Book of the Day - Pirates of BarbaryBy Adrian Tinniswood Cape, 352pp, £20: ADRIAN TINNISWOOD has written an absorbingly dramatic history book with an implicit instructive message to the leaders of countries whose ships are being hijacked on the seas off Somalia. International naval patrols are unable to stop today's Somali pirates just as the navies of England, Holland and France were unable to protect merchant ships against pirates operating from bases on the Barbary Coast of North Africa four centuries ago.
Piracy that flourished in the Mediterranean in the 17th century was not brought under control until European powers occupied Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers. To end present piracy in the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, should the United Nations now occupy Mughisho, the capital of Somalia? The implication is only an aside in the author’s foreword, yet makes his excellent book as relevant as reports of the latest Somali demands for ransom.
In the course of detailed “tales of bravery, brutality and betrayal”, Tinniswood records some astonishing facts about the scale of Barbary piracy. “Around one million Europeans,” he writes, “were enslaved on the Barbary coast in the 17th century.” There was an unknown number of Europeans who were there voluntarily, fugitives willing to serve as pirates, many having converted to Islam and changed their names.
Corsair raiders regularly sailed beyond the Mediterranean to capture or sink ships and take their cargoes and crews, and even ventured as far north as Iceland. Captives were held as slaves in North Africa until, if ever, their governments or next of kin had sufficient funds to redeem them.
The Barbary pirates daringly seized captives from England’s West Country and the south coast of Ireland. Readers in Ireland, particularly in West Cork, probably will be interested in Tinniswood’s graphic account of the sack of Baltimore. The master of that expedition was one Murad Rais, a renegade born Jan Janszoon of Holland. He was on his way back from Iceland with 400 prisoners in 1631 when he caught up with a 60-ton English ship off Land’s End and captured the 10-man crew, including a man who knew the lie of the Waterford coast, the harbours and coves of Co Cork, so acted as Murad’s pilot in Irish waters.
Motivated by the truism “My enemy’s enemy is my friend,” the natives of West Cork had been accustomed to trade clandestinely with the Barbary pirates who occasionally visited them. Baltimore had developed a “black economy”, Tinniswood relates, “trading in stolen goods, the whores, the cattle and casks of ale left in isolated coves.” But Murad came as an aggressor, leading a force of 230 pirates armed with muskets and scimitars. Undeterred by Baltimore’s O’Driscoll Castle, the barbarians devastated the pilchard fishermen’s dwellings, which can be seen on the Earl of Cork’s 1630 map of the settlement. The raiders then abducted 22 men, 33 women and 54 children. Only one of them was ever ransomed from slavery. The ruins of the castle are now among the attractions, with the yachts, that make Baltimore such a popular summer resort.
The book abounds in curiosities – but the most exciting narrative of all concerns William Okeley, whose escape from Algiers was a masterpiece of improvisation – well worth reading about.
Patrick Skene Catling has published 24 volumes of fiction and non-fiction