by Des Ekin
Pasha Hussein was a remarkable survivor in a troubled age. He was currently enjoying his fourth three-year stint as ruler of Algiers – an extraordinary achievement in an era when rulers tended to be deposed or strangled at short notice – and had long since adjusted to the realities of his unusual situation. He enjoyed all the riches and respect due to a man who represented the mighty and powerful ‘Sublime Porte’, the Court of the Sultanate in Constantinople. But there – as Hussein well knew – the illusion ended. The city was not ruled by faraway Constantinople: it was ruled by the Janissary troops who protected it by land and the corsairs who protected it by sea.
This dated back to 1516 when, just as the Turks were about to lose Algiers to the Spanish, the desperate inhabitants called for help from the notorious Muslim corsair Khayr-al-Din Barbarossa. His pirates swooped in and saved the city for the grateful Sultan, who made him governor and sent out reinforcements of crack Janissary musketeers to act as a permanent garrison.
With each passing decade, the Janissary militia grew more powerful and more independent. It had its own ruling body known as The Hearth Of The Household (ocak) and a ruling council called the Divan. Together with the corsairs, who formed a de facto navy, they held the real power in a city that prospered on piracy.
Throughout the ensuing decades, the governors sent out from Constantinople were increasingly controlled by the Janissaries. From 1616 onwards, the Pasha was actually selected by the militia and only afterwards approved by the Sultan.
The Taifa Rais or captains’ guild was a mirror image of the soldiers’ council, the Divan. For the past ten years the head of this council had been a fabulously wealthy renegade from Venice.
Ali Bichnin’s name was a translation of his Venetian surname, Piccino or Picenino. Like Morat himself, Ali was a genuine convert to the Faith. His successes at the corso – the trade of piracy – had provided Bichnin with two sumptuous palaces in town and a villa in the country. He owned at least sixty-five ships and his personal army of slaves numbered several thousand. Foreign delegates quickly realised that, if there were any single leader in Algiers in those confused days, it was Ali Bichnin.
As Ali watched Morat sail away, we can only speculate how much he knew about the true nature of this mission … how much anyone knew.
Was this just another routine trip? Or was there another agenda – a secret one, perhaps known only to Morat Rais himself?
Most voyages of this type were vague, opportunistic affairs. But this one may have been different. It may have been targeted against one particular country … perhaps even at one specific village.
Whatever the truth, we know that Morat’s motives were complex. The pirate captain harboured a guilty secret which was bound to have influenced him on this voyage.
To find out what it was, we have to go back five years to another strife-torn country, and meet an English undercover agent who was about to have the most extraordinary date with destiny.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Spark And The Powderkeg
Morocco, 1626
FIVE years before these events took place, a bedraggled and bare-legged figure dragged himself wearily across the hills near Fez, his face burning and sweltering under the blast-furnace heat of the North African sun. He wore a tattered Arab robe, and at first glance could have passed for any poor pilgrim returning from Mecca. But despite his fatigue, his eyes were wary and mistrustful, alert to the constant threat of danger.
The pilgrim’s name was John Harrison, and in fact he was an English agent, working undercover on a mission of the utmost delicacy and secrecy. England was at war with Spain, and Harrison was trekking across Morocco in a daring bid to acquire a toehold of English territory at a strategic point on the Atlantic coast.
The time was ripe. Morocco was in upheaval, with no universally recognised ruler. Harrison had his eye on one particular target: the city of Sallee, beside the present-day capital of Rabat. What made Sallee so tantalising was that it wasn’t ruled by any government – at least, none in the conventional sense. Almost uniquely for the time, it was a democratic republic, financed by robbery and enslavement. Sallee was run by pirates.
This statelet was known grandly as The Republic Of Bou Regreg. Within its boundaries, a motley assortment of northern European renegades and international pirates operated in uneasy alliance with the Hornacheros and Andalusians, two groups of Moroccan exiles who’d been forcibly expelled from their homelands in southern Spain. Sallee was, according to one European observer:
‘… an habitation for villains, a den for thieves, a receptacle for pirates, a rendezvous for renegadoes … and a miserable doleful dungeon for poor captive Christians.’
