White Gold

by Giles Milton

  Far more alarming was the news—relayed by the mayor of Bristol—that a second fleet of Barbary corsairs had been sighted in the choppy waters off the north Cornish coast. Their crews had achieved a most spectacular and disquieting coup: they had captured Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel and raised the standard of Islam. It had now become their fortified base, from which they attacked the unprotected villages of northern Cornwall. They had “seized diverse people about Padstow” and were threatening to sack and burn the town of Ilfracombe.

  These two-pronged attacks caught the West Country completely unprepared. The duke of Buckingham dispatched the veteran sea-dog Francis Stuart to Devon, with orders to root out and destroy this menacing new enemy. But Stuart was dismayed to discover that “they are better sailers than the English ships.” His letter to the duke, admitting defeat, expresses his fear that the worst was yet to come. “Theis picaroons, I say, will ever lie hankering upon our coastes, and the state will find it both chargeable and difficult to cleere it.” The long coastline had few defenses to deter the North African corsairs, who found they could pillage with impunity. Day after day, they struck at unarmed fishing communities, seizing the inhabitants and burning their homes. By the end of the dreadful summer of 1625, the mayor of Plymouth reckoned that 1,000 skiffs had been destroyed, and a similar number of villagers carried off into slavery.

  THESE MISERABLE CAPTIVES were taken to Salé, on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. This wind-blown port occupied a commanding position on the north bank of the great Bou Regreg river estuary. Her massive city walls were visible from far out to sea, and her turreted battlements and green-glazed minarets sparkled in the North African sunshine.

  Just a few decades earlier, these landmarks had been a welcome sight for England’s seafaring merchants. Lace–ruffed Elizabethans had come to Salé to exchange silver and woolens for exotic produce, brought in by desert caravans from the steaming tropics of equatorial Africa. In the overcrowded souks and alleys, they had jostled and traded with Moorish merchants dressed in flowing djellabas. After much haggling and bartering, they loaded their vessels with ivory and skins, wax, sugar and amber, as well as the fragrant Meknes honey that was famed throughout Europe.

  On the south bank of the estuary, directly opposite Salé, lay the ancient town of Rabat. This, too, had been a “great and famous towne,” boasting beautiful palaces and an extraordinary twelfth-century mosque. But Rabat had fallen into slow decay. By the early 1600s it was scarcely inhabited, and most of the dwellings had been abandoned. “It was in a manner desolate,” wrote an anonymous English visitor, “abandoned by the Arabs because of wild beasts.”

  Rabat would have fallen into complete ruin had it not been for a most unexpected circumstance. In 1610, King Philip III of Spain expelled all one million Spanish Moors from his land—the final chapter in the reconquest of southern Spain from the infidel. Although these Moriscos had lived in Spain for generations, and many were of mixed stock, they were allowed no right of appeal.

  One of the most enterprising of these emigre groups was known as the Hornacheros, after the Andalusian village in which they had lived.Wild and fiercely independent, they pillaged without scruple. One Englishman would later describe them as “a bad-minded people to all nations,” and even their fellow Moriscos viewed them as thieves and brigands.

  Expelled from their mountain stronghold in Spain, this haughty clan of 4,000 men and women set their sights on the ruined settlement of Rabat. They restored the kasbah, or fortress, and adapted with remarkable ease to their new homeland, which they renamed New Salé. However, they continued to harbor a deep resentment against Spain and vowed to do everything in their power to strike back. To this end, they began to forge alliances with pirates from Algiers and Tunis who had been preying on Christian shipping in the Mediterranean for more than a century. Within a few years, hundreds of cut-throats and desperadoes—some of them European—began to converge on New Salé in order to train the Hornacheros in the black arts of piracy.

  The Hornacheros and their cohort of renegades made a formidable fighting force. This highly disciplined band became known in England as the Sallee Rovers. But to their Islamic brethren they were called al-ghuzat, a title once used for the soldiers who fought with the Prophet Mohammed, and were hailed as religious warriors who were engaged in a holy war against the infidel Christians. “They lived in Salé, and their sea-borne jihad is now famous,” wrote the Arabic chronicler, al-Magiri. “They fortified Salé and built in it palaces, houses and bathhouses.”

