The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  Nor was it unusual for people in the early 1600s to ‘arrange’ corsair raids against their enemies.

  For example, in the early 1600s, a man named Andrew Gray was sentenced to death in Edinburgh for riot and arson. Gray escaped to Morocco, where he nursed his burning grudge for twenty years before leading the Sallee corsairs on a revenge raid on the Scots capital. Lying offshore, he threatened to level Leith port unless he received a huge payoff.

  The Italian historian Salvatore Bono has described several cases in which corsair attacks were engineered to settle vendettas among Christians in Mediterranean countries. These could also be viewed, from a modern standpoint, as a common man’s protest against a feudal society.

  Just seven years after the Baltimore raid, sixteen galleys of corsairs swooped on Nicotera in Calabria, Italy. The raid had been organised and led by a local man after a nobleman seduced his daughter.

  And in the 1640s, another disgruntled local organised a revenge corsair raid in Catanzaro.

  But the closest parallel to Baltimore occurred in the Sardinian island of San Pietro in 1798, when Barbary corsairs carried off nine hundred people – mostly women and children. It turned out that the attack was organised by a local man with a grudge.

  So it seems the idea of a deliberately engineered corsair raid on Baltimore is not so far-fetched after all.

  If we accept that all this is feasible, it is just a matter of examining all the evidence with an open mind.

  However, the political backdrop of Baltimore makes this difficult. The subject of English involvement in Ireland is still emotive, and there is often a temptation to choose your good guys and bad guys in advance.

  But history has shown that there were monsters and heroes on both sides, and if we are to understand the fascinating story behind the Baltimore raid we need to look beyond the clichés.

  Writers who have tackled this subject agree on very little, but they concur on one point: none of the players in this saga was a candidate for sainthood.

  In this chapter, I’m going to look in turn at the three men – all knights – who were involved in the titanic struggle for control of Baltimore. I want to abandon the chronological sequence of events in order to create a portrait of each of them and to describe their ambitions, their failings and their motivations.

  THE FIRST KNIGHT: SIR FINEEN O’DRISCOLL, GAELIC CHIEFTAIN

  The poet Edmund Spenser once described the investiture of a typical Irish chieftain in Elizabethan times. The new leader would step on a sacred stone and receive the symbol of his office – in the O’Driscolls’ case, a white rod. Then, ‘descending from the stone, he turns himself round, thrice forward and thrice backward.’

  As Fineen did so, he must have felt the dizzying sensation of a world that was shifting beneath his feet. Foreign customs and manners were being imposed on his people. English fortune hunters were casting covetous eyes on his castle and lands. The golden age of the Gael was fading into twilight.

  In fact, the O’Driscolls’ power had been on the wane for centuries. Rival Irish clans had forced them out of their extensive ancestral territory into a much smaller coastal area. But they had suffered most at the hands of the merchants of Waterford, whose ships they had harassed and attacked for centuries.

  This grudge dated all the way back to 1368, when the Cork clan had helped to attack Waterford town. In 1413, a Waterford mayor named Simon Wickens paid a ‘friendly’ visit to Baltimore on Christmas Day with a consignment of fine wine. Invited to feast in the O’Driscolls’ Great Hall, Wickens downed a cup of wine and danced to a Christmas carol … before arresting the O’Driscolls and marching them down to his ship in chains.

  One stormy February in 1537, a Portuguese ship was carrying wine towards Waterford when fierce winds forced it towards Baltimore. The O’Driscolls offered assistance and helped the ship into harbour. Then, treacherously, they imprisoned the crew and seized the cargo for themselves.

  The O’Driscolls hadn’t even finished unloading the wine when the Waterford men hit back with a lightning raid. Two dozen hand-picked men under Captain Pierce Doblyn sneaked into Baltimore in a light, fast sailing craft named Sunday. As the O’Driscolls fled in panic, the commando raiders took back their stolen ship.