So when Harrison received a tip-off that some elements within Sallee wanted to pledge their loyalty to England, it was too tempting a prospect to resist.
‘So to do Your Majesty’s service,’ he reported later, ‘I undertook a most desperate journey by land from Tetuan to Sallee in a disguised Moorish habit.’
Harrison would have made a prime catch for the Spaniards, who’d offered a thousand ducats – a huge sum – to anyone who captured him. He’d served as English Sheriff in Bermuda before being appointed special envoy to Barbary. A former groom to Prince Henry (King Charles’s late brother), he had close contact with the Royals and ready access to the King himself.
With the aid of two friendly sheikhs, the agent finally made it to Sallee. The exiled Moors welcomed him with open arms and introduced him to the pirates who held the real power.
At that stage, Sallee was ruled by a fourteen-strong council headed by an elected official who held the dual role of pirate admiral and president of the republic.
And so it came about that John Harrison, English agent, sat down to negotiate a pact with Morat Rais, the corsair chieftain of Sallee and the future destroyer of Baltimore.
Unlikely as it seems, the two men appear to have hit it off. They’d both been born in Northern Europe and raised as Protestants, but otherwise they were poles apart. Harrison loathed slavery on religious grounds and worked tirelessly to free as many slaves as he could. Between 1625 and 1630, no less than 260 captives were to be released from Barbary through his efforts.
Morat Rais, on the other hand, was burning with the zeal of the convert. Years beforehand, he had dropped the Christianity of his childhood and wholeheartedly embraced the religion of Islam. He had become a sword of the jihad, the holy war, but he was much more than just a foot soldier in this never-ending cold war. Morat Rais was a tactical mastermind, a man who had reached new heights of evil inventiveness in a bid to bring the war to the very doorsteps of the enemies of his new faith. He was part of a new generation of corsairs who were ready to sail far out into the wild Atlantic, to England, to Newfoundland, and even to the icebound fastnesses of northern Scandinavia, to spread panic and terror among the infidel.
The two men would have despised each other in principle, but, curiously, they were bound by a mutual respect.
They were to meet on many occasions over the next four years. We can picture these two charismatic figures talking long into the night in some warm Moroccan courtyard, their voices occasionally raised against the trickle of a water fountain and the chirping of the cicadas as they sip sherbet and perhaps share a water-pipe. Morat Rais is probably ‘seated in great pomp on a carpet, with silk cushions, the servants all around him’ (as he’s described on a later occasion).
We have no record of Morat’s appearance, but we know he would have been in his late fifties, his hair possibly turning grey, his northern skin tanned to leather by a life spent at sea. He would have been wearing the standard attire of a prosperous merchant – a silk shirt under an embroidered waistcoat, baggy pants and iron-soled slippers.
We’ll 4never know the details of their conversation, but one thing is clear. By the time their negotiations ended, Harrison had been totally won over.
Reporting to King Charles, he described Morat as ‘a Dutch renegado, but a great friend
to our nation.’
They were words that would later come back to haunt him.
The man who was to become Morat Rais was born in the Dutch city of Haarlem some time around 1570. His previous name was plain Jan Jansen. History records it in various versions – Jan Jansz, Jan Janse, Jan Janszoon – and, even more confusingly, he had a range of aliases including John Barber and Captain John.
Jan began his career legitimately as a privateer in the Dutch War of Liberation. He proved so expert at this trade that he began seeking out new opportunities on the Barbary Coast. Here, he was delighted to find a war that would never end and a privateering permit that would never expire. The three Barbary states of Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers formed the western front of the Islamic empire, and the triangular city of Algiers, where he was to settle for the next five or six years, was described as a bow pointed at the heart of Christendom.