  The Salé corsairs rapidly learned mastery of square-riggers, enabling them to extend their attacks far into the North Atlantic, and soon assembled a fleet of forty ships. They plundered with abandon, attacking villages and seaports right along the coasts of Spain, Portugal, France and England. One Salé corsair, Amurates Rayobi, led more than 10,000 warriors to Spain and ransacked the coastline without pity. Their success emboldened their co-religionists elsewhere in Barbary. The al-ghuzat from Algiers targeted vulnerable merchant vessels passing through the Straits of Gibraltar. They were fortunate that their attacks coincided with the beginnings of the mercantile age, when there were rich pickings to be had on the open seas. Between 1609 and 1616, they captured a staggering 466 English trading ships.

  Kings and ministers across Europe were paralyzed by a sense of helplessness. Sir Francis Cottingham, one of King James I’s clerks of the council, bemoaned the fact that “the strength and boldness of the Barbary pirates is now grown to that height … as I have never known anything to have wrought a greater sadness and distraction in this court than the daily advice thereof.”

  The lack of any coordinated defense encouraged the Sallee Rovers to widen their attacks. One of Salé’s most infamous renegade captains, the Dutchman Jan Janszoon, laughed in scorn at the ease with which he could seize European shipping. Known to his comrades as Murad Rais, he had first cocked a snook at the Channel defences in 1622, when he sailed to Zeeland in order to visit his estranged wife. A few years later, he embarked on a remarkable voyage of pillage to Iceland. His three-strong fleet dropped anchor at Reykjavik, where Murad led his men ashore and proceeded to ransack the town. He returned to Salé in triumph, with 400 enslaved Icelanders—men, women and children.

  Wales, too, was hit on several occasions, while the fishing fleets of the Newfoundland Banks suffered several devastating raids. In 1631, Murad Rais set his eye on the richly populated coasts of southern Ireland. He raised a force of 200 Islamic soldiers and they sailed to the village of Baltimore, storming ashore with swords drawn and catching the villagers totally by surprise. He carried off 237 men, women and children and took them to Al–giers, where he knew they would fetch a good price. The French padre Pierre Dan was in the city at the time, having been granted permission by the authorities to tend to the spiritual needs of his enslaved co-religionists. He witnessed the sale of new captives in the slave auction. “It was a pitiful sight to see them exposed in the market,” he wrote. “Women were separated from their husbands and the children from their fathers.” Dan looked on helplessly as “on one side, a husband was sold; on the other, his wife; and her daughter was torn from her arms without the hope that they’d ever see each other again.”

  Murad Rais’s bravado was feted in Morocco, and he was accorded the singular honor of being made governor of the port of Safi, some 200 miles to the south of Salé. His daughter visited him soon afterward and found that power had quite gone to his head. He was “seated in great pomp on a carpet, with silk cushions, the servants all around him.” When he took his leave, it was “in the manner of royalty.”

  Murad Rais was just one of many European renegades to strike an alliance with the fanatical corsairs of Barbary. The English apostate John Ward headed to Tunis shortly after King James I signed a peace treaty with Spain. Forbidden to attack the Spanish treasure fleet, Ward vowed to “become a foe to all Christians, bee a persecuter to their trafficke, and an impoverisher of their wealth.” He and his locally recru
ited crew wreaked such havoc in the Mediterranean that his name was celebrated all along the coast.

  This so delighted the ruler of Tunis that he gave Ward an abandoned castle and a large plot of land. Ward converted it into his principal residence, “a very stately house, farre more fit for a prince than a pirate.” He lived “in a most princely and magnificent state,” according to Andrew Barker, one of his English captives. Barker was stunned by the wealth that Ward had accrued and said he had never seen “any peere in England that beares up his post in more dignitie, nor hath attendants more obsequious.”

  Like so many Christian renegades, Ward had originally turned to piracy in order to seize treasure. But he quickly realized that the merchants of Barbary were more interested in human booty and would pay huge sums to acquire Christian slaves as laborers, domestic servants and concubines. Ward began to focus on capturing ships’ crews, who were taken to Tunis, Algiers or Salé to be sold in the slave markets.

