In the early hours of June 20th, 1631, the residents of Baltimore Cove in Co Cork woke to find their village in flames and 200 Barbary pirates running through the streets. The raiders cowed the villagers with blood-curdling cries and flashing sabres, but two men who dared to resist were hacked to death. The rest were dragged off to waiting ships.
The 107 captives included eight members of a single family: the wife and seven sons of William Gunter, one of the more prosperous citizens of the fishing village. Women and children comprised the great majority of those taken, along with about 20 men. All were bound for the slave markets of Algiers. Only two would see Ireland again.
It could have been worse. The raid on the cove was intended only as a prelude to an assault on the main village, further inland. But by the time the pirates secured their initial haul and returned, a defence of sorts had been raised.
One villager fired musket shots; another beat a military tattoo on his drum. The nearest garrison was more than 50 miles away, but the bluff worked. Peering up the hill in darkness, the leader of the raiding party - Dutch-born Jan Jansen, alias Morat Rais - opted for caution. When he sailed into Algiers six weeks later with his 107 prizes, it added to his legend in a city where his buccaneering had already made him rich and famous.
Piracy was nothing new off the south coast of Ireland in 1631. Only two years earlier Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork and owner of half of Munster, had narrowly avoided capture at sea by corsairs bent on ransom. The Barbary pirates' combined pursuit of Jihad and profit terrorised the waters south and west of England. What was shocking about Baltimore was that it was a raid inland on a country supposedly defended by the might of the British navy.
In his poem The Sack of Baltimore, Thomas Davis paints a romantic picture of the eve of the attack in a village free of fear: "The hookers lie upon the beach; the children cease their play/ The gossips leave the little inn; the households kneel to pray." Then he spies the mysterious barques, scything through the waves of Roaring Water Bay. And soon the village is in tumult: "The yell of 'Allah!' breaks above the prayer, and shriek, and roar:/ O blessed God! The Algerine is lord of Baltimore!"
The lords of Baltimore that night were Janissaries, the elite guard of the Ottoman empire. Originally a celibate order of soldier-monks, they had become a crack professional corps, feared by those they fought and, often, by those who employed them. After one too many palace intrigues in 1826, the entire force would be wiped out by Sultan Mehmet II. But in 1631, the poor fisherfolk of West Cork were no match for them.
An official inquiry into the raid uncovered inevitable corruption among those responsible for the marine defence of Munster. Having failed to save the villagers, however, the various parties had greater success in covering their own rear ends.
A scapegoat was found in the form of Dungarvan fisherman John Hackett, who was hanged for his role in piloting the corsairs into Baltimore. Davis compares him to Judas Iscariot and Diarmuid MacMurrough. But as Des Ekin writes in The Stolen Village - a fascinating and occasionally thrilling account of the pirate raid - nothing about it was quite as it seemed, starting with the village itself.
The captives' names - Gunter, Arnold, Broddebrooke, Amble, and so on - betray the fact that Baltimore circa 1630 was an English settlement. Its founders were not aggressive colonists, however. They were Protestant dissenters seeking the freedom and pilchard fisheries of Ireland's far west and paying an honest rent to the old chieftain, Fineen O'Driscoll, who was impoverished after the disaster at Kinsale.
The villagers' nemesis, Morat Rais, was complex too. A Dutchman who converted to Islam, he became an enthusiast for taking war to the infidels of his native Europe and enriching himself in the process. But his raid on Baltimore may have been personal, after the collapse of a deal in which he offered to convert back to Christianity and serve England.
Even the fate of the captives was muddled. Little is known about their lives in North Africa, although Ekin assembles a credible picture from the recorded experiences of others. The abler men may have endured the horrors of the galley: probably the grimmest prospect for any slave. Harems awaited some of the women. But experiences varied greatly and not all were intolerable, especially for those able to earn their freedom.
As early as 1634, the English consul in Algiers reported that 40 of the Baltimore prisoners were either dead or "turned Turk" (he did not differentiate). And when 10 years later - during the English Civil War - an expedition was finally dispatched to buy the captives back, only two could be secured. Ekin speculates that between what we now call "Stockholm Syndrome" and general assimilation, there was no returning even for many of those who had the option.
The murkiest issue of all in the raid, he suggests, was the ownership of Baltimore. The village had been the subject of a triangle of claims between an unscrupulous Irish lawyer, an opportunist planter and the penurious O'Driscoll, who had either leased or sold the land, or possibly both.
The younger O'Driscolls - exiled in Spain, angry at their patriarch's betrayal, and possibly in communication with pirates - may have been another factor in the intrigue. But in one seemingly significant transaction, dated 20th of June 1610, the hapless villagers secured title to their lands at Baltimore on a 21-year lease. It was an agreement that would expire exactly 376 years ago today, the morning the corsairs arrived.
The Stolen Villageby Des Ekin is published by O'Brien Press.