Baker is more comfortable with heterosexual misbehavior. Sidi Usuph, the strikingly handsome brother of a revered holy man, is caught by the watch at two in the morning coming out of a woman’s house. There is a scuffle and he is killed. “Unlucky accident!” laments the consul. “Thus to disoblige all the fine women of the town, who, besides the reverence they bore for ye holiness of his strain [i.e., his bloodline], were most of them at his devotion, so comely was his personage.”32 And when three Christian slaves are caught outside the walls with three women, he takes a delight in describing how the women are paraded around the town riding backward on asses with sheep’s entrails draped around their necks. One of the men turns Turk to avoid punishment; the other two have to pay fines of 850 dollars (about £200) and receive a bad beating into the bargain.
“Upon my word,” says Baker with a Pepysian flourish. “Twas a dear bout!”33
Baker didn’t concern himself exclusively with the welfare of His Majesty’s subjects, although English strategic interests usually lay at the heart of everything he did. This sometimes led him down some unusual paths. On one occasion, at the request of Hasan Abaza Dey, he provided a Tripolitan raïs with a letter of introduction to Lord Inchiquin at Tangier, requesting the English garrison to offer the corsair protection as he headed out to hunt for shipping in the Atlantic. His justification, that this was “no more than what he may reasonably claim by our capitulations with this government,”34 was technically correct, even though the raïs’s ship, a recently captured Genoese prize, was to be fitted out at Algiers, with whom England was currently at war. No doubt the prospect of the raïs harassing French shipping when he reached the Atlantic also played a part in the consul’s thinking.
It was a difficult job, as the Giaume Ballester affair and its aftermath showed. Ballester was a Majorcan captain who was taken with his ship in the Gulf of Venice and brought back in chains to Tripoli. Initial efforts to arrange his release foundered on the fact that the dey, convinced that Ballester had wealthy connections at home, set his ransom at an exorbitant 7,000 dollars, or around £1,650. His friends arranged to exchange him for a well-known Tripolitan being held at Naples, but this came to nothing when the Majorcan entrusted with the negotiations suddenly decided to convert to Islam and join the Tripolitan fleet. Baker was particularly appalled at the man’s behavior because he had been a guest in his house, and had actually gone from there to the citadel, “where he most infamously renounced his baptism and turned Turk.”35
In May 1684, two and a half years after his capture, Ballester was redeemed for just 2,000 dollars (£470)—still a lot, but a lot less than 7,000 dollars. The man who redeemed him was Thomas Baker, who received an order for 800 dollars from Ballester’s friends and trusted the Majorcan’s assurances that the rest would be repaid as soon as he was safe home. A redemption certificate was issued, and Ballester was released into Baker’s custody while he waited for a ship to take him back to Majorca.
Four weeks later he was rearrested and thrown into one of the city’s three bagnios.
Baker stormed up to the citadel to demand an explanation. He found the dey, Ali al-Jazairi, uncharacteristically calm and reasonable—but adamant. The captains had told him the Majorcan was worth twenty times more than 2,000 dollars, and they were so powerful, claimed Ali al-Jazairi, that he couldn’t contradict them.
The consul went back to his house fuming, convinced that the dey’s days were numbered. He was right. Before the week was out Ali al-Jazairi was on his way to Djerba, and a new ruler, Hajj Abdallah al-Izmirli, had taken up residence in the Assaray Al-Hamra citadel. Baker gave him four days to settle in and then renewed his assault. At a meeting of the full diwan he demanded absolutely that Ballester be given up. Not unless he came up with another 3,000 dollars, they said.
By his own account, this flagrant disregard for what was right goaded him into a bravura piece of brinkmanship. In front of the entire diwan he declared that this affront was done not to him but to the king of England. That three English warships were at that very moment on their way to Tripoli from Livorno. And that the moment they arrived he was going to declare war.