  Determined to wipe out the O’Driscoll menace forever, the Waterford merchants then sent a full-scale punitive expedition to Baltimore. Three warships carrying four hundred men blasted a relentless barrage of artillery at the O’Driscoll castles. They dismantled the castle of Dún na Long stone by stone and, finally, ‘they burned and destroyed Baltimore’.

  By the time Fineen assumed power over a rebuilt Baltimore three decades later, the stability of the clan was under threat both from without and within.

  Fineen’s second cousin, Conor Mac Fineen O’Driscoll, had also sought to be chieftain. The leader of a branch of the clan known as the Carragh O’Driscolls, he claimed superiority in lineage. The clan elders had negotiated a compromise in which Fineen would become chieftain, but Conor Mac Fineen would get half the rents and harbour dues. Neither man was happy with the arrangement.

  Meanwhile, opportunities for piracy had dried up as the English asserted their power. Most of the clan’s legitimate income came from the fishing industry. Every fishing boat had to pay the chieftain almost £1, plus levies of flour, salt, beer and a dish of fish.

  Now even that source was under threat. As early as 1569, a group of English entrepreneurs had asked the Queen to grant them the town of Baltimore and its lucrative fishing rights.

  Fineen moved swiftly to forestall this. He asked Sir John Perrot, President of Munster, to allow him to surrender O’Driscoll territory to the Queen, who would then formally re-grant it to him personally.

  Perrot, who was probably a love child of Henry VIII, regarded this as an important test case that would help eradicate the ancient Gaelic chieftainship system known as tanistry. As he wrote in October 1573:

  ‘Touching Fineen O’Driscoll’s suit, it is reasonable … to drown the custom of the tanistry.’

  Yet the matter lapsed, and Fineen became almost tetchy in his next petition. ‘[I have] been a suitor for a long time,’ he wrote to the Queen, ‘which delay of answer and detracting of time is a great hindrance and not without sore losses to [me], considering [my] dutiful and obedient service …’

  This was a pointed reference to his neutral stance during a recent rebellion.

  In 1576, Fineen formally pledged allegiance to the Crown. Three years later, when a second rebellion swept Munster, Fineen was positively enthusiastic in his loyalty. He shopped Spanish spies, supplied intelligence on the activities of Irish plotters overseas, and helped defeat the rebels by allowing Perrot to use his harbour as his main western base. The English governors praised his ‘loyalty in this dangerous time’.

  In 1582, Fineen sailed to London carrying a suit ‘to surrender all his possessions’ and was knighted by the Queen.

  Three years later he was ‘invited’ with other Gaelic chieftains to attend the Dublin Parliament, where – forced into uncomfortably tight English clothing – he formally ‘took his lands in letter patent from Queen Elizabeth … thereby extinguishing the Irish rite …’

  Under Gaelic law, he had no right to do this, and some of his kinsmen reacted with fury. Worst affected were the Carragh O’Driscolls.

  Throughout the 1580s, even as the Spanish Armada threatened to invade England, Fineen remained steadfast. A military surveyor, Geoffrey Fenton, reported that Fineen had pledged to give the English the strategic fort of Dún na Long if they needed it.

  By 1592, the former piratical rover had become respectable as Cork High Sheriff and was one of the most prominent men in the English administration. Even when Fineen was persuaded by his son to hand his castles over to the Spanish invaders, still the English treated him remarkably sympathetically when the rebellion was crushed.

  General Sir George Carew wrote that Fineen was ‘an ancient civil gentleman that, until this hour, hath ever
more held firm to the state and is now grown wild … the poor old man was overruled by his son and hath no disposition to be a traitor’.

  It was a tribute to Fineen’s charm and ingenuity that he managed to escape from this situation with his head still affixed to his neck. Forced to surrender his castles to the English troops, he cheekily assumed the role of the generous host, feasting the battle-weary men and holding banquets for their officers. It’s said that he even filled the town well with wine and coins, causing it to be nicknamed ‘the silver well’.

  The tactic worked. The English launched savage reprisals in the area, but his clan was given ‘all kind and mild usage’. It was pointed out that Fineen had ‘never in the course of his whole life been tainted by the least spot of disloyalty’ and had been ‘very odious to the rebels’.

