The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  The Janissaries were famous for their ability to do nothing, quite cheerfully, for long periods. European visitors to Algiers were amazed at their ability to sit still for hours on end, calmly smoking a pipe and meditating. In many cases the captains also adopted this laid-back attitude. If Morat Rais was anything like Pananti’s rais, he was quite happy to sit for three or four hours, cross-legged on a mat on deck, occasionally barking out orders but mostly content to smoke or smooth his moustachios.

  At night, there might even be entertainment. Pananti reported that the corsair crew treated the captives to a display of songs and dances and then called on the prisoners to sing their own folksongs. Surprisingly enough, many of the slaves obliged.

  On a calm evening, this heady mix of western and eastern music would ring out from the open deck and drift up towards the stars.

  Perhaps Morat Rais would invite some of the men from Baltimore to join him in his great cabin. This was usually a pleasant and airy chamber placed high on the poop deck and furnished with fine silk cushions and rugs. Barbary captains were often cultured gentlemen and they enjoyed good conversation.

  Pananti and a few other favoured captives were regularly invited to the great cabin by their rais. He would serve them coffee and rum (which, the Italian noted cynically, had been stolen from his ship in the first place).

  The Irish-born captive James Cathcart recalled how his rais, ‘a really good man’, served him coffee in his cabin and dispensed some philosophical advice.

  ‘Christians, be consoled,’ the captain would say. ‘This world is full of vicissitudes. You shall be well used. I have been a slave myself, and will treat you much better than I have been treated; take some bread and honey and a dish of coffee, and God will redeem you from captivity as he has done me twice.’

  This is not to imply that the Baltimore captives were having an easy time. The sickness and the squalor remained, along with the rats and the fleas in the miserable cable lockers.

  Yet there is plenty of reliable evidence to show that there were tolerable moments amid the horror.

  The accounts of Barbary captivity are full of cases in which captives found themselves mellowing towards their captors. Against all the odds, firm friendships could be established.

  To his own surprise, even the irascible Filippo Pananti began to adjust to life with the corsairs. ‘It is true our diet was not of the finest quality; but hunger, the best of all sauces, made us eat; and though our bed was not of down, yet habit enabled us to sleep,’ he wrote. ‘Our case was not quite so hopeless as we at first imagined.’

  He became friendly with the ship’s purser and the Janissary captain, both refined and civilised men. And even the rais eventually earned Pananti’s approval: although he was swarthy and fierce looking, he was ‘valorous and intelligent’.

  ‘[H]is manners,’ the poet admitted grudgingly, ‘were by no means repulsive.’

  James Cathcart said he too began to forge friendships. ‘[S]ome Turks who were more charitable than the rest … gave us some onions, oranges, raisins and figs from their own private stores,’ he recalled.

  ‘I likewise received relief several times for standing at the helm for the sailors and actually learned to smoke by the kindness of the ship’s steward, who gave me a pipe and tobacco.’

  And John Foss, who had been left almost naked by his captors, was bowled over by a single unexpected act of compassion. ‘[A]n old Turk, with an air of kindness, gave me an old shirt without sleeves,’ he wrote. ‘It was soothing to find a spark of humanity in my barbarous masters.’

  Such experiences can trigger off dramatic changes in the human subconscious. Gradually, without realising it, prisoners and hostages can shift towards a position in which they identify more with their captors than with their own countryfolk.

  There is a healthy psychological basis for this process of ‘survival identification’ among captives. It is a syndrome that has always existed – but it has only recently been given a name.

  At 10.15 in the morning of 23 August 1973, a burst of automatic gunfire shattered the silence of the business quarter of Stockholm.

  At that moment, an escaped convict named Jan-Erik Olsson blasted his way into the Sveriges Kreditbank. Police surrounded the building and for the next 131 hours, he kept four bank employees at gunpoint in a tiny bank vault. As the siege dragged on, the hostages began to side with Olsson. They claimed that the gunman was actually protecting them from the uncaring authorities outside. Surprisingly, their attitude persisted even after the threat had passed. They held no grudge against Olsson, but more than that – they were actually grateful to the convict for ‘giving them back their lives’. By this they meant that he had withheld his power to kill them.