Exactly how he got there is unclear. Morat himself maintained that the Spanish were holding him prisoner in Lanzarote when the Algerines captured the island and enslaved him. Another contemporary source has a slightly different take: it claims Morat had been ‘a merchant in Lanzarote and was there made a slave by the Algiers men that took the island … soon after his captivity, by renouncing his faith, he obtained freedom.’
The date of his capture is estimated at around 1613; other sources put it at 1618. Whatever the date, plain Jan Jansen was reinvented as Morat Rais – the word ‘rais’ meaning captain. The same name appears in various versions – Murad Reis, Matthias Rais, Morato Arraez, Morat Ariaz, and Matthew Rice.
Up until the arrival of Jansen and other expert Northern European seamen, the Barbary pirates had specialised in lightning raids in xebecs – open galleys rowed by slaves. Morat and his generation introduced larger sailing vessels capable of taking on the open Atlantic. Suddenly, the Barbary hunting grounds had expanded to embrace the entire known world.
Morat spent some time in Algiers as first mate to another renegado corsair, Suleiman Rais – an excellent teacher. When Suleiman died in 1619, Morat moved westward to Sallee, where his career really began to take off.
‘In a short time, [Morat] grew in great esteem among them by the many prizes he took, that in time they made him Admiral of their fleet,’ says the same contemporary source, ‘which charge he held a long time, to their enriching and to the great detriment of Christian merchants.’
We’re told that Moulay Ziden, the emperor of Morocco, ‘honoured him with one of his women in marriage’. Some sources say she was actually the Emperor’s daughter. It didn’t seem to bother Morat Rais that his alter ego, Jan Jansen, already had a wife and children back home in Haarlem.
In fact, there were at least three women in Morat’s life. The most significant, from a historical point of view, was the lover he never married – a Moorish concubine he’d taken at some stage in the early 1600s. Her name in Dutch was Margrietje, and she gave Morat two fine sons of mixed race. Both Anthony, who was born in 1607, and Abraham, born in 1608, were to emigrate to America, where Anthony Jansen Van Salee went on to become one of the most prominent and controversial citizens of Manhattan and the unlikely patriarch of some of America’s most blue-blooded families.
In the strangely advanced society of Sallee, where the most able leaders were chosen by democratic vote, the charismatic Morat Rais rose rapidly to the top. He also became very rich. As admiral, he received a cut of all the profits of the harbour.
Yet he seems to have been a man who bored easily. He refused to give up the pirate life, even though he no longer had any need to do the dirty work personally. In 1622, he travelled north in search of booty and sailed audaciously into the Dutch port of Veere. The Dutch authorities were furious – after all, Morat had spent the past five years raiding their ships. But the United Provinces had just signed a treaty with Morocco, and nobody could risk endangering it.
As Morat cheekily loaded up with provisions from the same merchants he’d been terrorising, a rather pathetic incident took place. His Dutch wife came on board with all her children and begged her runaway husband to come back home. What she thought of her Jan in all his Moroccan finery has never been recorded; nor whether the corsair ever came clean and admitted that he had two other women in Africa. But her tears were wasted, and the poor woman was left to lead her fatherless brood back to their bleak home in Haarlem, as the pirate admiral sailed back to his new home in the sun.
Harrison quickly wrapped up his negotiations with the Spanish Moors. The situation was simple – he wanted the English slaves, and they wanted English guns. It was time to sail back to London with the good news.
There was only one ship available in Sallee, a small and leaky Flemish man o’war. Harrison had her victualled for five months and set off.
The seas around Morocco were infested with enemy ships. But Harrison was not entirely alone. His escort through these troubled waters was to be Morat Rais himself, commanding three warships ‘to waft me off the coast for fear of Spaniards.’
But, disastrously, he lost Morat’s escort in the darkness. Then, about a week later, alone and unprotected, he ran into three aggressive Spanish vessels.
The Spaniards fired a volley of shots, but Harrison’s leaky tub proved surprisingly fast. ‘We trusted to our sails,’ he said, ‘and after they had shot at us, gave us chase, but we were to windward and sailed better.’