He was bluffing, but it worked. The diwan backed down and Ballester was immediately produced and taken to the consul’s house. “And so, with a present the dey made me of a pleasant young bear ended this troublesome business.”36
If only life were that simple. A couple of days later an English merchantman, the Unity, put in from Livorno with a cargo of French wine, and Baker asked its master, William Ferne, to take Ballester back to Livorno. The Unity left Tripoli with the redeemed captive aboard on July 16, 1684. Ten weeks later Captain Ferne was back, and he had two pieces of bad news. The first was that Ballester had died of a fever five days after arriving at Livorno. Including expenses, passage money, and various gratuities, the consul had paid out 1,320 dollars of his own money on the Majorcan’s redemption; the prospect of getting his money back also died in Livorno. “A good help to a poor Tripoli consul!” wailed Baker.37
However, Ferne’s second piece of news was potentially even more serious. The captain picked up a handful of passengers for the return voyage to Tripoli, and among them was a prominent Tripolitan who had just been redeemed out of slavery at Livorno. Off the island of Pantelleria in the Strait of Sicily the Unity was overtaken by a Genoese pirate, Giovanni Maria Caratini. Ferne was carrying an English pass; the liberated Turk was carrying a certificate of redemption. Neither of these facts cut any ice with Caratini, who seems to have decided his international status—the Genoese was sailing under Spanish colors in a Dutch man-of-war and holding Sicilian letters of marque—entitled him to disregard legal niceties. He took the Unity’s cargo, which was worth more than ten thousand dollars. He took four Jews who were traveling to Tripoli. And he took the Turk.
This was a disaster. There were echoes of the business with the Goodwill back in 1651, when Stephen Mitchell allowed the Knights of Malta to board his vessel and take thirty-two Tunisians: that incident had led to riots, reprisals, and war. And the timing couldn’t have been worse. The Dutch were concluding their own articles of peace with Tripoli, and the French were pushing hard for the dey to accept theirs. (That summer the Unity had brought news of a massive French mortar attack on Genoa which pounded the city into unqualified submission, and Tripoli was bracing itself for a visit from Duquesne and his bomb-ketches.) Baker was convinced the Tripolitans were looking for an excuse to break the peace with England, and, as he reported to the English government, unless the navy moved swiftly to free the Turk and punish Caratini, “they will be the more easily invited to take strangers’ goods and passengers out of our numerous unguarded shipping in these seas.”38
Baker was tired. The climate at Tripoli had taken its toll on him, and he suffered from gout—“a most disingenuous unkind mistake!”—and other unspecified chronic illnesses.39 It was time to go home. He had asked to be recalled in the spring of 1683, and now in a coda to his report he repeated the request, “which once more I presume languishingly to remind you of.”40 But before his letter reached England a French bark came into harbor at Tripoli with word that Caratini had panicked and destroyed the evidence, throwing the Turk and the four Jews overboard. Shortly afterward he was himself captured by the Venetians, who put him and his crew to work in their galleys. This gave some satisfaction to the Livornese merchants who had lost their cargo, but not to the Tripolitans, who believed Caratini was being punished for his piracy rather than for killing the Turk; nor to the man’s widow and children, “whose continual outcries and tears will neither be quicked nor dried up, unless the person of the pirate be rendered here.”41
If the consul was hoping for swift and decisive action, he was destined to be disappointed. When a response finally arrived in May 1685 (from the pen of Samuel Pepys, reappointed as secretary to the Admiralty after his return from Tangier), it was noncommittal. The matter was in the hands of the king’s secretaries of state, and there it must rest, although Pepys di
d add that if it were up to him, something would certainly be done to give the Tripoli government satisfaction for the murder of her subjects.
It wasn’t up to him, and as far as I can find out, nothing ever was done. The peace with England held, however, even after the expected bombardment by French mortars—which took place over three days that June—persuaded the dey and the diwan to conclude a treaty with Louis XIV.
Baker left no account of the French assault. That is because Pepys’s letter ended with the welcome news that James II was recalling the consul to London; he could go home as soon as his replacement arrived. When that was, we don’t know—only that on October 23, 1685, he “returned into the King’s presence and kissed his hand.”42 But the letter from Pepys, carefully copied into his journal, is the very last entry, as though with his recall the urge to keep a record “of whatsoever occurrences shall happen or be noteworthy” came to an abrupt end.