  The Sallee Rovers were particularly successful in seizing men, women and children, growing fabulously wealthy and powerful from their traffic in captured Christians. In about 1626—the year after their raids on Cornwall and Devon—they cast aside all pretense of owing any allegiance to the Moroccan sultan and declared their intention of ruling themselves. “[They] resolved to live free,” wrote the French slave, Germain Mouette. “Finding themselves more numerous than the natives of Salé oblig’d them no longer to own any sovereign.” Salé became a pirate republic and was henceforth governed by a twelve-strong divan—stave–trading corsairs—who were overseen by a grand admiral.

  FEW IN ENGLAND had any inkling of the fate of captives seized by the corsairs. They disappeared without trace and the majority were never heard from again. But one of them did manage to get a letter smuggled back to England. Robert Adams, who was seized in the first wave of raids in the 1620s, managed to relay news to his parents in the West Country. “Lovinge and kind father and mother,” he wrote, “ … I am hear in Salley, in most miserable captivitye, under the hands of most cruell tyrants.” He explained that he had been sold in the slave market soon after being landed in the town and was subjected to the harshest treatment by his owner. “[He] made mee worke at a mill like a horse,” he said, “from morninge untill night, with chaines uppon my legges, of 36 pounds waights a peece.”

  Adams ended his letter with a desperate plea for help. “I humbly desire you, on my bended knees, and with sighs from the bottom of my hart, to commiserat my poor distressed estate, and seek some meanes for my delivery out of this miserable slavery.”

  Adams’s parents must have been appalled by what they read, but any appeals for help from the authorities fell on deaf ears. The lords of the Privy Council displayed a callous lack of concern for the enslaved mariners, while church leaders were powerless to do anything more than organize collections for the families of captured seamen. Eventually, the “slave widows” themselves were galvanized into action. They drafted a petition, signed by the “distressed wifes of neere 2,000 poore marriners,” and sent it to the Privy Council. The petition reminded the lords that the women’s captured husbands had “for a longe tyme contynued in most wofull, miserable and lamentable captivitie and slavery in Sally” It also informed them that they were enduring “most un–speakable tormentes and want of foode through the merciles crueltie of theire manifolde masters.” Their continual absence was not only a source of grief, but also threatened the very survival of their families. Many women had “poore smale children and infantes” who were “almost reddie to perrish and starve for wante of meanes and food.”

  Their request was straightforward and emotionally charged. “[We] most humblie beseech Your Honours, even for Christ Jesus sake … to send some convenient messenger unto the Kinge of Morocco … for the redemption of the saide poore distressed captives.”

  What these women did not realize was that King Charles I had already started to tackle the problem of the captives being held in North Africa. Within months of acceding to the throne in 1625, he dispatched the young adventurer John Harrison on a secret mission to the infamous city of Salé.

  Harrison’s voyage was one of extreme danger. He was required to land in Morocco without being captured by the corsairs, and then travel to Salé undetected where he had to contact the ruling divan. He was given full powers to negotiate the release of all the English slaves being held by the town’s corsairs. This latter point had provoked much heated debate among the inner circle of King Charles’s advisers. Sir Henry Marten, an eminent lawyer and Cornish Member of Parliament, was appalled by the idea of entering into dialogue with the Sallee Rovers, stating bluntly that they were “a company of pirates, with whom there is no treating or confederacy.” He argued that Harrison should parley only with the Moroccan sultan, even though the sultan had virtually no influence over the Salé corsairs. King Charles himself was rather more pragmatic. Although he penned a long letter to the “high and mightie” sultan, Moulay Zidan, he suggested that Harrison might have more success if he negotiated directly with the corsairs who were terrorizing English shores.

  Harrison landed secretly in Tetouan in the summer of 1625 and set out for Salé disguised as a Moorish penitent. Lesser men might well have balked at such a hazardous assignment, but Harrison was in his element. He relished the opportunity to smuggle himself inside one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Nevertheless, the overland journey stretched him to his physical limits, “the greatest parte on foote, bare-legged and pilgrime-like.” It was blisteringly hot, and Harrison suffered from the dusty air and a constant lack of water. He would later describe it as “a most desperate journey,” yet he took a perverse pleasure in traveling undercover.