  As psychologists began to study the phenomenon, they worked out a theoretical explanation. Under the threat of death, the hostages had unconsciously adopted another identity, a pseudo-personality which is sympathetic to the captor and makes it harder for him to harm his victim. For this technique to work, the feelings must not be false or forced, but genuine and heartfelt. This is much deeper than superficial dissembling – it is an age-old coping mechanism with roots deep in the psychology of human evolution.

  Other cases were recognised and diagnosed. The most famous was Patty Hearst, the American heiress who joined the terrorists who had abducted her. And during the seizure of a Dutch train in 1975, some of the hostages developed bonds of sympathy with the guerrillas who’d captured them.

  Three vital elements are needed for this process to work. First, the hostage must consciously develop positive feelings for the captor, usually after some small act of kindness. In some cases, it is sufficient that the abductors choose not to use their power to kill.

  Secondly, the captor must reciprocate these positive feelings.

  And thirdly, the prisoners must develop negative feelings towards their own authorities – for example, if they feel that their government has betrayed or forgotten them.

  No-one is certain about the deep forces that drive this syndrome. One expert saw it as sexual, part of the same process that attracts some women towards obvious scoundrels. Another has seen it as a return to babyhood, with the helpless captive regressing to an infantile state in which the captor represents the all-powerful parent.

  Did the Baltimore hostages experience any of these symptoms? We simply don’t know. What we do know is that all the elements identified by modern psychologists were in place: an abduction by force; a lengthy confinement with the abductors; captors who turn out to be less brutal than expected; and a feeling that the uncaring authorities at home have let them down.

  The subtle shifts that began on board the ship might go a long way to explaining the surprising events that were to unfold more than fifteen years later, when the question might legitimately be asked: was Baltimore an early seventeenth-century example of the Stockholm Syndrome?

  As Morat’s ships reached Gibraltar and changed course towards the rising sun, the twin coasts of Africa and Europe loomed out of the haze and narrowed to a gap a mere twenty-seven miles wide. On the right, the world of Islam; on the left, the world of Christendom, so close that Ryder and the other captives must have felt they could almost swim to safety. Morat’s men tensed and the captives held their breath, both sides knowing that the Straits were regularly patrolled by Spanish gunships and that this represented their last, desperate hope of rescue.

  Back home in Baltimore, the relatives of the captives shared this forlorn hope. In such cases, wishful thinking can rapidly translate into rumour. At around this time, Captain Hooke of The Fifth Whelp actually reported to London that the Spanish had indeed rescued all 107 captives.

  ‘No pirate has been here since the two Turks,’ he wrote, ‘and I hear they were captured by Spaniards off the coast of Spain. I hope it is true.’

  Hooke would have loved it to be true, but unfortunately it wasn’t. We can only imagine how the false report must have lifted the Baltimore relatives to the heights
of joy only to plunge them, later, into even deeper gloom.

  A contemporary naval officer, one Captain Plumleigh, summed up their despair. ‘I never saw people in whom one disaster had settled so deep an impression,’ he wrote, ‘as the Turks’ last descent has done in these Irish.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Diamond City

  By now, it is late July. Morat’s two ships hug the sunbaked Mediterranean coast of Africa, passing bays where the turquoise water reflects cobalt under the wings of wheeling seagulls. The waters are busy with exotic shipping: polacres, tartanes, and xebec galleys with banks of slaves straining at the oars.

  As they enter the territory of Algiers, the mounting excitement among the crewmen is matched only by the sense of dread and apprehension among their captives.