Thomas Baker was a good consul. He served his country more conscientiously than many public officials, and with less regard for his own pocket than most. If he was a man of his own time with all the prejudices that entailed—he called Islam, for instance, “that accursed superstition,” and the French, his bitter enemies, the “scum of the earth”—at least he was able to establish good relationships with individual Tripolitans, based on shared interests and mutual trust.43 He was sorry when the treasurer of Tripoli was dismissed and banished to Crete, because he had been a “constant friend” not only to English interests but also to Baker himself. (He put the blame for the treasurer’s downfall on the man’s interfering wife: “Women hold an empire even amongst these barbarous nations, as well as in England.”44) He regarded the captain of the port, who was sacked a few months later, as “my truly cordial friend.”45
One gets the impression that for all his grumbling Baker rather liked North Africa and North Africans, an impression confirmed perhaps by the fact that he went back. He was appointed consul to Algiers in 1691, and when he left the post, in 1694, he went on to Tripoli to renew the articles of peace before coming home for the last time—in a vessel provided by the dey of Algiers, who wrote that “since his coming [he] has gained the love of all our people.”46 The government reimbursed him £1,389 0s. 6¼d. for the redemption of captives in Algiers, Salé, and elsewhere in Barbary during this second stint as consul, and he was able to end his time there with a remarkable declaration—that there were no longer any subjects of the crown taken under English colors in slavery anywhere in Algiers, Tunis, or Tripoli.47
SIXTEEN
The Last Corsair: Colonialism, Conquest, and the End of the Barbary Pirates
On the morning of Saturday, June 17, 1815, a lookout on the U.S.S. Constellation spotted a frigate sailing alone twenty miles off the Spanish coast at Cabo de Gata. She was flying the Union Jack, but the captain of the Constellation, Charles Gordon, suspected she was really an Algerian corsair sailing under false colors. He ordered his crew to break out the flags signaling “Enemy to the South-east” to his commander in the U.S.S. Guerriere, Commodore Stephen Decatur, and the entire American squadron of eight ships turned in pursuit.
The strange frigate held her course. But she was poised for flight, and when an overenthusiastic Captain Gordon raised the Stars and Stripes, the ship took alarm and “was immediately in a cloud of canvas,” in the words of a young midshipman who was watching from the deck of the Guerriere.1 As the Americans gained on her, she altered course and doubled back, amazing them with her seamanship—and with the marksmanship of her snipers, who picked off several sailors from vantage points in the rigging. But she was outnumbered, outgunned, and eventually outmaneuvered. The Constellation came within range and opened fire; then the Guerriere did the same. In less than half an hour she surrendered.
The American prize crew that boarded the crippled frigate took 406 prisoners, many of them wounded. They were sitting quietly on the cabin floor belowdecks, “smoking their long pipes with their accustomed gravity.” 2 About thirty had been killed, including the frigate’s commander, and only then did the Americans realize what they had done. That commander was none other than the legendary Hamidou Raïs, the most distinguished fighter in the Algerian fleet. For years Hamidou had been celebrated all over Barbary as the master of the seas, the champion of the holy war against the infidel. Now he was dead.
The Americans had killed the last of the great corsairs.
In the 130 years which had passed since the treaties of the 1680s, relations between the European powers and the Barbary states had achieved an uneasy equilibrium, in which piracy played an increasingly insignificant role. Britain, France, and Holland, followed by the Danes, the Swedes, and the Venetians, discovered that if the agreement and renewal of articles of peace were accompanied by the giving of presents and hefty cash payments, the corsairs would be more punctilious in their observance of those articles. The sums involved varied, but they were substantial. In the 1780s, Great Britain was paying Algiers around £1,000 a year to maintain the peace, roughly equivalent to £1.2 million today. The Dutch paid about £24,000 and the Spanish a colossal £120,000.