  Queen Elizabeth pardoned his temporary lapse and summoned him to visit her in London. However, she died before he could receive the formal pardon.

  The cost of the trip to London and the expense of restoring his reputation had left Fineen almost penniless.

  For the first time, he became vulnerable to fortune hunters.

  According to one historian, it was during his absence in England that one of his trusted servants began to ‘intrude’ into his affairs.

  This servant was a native Irishman and a staunch Catholic, but he was as cruel and acquisitive as the worst of the English Protestant invaders.

  His name was Walter Coppinger.

  THE SECOND KNIGHT: SIR WALTER COPPINGER, IRISH MONEYLENDER

  Two and a half centuries after his death, the name of Walter Coppinger was still being spoken with a shudder in Baltimore. His notoriety lived on in oral histories recorded as late as the 1800s:

  ‘No Russian nobleman of former times lorded it over his serfs with such despotic sway as Coppinger,’ historian Dr Daniel Donovan wrote in 1876.

  ‘It is related how he had a yard-arm extended from one of the gable ends of his mansion … a gallows wherewith to hang the victims of his unlicensed power.’

  The stories claimed Coppinger’s enemies were thrown into a dark dungeon to ‘pine for years in wretchedness and chains’.

  While Donovan admitted that these tales may have been exaggerated, they probably contained some grain of truth. And we can find other, well-documented evidence of the unsavoury character of this prominent lawyer and moneylender.

  Take, for instance, the case of Jeanette Grant, Coppinger’s niece, who claimed in 1630 that he had cheated her out of her inheritance.

  When she was only fourteen, Coppinger had given her in marriage to a wealthy gentleman named Walter Grant – aged almost eighty.

  This grotesque marriage between teenager and octogenarian did not last long, but after Grant died, she trusted Coppinger to manage her estate.

  Years later, when she found herself penniless, Jeanette discovered she had been robbed by her own uncle. Coppinger had simply altered the legal documents to replace Grant’s surname with his own.

  Realising she could never get justice in Coppinger’s home county – he was notorious for nobbling juries – the resourceful widow took her case to Dublin. The furious Coppinger reacted by smashing his great fist in her mouth and knocking her teeth out.

  When he returned to Cork, he trumped up some charge against Jeanette. She was thrown into prison for four years … the price of crossing Walter Coppinger.

  On her release, Jeanette pleaded for justice. She accused Coppinger of ‘corrupt practices’ and fraud.

  In a separate case, a young Cork woman named Ellen ní Driscoll came into a substantial inheritance and sought legal advice from Coppinger. Instead, he tampered with the deeds to put her estate in his own name.

  Ellen complained: ‘[I] cannot get justice from him on account of his power with jurors, and [I am] afraid of [my] life if I should sue.’

  At one stage Ellen, then heavily pregnant, begged the Coppinger family for some money to tide her over.

  The man she approached may have been Walter himself, or his brother Richard (the wording is ambiguous). His response was horrific:

  ‘[He] did batter [Ellen] in a most cruel manner, and threw her over the cliff into the sea.’

  By some miracle Ellen survived, but she lost her baby.

  These cases sum up Walter Coppinger: his greed, his corruption, his violent rages, and his utter ruthlessness.

  When Coppinger wanted something, he would let nothing stand in his way.

  And in 1631, what Coppinger wanted more than anything else was Baltimore.

  Coppinger was a complex and fascinating character. His family – of Viking stock – was neither planter nor Gael, but had carved out a formidable niche in local politics. There had been no fewer than eight Coppinger mayors of Cork city.

  Walter began his career as a valet. Tradition says he was a page-boy to Walter Raleigh. If so, he would have had an early taste of the high life: Raleigh’s court was so opulent that even his servants wore chains of gold.

  Later he became page to Fineen O’Driscoll, and secured an entrée to the aristocracy when his brother Richard Coppinger married O’Driscoll’s daughter. It was the only opening he needed. Before long, the servant would become the master of the lord.

