Corsair

HISTORICAL NOTE

In 1631 a particularly brazen Barbary corsair was operating from Sallee on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. A sea captain from Flanders, he had ‘turned Turk’ and taken the name Murat Reis. That year, with two ships, he made a surprise raid on the Irish coastal village of Baltimore and successfully kidnapped almost the entire population: 107 men, women and children. He then took them back to North Africa to sell. A French missionary priest working in Algiers saw several of Murat’s Irish victims put up for auction. After that, very little more was heard of them.

Slavery in various guises was flourishing on all sides of the Mediterranean throughout the seventeenth century. The Regencies of Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli were infamous in the Christian world as places where the unfortunate captives were either set to work or held for ransom. Yet there were also thriving slave markets in Malta and Livorno where Muslims – and sometimes non-Muslim as well – were bought and sold. The Knights of St John of Malta were at the forefront of the trade in much the same way that the corsair guilds in the Regencies, the taifas, were the chief providers of human merchandise in North Africa. By the same token, it was virtual slavery to be condemned to the oar in France’s Royal Galley fleet, one of Louis XIV’s pet projects. On the Sun King’s galleys, French convicts sat alongside Turkish prisoners of war as well as Iroquois Indians captured in North America. The Turks could hope to be freed in a prisoner exchange, but many of the French galeriens died in chains while the unfortunate Indians mostly perished from fevers and malnutrition.

The turbulence of politics in the Mediterranean encouraged this state of affairs to continue. Against the general background of the Eternal War between Cross and Crescent, the various European nations were competing with one another for commercial and territorial advantage. France was suspicious of Spain; the Spaniards mistrusted the Portuguese; the English, Dutch and other Protestant nations jostled with one another even as they warily dealt with the Catholic powers. Everyone was nervous of the Turkish Sultan in Constantinople. Amid such disarray the Barbary corsairs thrived. A shipping list for the period between 1677 and 1680 (roughly the time of Hector’s and Dan’s fictional adventures) shows that the Algerines captured no less than 160 British ships. This would have provided approximately 8,000 British captives for the slave pens of that Regency.

This was also a time when the nature of naval warfare in the Mediterranean was altering. Oared vessels, the preferred warships since the days of ancient Greece, were obsolete. Too expensive to build, their huge crews were too costly to maintain, and their hulls and rig insufficiently seaworthy. Above all, they could not carry the numbers of heavy cannon which gave their rivals, the sailing ships, such devastating firepower. Nevertheless the flamboyant galley with its colourful pennants and massed ranks of half-naked oarsmen remained a potent symbol, much loved by contemporary painters and illustrators, many of them Dutch. They often depicted imaginary battle scenes between galleys and sailing ships. These same artists also found the Barbary city states, particularly Algiers, to be a worthy subject, basing their images on the reports of the embassies to the Regencies as well as the harrowing tales told by returned captives. There were many such memoirs by the ‘white slaves’ from Barbary though, by contrast, hardly any of the galley slaves of Christendom wrote about their experiences. An exception is the account written by a Frenchman, Jean Marteilhe, a Protestant condemned to the oar in 1701. He joined his first galley at Dunkirk on the Channel coast and describes the extraordinary pantomime – hiding under the oar benches, kicking their legs in the air, holding up their hands, coughing, bowing, and so forth – which he and his shipmates had to perform for the amusement of their captain’s guests on board.

Unlikely though they may seem, several of the characters mentioned in the preceding pages were real: the reverend Devereux Spratt, Rector of Mitchelstown in North Cork, had been a slave in Algiers. Samuel Martin was the English consul in Algiers between the years 1673 and 1679, while Jean Baptiste Brodart, the Intendant of the Royal Galley base at Marseilles, was renowned for his venality. Joseph Maimaran, a Moroccan Jew, acted as chief financial adviser to the megalomaniac Emperor Moulay Ismail and served for many years as virtually his first minister as well as chief money lender. Unwisely Maimaran asked for repayment of a loan, and paid for his lese-majesty with his life. He was knocked down and trampled to death in the street by a loose horse belonging to a member of the Black Guard. The death looked like an accident but contemporary opinion held it was an assassination ordered by Moulay. The Emperor himself ruled until 1727, dying in his eighty-first year, and he did have an Irish gun founder who was overfond of the bottle. What happened to his monstrous favourite wife, Zidana, is not known. Famously, Moulay is reputed to have sired 888 children – 548 sons and 340 daughters – during his lifetime.