  Harrison could have been forgiven for a failure of nerve on his arrival at the great walls of Salé, whose array of bronze cannon gave a hint of the menacing threat within. His orders were to penetrate the inner sanctum of this nest of corsairs, who held all Christians in the utmost contempt. Their spiritual leader was Sidi Mohammed el-Ayyachi, a wily marabout, or holy man, who was revered by the Salé slave traders. Pious and politically adroit, he had a personal magnetism that inspired fanatical loyalty. He was particularly revered for his hatred of Christianity and would later brag of having caused the deaths of more than 7,600 Christians.

  Harrison abandoned his disguise on arriving at Salé and tentatively made contact with the ruling divan. To his surprise, he was greeted with the greatest courtesy. Sidi Mohammed invited Harrison to visit his residence and proved most attentive to his guest, “entertayning me verie kindlie.” For all his religious fanaticism, Sidi Mohammed was also a pragmatist. He was willing to release his English captives if he stood to benefit, realizing that Harrison’s mission could be made to work in his favor.

  Harrison met Sidi Mohammed on several occasions during his first week in Salé. After a few days of pleasantries, the marabout turned to the matter at hand. He expressed approval of Harrison’s mission and promised “to releasse all Your Majestie’s subjects made captives,” including those who had been “bought and solde from one to another.” But there was a high price attached to his offer. He expected English assistance in attacking the hated Spanish and demanded a gift of heavy weaponry including “14 brasse peeces of ordinance and a proportion of powder and shott.” He also asked whether some of his own cannon, which were “broken and unservicable,” could be taken to England for repair.

  Harrison’s instinct was to conclude a deal and free the slaves. But he knew that Sidi Mohammed’s offer was tantamount to a declaration of war against Spain, and it could not be agreed to without the consent of the king. He had no option but to return to London, where the marabout’s offer was discussed at length by the king and Privy Council. They eventually agreed that freeing the English slaves was imperative, but also decided to play games with the Moroccan marabout. They deliberately misread the number of cannon he requested—sending four instead of fourteen—and also scaled down the quantity of powder and shot. Harrison
was told to make encouraging noises about an attack on the Spanish, but offer no firm commitments.

  A weary Harrison landed back at Salé in March 1627 and was given a lavish welcome. He presented the four cannon with all the pomp he could muster and was surprised when Sidi Mohammed accepted them without a quibble. Harrison informed the corsairs that King Charles I was eager to attack the Spanish and would soon be preparing for war. Sidi Mohammed was so delighted that he vowed to release the English slaves immediately.

  Harrison’s sense of triumph was somewhat dented when he came to view the slaves. He had expected to be presented with at least 2,000 captives, and was concerned about how he would ship them all back to England. In the event, a mere 190 were released from their underground dungeons. Harrison accused Sidi Mohammed of trickery, but soon discovered that the majority of captives were no longer being held in Salé. Large numbers had been shipped to Algiers—the principal entrepôt for European slaves—while others had been acquired by the sultan. Many more had been “carried into the countrie” and sold to wealthy traders. But by far the largest number had “died of the late plague,” which had ravaged Morocco in both 1626 and 1627, leaving less than 200 for Harrison to take home with him.

  These ragged survivors were a picture of human suffering. Kept in underground cells for months, they were pale, malnourished and weakened by dysentery. According to Robert Adams, whose testimony is one of the few from this period to have survived, they had been held in virtual darkness, forced to live in their own squalor and excrement. Their diet was appalling—“a littell coarse bread and water”—while their lodging was “a dungion under ground, wher some 150 or 200 of us lay, altogether, havinge no comforte of the light, but a littell hole.” Adams himself was in a terrible state. His hair and ragged clothes were “full of vermin”—lice and fleas—“and, not being allowed time for to pick myself … I am almost eaten up with them.” Worse still, he was “every day beaten to make me turn Turk.”