumes he has been poisoned but can’t feel any regret since the man was no friend to the English and was, in any case, “as malicious as ignorant.”29
The other facet of Tripolitan life which fascinates the consul is sex. Any kind of sexual relationship between a Christian man and a Muslim woman was in theory punishable by death (although the sentence was usually commuted to a heavy fine); and fraternizing with the local women was frowned on by both sides. But six years was a long time to stay celibate. Whores plied their trade in the Greek and Jewish quarters by the Arch of Aurelius, and there were those taverns by the marine gate where “all sorts of religion go to play from morning until evening.” Perhaps Baker was made of purer stuff. Perhaps that’s why his thoughts lingered on stories of sexual transgression.
These stories are presented with little in the way of moralizing, even though it is precisely because they are transgressions that Baker gets to hear about them. In the summer of 1683, for instance, the son of a Dutch renegade, “a brisk young fellow of the town” is gang-raped in a tavern by thirty-six Janissaries;30 the consul remarks that the rape was carried out without shame or fear of retribution, but that’s as far as his censure goes. He seems to maintain a bemused detachment, as he does when a Turk is given 500 strokes on his buttocks, “not for having committed the act of sodomy with a boy, but for that, after having so done, he threw him over the town wall, whereby he brake both his legs.”31 That’s it. It is as if Tripolitan homosexual mores can be marveled at, but they are so impossibly alien that it is really none of his business to condemn them.
Pirates of Barbary Page 30