  Over the next ten years, Coppinger made a fortune from moneylending. His technique was simple. He would offer loans to Gaelic gentry who’d been left destitute by the great rebellion. Many had no intention of paying him back. These men thought they were taking out loans secured against their property, which was worth far more. But they were mistaken. As they found out when Coppinger brandished one of his notoriously complex and impenetrable legal agreements, they had actually sold their entire property to Coppinger in a deal that would be cancelled only if the money was repaid on time.

  By the early 1600s, Coppinger had already gained his first stately home in this way: Cloughane Castle, ancestral home of the McCarthys.

  Meanwhile, Coppinger – a staunch Catholic – was clashing with the authorities over his refusal to attend Protestant church services. Hauled before the courts, he responded proudly and defiantly.

  —My forefathers practised the Catholic religion, he said. And my conscience ties me to do the same.

  —What is your conscience? his interrogators asked.

  The record showed he did not reply.

  Coppinger was ordered to pay a savage fine of £100.

  This case in 1605 may have proved a watershed for Coppinger. During the O’Neill rising he had actually assisted the English forces. Like most Catholics, he had expected greater tolerance from King James. Instead, he found himself stalked and persecuted like a criminal for his religious faith. He had every reason to feel bitter and resentful towards the English.

  A few years later, Coppinger felt confident enough to tackle one of the most powerful organisations of the era – the mighty East India Company.

  In the early 1600s, the company bought Dundaniel Woods in Cork for £7000 and set up a major shipbuilding operation there. Three new townships – named Thomas, Hope and Bantam – were built to house three hundred specialist workers. They created a dam on the Bandon River, built a dockyard and laid down the keels on the first two ships – substantial merchantmen of 400 and 500 tons.

  As carpenters hewed the oaks and elms and smoke rose from the ironworks forges, Coppinger appeared on the scene with a legal deed that claimed the woods were his.

  He began with his usual tactic: the long, wearisome law dispute. The Company complained that he was ‘continually indicting the workmen through corrupt oaths’ and ‘intending to weary out the [Company] and force the English from the works.’

  Although the shipbuilders had leased a nearby castle, Coppinger persuaded the owner to evict them.

  ‘[This] would render the English plantation incapable of defending themselves,’ the Company complained.

  One morning, the shipbuilders arrived at the yard to find that Coppinger’s men had destroyed the vital river dam. It had been smashed to piece
s in the night.

  Was Coppinger an eco-warrior, fighting to preserve the woodlands? The answer is a definite no. Later, he himself attempted to devastate the beautiful Rowry river valley and turn it into a similar industrial zone for his own profit. It is more likely that he simply wanted to drive out the English and take over their lucrative operation.

  If so, he failed spectacularly. The two great ships were completed by 1613. Coppinger had probably conceded that he’d met his match: these were tough shipbuilders, not so easily intimidated as pregnant women and widows.

  By 1610, Coppinger had matured into an accomplished political activist. They were traits that he was to pass on to a dynasty of Coppinger insurgents: his son, grandson and great-grandson were all to be outlawed for high treason.

  Coppinger had learned that you didn’t need to fight the English openly on the field of battle.

  By the time he set his sights on Baltimore, he knew that there were other ways to get rid of their troublesome settlers.

  Like the dam at the shipyard, they could simply be made to vanish quietly in the night.

  THE THIRD KNIGHT: SIR THOMAS CROOKE, ENGLISH PLANTER

  ‘Mr Crooke … hath, at his own charges, within two years, gathered out of England a whole town of English people, larger and more religiously organised than any town in this Province.’

  This resounding testimony, signed by a bishop, two knights and a military officer, sums up what Thomas Crooke achieved (for good or for ill) in Baltimore within a mere twenty-four months up to 1608.

  As we’ve seen, Crooke was a prominent London lawyer, and a member of a family of intellectuals and religious freethinkers whose Calvinist views had put them on a collision course with the authorities.

  When Crooke came to Baltimore with his fellow settler leaders – John Winthropp, Thomas Notte and James Salmon – his motive was not only to establish a fishing colony, but also to achieve freedom of religion.