  The approach to the city of Algiers by sea is so dramatic it might almost have been stage managed. A headland withdraws, almost like a curtain, to reveal a beautiful horseshoe-shaped bay; and then, suddenly, a blast of blinding white that assumes the shape of a huge triangle affixed to the green backdrop of the Sahel Hills. Perhaps someone on board makes the usual romantic comparison to a diamond in an emerald frame. As Joane’s eyes adjust to the glare, the white triangle defines itself as an ancient city, stretching all the way from the water’s edge right up to the hilltop.

  Working before the mast, John Ryder, Tom Paine and the Gunter boys watch in sheer awe as the features of the city begin to unfold: the flat-roofed buildings, the squat forts and octagonal minarets, the aqueducts and mosques. The searing white is broken only by terracotta roofs, a red tower, and dusty shade trees.

  To the left of the city, they can see a hill with a flattish top, crowned by a fortress with a fluttering flag. To the right lies another hill with a more defined crest. Between the two summits, the city flows like a white hot stream of lava down to the shoreline.

  At the top, four hundred feet up, lies the 115-year-old citadel of the Kasbah, forming the apex of the triangle of Algiers. The waterfront forms the base, and all three sides are defined by formidable stone walls. Along the shoreline, the white marble columns of the principal mosque, the Jamaa-el-Kebir, proudly proclaim the city’s religious affiliation to the world.

  To the right of the waterfront lies the harbour, built in the shelter of the long mole that Barbarossa threw up between the mainland and the the main island. A small forest of masts thrusts skyward, representing just some of the navy of fourscore ships based at Algiers. Protecting this fleet is the latest addition to the Algerines’ ring of fortresses – the redoubtable Bordj El Fenar or Fort of the Lamp, a squat tower topped by a beacon and bristling with fifty-five cannon on four levels. One glance at this fortress would be enough to convince Ryder and the other Baltimore hostages to abandon all hope of a rescue by sea.

  For the final stage of the journey, the male captives are manhandled below and clapped in irons. They miss the spectacle, for as Morat’s two ships draw nearer, the city explodes in noise. The gunners at the Bordj El Fenar let fly a salvo of fire; the sound of the shots crackles and echoes across the hills. Morat’s gunners respond shot for shot. It is the traditional welcome, but it contains a coded message, for the corsair captain’s success will be judged by the enthusiasm of his reply.

  To Ryder, Paine and the other men confined below, the turmoil is terrifying. Emanuel D’Aranda recalled being awoken by the deafening gunfire as he lay in the hold where ‘I slept with thirteen other Christians, each one with a foot in chains … At this noise, all the curious folk of the town came to the harbour.’

  Throughout the city, the atmosphere is electric with anticipation. Shopkeepers are stocking their shelves, tavern owners check their wine cellars, and the whorehouses spruce up their women ready for a brisk trade.

  To the cheers of the waiting crowd, the flagship and her consort edge through the packed harbour and toss ashore the lines. Dockhands spring aboard to disable the rudder, a standard precaution to prevent hijacking by runaway slaves. By evening both ships will have been emptied – ballast and all – to be cleaned and waxed ready for the next mission.

  The sailors throw their kit ashore and shout greetings to their families and friends. Ryder, Paine and the other men are led up, squinting and blinking, to line up on the deck alongside their women and children. Official auditors come aboard and run a practised eye over the new captives, valuing them as swiftly and accurately as a horse dealer might value a stallion.

  The officials leave to take the good news to the Palace. At a nod from Morat, the slaves form a bedraggled line and file miserably down the ship’s gangway to the harbour.

  It is late morning on Thursday, July 28, 1631, when the first of the slaves sets foot on Algerine soil. Their arduous thirty-eight-day voyage is over; their former lives are fading away like the sea mist on the horizon. It is time to begin their new lives under African skies.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Moving Next Door To Hell

  Buried in the vaults of the British National Archives in Kew, near London, lies an extraordinary document. It forms part of the F71/1 collection – the correspondence between London and the Barbary States in the early 1600s. It is the only existing record of the arrival of the Baltimore captives in North Africa.