Algiers commanded the biggest bribes, since it still presented the biggest threat to European merchant shipping, but the other states also needed to be paid off. Spain, Austria, Venice, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark all gave large sums to the bey of Tunis. Venice handed over 3,500 ducats a year to Tripoli; Sweden gave 20,000 dollars. An English colonel living in Morocco in the 1780s reported that the sultan had announced his intention to declare war on the Dutch “if their embassy (that is, their presents) does not soon appear. . . . It is a tribute,” admitted the Englishman, “and we are all tributary to him.”3
There were good reasons why the European powers tolerated this rather distasteful system of paying for licenses to trade. It was easier and cheaper than launching punitive expeditions, convoying merchantmen to and from the Levant, and maintaining expensive squadrons on permanent station. And, even less creditably, it ensured that the Barbary corsairs directed their attention toward poorer commercial competitors who couldn’t afford to pay them off. Most telling of all, if one state were to break out from beneath what an American diplomat eloquently described as “the dark cloud of shame which covers the great powers of Europe in their tame submission to the piracies of those unprincipled barbarians,”4 it would immediately place itself at a disadvantage in relation to its rivals.
An act of rebellion on the other side of the Atlantic led, indirectly, to the collapse of this tribute system. When the American colonies declared independence in 1776, Great Britain withdrew the safe-conduct passes which its merchant vessels carried throughout the Mediterranean. New passes were issued—but, understandably in the circumstances, the errant colonists were deleted from the mailing list.
This was a major blow for America. Between eighty and a hundred ships from the thirteen colonies traded in the Mediterranean, exporting wheat, flour, dried fish, timber, and other commodities, and bringing back wine, salt, oil, and Moroccan leather. In one year alone, 1770, the total value of American produce exported to southern Europe and North Africa was £707,000. And every one of the ships carrying this trade relied on being able to show British Admiralty passes if they were intercepted by corsairs.
After the American War of Independence was over, the Continental Congress did its best to obtain protection in the Mediterranean from other friendly states—first from France, and then from Holland. Both were polite; neither was prepared to help. In desperation, the Congress even asked Britain if she might help to negotiate with the Barbary states on its former colony’s behalf. Britain declined.
The United States was left with no alternative but to embark on its own negotiations. In 1786, John Adams, then the U.S. minister to the Court of St. James, held a series of meetings with Abdurrahman, the Tripolitan ambassador in London, who told him a perpetual peace between their two nations was perfectly possible. It would cost a mere 30,000 guineas, and he let it be known he expected the Ameri
cans to pay him a commission of £3,000 for arranging it. (The conversation, said Adams, was carried on “in a strange mixture of Italian, Lingua Franca, broken French, and worse English.”5) Abdurrahman went home without his commission, and John Adams went home without his treaty.
In 1794 the United States government set aside $800,000, partly as ransom for a hundred slaves who had been captured by Algerian corsairs since America had lost the protection of Britain in the Mediterranean, and partly as tribute to the dey and his officials in return for agreeing to a peace treaty. Joseph Donaldson, the Philadelphian sent to Algiers to negotiate with the dey, was not an obvious choice for a delicate diplomatic mission. A middle-aged, sour, and rather surly man, his gout was so bad when he arrived in Algiers in September 1795 that he needed a crutch to walk and had to wear a huge velvet slipper on his afflicted foot. Nor was his temper improved by his being made to limp unaided all the way from the harbor to his lodgings, or by the curious crowd which followed him every step of the way, or by the fact that when he finally reached his house he had to climb a long flight of marble steps to reach his apartment. When he got there he collapsed on a couch, threw off his hat, and swore so long and so loudly that one of the Algerians asked in amazement what was happening? What was the infidel saying? “The ambassador is only saying his prayers and giving God thanks for his safe arrival,” he was told. “His devotion is very fervent,” replied the Algerian.6
In spite of this inauspicious start, Donaldson’s negotiations were a success, but it was a hard battle. The dey began by demanding $2,247,000 in cash, plus a pair of thirty-six-gun frigates, an annual donation of naval stores, and “presents” every two years. Donaldson countered with an offer of $543,000; the dey said he would accept $982,000. They finally agreed on a price of $585,000, plus an annuity of naval stores and biennial gifts. It wasn’t much, said the dey, but he agreed “more to pique the British who are your inveterate enemies and are on very bad terms with me, than in consideration of the sum, which I esteem no more than a pinch of snuff.”7
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