The agent was literally running for his life. But suddenly, the incredible happened. The Spaniards turned tail and fled. Harrison, bewildered, sent a lookout to the top of the mainmast and found out why – there were five mysterious ships on the horizon sailing to his rescue.
His benefactor was none other than Morat Rais. The pirate admiral had seized two ships from Hamburg, and their captured crews – including a handful of English sailors – were on their way back to Sallee.
Morat produced the five miserable Englishmen and delivered a goodwill gesture that was to leave a deep and lasting impression on Harrison.
‘He released [them] and gave [them] freely to me,’ Harrison reported warmly, ‘as he hath ever done Englishmen, never doing hurt to any, but good to many.’
Back in England, Harrison’s mission was recognised as a huge success. King Charles himself wrote to Sallee praising Harrison’s work and adding: ‘Out of respect to us, you have set at liberty many of our subjects, for which we give you thanks.’
Throughout all this, Harrison seems to have deliberately closed his mind to the less desirable activities of his new friend Morat. He saw only Morat the charmer, the diplomat and the Anglophile. And indeed, the shrewd Dutchman had a silken tongue and the ability to be all things to all men. Cultured and intelligent, he had been responsible for negotiating a delicate treaty which gave France favoured status in Sallee. At around the same time, he wrote letters to Holland promising ‘to respect and honour my fatherland as long as I draw breath’. And when he professed to Harrison his undying love for England, he was no doubt continuing this diplomatic chameleon act.
In 1630, Morat saved Harrison’s life a second time. The English agent’s ship was in the harbour at Sallee when a hijacked Spanish warship manned by drunken mutineers sailed right into port and opened fire, killing one of his officers. Harrison fled for the protection of the castle, and the Sallee guns roared back at the invaders.
At that stage Morat Rais appeared on the scene. In an impressive display of courage, he went straight on board the maverick ship and used all his powers of diplomacy to persuade the mutineers to stop shooting.
‘In this fight, our master’s mate was slain, his head shot off,’ Harrison recorded pragmatically. ‘No other hurt done.’
It was later that same year – 1630 – that Morat Rais dropped his bombshell: an astonishing proposal to Harrison that was to change the situation completely.
Morocco was on tenterhooks. The atmosphere was tense; people were jumpy and nervous. Around that time, reported Harrison, ‘a strange prognostication’ took place. An unfamiliar dog, pure white in
colour, appeared on the streets of Sallee. The animal was savage, biting several locals on their legs, but for some reason it fawned on the English. Many of the Moors interpreted this as a sign that they should turn away from their Islamic faith. It was in this highly-charged atmosphere that Morat Rais took Harrison aside and made an offer calculated to make the agent’s jaw drop with surprise.
The pirate admiral of Sallee, the hero of the jihad, wanted to defect.
—I want you to procure me leave from His Majesty to come and live in England, he told Harrison.
—When?
—I am prepared to go at the first opportunity, Morat said. At least, as soon as I can set out to sea again and capture a good prize from the Spanish or Portuguese.
The corsair admiral must have read Harrison’s thoughts.
—I am still a Christian at heart, Morat whispered to the astonished agent. In my younger years of infirmity, I was forced to convert at Algiers. First I was taken prisoner by the Spanish at Lanzarote. Then, when the Turks took the island, I was made their slave. Afterwards, I was compelled to turn to their religion.
Just in case Harrison was in any doubt, he pledged solemnly: ‘I would adventure my life to His Majesty’s service.’
It is possible that Morat was lying – but by no means certain. Several leading corsairs had sought amnesties from Christian nations. Morat would have been familiar with the case of Henry Mainwaring, an English corsair who had organised a pardon and then enjoyed a comfortable career as an anti-piratical consultant.
The agent, for his part, would have been delighted with this offer. Solemn promises would have been made, commitments entered into. It would have been taken for granted that a man of Morat’s stature could not live in England without some sort of suitable position or reward. There was even provision for this sort of event. A previous Lord Deputy of Ireland had recently tried to entice Dutch corsairs to defect and form an elite coastguard fleet.