  Folio number 157 is entitled ‘A note of such English ships … brought into Algiers’ and is annotated: ‘About ships from April 1 1629 to November 26 1637. Admiralty’.

  It is a long list, brown with age, and recorded in spidery handwriting. In fact, it looks rather like a page from a child’s copybook from a bygone era. There are three columns: date, details and number of people on board. It contains over seventy separate entries for ships from places such as London, Yarmouth and Weymouth, sometimes with dozens of seamen on board, and the speed at which they were flooding in can be judged by the fact that the original final total of ‘1466’ had to be struck out with pen at the last moment and replaced with ‘1473’ as another seven men arrived.

  Somewhere in the middle of all this is an entry which reads as follows:

  1631.

  July 28. Morrato, [a] Fleming, and his consort brought from Baltimore in Ireland eighty-nine women and children and twenty men, moreover twenty-four men which they took out of a barque of Falmouth, master John [illegible surname], and two fishing boats which they set adrift, in all: 133.

  What I find remarkable is that the Baltimore reference is just another routine item in a list. Although deemed so significant that it takes up three whole lines in a document of mainly single-line records, it is squeezed in between an entry for thirty-eight people who arrived with the Falcon of London on April 8, 1631, and another entry for twelve people who arrived on a Weymouth ship later in July. The implication is clear. Baltimore is just one more drop in the ocean. The circumstances may be unique and unprecedented; the arrival of so many women and children may be heartbreaking; but in terms of numbers, in this city of slaves, it is really nothing special.

  James Frizell was not a happy man. In the six years he had served in the difficult role of English consul in Algiers, things had never been so bad. The Algerine corsairs were attacking his country’s shipping almost at will. New consignments of English slaves were continually arriving in port and the numbers were mounting faster than he could cope. Only five years ago there were fifty or sixty, a manageable number. Now, on this morning of July 28, the figure stood at 207.

  The English authorities refused to negotiate ransoms, reasoning that it would merely encourage the corsairs to return and capture more.

  Frizell wrote home regularly describing the dreadful conditions of the captives in Algiers and urging that at least some of them be ransomed. It was becoming increasingly clear that he was wasting his time.

  Irritated, the corsairs had recently decided to up the ante. They’d warned the English ambassador in Constantinople, Sir Thomas Roe, that if ransom cash didn’t arrive soon, they would target English territory with the same sort of devastating land raids they had carried out in
the Mediterranean.

  Sir Thomas had taken this threat extremely seriously. He had written to his superiors warning that the number of British slaves could soon number a thousand. ‘They say that, unless you send [ransom money] speedily, they will go to England and fetch men out of their beds as commonly as they used to in Spain.’

  Incredible as it might seem, the figure of a thousand was a mere fraction of the number of captives in Algiers at that time. Every year, hundreds of Europeans were being snatched up and fed into the gaping, insatiable maw of the Algerine slave machine. Between 1621 and 1627, one tally listed 20,000 slaves of all nationalities in Algiers. In the four years since then, the figure had swollen by nearly a quarter. In the early 1630s, a Redemptionist priest, Father Pierre Dan, would estimate the total number of slaves in the city at 25,000 – not counting an extra 8,000 Christians who had changed religion.

  As for the English and Irish slaves, Sir Thomas’s prediction of a thousand was to prove eerily accurate. That figure would, in fact, be bypassed by the late 1630s, and by 1640 there would be three times that number.

  As consul, James Frizell knew there was little he could do to help these people, even though he was their only hope. There was no money in the kitty to buy their freedom, and his own pockets were empty.

  Frizell was not paid by his Government, but by the Turkey Company, a commercial shipping firm which was supposed to give him a salary and let him levy fees from English ships. But in Algiers, English merchant ships were rare … and James Frizell was facing financial ruin. Even his basic salary had dried up and there were times when he was close to starvation.